What Dawkins doesn’t realize is that the inspiration to will the good of the other is known as Love, and since God is Love, when he experiences Love, he is experiencing God. If only he could understand this.

First, each and every one of your claims has been resoundingly refuted long ago, by Mr. Dawkins himself and many others.  You should take the time to research the target of your essays before you publish them.  Second, in this crisis, I applaud EVERY organization, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist or any other faith, that helps.  The last thing we should be doing is criticizing one another’s charities.  And third, would you give your donation through a Muslim organization if none other were available?  I doubt it.  Why do you think an atheist would want to sponsor the Catholic Church’s efforts?  We could go into all of the problems suffered by the Church over the last few decades, and illustrate why an atheist might not want to donate, but that would be counterproductive to the real cause: Getting help to Haiti.  Shame on you for posting this snide essay.  You should instead be encouraging any and all of your fellow humans who want to help.  For a more detailed essay, see my blog at religionvirus.blogspot.com later today.

Sorry, there are plenty of “philosophical groundings” for helping one’s fellow humans - for “good” in general - that don’t require gods. Dawkins actually provides a few in his works, and they’re not exactly hard to find if you actually look for them.

In any case, you may believe that atheists “borrow” morality from theists - that’s wrong, but a fairly common belief. Dawkins isn’t arguing against that with this action.

He’s disproving a far more common belief - that atheists can’t be moral at all. Trust me - examples of that prejudice are very easy to find, too. Hopefully, once people understand that atheists can be moral, too, they might evince some curiosity about why. I hope you will, eventually, too.

Dear Craig

Mr Dawkins has not ‘refuted’ any of the philosphical proofs of the existence of God, he is an emminant biologist to be sure but he is a poor philosopher and does not realise that materialism does not stand or fall with darwinism. As Professor Edward Feser demonsrates in his books Dawkins either delibrately distorts the positions of his oppononts in which case he is being dishonest or does not understand them in which case he should shut up.

Mr. Archbold writes, “Why is other human life worth anything if there is no God? From what philosophical groundwork is he basing his good works on? Dawkins, it would seem to me, hasn’t defined his terms and is only borrowing our definition of ‘good.’” The way i look at it, human life has intrinsic worth. This worth is not dependent on belief in a religiously defined god. Also, no religion has a right to claim the ultimate definition of “good.” We humans had very real conceptions of goodness way before the invention of the Christian God. I encourage everyone to give money to the Red Cross to help in Haitian relief!

I’m not sure where to begin on this one.  The concept of reciprocal altruism is innate to many mammalian species.  I suggest reading Lyall Watson’s “Dark Nature” for a good overview on the biological origins of good, evil and altruism.

Frankly I’m not sure what the point of your post is except to laugh and point while chuckling “Look at those funny atheists trying to be good”.  I would suggest that if that is in fact your intent, that you pick another topic other than atheists helping Haitians.  Better yet, stop laughing and pointing and contribute to the relief effort.

I dont believe in god, but I grieve for the people who I will never meet who will suffer more than I ever will. As a night shift taxi driver, I am given opportunities to help my fellow human. Almost everynight I am picking up people who are down and out, who have hit rock bottom. I’ll stop by a fast food joint and pick up a bag of food and give it to the homeless that live down the street.
Guess what Mr. ArchBold?  If I believed in a god or not, it would’nt change the way i live, or my feelings towards my fellow humans.

What I find interesting in all of these comments is that no one has proven WHY human life is “intrinsically” valuable. Haven’t atheist environmentalist gone on saying that human life is directly responsible for the worsening of our planet? It should then be seen from that point of view the a few hundred thousand less people would be a good thing.

Indeed, from an atheist point of view, why should I care about a people who live thousands of miles away from me? Why should I care for anyone who doesn’t directly benefit me in some way? Why should I pay any attention to these “emotions” like pity and love if, rationally, I know they are simply chemical responses in the brain? Why should I care if some human being who is so poor as to not be able to contribute anything to the rest of humanity dies? 

If God or a perfect example of morality doesn’t exist, then aren’t in martial concepts like “good” and “evil” simply and ultimately subjective? And if they are subjective, why should I care what anyone other then myself believes to be good and evil? Shouldn’t Good be that which directly benefits myself while evil be that which doesn’t?

Without God, the only important person in my life is myself. Everyone else is secondary and only if they someone contribute something to my success. If God doesn’t exist, and the only thing waiting for me in death is absolute oblivion, why should I care? The only reason I might be “good” in a godless world is that I’m too weak or cowardly to take what I want at any given time. In a godless world, we should be looking up to the successful cut throat killers and thieves for examples on how to pray on the weak while becoming more powerful.

After all, when we all face the same end. Truly, when our sun finally becomes some sad little ember burning in the infinite and everything we have worked on and completed in our history will be reduced to ash, why should an atheist adopt anything expect a completely nihilistic outlook on life?

If the world ends in the next hour, with all life and history obliterated, and I rape and murder a little girl, does it really matter?

“Because without our definitions he’d have to ask the question, “What is good without God?” And that’s something I haven’t seen answered yet.”

That’s because people like you stick your fingers in your ears and say “lalalalala” every time it’s answered.

Morality is evolutionary, not divinely granted.  This has been shown many, many times.  Just because you refuse to look at the evidence doesn’t mean that the evidence doesn’t exist.

Matt…. is another theist posting as an atheist.
Matt, if beleiving in God prevents you from raping and other things, then by all means stay a theist.  Having to have an imaginary authority figure ready to knock you down if you do something wrong…is borderline psychosis, Ethics and Morality has nothing to do with a lack of belief in Allah, or Joe Smith, or Yahweh

Commenter Andrew Smith is right on all counts, M@thew, although he is somewhat politer about it than he could be.  Your ignorance about the evolutionary roots of altruism is rivaled only by the crassness you’ve shown in writing this idiotic post in the first place.  (Vulgar comments edited.)

Even if you buy the silly notion that a sense “morality” provided some evolutionary advantage, that does not define “good”

I think a much better case can be made that evolution deselects atheists, so it doesn’t really matter much what you evolutionary mishaps think.

Matt,

I’d recommend to you that you get out and meet and talk with some atheists.  Studying a bit of biology likely wouldn’t hurt but that’s a secondary concern.

Not about religion, because obviously on that point we’d have to agree to disagree.  Talk about families, friends, hobbies, that sort of thing.  You strike me as somebody who seriously needs a reality check. 

Atheists are no more demons in human flesh than your average Christian embodies the values of Tomás de Torquemada.  When you’re ready to behave in a civil manner with atheists perhaps this conversation might progress on more interesting lines, but right now your baseless accusations of viciousness are severely hampering your ability to be taken seriously.

Matt, all ethics are subjective, even your “theistic” ethics use human standards to judge what is ” good” and ” bad”
God is beleived to do good things, while the devil is belived to do bad things.
If you never judged by human standards, then you would neevr know if you were worshiping the devil or not.
Nobody can escape ” situational ethics”.
If you believe in ” absolute morals” then why is Old Testament Ethics so out-of-touch with modern ethics, yet was culturaly normal at the time? In the Old Testament, God told everybody Slavery was OK and normal, also genocide, rape and enslavement of the enemies woman and children.

Did your Old Testament God practice situational ethics?

Andrew Smith
You are attacking a straw man.  Matthew never said that atheists are “demons in human flesh”

His assertion that the desire for altruism and the belief that individual lives have value come from God, whether Dawkins thinks so or not, is hardly viscous.  Or do you define vicious as disagreeing with you?

Are you [...] kidding me?  You are knocking non-theists for being charitable?

Patrick:

I am responding to his comments, not the original post.  Specifically:

“Haven’t atheist environmentalist gone on saying that human life is directly responsible for the worsening of our planet? It should then be seen from that point of view the a few hundred thousand less people would be a good thing.”
and;
“Why should I care if some human being who is so poor as to not be able to contribute anything to the rest of humanity dies?”
and;
“Without God, the only important person in my life is myself. Everyone else is secondary and only if they someone contribute something to my success. If God doesn’t exist, and the only thing waiting for me in death is absolute oblivion, why should I care? The only reason I might be “good” in a godless world is that I’m too weak or cowardly to take what I want at any given time. In a godless world, we should be looking up to the successful cut throat killers and thieves for examples on how to pray on the weak while becoming more powerful.”

I think those would qualify as accusations of viciousness.

So what you’re saying is:

# Dawkins is ... intent on proving that atheists can be as good as Christians.
# [Atheists are] desperate to prove that they’re as good (and usually better) than us religious types.
# Dawkins is only proving that he can be good without acknowledging God.
# Atheists can’t define good and evil, and are only borrowing from Christianity.

Mr. Smith et al,
Please note that the Matt of the comments is not the author of this post.

This article seems rather petty for a religion that prides itself on humility. So what if atheists want to contribute to the relief efforts, shouldn’t you be glad people, regardless of faith or lack thereof want to help? Instead it seems you would rather they didn’t by your juvenile reaction.

Did you get to one up the atheists in the playground there sparky?

Your article comes off as childish and rather provincial in your thinking, I would have expected more adult behavior. If the atheists want to contribute to relief efforts you should be an adult and commend them, not act like a bratty 4 year old, at your age you really should be ashamed.

You are a horrible, misguided individual to think that Catholics (and in subtext only religious people) have a monopoly on compassion, caring, and charity.  If you represent the best hope of humanity, then I fear for humanities future.

Hey Catholics, you ever heard this one - “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”?

Utterly and tremendously foolish article.

It’s people like you, sir, that are assisting in your own demise as your religion disappears from this country.

“In fact, I think Dawkin’s efforts to do good is one of the best arguments for innate knowledge of right and wrong.”

Obviously. That is why Dawkins has been saying this very thing all his life, in just about all of his books.

“[Dawkins] is only borrowing our definition of “good.””

So, which is it? Does he have an innate knowledge of right and wrong or is he borrowing your definition of them?

““What is good without God?” And that’s something I haven’t seen answered yet.”

Well, you answered it yourself: “innate knowledge of right and wrong.” That’s what good is without God. If we don’t all have this innate sense of morality, then you’ll have to be ready to admit that it comes from religion. If it does come from religion, it follows that you admit that, were it not for religion, you would go about murdering, stealing and pillaging, and religion is the only thing that keeps you from doing these things.

There are some of us who don’t nee that, though. Some people don’t need a religion to tell them that murder, perjury, cheating, etc. are wrong, or that helping others in need is the right thing to do. Whatever else may be said of our sense of morality, one thing is sure: it doesn’t have anything to do with religion. As you said, it’s innate in us, in some more than others.

I am not saying that religious folks have a monopoly on goodness as Mr. Dawkin’s charity shows. What I’m saying is that God calls all of us to be good; atheists and believers. And that desire inside of us all to help our fellow man is from God whether we acknowledge it or not.

This is really unsettling. I’m not sure why this was allowed to be published but Mr. Archbold is way off on all accounts. He’s also snide, boastful, and just plain irrational. Christians should hold themselves to higher standards than this. Mr. Archbold just wrote a piece that he hoped would show that atheists, like Mr. Dawkins, are acting like Christians because in times like these it’s evident that everyone has some inherent piece of God in them that shows through. Instead, he just showed that a majority of Atheists are very well intentioned and us Christians are exactly as we are viewed by them…ignorant and full of ourselves. Congratulations Mr Archbold, you and everyone as ignorant as you are the reason why Christianity is slowly losing followers.

You ask: “‘What is good without God?’ And that’s something I haven’t seen answered yet.”

Empathy is a universal trait found across all human societies regardless of religion or creed (or lack there of).  It’s even found in some animals. Pretty simple and basic stuff if you weren’t trying so hard not to see it.

What’s scary is religous folks who couldn’t figure out how or why to be good if it wasn’t for their super-duper sky daddy giving them written instructions.  Yikes.

No, Mr. Archbold, that’s not what you’re saying.  Have the courage to stand behind your own words. But let’s take your argument and turn it around:  Since there is no God, and all goodness and morality are part of our genetic, evolutionary makeup, religion has merely embodied our instinctive knowledge.  You’ve created “God” and projected your instincts into his words.  But that’s not the issue here.  The issue is that, as I said earlier, your essay is inappropriate.  This is a time to pull together, not a time to be throwing insults at one another.  I may not be Christian, but I probably know more about your Bible’s history than you do, and I know that your essay is un-Christian.

“Posted by Matthew Archbold on Tuesday, Jan 19, 2010 12:36 PM (EST):

I am not saying that religious folks have a monopoly on goodness as Mr. Dawkin’s charity shows. What I’m saying is that God calls all of us to be good; atheists and believers. And that desire inside of us all to help our fellow man is from God whether we acknowledge it or not. “

Ah, convenient circular logic, I can never disprove your assertion.  If only the world was as simple as your mind.

I deny the holy spirit!

Re: Matthew Archbold
      “I am not saying that religious folks have a monopoly
      on goodness…that desire inside of us all…is from
      God whether we acknowledge it or not.”
Right, you’re not saying that religious folks have a monopoly on goodness, but you are stating that you think the gods of the religious folks have a monopoly on goodness. Personally, I find that an equally arrogant statement to make.

Pat Archbold:

Thanks for the clarification, I had been under the impression they were one and the same.  My first comment applies to the Matthew of the original article, my second is retroactively applied to the comments of the other Matt.

As a Catholic and a catechist for many years now, I am highly offended by this article. You are passing Catholics off as arrogant and ignorant bigots, an image we have been striving to fight off for a long time. Maybe you should refresh your own beliefs, because Catholicism does not inherently believe people are good at all times. You have to strive to be good, you have to stave off evil thoughts and agendas (we even use to think we had to fight demons!).

If this article possibly served the purpose of conversion of possible atheists, it would fail miserably by laughing in their face at their own good efforts and calling them ignorant. It is articles like this that when faced with the Truth in a really life changing scenario, atheists will still turn down the belief in God because they know Christians, et. al., are all arrogant bigots!

I’m just so disgusted at the them and us you are furthering, you don’t have to stoop to their level.

Matthew Archibold:

“I am not saying that religious folks have a monopoly on goodness as Mr. Dawkin’s charity shows. What I’m saying is that God calls all of us to be good; atheists and believers. And that desire inside of us all to help our fellow man is from God whether we acknowledge it or not.”

And yet studies of biology show that other animals possess altruistic tendencies.  More to the point, in game theory simulations such as the prisoner’s dilemma, altruism is shown to be the “winning” strategy.  While I realize that this doesn’t discount the involvement of a god, it would appear that that god in question uses biological drives to accomplish this goal.

It is also worth noting that since this is uniform across any number of human religions (many of which maintain claims similar to the Christian religion that they are the one, true religion) it is more likely that religion is in fact irrelevant to the altruistic drive.

Pat R, I don’t recall every saying that I “believe people are good at all times.” Not sure where you got that?

You are way out of your philosophical depth. You ask, how can human life be worth anything if there is no god. It is precisely because there is no god that human life is worth anything. If you believe that this life - the only one we know for sure to exist - is merely the briefest period before some everlasting afterlife, then suffering and injustice in this life don’t matter. As Antonin Scalia said, “to the believing Christian, death is no big deal”, and it follows that killing is no big deal. Religion is all about tribalism and setting one people against another. Atheists recognize that we are all fellow humans first and foremost, and this life is all that exists so we might as well work to make it the best it can be.

This is in response to your 11:24 post:

“If the world ends in the next hour, with all life and history obliterated, and I commit a horrible crime against someone unable to defend themselves, does it really matter?”

***YES*** it matters—it matters to them, and that is all! And that is enough!

I think you are looking for a platonic/idealized version of morality. It doesn’t exist. It is an illusion in your mind.  Platonism is a terrible concept here. There is no “ultimate transcendant morality” just as there is no “ultimate transcendent car”. 

Yes, there are cars, yes there is morality. Some are pretty unambiguous; a toyota corrolla is a car, murder is bad. Some are more ambigous; is a dune buggy a car?  Is stealing food when you are hungry ok? Ambigous. Morality has varied greatly across cultures and times—but it does exist. I hope this helps…

Please note again, The 11:24 (Matt) post is not the author of this post.

If you believe that this life - the only one we know for sure to exist - is merely the briefest period before some everlasting afterlife, then suffering and injustice in this life don’t matter. As Antonin Scalia said, “to the believing Christian, death is no big deal”, and it follows that killing is no big deal.

It’s a *bad* idea to follow a quip about “being way out of [one’s] philosophical depth” with a statement about alleged Christian belief that would flunk you out of Sunday school.

That you feel sentimental about human life is nice, but there are plenty of atheists (e.g., Sam Harris) who don’t share those sentiments.

By its terms, atheism has to dispense with all transcendent notions concerning human dignity and worth.  In a materialist world view, human life is valued to the exact extent he/she/they who wield a monopoly on the use of force decide(s) it has value.  The fine print also clearly states that said monopolist(s) also reserve(s) the right to amend, modify or abolish this understanding without prior notice.

Great article Matt.  You are right on target with all your points; points I think most of the commentators here are missing.  As you mentioned we applaud anyone seeking to help their fellow man, but one can’t help the irony of Dawkins actions with regard to his extensive attack on Christianity and religion in general.  I may have missed it, but one good question you asked an older post comment, which I’ve noticed has not been answered is the case of human value.  Truth is that this cannot be answered without an appeal to natural law or God.

God’s idea of “good” also include:

Killing children that curse you. 
owning slaves.
killing anyone who eats pork or drives a car on Saturday.

shooshx:

Scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist.  Perhaps you should consider learning to read the Bible from somebody other than a high school sophomore.

Matt is an example of an immoral theist, someone who sees no reason to be good at all except for either greed for heaven or fear of hell.

A life that formed through natural means and is the only life you will ever get is infinitely more valuable and worth living than one which was specifically created and has an eternal afterlife

Mr. Archbold writes, “I almost hate to inform Mr. Dawkins that his little plot is actually helpful to believers as we believe that no matter what you espouse verbally each man has written on his soul the ability to tell right from wrong. And while Dawkins denies it, his actions indicate otherwise.”

I hate to inform Mr. Archbold that nonbelievers largely believe the same thing. The differences, of course, is that we believe not that “each man has written on his soul the ability to hell writhe from wrong” but that evolution has imparted upon us an innate moral sense that aids in furthering the species.

We all do good, believer or not, because it feels right to do so. Skeptics just have a scientifically plausible explanation for why this is so.

“But we’re glad for the help anyway. Thanks.”  ..... [VOMIT]

Its incredible how religious people claim a monopoly for pure motives. An atheist is good to others WITHOUT the threat or orders of an all powerful enforcer, without the prospect of reward or damnation after this life and yet it is those whose motive for doing good includes fear and nest lining that claim ultimate moral authority.

Respect for your fellow man does need to be granted by God. Respect for the individual as another human being, regardless of their arbitrary differences in race creed or geographical location can come by virtue of your own humanity. Atheists do not delight in the suffering of others but can empathise and seek to help.

Most importantly this help can be given through a channel they are comfortable with, one that is free from the bias of religion, for example in refusing to use condoms in the effort against the spread of aids.

Religion and religious aids efforts can do an astonishing amount of good, but so too can the efforts of secularists, humanists and atheists. Now is a time when we should be proud to see people pull together in support of our fellow man after this disaster, and not engage in childish sniping over who is being good, and who is proving who wrong.

“What is good without God?”
Almost everything! the good and evil concept are in the bible..without it you can find good and many other ways.
In this matter save another human being is a well recognized practice in our modern society. We don’t need god to be good. Morality does not need religion. I love my friends, my relatives, parents and even you. And I dont believe in any god. I just want all the best for everybody so we can enjoy a better life while we are here.

Good thoughts, Mr. Archbold. Hopefully it will get many who read it to try and reconcile their honest and natural inclination to “do Good” (while inherently appealing to an objective standard of Good) with the logical inevitability that a greatest Good (God) must exist.

If there is no God, then there is absolutely no reason to get all worked up about this article (or anything else for that matter).

“I have to wonder from what philosophical grounding does Dawkins’ altruism emanate? Why is other human life worth anything if there is no God?”

Have you ever watched an animal mother that cares for its children, e.g cat or a duck? Are you aware that there are species that even take care of children, not of their own, but of other mothers of their flock? Have you seen a herd or flock band together to be stronger and more survivable? Do you really think this is all happending, because this animals are *believing in god*???

And would you really run around and steal, assault and murder your fellow man simply because you were told that there were no god???
In this case: please keep on believing in the punishments of god! Otherwise I would really be afraid of running into you!

Matthew Warner:

“If there is no God, then there is absolutely no reason to get all worked up about this article (or anything else for that matter).”

Mr. Warner,

You seem to share the common fallacy that we are all robots, only animated when filled with belief for some mythical being.  There are a number of very good reasons to get worked up about any number of things, not the least of which being that we are able to empathize with our fellow men and do not with for them suffer.

As far as this specific article, I am irked by Mr. Archibald’s theory because it is demeaning.  To assume that atheists are puppets of your god, working against their robotic nature in spite of their empty slates, is a rather dehumanizing view.

Imagine how you’d feel if somebody told you that all the good you do was because Allah moved you to be good, in spite of your beliefs in the false Christian god.

It always amazes me how much the religious establishment hates people who don’t believe what they do and will do anything they can to discredit them.  I’m not saying this of Christians, but specifically the church and idiots like Archbold.

I think the reason for this behavior has to do with the fact that as soon as people start thinking for themselves they quickly realize they’re being fed bullshit in the name of god.

Just be a good person ... it doesn’t need to be any more complicated.

Morality is not a strictly human enterprise, it is certainly not monopolized by the religious.  Look at the hierarchal structure and altruism of the other great apes that cannot articulate in their own digital language what is right and wrong, shameful behaviour, the golden rule, etc.  They come to these understandings because they act as stabilizers and evolutionarily stable strategies.

We would not have evolved to the point where we could develop religion if the desire to trust and reciprocate kind behaviour was not already there in our primative origins.

Atheists do not want to be “as good as Christians” because for one, we don’t think their doctrine teaches people to be good. It is based on a violent selfish god. Secondly, Dawkins isn’t promoting giving to charity as a egoistic ploy, rather, it is simply a progression of a free thinking movement. We need to show people that Atheists are kind giving people. The media and religious people have lead society to think Atheism is bad or of the devil, etc…. It is quite the opposite. The media also cannot wrap it’s head around the fact that Atheists have no agenda, so they are always trying to invent one.  Morality was around long before the ten commandments, yet creationists ignore that fact.  I sure wouldn’t want to base my life on a god who killed lots of people and promoted slavery and evilness toward women and certain groups of people.  the christian religion has a horrid background.  Read the old testament.  Even the new testament has atrocities against mankind.

The lord works in mysterious ways and apparently, one of those ways is leveling a major city and killing thousands of innocent men, women, and children.  If baffles me how people can continue to claim that “god is good” when they watch the bodies of children being pulled from piles of rubble.  No thank you, Mr. Archbold, I’ll take my goodness without relying on an evil, fictitious higher power.

Posts were closed automatically. The original, initial limit of 53 comments was reached. It has been increased.

If everyone on Earth realized the truth - that god and heaven and hell don’t exist - and in turn realized that there is no “afterlife” (this life is all we’ve got), then people would be more likely to make the most out of this short life….and try to make it better for themselves and others.  Think about it…

Actually, enlightened one, they would say what such people have always wound up saying in the past:

“Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a man comes to his end, and no one has been known to return from Hades. Because we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been; because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts. When it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes, and the spirit will dissolve like empty air. Our name will be forgotten in time and no one will remember our works; our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud, and be scattered like mist that is chased by the rays of the sun and overcome by its heat. For our allotted time is the passing of a shadow, and there is no return from our death, because it is sealed up and no one turns back. “Come, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that exist, and make use of the creation to the full as in youth. Let us take our fill of costly wine and perfumes, and let no flower of spring pass by us. Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither. Let none of us fail to share in our revelry, everywhere let us leave signs of enjoyment, because this is our portion, and this our lot. Let us oppress the righteous poor man; let us not spare the widow nor regard the gray hairs of the aged. But let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless. “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. We are considered by him as something base, and he avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father. Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life; for if the righteous man is God’s son, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture, that we may find out how gentle he is, and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.”

Andrew Smith,

Robots? Seriously? Get a grip man. I’m talking about sound REASONING here…not your emotions and “feelings”. And to answer your question, if there is no God it frankly doesn’t matter how I “feel.” How I feel would just be the consequence of some electrical impulses releasing chemicals in my brain. It would mean a meaningless existence. You could find no more meaning in this life than a dog finds in chasing its tail.

So there would be no REASON for me to get all worked up if somebody “dehumanized me” or called me a robot or attributed my good works to Allah or anything else. And I certainly wouldn’t get all worked up over a blog post.

The fact that you and many others ARE getting so worked up and that you implicitly appeal to some sort of objective standard of “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong” in your very arguments here only serve to support the existence of God even more.

Matt, no offense, but your assumptions about the mind-set of atheists is all wrong ( you can argue about it, but reality is your not an atheist, you cannot accuratly tell us.. how we think or see the world)
Yes. Life does have meaning, ethics, ( most of us) still see beauty and purpose all around us… I am not going to bother going into detail.
But your going to have to play a difficult mental mind game in trying to put yourself in our shoes, which is going to be almost impossible for you,
unless you simply ” let all assumptions go” and see things from an atheistic point of view… you would have more success ” walking in our shoes” and understanding the atheist point of view if you approached it from an academic or intellectual context… you will discover not much difference between the humanity of atheists and theists

Homeskooled
You say “Yes. Life does have meaning, ethics, ( most of us) still see beauty and purpose all around us”

Why?  Is it self imposed?  Arbitrary?  Personal?  To have meaning or ethics requires something transcendent.  Anything else is just a personal code.  Might make you feel better but won’t matter a whit when we are all fossil fuels.

<quote>The only reason I might be “good” in a godless world is that I’m too weak or cowardly to take what I want at any given time.</quote>

That says much more about your “innate” morality than it says about any atheists’.

Matt, without writing ten pages to answer your question.
Just take a look at Japan, or the Netherlands, whose majority population dont beleive in God… yet millions of Japanese and Netherlanders still live lifes of purpose, love, meaning,and even fulfilling happy lives no different than theists..

and Matt, maybe it does or doesnt matter when we have all turned into tommarrows fossil Fuels, I dont know, nobody does…. but understand that the Universe is 13 Billion years old, and almost all of us humans NEVER once felt any sense of loss or regret not remembering the past 13 billion years… whose to say the next 13 billion will be no different?

The fact that some people in the Netherlands do or do not acknowledge God doesn’t disqualify God. God does not depend on the acknowledgement of the Netherlands to exist. The fact that many people who do not acknowledge God are able to act in a loving manner, I believe, is indicative of a loving God’s gift of conscience.

Yes Matt, of course the Netherlands ” happy” atheist population does not prove or disprove gods existence at all .. you are 100% correct…. however you have gone on a completely different rabbit trail, that has nothing to do with the current discussion.
but reveals your mental state and motivations.
For this reason I bow out and I am no longer going to reply. Its pointless and a waste of time.
I would explain why, but its pointless to do so, you would not understand.
Peace to you.

God is not needed for morals or anything really. God is a man-made concept which is no longer relevant in modern society. If the oppression of women or the hatred of gays isn’t enough to convince you then I feel sorry for you. Wake up sheeple. In the beginning Man created god.

“From what philosophical groundwork is he basing his good works on?”

As a non-Catholic, Dawkins can see that Philosophy is a useful exercise, but it is only Catholics who take seriously the musings of metaphysicists and hubristically hope to find truth through nothing other than the power of their own minds.

Further to my comment on the folly of Philosophy:

“Atheists love you. They just don’t know why”

At least we can admit that.

“Because if that’s true then it would seem that the greatest value of Haitians lives to Dawkins is how they make Dawkins look.”

Conversely, it seems the greatest value of Haitian lives to M Archibold is being able to exploit their suffering to make cheap jibes at those who aim to help them.

“What is good without God?” And that’s something I haven’t seen answered yet.
It’s been answered many, many times. What I’d like to know is ‘What is good WITH God’.

1.  What God says is good.
2.  God is the standard by which good is defined.

In other words, a circular argument.

If I believe that all I have is this world and the other people who are on it, I am going to treat them better than if I believed that my religion made me a superior being, and everyone else is going to fry in hell.  Atheists care more about the here and now than Christians do.

Roxanne said “If I believe that all I have is this world and the other people who are on it, I am going to treat them better.” I’m seriously asking why? What philosophical grounding is there for you to treat people better?

And while many people say that some sort of morality code has been implanted in humans via evolution, why should you pay attention to it? Is there no free will in your philosophy?

Meanwhile, apparently, Catholics can’t love you without talking about how superior they are to everyone else.

Thaaaaaanks!

“I’m seriously asking why? What philosophical grounding is there for you to treat people better?”

An expectation of reciprocation, and the fact that helping people makes you feel good. I help people because I like doing it, not because some invisible space wizard implanted me with his rules.

‘Because without our definitions he’d have to ask the question, “What is good without God?” And that’s something I haven’t seen answered yet.’

Are you kidding me? If God defines what is good, how the hell do you judge that God is good?

Either you get your sense of good from something else, or ‘good’ is dependent on the whims of your sky daddy.

Mike, you say you do good because you have “An expectation of reciprocation, and the fact that helping people makes you feel good.”

So being good to you is an act of self interest. And in that sense the other’s existence is important only in how it makes you feel, is that right?

You think it’s somehow less meaningful to do good works for others if it’s all out of self-interest?

Why is it only okay to be charitable because of a god?

Also, what you don’t seem to be understanding is that humans are empathic beings. We can feel the pain that others go through. We know how we would want to be treated, and we behave accordingly.

Those of us who aren’t broken, of course.

@Matt

If you need god to feel any (and I stress any) empathy for or solidarity with people thousands of miles away from yourself, then by all means keep worshiping God as it sequesters your abnormal narcissistic inclinations in the dark corner of your mind where they belong. I would imagine, partly by your own admission, that by nature you are a very self-centered person and that is part of the human experience for many members of our species so I live with it.  However, I am quite happy that the majority of people on earth don’t appear to be as uncaring as you have admitted.

As for why no one has explained why humans are intrinsically valuable in these comments, I’ll tell you, it would take far more words than these comments allow.  You would need a primer in the modern findings of sociology, anthropology, biology, and psychology to come understand why humans care for one another and find our neighbors as valuable as ourselves.  I admit it’s not a simplistic explanation like ‘god did it’ but when you do some real research and reading you’ll find the answers you are looking for will begin to unfold.

“So being good to you is an act of self interest. And in that sense the other’s existence is important only in how it makes you feel, is that right? “

As opposed to doing good so you can score points with your God and therefore get into heaven? How is that not self-interest?

I applaud the efforts of anyone who desires to help the suffering, and less fortunate among us. However there is something that jumps out at me when I read the comments to this article. It is very easy to detect the believer’s comments from the non-believer’s comments without even reading the entire argument.  The words of the non-believer’s are full of bitterness, anger and resentment.  The words of the believer are full of love, compassion, and patience.  After all, God is love, so why shouldn’t I be able to recognize Him from miles and miles away, or even from cyberspace?  Unless of course, I do not recognize authentic love, then I will never recognize His presence.

I always love when people arguing for a point simply say “I’d explain it but you’re too stupid to explain it to.” Funny, when people say that I start wondering if maybe they don’t have an answer.

I simply want to know where an atheist’s definition of good comes from. If we are just some unloved species on a rock floating through space then morality as we understand it is just some evolutionary impulse that I would have no reason to adhere to.

What I’m saying is that God loves us all and gave us a gift of conscience and whether you acknowledge God or not, it is still there. And you acknowledge it when you act in a loving manner.

“If we are just some unloved species on a rock floating through space then morality as we understand it is just some evolutionary impulse that I would have no reason to adhere to.”

Philosophical reason? Maybe not. Biological reason? Sure. Unless your brain is broken, like I said.

This is a logical fallacy called the argument from final consequences, by the way. The fact that you find the reality of the outcome distasteful does not mean that the cause of that outcome is false.

‘Dawkins, who has been saying for years that religion is the “root of all evil,”’

I think you’ll find that he has never said any such thing. The BBC program with that title was named by the show’s producers, not him.

But hey, don’t let actually researching another person’s position get in the way of writing a screed!

@Matt
I suppose I will flip things around on you.  I believe the burden of proof is on the one that claims a god without providing evidence for its existence or any subsequent assertion of that entity’s capabilities. 
For me, it is evident that people are moral, good, and beneficent without a divine authority having instilled those values in us upon creation as explained in various mythologies.  If I don’t believe in a god yet I observe a behavioral characteristic then it follows that there has to be an explanation and I accept the natural one.  I believe that human beings are animals like all others that live on this planet.  We have evolved as social creatures and as a result are dependent on others in the societies we live in for our individual survival.  Without other people most of us would die for lack of ability.  In order to further enhance the survival of our genes we have evolved a morality that serves to ensure the survival of the societies we live in which ultimately serves our own selfish interests even as we are unaware of what is happening when we behave in this altruistic way.  I believe this is further highlighted as people in society become more specialized and we become more dependent on one another.  As a result our standard of living increases as does our life expectancy which gives us more cause to be concerned with the welfare of the next person because we are all the more vulnerable.  It is to our benefit to be concerned about the welfare of our neighbor.

We have evolved responses to observing human suffering so that we have immediate reactions when we see it and are generally compelled to alleviate it.  Because we have television signals that beam in images of suffering from great distances, our vivid imaginations take over and our solidarity gets extended to other people thousands of miles away as our genetic compulsion has no way of discriminating against people that are not members of the society we live in that may benefit us.  You can’t just simply choose to stop caring because that is not characteristic of our species.  Because we have also evolved self-awareness it might be possible to actively work against your natural inclinations, but this would ultimately result in the erosion of the social fabric.

To the religious person that initially confronts this reality it appears bleak and devoid of humanity.  For me this is all a wonderful and beautiful thing that gives more meaning to life than creation stories and vicarious salvation.  It means that we need each other for survival and would cease to exist without possessing the capacity to love.  Hopefully without sounding too contradictory, love is a necessary but voluntary imperative instead of a heavenly decree and as a result is all the more special and meaningful.  If we choose not to care for one another we will not survive.  If the golden rule was not an idea much older than Christianity and Judaism then we would not have made it this far as a species and if we abandon it now then we will demonstrate how much we have in common with 99% of all of the species that have ever lived on earth.

“What I’m saying is that God loves us all and gave us a gift of conscience and whether you acknowledge God or not, it is still there. And you acknowledge it when you act in a loving manner.”

Argument by assertion is absolutely useless unless you’re using it on people who agree with you. I can assert, with JUST as much evidential support, that your conscience comes from a five-dimensional frog named Steve, whether you acknowledge him or not. Do you really not understand why your claims are futile?

“I simply want to know where an atheist’s definition of good comes from.”

And I simply want to know where a theist’s definition of good comes from. I’ve asked already and you don’t seem to have an answer.

Again, We’re told 1) What God says is good; and 2)God is the standard by which good is defined. In other words, you judge God to be good by his own standard - a circular argument.

This gives NO extra meaning to the definition of good that any atheist can come up with. 

“God loves us all and gave us a gift of conscience”

And how do you know that conscience is ‘good’? What measure are you using to judge it? If it’s the measure that God gave you, then again, that’s a circular argument. How is this superior to anything proffered by atheists?

Andrew Ryan makes a great point.
Even theists MUST use humans standards when defining what is “good”.
God is understood to do good things while the devil is understood to do bad things.. this is a human judgement
....there is no escaping human standards in defining what is “good”... if the human standard is not applied, nobody would know if they were worshiping the devil or not, resulting in things like “righteous” suicide bombing

Thanks Doctor. Is a theist going to reply that we KNOW God is more moral than Satan, because God tells us he is? Or perhaps God is more moral because he’s more powerful? Neither of these are good reasons. Feel free to come up with a ‘common sense’ reason to choose God over Satan, but that removes the need for a God to give us ‘good’ in the first place.

You say “good” is some evolutionary impulse to help others. But do you always follow your evolutionary impulses? If not, what standard are you using to judge whether or not you should act on your impulses? I would call that standard your conscience; a gift from God. What would you call it?

“Posted by Dave ....The lord works in mysterious ways and apparently, one of those ways is leveling a major city and killing thousands of innocent men, women, and children.  If baffles me how people can continue to claim that “god is good” when they watch the bodies of children being pulled from piles of rubble.”

And yet with no sense of irony these believers than thank the lord for the one baby saved from the rubble.

“If Dawkins is running this charity to show up religion and helping Haitians is only a secondary consequence then we could hardly claim that what he’s doing is good by most definitions.”

And if believers perform good works so they will be rewarded with heaven or to appease their God ...

@Matthew Archbold
You asked do we always have to follow our evolutionary impulses, and I would say no.  As I mentioned earlier, we have evolved self-awareness and as a result can choose not to follow these impulses if we desire.  I ask a question though, what happens if we fail to eat food or drink water, both of which actions have evolutionary derived impulses?  Of course, we die.  What happens if we fail to move our hand away from a flame we are holding it over?  Of course there is pain and further consequences to our bodies that can be debilitating or life-threatening if we fail to act.  The same is true for the impulse to be good or other human qualities that not only have consequences for us but for society at large.  The underlying point of evolution by natural selection is that if you don’t possess the appropriate survival strategy to thrive in the environment you find yourself you will die off.  It may happen with one individual or it may happen on a macro level over time but if you fail to do what’s necessary to survive in the harsh reality you find yourself then you and/or your species will pay a price.  That’s why I mentioned the necessity for the study of sociology and anthropology in addition to biology being important to understanding the origins of human morality.  You first have to identify a quality or behavioral characteristic that is universal in humans and that was identified in goodness or mutual cooperation/solidarity.  You can begin to trace its importance to the species as a whole once you have isolated it and can begin to find the biological origins to further enhance understanding

“I have to wonder from what philosophical grounding does Dawkins’ altruism emanate? Why is other human life worth anything if there is no God? From what philosophical groundwork is he basing his good works on? Dawkins, it would seem to me, hasn’t defined his terms and is only borrowing our definition of “good.” Because without our definitions he’d have to ask the question, “What is good without God?” And that’s something I haven’t seen answered yet.”

It is apparent to me that you haven’t read any of Professor Dawkins’ works.  What is good without God?  Any action which proves beneficial to the survival of the genetic material of which a human being is a character.  So, yes, “right” and “wrong” is innately written into human beings’ “hearts”, because those actions which are most often considered “right” necessarily tend to be of benefit to the greatest number of people, particularly the actor’s genetic “in-group”.

Your arguments are specious, invalid, and irrelevant, Mr. Archbold.  If Christians are only giving to Haiti to win divine approval or to propagate their religion, how does that make any of you different from Professor Dawkins?

If not, what standard are you using to judge whether or not you should act on your impulses?”

And for the third or fourth time - what standard are YOU using to judge the standard that God gave you? What stops this being a circular argument? Your avoidance of this question is becoming very noticeable.

Noahs Flood was a tragic event, as catastrophic as the earthquake;
Its victims included almost the entire worlds population.
Everytime I see cute Noahs Arks childrens pictures, I think of all the dead babies floating around the ark…yet this event was seen as Good. Why?
By what standard is a God-caused event like this that causes unimaginable sadness,suffering,pain….by what standard is this good or evil,
and by what standard do we judge that standard to be the right standard?

I think if people believed that the biblical God is truly Omni-everything, then the only correct answer is ” God is the one responsible for causeing the earthquake”

“Why is other human life worth anything if there is no God?”

That comment alone reveals your woeful ignorance.

Those of you discussing morality and the circularity of Christian morals might enjoy a blog I wrote a while back called, “Was the Bible Written by Satan?” (religionvirus.blogspot.com/2009/03/was-bible-written-by-satan.html)  It was a tongue-in-cheek article about a copyright-infringement trial between God and Satan, but it illustrates this very problem: If you start from a completely neutral stance, and ask was God or Satan the author, it’s pretty hard to take God’s side in the arguement.  The evidence comes down pretty solidly in Satan’s favor.

First, a comment on a comment. This comes from Matt, who posted on 1/19/10 at 11:25: “In a godless world, we should be looking up to the successful cut throat killers and thieves…” Do you honestly think Carl Sagan, one of the most famous (and beloved) atheists of the 20th century, felt this way? Is this sentiment expressed and argued for anywhere on any page in “The God Delusion” or “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris?

Someone else insinuated that conscience can’t be explained by evolution and must be “a gift from God.” Our sense of conscious IS most certainly rooted in evolution. There’s no mystery at all as to why human beings can be altruistic, for example. Yep, a sense of wanting to do right by people is most certainly explained by evolution.

As for the perennial questions about why be good in a godless world, I would recommend “The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality” by Andre Comte-Sponville. As for a good collection of short essays on different issues but all of them leading back to the title of the book, I would recommend “Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life Without God” by A.C. Grayling. Both men, particularly Grayling, discuss the subject of love and explain why this feeling we have (in its many permutations) has nothing at all to do with positing the existence of a Supernatural Being.

But the ultimate reason to dislike religion, particularly Christianity, is that it says things about the world that are not true. We applied with hindsight the eventual knowledge that thunder and lightning were not the acts of some unseen supernatural being who was having a fit but the consequence of dispassionate nature acting a certain way. And so it goes with many things we’ve learned since then. Human biology, the news and discoveries of which we can apply retroactively to all human beings who have ever lived, tells us that an uninseminated human female cannot later give birth. Why? Because human organisms don’t work that way. Another: all animals—ants, dogs, human beings—eventually die. Death is a fact of life. Corpses do not come back to life. There is no super-dooper-natural world. There is only the natural world, which abides by certain Laws of Nature, and no other.

What’s funny (when not infuriating) about believers is that they won’t face the fact that so much of what they talk about and believe in is based on make-believe. We’ll never be able to pin these terms on any particular individual, but that shouldn’t stop us from recognizing that someone somewhere a very long time ago came up with the idea of the “soul” and “heaven” and “hell” and “miracles” and “angels” and “prayer” and then later on other people came along an attached a “theology” to these ideas to give them the luster of legitimacy and respectability—all the while forgetting that all of this stuff is nothing but make-believe! THAT is the astonishing and perplexing story of humanity, which is to create gods and then dispense with them, create some more gods—and then get rid of those eventually, and so on to the present day with the fictitious and made-up (sorry for the redundancy) Abrahamic gods. Or as Richard Dawkins so perfectly put it: “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some if us just go one god further.”

Certainly “Allah” constantly moves me to be good. Just like “Dios” and “Gott” and “Bog”.

  Using a different word does not make a “different god”. When Arab Christians pray, they say “Allah”.

  If you “brights” think that is a tremendous issue, a study of the “rites controversy” would probably make your heads explode.

For the record, I can’t stand this word “brights,” which Christopher Hitchens has said is “cringe-inducing”. Exactly.

The nomenclature of “god” and its derivations in other cultures is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that “god”—as this generically-named Supreme Being is now called in most parts of the world—is an idea that someone made up, not something we discovered to be true about the world and the ever-perplexing and still-expanding universe in which we live.

I’m amazed how many atheists read the National Catholic Register…I mean, taking into account everything they say about this specific article. Keep reading.

A clarification. I didn’t deliberately seek out the National Catholic Register. I was only alerted to this blog by accident because of a Google Alert I had that pertains to atheism. So as for any possible burgeoning interest in the Catholic Church on my part, sorry. Been there, done that. As I like to refer to myself, I’m a born-again atheist (it’s true: we all come into this world as nonbelievers). What remains intriguing for me is that I saw early on in my childhood that Catholicism was a load of hooey, but I wasn’t able to formulate the reasons why I realized this until I reached my late 20s. What do you suppose it was that first happened, in the midst of my Catholic upbringing, that initiated that spark of skepticism that eventually led me to the good news of secular humanism at so early age? The answer has remained a mystery to this day.

Has anyone here read “The Flight of Peter Fromm” by Martin Gardner? It’s a wonderful novel about a student wrestling with ideas with his atheist professor at the Chicago Divinity School. The following comes from the chapter where Peter wrestles with his professor over the tenets of Catholicism (I typed this out months ago for an atheist friend who hadn’t heard of the novel).

—-

Peter had just finished telling me that he had been talking with one
of the younger priests at the Church of Saint Thomas, and the priest
had assured him that no modern Catholic believes any more that all
non-Catholics are destined for eternal damnation.

“Hallelujah!”, I exclaimed. “Yes, the population of Dante’s inferno
has been steadily declining ever since he wrote about it. And Catholic
obstetricians no longer keep at hand those long syringes they once
used for baptizing infants who might die in the womb. But SOME sinners
still arrive in hell, don’t they?”

“Only those who consciously and willfully turn against God.”

“Does anybody do that? And even if they did, should they suffer
forever? Wouldn’t it be kinder just to let their wretched souls fade
out of existence?”

“But”, Peter countered, “we shouldn’t think of hell as duration in
time. Heaven and hell are part of eternity. How can we know now what
eternity means? Hell is just a crude symbol for something outside of
space and time, something we can’t understand.”

“I know exactly what you mean”, I said. “It’s the last defense. But
even if the true nature of hell is beyond our comprehension, that
doesn’t make the idea less offensive. Isn’t it easier, more respectful
to God in fact, to assume the concept developed because it gave
believers an outlet for their unconscious feelings of revenge and
self-righteousness? Do you know what Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote about
the suffering of the lost?”

He shook his head.

I got up and took a book down from the shelf. After locating the
passage I had in mind, I read aloud: “In order that nothing be wanting
to the happiness of the blessed in Heaven, a perfect view is granted
of them the tortures of the damned.”

Peter, his face coloring, tightened his lips and did not reply. We
shifted to other topics. It was two in the morning (my wife had long
since gone to bed), and both of us were getting sleepy. Again and
again Peter came back to the notion of the finite symbol that points
to a transcendent, inconceivable truth. Satan, for instance. Obviously
he is not a personality like Milton’s admirable angel or Dante’s
three-headed monster. Nevertheless, Peter argued, isn’t something lost
when the concept of the devil is dropped altogether?

“The Devil symbol puts evil outside of God”, he said, “but lower and
less powerful. it treats evil as something that has to be fought and
conquered. That’s why Chesterton, in “The Man Who Was Thursday”,
picked for his Satan symbol the only true anarchist in the story. He
was the man who really wanted to blow up the world.”

Peter tried the same argument with Original Sin. He was willing to
admit there had been no actual Garden of Eden, with its strange trees
and thornless roses and persuasive serpent. Still, there must be a
profound truth of some sort lurking behind the myth of the Fall,
though he wasn’t sure exactly what it was.

“How can you be saved unless you’re saved FROM something?” he asked.

“Look, my dear boy”, I said (it is the only time I can recall when I
almost lost my temper with him), “why don’t you stop fooling yourself?
Blood sacrifices and atonements have long, long histories. They go
back far beyond the death of Christ. You can read all about them in
James Frazer’s “Golden Bough”. The atonement myth keeps popping up in
so many forms, in so many cultures, precisely because it expresses so
poignantly man’s feelings of loneliness, his sense of guilt, his
hunger for the love and protection of a supreme Father. The myth, to
be sure, is beautiful. It’s profound. Don’t cheapen it by believing
that it’s true. The story of Leda and the swan is a charming Greek
fable unless you think it really happened. Oz is a delightful place in
a child’s imagination unless he begins to think Oz really exists. The
Virgin Birth and the Resurrection are marvelous fairy tales. Let’s
keep them that. Let’s not degrade God to the level of a magician who
made a miraculous entrance on the stage of history two thousand years
ago, disguised as a Jewish prophet and faith-healer, to perform a
carnival trick of dying for the sins of humanity, then sprang back to
life again, like Houdini escaping from a locked trunk, and finally
left the scene by floating up into the clouds.”

Peter was looking at me strangely. “I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

“I don’t. But if I did, I’d try to believe in a more dignified deity
than one who went about engaging such drolleries.”

“The Crucifixion isn’t droll.”

“No. Did you ever think, though, how droll the Virgin Birth would have
been if only it were true? Poor old Joseph the carpenter, building a
house and trying make up his mind whether his pregnant young wife is
telling him the truth about Gabriel and the Holy Ghost! No wonder the
Gospels tell us so little about him.”

A year ago I would have not have dared talked this way to Peter. It
would only have made him angry.

Thanks Barry, You ask the right questions where they should be asked. And if you think you’ve found ground to stand on, stop, and rest…I leave that up to you. I confess that a lot of Catholics don’t know their faith well enough to state the case convincingly, providing solid proof. In my Catholic upbringing, I’ve been lucky to meet people who do. In the words of Chesterton—and I through this in for irony-“We need not deny that modern doubt, like ancient doubt, does ask deep questions; we only deny that, as compared with our own philosophy, it gives any deeper answers. And it is a general rule, touching what is called modern thought, that while the questions are often really deep, the answers are often decidedly shallow.”

Forgive me for being blunt, though, but if someone up there made men free—free enough to despise the creator—I think that someone knew he would also respect the well-educated choices of those men. Or else we could completely trash the idea of a just God…

I have no idea what “decidedly shallow” answers Chesterton might have been referring to (maybe I’m missing your irony). Was his referring to meaning and finding purpose in our lives? If so, these are things we create, not discover. I highly recommend the Comte-Sponville book.

But the larger question is this. While reason and science have not given us ultimate answers to everything—What “existed” before the Big Bang? Why did organic life emerge only recently, relatively speaking, in this universe that is 13.7 billion years old?—such unanswerables do not give license to scientists to start making stuff up. And yet the “foundation” of all religions, the Catholic Church in particular, is made-up stuff.

“I always get a kick out of evangelizing atheists and how they’re so desperate to prove that they’re as good (and usually better) than us religious types.”

Hi Pot, this is the Kettle. You’re black. Seriously, this is said from a position of such smug sueriority that I doubt the author is even capable of seeing the laughable irony.

I have to wonder though - why is the author so threatened by the very notion of atheist charity? Could it be that he is afraid that it may be true that one does not need god-worship to make one moral and humane? Poor insecure baby.

I am puzzled by Archbold’s concern about the “value” of human life. What is the value of Archbold? What is the value of me? What, for goodness’ sake, is the value of God? Archbold simply assumes that there is this thing attached to a human life called “value”, and then he complains that Dawkins doesn’t define his terms.

If I see a person suffering from grievous injury, I don’t waste time debating that person’s “value”: I call an ambulance. I know what it is like to be a person, and I have what I consider a perfectly reasonable idea of what it is like to be a person in trouble. I know, for example, that pain hurts. I can’t help it if I want to do something to help. That’s me. Why should God have anything to do with it?

There is no positive evidence for God (except, as the first poster shows, through the eyes of prior belief) while there is a great deal of negative evidence. I am happy with evolutionary explanations for why I care. Why should the notion of God implanting some nice feelings in me be any better? Would it make me a better person or a worse? Either way, I am what I am and, just as I didn’t ask to be born, neither did I ask to have particular feelings about this or that. They matter to me, even if I couldn’t sell them to save myself from starvation, and when the chips are down I don’t care where they come from.

I suspect that the value of God originates in the wretched need to give “value” to oneself. Otherwise I would have to suppose that value *for* God is in having a nearer-than-ringside view of sentient creatures writhing in agony while the angels praise his name.

Oh look!  Another passive-aggressive article from a “loving” Christian who wants to hoard all the goodness in the world to himself and his faith.  Sorry dude, you CAN be good without God.

Dear America,
  What have the American Republicans done to the American Pie that made it so interesting to the world that the Democrats cannot fix??  Part of the freedom and Liberty of the American Pie originates from the giant American stature in New York.  If the French realised the Americans abused the freedom and Liberty and the famous tradition of the American Pie which represents peace, the French people would take back their stature, part of which made Americans extremely popular and known to the world.  Whether we like it or not the world needs the American Pie for entertainment and America to supply it, lead the way and show the world an example on how its done.  American lust is international lust, a great federal foreign debt payer, it’s a multi billion dollar economy, therefore it’s useful.  The EX Republican President George Bush is responsible for the destruction to the American Pie and is to blame for mixing religion and politics together which makes my blood really boil with anger and FURY!!!  The Catholics usually have something to grumble and whinge about anything to do with the American lust which is the American Pie.  There is nothing worse than a politically motivated church and a religiously motivated government which destroys anything lustful and erotic.

matt says:
“What I’m saying is that God loves us all and gave us a gift of conscience and whether you acknowledge God or not, it is still there. And you acknowledge it when you act in a loving manner. “
I would like to know on what evidence he his basing his conviction that our conscience comes from a supernatural being (exactly the one of Catholicism, no less) rather than evolving naturally as has been observed in, oh, all other altruistic animals:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism_in_animals

Or is this just a case of special pleading?

“Vampire bats commonly regurgitate blood to share with unlucky or sick roost mates that have been unable to find a meal, often forming a buddy system.”
Did God give a gift of conscience to vampire bats too?
Science: 1, Philosophy: 0.

Sorry for triple post but, regarding the Chesterton quote:

“We need not deny that modern doubt, like ancient doubt, does ask deep questions; we only deny that, as compared with our own philosophy, it gives any deeper answers. And it is a general rule, touching what is called modern thought, that while the questions are often really deep, the answers are often decidedly shallow.”

I’m guessing he said this before Quantum Mechanics. Or General Relativity. But by the end of the 19th century we already knew why time appears to go forward, and the explanation is mind-blowingly elegant.

The Chesterton quote is from a collection of essays, “The Well and the Shallow”, published in 1935. Like most of Chesterton’s writings, it is excellent entertainment but suffers from such sweeping generalisations that it is not easy to be sure what precisely he is referring to. The problem is that the object of his attacks is always described in very general terms and with a style of absolute, even dogmatic, conviction, which leaves the reader to supply the details while somehow feeling guiltily certain that he or she *ought* to know what the man is talking about. One cannot avoid the suspicion that he is generally saying much less than he would have us believe, but one cannot deny that it sounds good…

However, I am now guilty of side-tracking the discussion, so it’s back to our post. Archbold thinks that Dawkins is borrowing a Christian definition of “good”. Well, in my opinion he isn’t. The concept of “good” is much older than Christianity; but this quibble is irrelevant, because we are not talking *about* “good” but about trying to help people in need. Archbold can think that this is “good” in his terms if he likes, but it is not important. We want to help because we want to help, and because we know that when people are in trouble they help one another. We might think that it is “right”, and in a way that is a much better word because it suggests an affinity with our instinctual makeup, not an anxious searching through the minutiae of ethical philosophy to be sure that what we are about to commit ourselves to is “good”. In addition, conventional language is such that one can use one’s own definition of “good” if one wishes, and who cares very much what it is or whether the Christians agree or not?

The question of “what is good without God” was dealt with very thoroughly by Plato in his dialogue “Euthyphro”, and as the conclusion is decisively bad for Christian ethics I would suggest that Archbold doesn’t read it.

@ TCM
Sir John Eccles, a British nuerologist says:
‘I would rather think that we had to base our possibility of consciousness in animals upon more subtle things such as their performances in the ordinary life in their relationship to one another and to human beings and so on. Nevertheless, there are certain things at that level we have to be careful about. The point I wanted to make about animals is that it is nice to see how they get on together as living beings in company with one another and with other species of animals, and so on, but one of the questions that I ask is: how do they care for their sick and their dead? Professor Washburn of Berkeley has described the case of a pack of monkeys going through the forest climbing and jumping and so on, while the sick monkeys, one or two of them, who can´t keep us with the pack, struggle along doing their best but falling, and eventually the pack goes on and leaves them behind to die. It takes no cognizacnce of them whatsoever. In the monkey, therefore, there appears to be no feeling of compassion. It is doubtful even that Jane Goodall has described so much of this at the chimpanzee level. I am not speaking of course at any level about maternal affection of mother and child. This is something which is instinctive and inborn and can happen in quite lowly organized animals. I am speaking about the care that animals have for the sick and for the dead. Do they in fact just reject their dead or do they begin to take some cognizance that this dead animal is like themselves and that they too may die? I have seen no evidence of this in any of the recorded cases of animals in the wild. It is of course generally recognized by ethologists that you shouldn´t use anecdotal data from domesticated animals. Because of their imitative abilities, you are never sure how much they are imitating without understanding in their relationships to, say, a dead animal or a dead master. This whole question is very important. I venture to suggest that, if animals have consciousness, they don´t have self-consciousness even at the minor level.’
So, don’t confuse science with psychology and claim that instinct is the same as self-consciousness. It is very unscientific of you. Also in an earlier blog you said that Philosophy doesn’t have room in the debate since only Catholics are concerned about it. Well, I hope that Plato isn’t catholic by your definition. Or was Kant catholic… or Perhaps Martin Heiddegger, or Sarte (well, He was an aethist but converted to Catholicism before dying)

Oh please.
Those who are nonbelievers just want to give aid, that is not linked with promoting a religion.

In Evolution, there is the fact of Kin Selection, where we are biologically wired to take care of eachother, just like primates, wolves, and most advanced animals that take care of their own. Its genetic selection.
It has nothing to do with any God or Gods.

You have Pat Robertson who thinks he speaks for God, that is where these God pronouncements will get you.

As a matter of fact, most atheists and humanists are more generous and caring of their fellow persons that the judgemental self-righteous religious types.

So Dawkins setting up a way to give aid for non-believers is excellent.
People shouldn’t be force fed a religion with their aid.

@ JC

Just to make sure that there is no misunderstanding: it was I who brought Plato in, not TCM, and I was replying to Matt Archbold’s comments on my own account, not on TCM’s or anyone else’s. No doubt TCM will reply to your other objections in due course.

In defense of those non-believers posting here, I will say the following:

(1) This article *is* flippant, and I’m getting more and more impatient with blogging and such which takes such a tone. The Christian mindset is obvious to Christians, and the atheistic mindset is obvious to atheists. Dialogue is the only way to resolve our disagreements.

(2) Evil exists, which is the main (albeit, not the only) reason people don’t believe in God. Evil is tough to deal with. Christians should be sympathetic to non-believers because of this. Yes, we have an answer to the existence of evil, but it’s a complicated one and is *not* easy to understand or accept.

——————————————————————————————————

However, in reading the comments on this page, I think that most non-believers do not understand what believers are actually arguing concerning morality.

(1) Christians do not pursue moral behavior merely because we “fear eternal hellfire” or whatever. That’s a cartoon assessment of Christianity. We pursue it because we love God, and we love our fellow man as brothers and sisters, common children of God. I understand why many of the non-believers posting on this page think that they have superior motives for helping people because they don’t feel like they have to be threatened in order to be “good,” but the reason they might be coming to that conclusion is based on a faulty understanding of Christianity.

(2) People, and animals more generally, are capable of being somewhat “good” in an instinctive fashion, but that’s not enough for believers. Because we do not acknowledge the sufficiency of instinct or survival as foundations of human morality, we demand that a reasonable explanation be given for why one should live a “moral” life. “Just be good, it’s not that hard” is not what concerns believers. What concerns us is WHAT *IS* GOOD (emphasis, not shouting). Again, we do not acknowledge instinct or “what promotes the survival of the species” as a sufficient foundation.

(3) This is what is offending non-believers the most, but it must nevertheless be repeated: there is no reason beyond the arbitrary wills of individuals for being “good” if God does not exist, because there is no fixed foundation upon which “good” can be identified. There just isn’t. I don’t know why this is so hard to accept for most non-believers. Christians and other religious seem to be more in touch with their dark sides than others, I guess. As I’ve heard said (can’t remember where), the Church is a “hospital for the broken.” If you are not broken, then I guess you don’t need God. Christ even said so.

(4) The evolution of species does not seem to prove or disprove anything about the existence or non-existence of God. I think non-believers make far too much of evolution. It only proves that God did not just plop us in Creation ready-made, but this has never been a doctrine, nor a widely held belief, of the Church. It’s only in modern times that one starts seeing so-called “creationism” as a reaction against the theory of evolution. If you have a beef with a literal interpretation of the Genesis story, take it up with those who advocate such an interpretation.

Regards,
Tele

This is so funny. Suddenly hundreds of atheists appear from nowhere and beat the author of this article. I must say that the author in my opinion is unkind to atheists and I certainly do not share his views. But it only takes a look at Africa, or Asia, or ANY other place in the world where there are relief activities by unpaid people to see that believers (especially Christians) are overwhelmingly represented. Never mind if the reason for their being there is “greed for Heaven” or “fear of Hell”, or whatever. They are just there, while the numerous, according to them, fellow atheists of North America, Europe and Japan are nowhere to be seen except in their homes, reading Dawkins or going to a trendy vegan restaurant two blocks away. This should make people think. I must say that Dawkins’ effort is worthy and welcome. However, it sounds a bit hollow in its motives (to snub Christians or deprive them of the monopoly of altruism!?) and a tad ridiculous in its motto.

Thank you, Telemachus. There is a lot here, and I don’t think it can all be answered in one post. Also, I can only speak for myself, so perhaps I had better state my own position more clearly.
_
I am reminded of an article recently published by Richard Dawkins in which he criticises the obnoxious Pat Robertson, and then points out that Robertson is at least being consistent and standing up for “real” Christian values (I hope this is not so brief as to be a mere parody of what Dawkins says). Now, it seems clear to me that Dawkins is really quite unjust here. In my view, religious thought is human thought like philosophical or any other kind of thought, and it evolves and develops with time and experience. I don’t expect it to stay the same, and I do expect there to be many differences of opinion amongst believers. And history shows that this is the case. But it means that from my point of view, there are many “Christianities”, perhaps even as many as there are believers, and after all, if God is a person, we should expect faith to involve a personal relationship.
_
The sticking point is the nature of this relationship. When I consider the kind of believers I meet, it seems to me that the kind of beliefs they have are consistent with their general characters. This is actually surprising, because one would expect a relationship with the ultimate Good to bring about a more consistent character than seems to occur in fact. I am unfortunate enough to have had religious acquaintances who are arrogant and unpleasant to the point of positive cruelty, but the majority are just ordinary and not specially different from most careless people who just get on with their lives without thinking too deeply about “things”. I have met hardly anyone who possesses that humility and integrity (I can’t think of a better word) that I would have expected from someone who “walks with God”. On the other hand, I have met such qualities in people who have no particular belief or even no belief at all.
-
This inclines me to the view that the “relationship” is an imaginary one, and its manifestations are such as one would expect from this type of person or that. People make of their religion what they want to, and they make God in their own image. Thus we vary from the one extreme of vigorous and aggressive Bible-thumping to the opposite extreme of non-judgmental compassion, and with everything in between from guilt-ridden soul-searching to calm contemplation and humility. Belief will reinforce one tendency or another, creating a growth in this faculty or that, which will probably be described as a growth in spirituality.
-
Does evil exist? Only in us, I think. The universe is innocent, but we through self-awareness and awareness of “the other” have discovered the possibility of deliberately causing harm, of deliberately exploiting suffering to further our own ends.
-
The point of all this somewhat rambling discourse is that the products of religion are no more than the products of human nature. Religion makes claims to be very special indeed, but furnishes no evidence of being any better than other attempts at human betterment. Individuals will disagree, but it is the whole that concerns me.
-
I’m sure I have far exceeded whatever quota I am allowed of column-inches. However, the point about the nature of Good is obviously crucial. “Instinct or survival” are not explanations of why we *ought* to be moral: they merely help to explain why we (usually) are. Science is about *is*, not *ought*. It asks why we do what we do and finds a hypothesis, etc etc. The question of what is the nature of “the Good” is a philosophical one, but it cannot evade a certain amount of scientific contribution, such as, “Why do we ask questions like this? Is it not that we are conscious of our tendencies to cooperate, we give them the label ‘good’, use the label to train our errant progeny, and then spend thousands of years wondering what ‘Good’ is.” I think that it is partly that we tend to treat abstractions as having a shadowy reality somewhere other than in our own minds, and partly that, having done this, we feel the need to be sure that it is really real. I earlier mentioned the Euthyphro paradox: whether a thing is good because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is good. This seems to remain a reasonable question even if one identifies God with Good.

Tele, thanks for your thoughtful post.

“Christians do not pursue moral behavior merely because we “fear eternal
hellfire” or whatever. That’s a cartoon assessment of Christianity.”

I’m sure it’s pointless trying to generalise about the motivations of ALL Christians. I suspect that some fit that assessment, and some don’t.

“We pursue it because we love God, and we love our fellow man as brothers and sisters, common children of God.”

Would you accept then that atheists could pursue it for more or less the same reasons as you describe here, just minus the God part? I can still love my fellow man, surely? He is still my brother (or sister). Surely you loving your parents is not conditional on the existence of a God?

“there is no reason beyond the arbitrary wills of individuals for being “good” if God does not exist, because there is no fixed foundation upon which “good” can be identified. There just isn’t. I don’t know why this is so hard to accept for most non-believers”

Well Tele, I’ve asked this question so many times on this board, and on countless others, and the fact that no Christian has EVER been able to answer it, leads me to doubt your assertion here. Here’s the question again:

I simply want to know where a theist’s definition of good comes from. I’ve asked already and you don’t seem to have an answer.
Again, We’re told 1) What God says is good; and 2)God is the standard by which good is defined. In other words, you judge God to be good by his own standard - a circular argument.
This gives NO extra meaning to the definition of good that any atheist can come up with.
“God loves us all and gave us a gift of conscience”
And how do you know that conscience is ‘good’? What measure are you using to judge it? If it’s the measure that God gave you, then again, that’s a circular argument. How is this superior to anything proffered by atheists?

Finally, evolution is only an issue because of the vast number Creationists denying it, trying to get it banned in schools etc. As a Christian who accepts it, you should be playing your part in arguing with your fellow Christians who deny it. However, evolution is also significant in addressing Christian claims that atheists have no explanation for why humans would act altruistically, or even Christians who claim that altruism somehow REFUTES evolution, when in fact it is what one would expect in an evolved, social species.

Non-believers don’t not believe in God, because of evil.
Its because there is no proof of God.

Some Believers say that God exists because of the miracle of trees, and love.
Well, trees actually prove there is no God of trees, they evolved over millions of years, no God there.

Same with love. Animals always care for their own, some more, some less. All primates care for their own, and their troop. Now, due to the media, those on the other side of the world, feel like family.

God is not saving Haiti. God hasn’t done anything, other than allow children to be crushed to death and die a slow death of suffering, that is your God.
Its humans who are trying to save people, not God. God has not done anything, as usual.

Scientologists are now going to Haiti, to give water, and spread their religion.

The message is clear, you are being saved by God, who is giving the water.
That is wrong.
And non-believers want to help, without sending the message that God is saving people,  which he is not.
There is no God. If people didn’t help Haiti or elsewhere,  then they would all die.

So it has nothing to do with God.
Its about being a decent human being, who has evolved over millions of years to care about your own species, and your ecosystem, and the planet.

The human concept of God is one of the most primitive and destructive beliefs on the planet.

Good and Evil…seems like a simple answer.
Good is that which minimizes pain and suffering. Evil is that which causes pain and suffering.
How many theists would worship an “angry” God that promised eternal pain and suffering for its followers? NONE.  How many theists would try and justify such a belief system and try to call it “good”? Probably none, and after time such a god would go exstinct, as I am sure thousands have over the eons.

there is no escaping Humanist standards when judgeing a thing Good or Evil.

The whole point of worshiping a particular god, is this god promises good things to its followers….otherwise no one would call themselves christian, if being a christian meant that its followers would live forever in unhappiness…...

this is a human standard of “good”

The problem is that you have a negative definition: I could say “A dog is not… e.g. a baseball bat” Great, wonderful but still you haven’t told me what you define as a dog. So until you define what good is, then it is impossible to have a rational discussion.

JC, who has the negative definition here, the theists or the atheists? I’ve seen atheists provide a definition of good, but have only seen theists say that ‘good is what God says good is’, with no reference to what that actually MEANS.

Andrew Ryan wrote in response to the question “I simply want to know where an atheist’s definition of good comes from?” this:
“And I simply want to know where a theist’s definition of good comes from. I’ve asked already and you don’t seem to have an answer.
This is not an answer but puts the burden of proof on the Theist. Does this seem to be circular. “Ask me, so I ask you, you ask me, I ask you. We’re not getting anywhere.”

Let’s put the burden of proof on the Atheist: prove to me that God doesn’t exist> the impossibility that he exists: Physically it’s impossible to prove God can’t exist or that he doesn’t exist. (Try to prove to me that something non-material materially doesn’t exist and so can’t non-materially) But here we enter into Philosophy as the argument. Philosophically, if you admit possibility, then you, according to some philosophers, admit that he must exist. Others have a positive proof of God’s existence like Aquinas which has been standard for many years.

Hmm, I might have just lost my post. Or I might now be posting the same thing again. Apologies if another post from me immediately precedes this one.

JC, I’m not the one making claims. I’m not claiming Gods don’t exist, I’m just rejecting the claims that they do. I don’t have to prove that Gods don’t exist in order to be an atheist, any more than I have to prove the non-existence of ghosts in order not to believe in them. If I get convincing evidence of a God, then I can change my mind; until then, I proceed as if there are no Gods.

Ontological arguments for the existence of God have been around a while. You can find them all online, together with refutations. I’m not interested in getting involved in an off-topic discussion of them here. And you can’t just put ‘according to some philosophers’ at the end of any old assertion in lieu of an actual argument.

As for ‘good’, again it is not the atheists making the claim here. We are responding to a Catholic saying that ‘good’ makes no sense without reference to a God. I’m asking for justification for that claim. As yet, none is forthcoming. What is it about a deity that gives extra, or necessary, meaning to the word ‘good’?

Would a species need to believe in a God before it could have a concept of ‘dangerous’? Surely neanderthals could understand the concept that tigers and snakes might be dangerous to them. They would benefit from a word that encapsulated this so they could warn other members of the tribe.

No God needed for this, right? Well wouldn’t it also be useful to have a word that specifically referred to other people who could be harmful? Violent members of the tribe, or those who couldn’t be trusted to warn you about dangerous animals. So there we’ve got a rational reason to come up with the word ‘evil’.

From there it’s not hard to understand how we came up with a word to some up helpful or kind members of the tribe, or to describe our relationships with our parents or whatever. ‘Good’ would be a tremendously useful word and concept to our species. So again, what gives extra, or necessary, meaning to the word is gained by positing a God?

Speaking of a cartoon assessment of Christianity, the very foundation of it—that a supernatural being is responsible for the existence of life on this particular orb in this particular minuscule corner of the universe—is itself a fiction, a cartoon, if you will. I’m an atheist not because of the existence of murderers and child rapists and Ponzi schemers; I’m an atheist because “god” is a fictional character long ago created by humanity in exactly the same way novelists and short story writers create literary characters—and “god” is the most enduring literary creation of all.

Good is that which perfects. I think that there is a nature for things: each person has a human nature, a dog has a nature of a dog, etc
There are things that make a human better (more perfect) like learning, arts, sports, things that develop his nature (he is rational). Man can be more of a man if he develops his capacities, perfects himself. What doesn’t perfect him is not a good for him: so even though insecticide might be good (to kill insects) it isn’t good for man to drink. In his actions he can do good or bad (evil in itself doesn’t exist but just the lack of goodness does)
All men, atheists and theists, can be equally as good: some atheists can be better than some Christians and some atheists can be worse than Christians: to generalize is a huge error of both sides (to take Stalin as the only type of Atheist or A terrorist as the only type of religious guy)
This is why I think all men can be good: they all know (more or less because some things take a lot of thought to decide if they are good or bad, if they are in accord with our nature or not: that’s what ethics is about) that there are things that perfect them as humans. Thus by seeking what perfects their nature, they avoid what doesn’t “Do good and avoid evil”. We can know a thing’s nature and thus if it is good for me and others or not. A terrorist, by going against reason, claiming God tells him to, doesn’t do good (I personally think that there needs to be a distinction between religions: we don’t all refer to the same thing as ‘God’. For me, God, because of his essence as BEING itself, is perfection and thus is goodness, and thus God is good) God doesn’t set the rules and says ‘today, this is good, tomorrow it isn’t’ because they exist and have a nature which he gave. But the question is where does goodness come from for an atheist? Where does human nature come from? Or is it just a chance incident that doesn’t have rationality? So is there any reason why anything is good? And by the way, how did it come about?
But where does the human nature come from? If it is just an animal without rationality, then their can’t be good. Man is free to seek what is good and thus has responsibility for his actions. I can’t do anything I want since I must use my freedom to seek my good (not subjective but objective – human nature)
No, Goodness is based on existence of things and their natures. What Theists (Not just Catholics) do believe is that God is the ultimate cause of existence and thus of goodness.

I came onto this post because of TCM’s assertion that Philosophy is just for Catholics…(at least I disprove it) I don’t think that is true and that is the only thing I have been trying to show.
We can’t prove directly God’s existence materially (for this is against who he is according to a Theist’s belief) but using effect to cause arguments we can posit a first cause of existence, of perfection, etc. (see Aquinas’ 5 ways) - this is a proof from being.
For Philosophers who are rationalists or idealists, then the ontological proof works (Kant didn’t respond to the III chapter of Anselm - see Hartshorne)
What I just want to point out is that it is a belief that God exists. But that this belief is not irrational. Yet also to say that the universe just existed like it has (without any cause before the Big Bang) is just a belief too. A scientist can’t prove me what was before it because he doesn’t know: he can speculate. Religion is not contrary to science.
So what irritates me is that Dawkin, an really intelligent guy and a great scientist, takes this knowledge and then speaks as a philosopher (interprets it but claiming to have the same validity): as a scientist I don’t doubt that he’s right- got to believe the man because he has studied all that stuff. What I don’t agree with is that he then uses his status to say that it is irrational (because he’s a scientist) to say that God exists (not able to be refuted by science). I just want a bit of intellectual honesty knowing where the limits of science are.

Some good questions in a recent response:

“Where does human nature come from? Or is it just a chance incident that doesn’t have rationality? So is there any reason why anything is good? And by the way, how did it come about?”

Fine questions all, and the fantasy-oriented, make-believe world of religion answers none of them.

Hey, Barry, could you answer them please? I put them there to provoke thought. I don’t get your reasoning. One doesn’t need to be a religious guy to answer them. I don’t have a problem that there are Atheists: it’s a belief that God doesn’t exist. Just don’t say that I haven’t tried to reason a bit. I don’t live in make-believe world but I do try to make sense out of it and ask myself what is the meaning in life.

This is all mixed up (with very minor edits on my part for brevity and clarification):

“To say that the universe just existed like it has (without any cause before the Big Bang) is just a belief too. A scientist can’t prove me what existed before it because he doesn’t know: he can speculate. Religion is not contrary to science.”

This is all kinds of wrong. To say the universe is what it happens to be is not a belief. We know what we know (so far) through the ingenuity of the scientific method (speed of light, quasars, what the Hubble telescope has shown us, and so on). Scientists don’t speculate about what happened before the Big Bang because scientists don’t know what “existed” before the Big Bang. But religionists? THEY are the ones who do the speculating.
Again, religious people are always making stuff up. We don’t know what existed before the Big Bang or why the Big Bang occurred. But to say some Invisible Entity must have started it all is sheer speculation.

Can anyone give me an example of where religion stepped in to explain something about how the world and the universe works and functions? No example will be forthcoming because religion is totally and utterly contrary to science. Why? Because religion is based on made-up stuff—the “existence” of “souls” that go to “heaven”, to cite one laughable example—whereas the scientific method is not.

“Posted by jc on Thursday, Jan 28, 2010 10:23 AM (EST):Let’s put the burden of proof on the Atheist: prove to me that God doesn’t exist”

Prove to me that Zeus, or unicorns, or the Celestial Teapot does not exist.  Any one of the three and we’ll be even.

So, if a religious person is ONLY good because he believes in a god, this means he cares about that god more than he cares about his fellow human being.  In fact, the recipient of his aid is really only a pawn to aid in pleasing this god - and perhaps a stair step to heaven.  The recipient of aid is a means, not an end.  This is dehumanizing.  It is only by helping one another, without regard to pleasing a god, that we elevate and truly value humanity.

Fascinating discussion, and I’m glad so many divergent opinions have made it to this forum.  Unfortunately, about two thirds are more heat than light, which is to be expected on matters of such strongly held belief.

I think the greatest challenge to a notion of atheist “spirituality” or moral ethos without an appeal to God is the futility and inconsistency of its practice.  Now of course one could level the same criticism at a Catholic morality—that it has all sorts of inconsistencies and ultimately has no meaning that we can prove.

But it would seem that the logical extension of the atheist materialist viewpoint really has no long-term viability.  We’re here by chance, and everything in is us a hyper-developed survival instinct somehow.  Helping our neighbor, poor and distant as he may be, doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, other than, “Boy, I hope if I’m ever in the same fix, someone does the same for me.”  Or “Well, that individual’s genes might be important to the overall survival of the human species, so I’d better do what I can to preserve it.”  Or minimally, “Well, my t-shirts will be more expensive if we don’t protect some of that cheap labor in the developing world.”

Isn’t an atheist materialist just as justified in turning his back on the victims of a disaster like this?  Couldn’t we argue that there is a net benefit to the deaths of a few million or even billion human beings?  More resources to go around, more space, less stress on the planet, etc.

So which approach is right?  Moral?  “Good”?

And if it’s about my feelings, as in, “Genetically, I’ve evolved to the point where I feel better if I help someone in need,” wouldn’t it be better just to ignore the suffering and pretend it’s not there?  Or pursue something else that makes me feel good, like sex or food or physical activity?  But then I might feel guilty… but why?

Seems that the “invention” of religion, or of “God”, has gone a long way toward cultivating this moral sense.  Was religion just an evolutionary quantum leap?

I have a lot more that I’d like to write about his, but no time now.  For the record, I think Matt’s original essay can definitely be read as arrogant and smug, and that’s too bad.  Likewise the majority of the comments.  My hope is that my contribution here is not seen as snarky or combative, because I am sincerely interested in the response.  From my seat, the Catholic faith, in its entirety, offers the most compelling explanations for human nature, the existence of God and our relationship to Him, and the destiny we have. (that’s not to excuse all sorts of failures through the centuries, of course—another topic)  Though I don’t expect you all to agree, I want to talk further about it.

I can understand what it means to say that I am motivated by a feeling of love for other people (or for that matter for baby cats, very small bushes, really pretty stones, whatever). I do not understand what it means to say that God loves X, Y or Z, because the “love” of a being without body, parts or passions must forever be completely incomprehensible to me. Likewise, when I desire the good of this person or of that baby bush or bush-baby I know that what I most earnestly desire is that which will benefit and promote the well-being of the one I am thinking of or actively caring for (well-being might be defined as growth, attaining full potential, and include—for persons—intelligence, accepting responsibility, and so on). As far as persons are concerned, I include in the notion of well-being the avoidance of anything which might encourage a feeling of selfishness or a desire to exploit others, because if my notion of a person’s well-being is that of promoting his or her good, then this is something that has to be both shared and passed on: the loved person should also acquire a like desire to promote the well-being of others. To put it another way, whatever applies to me must necessarily apply to the other, and vice versa, otherwise the notion of “well-being” becomes inconsistent. This must necessarily rule out the possibility that a person might conceive his or her well-being in terms of the ruthless exploitation of others. It also implies that self-sacrifice is a decision that sometimes has to be taken, although it can be neither enjoined nor enforced.
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Such a notion cannot be associated with God. Whatever is “good” to God must forever be beyond our understanding. Thus, because God permits the suffering that we see in Haiti, and the ultimate kind of suffering undergone by the victims of prolonged and calculated torture, it is clear that his “goodness” —if that is what it is—is of a kind which makes no sense to us, and has no meaning in our terms. Therefore an attempt to define “good” might perhaps be successful in so far as it accurately states what an individual human person regards as good, but will be meaningless when transferred to God, so that there is no way in which God can be used to underpin our own notion of what “good” is; furthermore, by the human notion of good described above it is possible to define God as evil.
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If “good” is to be meaningful in any absolute sense, then the question of how to *define* good becomes pointless. Believers worry that if “good” is not somehow underpinned by some absolute authority it can never be really valid — that is to say, it can’t really be “good”, can it? But if good really is good—that is, is *absolutely* good—then it is good in itself and for its own sake. It requires no God to justify it. It is just there. If it is really there in some way, then it is there just as the universe is there, requiring no justification beyond the fact of its existence. On the other hand, if good is an abstraction of the human mind, it is a means by which we relate to one another and to the world in general. But this latter case still implies a reality of some kind, and if that is correct, then it is a reality of our own creating: we ourselves have called good into being in so far as it is our way of describing an important part of our experience of existence.
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If good is an absolute, then not only can it not be underpinned by anything else, it stands alone, self-sufficient. Therefore it is something which we can apprehend, but is not necessarily something that can be defined except perhaps in terms of the situation in which we find ourselves at any particular time. This self-sufficiency of good is sometimes taken to be the definition of God, but if that is so, it is merely a question of synonyms, and the notion of God becomes pointless. It seems to me that believers tend to personify God and abstract the good, and then try to prove in some way that the two are the same, or at least that the former underpins the latter. But this leads to the very dilemma that some believers on this thread are trying to throw at the unbelievers. It is their own doing, and they can’t have it both ways. God cannot be used to justify any intelligible notion of good.

I realize part of the nature of atheism is that no one person can speak for that system of belief.  But Gordon, does your train of thought here indicate that there is no absolute good?  From what I read, it’s hard for me to imagine that any good (or any abstraction, be it love, or evil, or whatever) can be anything but a relative, subjective term.  It ultimately centers on my feelings, my perceptions, etc.
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How then do we have any standard or basis for law, morality, or behavior?  What is justice?
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What level of self-sacrifice is appropriate to promote the well-being of others?  I somewhat get your attempt to define “well-being” as a reciprocal feeling and action that one desires to share with others.  But how far does it go?  And how does that notion of well-being translate into helping one individual and not another?  Doesn’t an elderly person or a severely handicapped person or an unborn person become merely expendable in that worldview?
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By the way, is it fair to say that an atheist rejects the idea of anything “transcendent”—that there is more to our existence than meets the eye or can be discovered or explained or somehow defined and comprehended?

A variety of quick responses to some things that have shown up in my inbox (hard to keep track of all these, especially when I don’t check my e-mail as quickly as some other people might).

The burden is not on me or any nonbeliever to prove that a celestial teapot or zeus do not exist. It’s up to people who believe in such things to prove that they exist. Or to put this another way, if I went around saying that I have an invisible rabbit named Harvey as a friend, it is not up to YOU (anyone reading this response) to prove that it doesn’t exist, it would be up to ME to prove that my Invisible Friend exists.

Yes, the invention of god has been helpful, in some small regard, to develop a moral sense. But did we really need to create gods to come up with the Golden Rule?

Someone else wrote of the “existence of God”. No, that’s not right. If God existed people wouldn’t believe in this being. Its existence would simply be a matter of course and everyday acceptance, like gravity of photosynthesis. Religious believers give away the game—of admitting that what they believe is not true at all—because they keep going on about what they believe. Why is it important for people to tell other people what they believe? Why are your beliefs important to me or the world? I don’t care about what you believe. I care about what you KNOW.

Consider: I believe there are no alligators at the North Pole. I say this even though I’ve never been to the North Pole. But notice that my “belief” does not rest on any made-up idea. I can explain through arduous means and some not so arduous why I believe all sorts of things like my belief that rats are not scampering around the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, why snow is not bits of frozen ice cream falling from the sky, why there is no molten caramel at the core of the sun, and so on. All of us hold to many beliefs that we never care to mention because to bring them up for discussion would only be silly. But there is an exception: religion, and all the crazy beliefs associated with them. All religions are nothing more than unwarranted and unsubstantiated beliefs that people agree to believe without a shred of evidence of reason to back up such beliefs.

“Hey, I know, let’s deny the reality of death, which applies to all other organisms on the planet. And let’s say, just for fun, that we have these ethereal invisible entities in our bodies called “souls” and that when we die our souls will just leave our bodies and go to a place called ‘heaven’.” That, my friends, is a perfect example of the stuff made up by Catholics.

“Hey, I know, let’s posit the idea of meaningful telepathy—but let’s call it ‘prayer’—so that when I think certain thoughts I can ‘direct’ them to an unseen Invisible Entity, who in my times of trouble and despair, will answer me and give me comfort.” That, my friends, is yet another example of made-up stuff.

I could go on with this all day, but I won’t. Let me just say that I find the feebleness of Catholic thought shocking (and arrogant) because, again, believers and the pope and the priests go on and on and on about what they BELIEVE, which is just another word for “None of this is true: I just want it to be true.”

Here’s the deal. There ARE mysteries out there. We don’t know what happened before the Big Bang. We don’t know why or exactly how the Big Bang even occurred. And because the universe is still expanding, we feel inclined to ask: What is it expanding INTO? What is being “filled up” by this expansion? We don’t know. We don’t know why life emerged on this orb many billions of years after the universe came into being. As best we can (I say this because we are flawed and fallible creatures), we use reason and the tools of the scientific method to understand and comprehend the world around us—and religion is of zero help to us because religion has never been able to answer any question about existence.

Again, this always comes back to the Catholic believers fatal misunderstanding or misuse of the word “belief”. Believers think they do have answers but they are mistaken because they forget that the Catholic Church (in this case) is just a huge aggregate of agreed-upon beliefs for which people have no evidence and for which reason, as the method to which these beliefs are held, does not apply. That is why I maintain that the entire “structure” of Catholic thought is an indeed a proverbial castle in the sky. It’s all empty thought, hot air, if you will. Please people, think it through. “Transubstantiation” is just an idea that believers have collectively agreed upon. There’s no way to reason your way to transubstantiation because this idea is just that, an idea, that is untethered from the world, a consequence of pure thought that has no bearing on who we are or how we and the universe and function. The question then is this: is transubstantiation a GOOD idea? I say it is not.

Part of the problem is language and the inability or refusal to translate. Consider how during the Vietnam War the military came up with the idea of “collateral damage”. What is collateral damage? It’s just an invented term to lessen the brutality of “civilian casualties”, which is blunter and, of course, more to the point. It’s too uncomfortable and horrifying to directly admit to civilian casualties so let’s just call such deaths collateral damage—and this is exactly what the military does to this day.

Let’s get back to transubstantiation and that moment in the mass when the priest hands out or delivers directly to the mouth that wafer. What is really going on there? I urge you translate religious jargon to plain language. Transubstantiation sounds SO important and SO intellectual, but the truth of the matter is that at that moment of the mass congregants are engaged in symbolic cannibalism. You are pretending to eat the body and blood (if wine is sipped) of Jesus. Why doesn’t symbolic cannibalism disturb any of you? I say it doesn’t because you haven’t yet thought of it AS symbolic cannibalism—until you’ve read my words just now. Now that you have, let’s have a show of hands. Who’s disturbed by this idea? Who thinks it’s nuts? Really, people. Symbolic cannibalism? Is this a good way to spend your time?

And so we come full circle. You pretend. You make up stuff. Something that is just a cracker or ordinary bread made of flour and water is believed (there’s that annoying word again) to be something else. This is why I continue to bang the drum of make-believe. The Catholic Church is shot through will all sorts of make-believe and yet most of the readers here refuse to see all these things as demonstrable examples of make-believe. Why?

As I was writing this response I see that another response just came in: “How then do we have any standard or basis for law, morality, or behavior? What is justice?” Again, these are excellent questions—and religion answers NONE of them. I urge people again to read “The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality” by Andre Comte-Sponville. You are not permitted to snicker or roll your eyes at the presumed silliness of such an idea, that atheists can be spiritual, without having read the book. Read the book and give me a report. I expect to see your papers on my desk long before the end of the semester if you want to get a good grade.

Why all the mystery understanding atheist ” spirituality”?
I woke up this morning, happy to be alive, with feelings of empathy towards all the humans who will suffer more than I ever will. I woke up this morning surrounded by the beauty of Nature and the Universe, and with feelings of love towards the people I love, and a desire to make life choices that would encourage positive concquence. I woke up this morning happy to help whoever happens to cross my path today. I woke up with the desire and impulse to help make the ” world a better place”. I woke up this morning with the feeling of PURPOSE, maybe that purpose is to just be Human…God knows thats a fulltime job.
I feel all these natural emotions and empathy WITHOUT the addition of a beleif in a Man-in-the-sky.

Joe—I think that’s great.  But why?  And what of anyone who doesn’t share your feelings?  And should we have a drug that would help to induce those feelings in others?  And what to do when you are faced with someone who doesn’t reciprocate your empathy and good will?  And do you go out of your way to help those who cross your path?  Or do you deliberately find a path that has more people who need help?

And Barry—dude.  I was trying to do anything but snicker or eye roll.  So is there a set of agreed-upon beliefs by atheists?  Because I’m not certain how atheism answers the questions I posed any more convincingly than religion does.  I’ll see about the book, but there’s been lots of books about spirituality, some longer, some “littler”.  Does this just make another religion, then?  (Okay, there may have been some very slight eye-rolling on that last one, but it was meant with love.)

To Steve P
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Thanks for your reply,Steve. I only have time at the moment for a quick reply because I shall be busy more-or-less till tomorrow evening. Sorry, but I hope this will at least provide some food for reflection in the meantime:
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The problem of God and good is of course a very old one. In one way or another the Euthyphro dilemma will keep cropping up, and many many philosophers from Aristotle to Swinburne have expended vast quantities of ink and ingenuity in not solving it. I am not sure what my own answer to your question is yet, but I feel I really must point out that the question of a standard of morality poses a great difficulty for theism. Is good prior to God or not? Why should God be the standard? On what basis does God decide?
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Was God fair to Job? Children seem to know by instinct all about fairness. It seems to be part of our nature. If it wasn’t planted there by some agent, then it is simply there, like cells and atoms. Looking at Job’s situation, the most obvious response is: No, it damn-well wasn’t fair! In fact, god’s behaviour was abominable. Why do I say this? Because I can put myself in Job’s place and imagine how appalling his suffering would have been. And because my principle of fairness tells me that just as I wouldn’t want that to happen to me, so it would be reasonable to help others in such a situation. We all want help, so it is fair to give it, too. How else can we demand it in our turn? And this isn’t just a selfish consideration: it really does seem “only fair”.
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The problem with God is that he is in just exactly the same boat. He can’t guarantee that morality is really really right. Either he just happens to be moral (in which case he can’t help it, it’s the way he is) or he has to obey the moral law. In neither case can he justify moral behaviour. We, on the other hand, can justify it, because we can appeal to fairness in our dealings with one another.
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This may not be the absolute standard you crave, but it’s the best I can do for now. I’ll give it more thought in due course.

Joe’s comment at 11:01 is a perfect summation of what I’ve been writing about. Bravo, and hats off to to you. (Though I could have done without “God knows”, even though I know you used that phrase in its denuded colloquial sense.)

“The problem of God” as noted by someone else is a non-problem—except for the variety of problems that have come from this human creation. Wow, human beings are certainly creative, aren’t we? No doubt about it, “God” is mankind’s greatest creation ever. Total make-believe and fantasy and yet people get so much mileage out of it! Amazing. Really, just wake up one day many thousands of years ago, insist that some invisible entity in the sky created everything, create a mythology and theology around it, and then, presto, you have this system of pretend-intellectual thought where people think they are discussing something serious. Hilarious! What madness will human beings think of next? Really, it’s fascinating to consider the depths of vapidity and delusion that human beings will go to and certainly our creation of “God” has to be our saddest—and maddest—creation of all.

Thought you all might appreciate this piece…it’s very similar to the back and fourth going on here that has taken nearly 150 posts and resolved nothing.

A 12-MINUTE RELIGIOUS DIALOG

1A:  Hi. I’m an agnostic and I understand you’re a believer.
B:  Yes, I postulate and believe in a God, souls, miracles, life after death, and so forth.
2A:  Since you postulate all this, the burden of proof is on you. I can’t agree with you yet.
B:  But the proof is all around us. The miracles of space, time, life, the beauties of nature, all created by God.

You can read the entire piece here: http://www.oscarfalconi.com/wn/rd.html

Joe—I think that’s great.  But why?  And what of anyone who doesn’t share your feelings?  And should we have a drug that would help to induce those feelings in others?  And what to do when you are faced with someone who doesn’t reciprocate your empathy and good will?  And do you go out of your way to help those who cross your path?  Or do you deliberately find a path that has more people who need help?
STEVE,
I drive a graveyard shift taxi on the weekends in a big city, trust me I dont need to go out of my way to find people to help. Every night is a new adventure.
And I dont get whats hard to understand about atheist morality, since your human the same as I. Ever notice babies are naturaly programmed to respond to love,empathy and affection?  All the babies I know are atheist.
And so what if I am faced with someone who doesnt share my feelings?
There is always somebody in the world, whom I have never met, who wants to kill me…it doesnt invalidate my feelings

“Ever notice babies are naturally programmed to respond to love, empathy and affection? All the babies I know are atheist.” Excellent!

Regarding the 12-minute dialogue:

“But the proof is all around us. The miracles of space, time, life, the beauties of nature, all created by God.”

This is not proof for the existence of a god at all. You see what you’ve done here. Present a mystery (why anything exists at all), get perplexed by it (as well all are to some degree) and then in frustration assume some Special Nice Being is responsible for it all. This kind of “reasoning” is not impressive because it’s not reasoning at all. It’s belief.

Barry, regarding the 12 minute dialogue, check out the entire piece at the link provided…what I provided was just the beginning. You will enjoy it I am certain.

Barry, here is a bit more of it. It provides an interesting back and fourth between the theist and the atheist and their respective points.

1A:    Hi. I’m an agnostic and I understand you’re a believer.
B:  Yes, I postulate and believe in a God, souls, miracles, life after death, and so forth.
2A:  Since you postulate all this, the burden of proof is on you. I can’t agree with you yet.
B:  But the proof is all around us. The miracles of space, time, life, the beauties of nature, all created by God.
3A:  But who created God?
B:  He always was and always will be!
4A:  Now doesn’t that strike you as a much greater miracle than space, or time, or even the evolution from chemical to man through mutation, natural selection, and survival of the fittest?
B:  It is incomprehensible and obscene to think that man could have evolved from a chemical slime and monkeys!
5A:  But an infinite God existing before the creation of the universe and existing after its finish??
B:  Aha, you’re beginning to understand!
6A:  Hmmm. Well, now how do you feel about free will? Does it exist?
B:  Yes. Our free will decisions throughout life, such as to sin or to accept the Lord, will be judged upon our death to determine where we’ll spend eternity.
7A:  You mean we continue on after death? Surely the blackness after death is the same as the blackness before birth?
B:  Not at all - your soul just doesn’t disappear, you know!
8A:  It seems to have appeared easily enough, from nowhere, eh?
B:  Each soul was created by God and exists forever.
9A:  I guess if I can accept a God I can accept souls. What’s a soul?
B:  It’s that spirit that leaves the body after death.
10A:  Wow, you mean something weightless leaves the body and spends eternity somewhere?
B:  Sure. You must have faith, or YOUR soul’ll be forever in Hell!
11A:  God forbid!
B:  Oh VERY funny.

....you can read the rest at http://www.oscarfalconi.com/wn/rd.html

Just read the 12-minute piece. I thought it captured very well the intrinsic inanity of the religious believer with all the assertion-making all based on—here I go again!—make-believe.

It’s interesting (and telling) that not a single believer responding to this essay will come back with a defense of the “soul”. Why? Because everyone knows that the idea of the soul is just something some lunatic made up long ago out of thin air—and since then everyone has signed on to it. “Oh, yes, of course we have souls” they say without examining why they think we have souls.

And, hey, symbolic cannibalism anyone? That is EXACTLY what Catholics participate in at mass. You saw my earlier analogy with “collateral damage”. Don’t hide behind this fancy-schmancy word like “transubstantiation” like I’m supposed to be wowed and impressed by it. Why or how is symbolic cannibalism necessary for living a proper life in the world? Most important, why doesn’t it seem ghoulish to you? What haven’t you thought this through? Pretending to EAT a dead guy? “Oh, but we do it symbolically.” Oh, really, and that’s supposed to exempt you from this madness? Come on, give me all you got, people. I want to hear this defense of symbolic cannibalism. I want to know how it’s not weird and strange and screwy. Go ahead. I’m waiting. This I gotta hear.

Barry et al. (But Barry especially),

I won’t be doing anything with this thread this weekend, but I just wanted you to refresh my memory—are you the one earlier who was a “born-again” atheist or something?  Like raised Catholic?  I don’t remember who posted about that.  So I just wanted to know how much you actually had in terms of Catholic background.  Your posts are certainly oozing derision, which doesn’t bother me of itself.  I just wanted to know what terminology you’re familiar with.  You mentioned the book, which I said I’d look into, and I didn’t know how extensively you’ve “looked into” Catholicism.
Also, I’m willing to accept that we’ll likely just talk past eachother about belief and faith and make-believe and whatever else.  If that’s the way it turns out, so be it, and hopefully no hard feelings.

Steve

Steve,

I’m the guy who was raised Catholic. Been there, done that. My parents are so Catholic that as kids we used to celebrate Passover, yep, the whole matzoh thing and all the rest of it. I never understood why my parents did that (deference to the Jews I guess, with Jesus being Jewish and all). Interestingly, my older brother go suckered into being an altar boy. Odd how that wasn’t pressed on me. Maybe they saw me as the House Skeptic. No surprise because I’ve always been this way. In fact, right now I’m finishing work on my first book about the stupidity of marijuana prohibition (and drug prohibition in general) and how this plant should be sold as if it were a fermented berry.

But while the ill-named “war on drugs” is a supreme idiocy (ill-named because you can’t wage a war on a plant, only on people), I’ve long held a special contempt for religion, not just Catholicism, but all religions. Yes, Christianity is a cancer on the planet, but it’s the entirety of religious belief and faith of whatever religion that gets my goat. It’s truly sad that believers of all stripes can’t see or won’t see the intrinsic fantasy of what they believe and do. It’s amazing the mischief people can get up to. Let’s pretend we have souls and then people run with the idea and build a theology around it (and other things). Let’s pretend there’s a heaven and that there a ways to get there and then people build a theology around that as well. They do all this and yet no one has the guts to face themselves and say, “Hey, wait a minute. We’re wasting our time with make-believe and fairy tales here.” People won’t say this because they’ve invested too much into it. But as I said in an earlier post, I discovered the good news of secular humanism long ago and have been a happy atheist ever since. I once again urge that you read “The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality” by Andre Comte-Sponville. It’s a great way to begin the humanistic adventure. And for dessert, one must read, everyone must read, “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris. Wow, what a great little book. Beautifully written, brilliantly argued, Harris exposes Christianity in whatever form for the sham that it is.

Another point.

As I said in an earlier post, the theme of a man/god—the idea of God “visiting” earth in human form to die, only to come back to life days later—is not new. It is not unique. There is nothing new or original about Christianity (apart from its key players). This is not an opinion. This is a cultural fact relating to the history of varied civilizations on the planet since the beginning of recorded history.

Some of you may have blanched at my mention of “symbolic cannibalism” because you think it’s a kind of heresy, that I’m some sinister Gnostic pointing to a road away from the “true faith”. But there you go again. There’s no such thing as “heresy”. It’s just an idea borne from swimming in the waters of make-believe.

Here’s another: sin. There is no such thing in the world as sin. There is disagreeable behavior, there is wrong behavior, there is atrocious behavior that can destroy the lives, literally, of others, but there is no such thing as sin because “sin” is a religious word that was made up because religion is an enterprise devoted to making things up instead of discovering what’s true (and false) about the world. I keep referring to the same theme over and over and I will do so again: sin isn’t something that was discovered; it was MADE UP. That’s what religions do. That’s what separates religion from seismologists. Seismologists don’t spend their time making stuff up. But religions, all religions, are self-enclosed systems of make-believe. The evidence for this assertion is all around you whereas religious people are ONLY asserting stuff without backing anything up. “She died and went to heaven.” I understand what the first part of that sentence means but what is that “went to heaven” all about? Here we go again: heaven is an IDEA that someone simply MADE UP. (Sorry to use all caps but I can’t use italics for emphasis.) Heaven does not exist. Hell does not exist. Purgatory does not exist. It’s all made up. Really. I wouldn’t lie to you.

Comte-Sponville and Sam Harris’s “Letter”. Start there.

I’m an atheist, and I’m very happy that Non Believers Giving Aid has been established. I’m particular about how I donate to charity: I want my money to go to helping people, not to excessive overhead or evangelization. It can sometimes be very difficult to differentiate truly secular charities from religious charities that engage in proselytization but hide it. NBGA doesn’t relieve me of my duty to donate responsibly, but it does make it a bit easier to make sure that my charitable donations will go towards actually helping people rather than converting them.

Hello,
  It is unnecessary to be a Christian church believer to be a good citizen of the world’s society.  If people are not crime doers and don’t steal, don’t murder, don’t take drugs, don’t drink heavy and break the law then consider themselves as non-sinners and do not need Jesus for a saviour for cleansing or spiritual healing.  I may be a very strong atheist but that doesn’t stop me from being a good citizen of legal government law.  I would rather do everything by the book not by the Bible book but by the Law book.  Okay so the Bible is a good book but there are other good books besides the Bible which is not the only book.  The world is a very big place full of good books, knowledge and emotions.
  What is your opinion??
  Kind Regards,
  Geoff.

What do you mean by “don’t take drugs”? What’s wrong with marijuana? As a slow move toward legalization comes (watch for California in November), we should remind ourselves that marijuana is perhaps the most remarkable plant on the planet. Apart from the enjoyment that comes from responsible recreational use—I happen to be stoned right now as I type these words—it be used to make clothing, plastic (cannabis is 100% biodegradable), oil and a replacement to wood (deforestation could become a thing of the past).

As for other books, apart from the two I’d mentioned earlier, how about a book by A.C. Grayling that’s in keeping with the general tenor of this argument? Here you go: “Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God.”

How about Alain de Botton? Here’s a graceful writer who never fails to charm. “On Love” is a pretty good novel by him, but I tend to like his nonfiction, particularly “Status Envy” (I haven’t read his new yet about work).

Finally, there are novels. I recently read “On Chesil Beach”, which is about a pair of young and inexperienced lovers, and just the other day I read “The Houseguest” by Thomas Berger. It’s another one of his delightful farces of misunderstanding and miscommunication, but I tend to agree with Anne Tyler, who said that “The Feud” is Berger’s “comic masterpiece”.

And that’s it for now on the book front.

Geoff:

So you follow the law and that makes you good?

“I may be a very strong atheist but that doesn’t stop me from being a good citizen of legal government law.  I would rather do everything by the book”

Okay, which “book” is good? How do you define “good”? If being law abiding is “good”, is it “good” to be a loyal German citizen circa 1942 and assist in the deportation or Jews, or report on their whereabouts? Those laws were made by elected representatives of the German people and Hitler was constitutionally selected leader.

In anticipation of your reply, is it “good” to follow the laws of any country or just a democratic republic/democracy? Since I’m guessing you think “yes”, does it then follow that all laws passed by legislatures expressing the majority opinion of their constituents are good?

What about the Jim Crow laws post US civil war? What about laws passed preventing northern abolitionists from helping escaped slaves by saying they were trafficking in stolen property?

What about state sanctioned eugenics?

What if the law said separate facilities based on race was legal?

What if the law said buying, selling, manufacturing alcohol was illegal?

What if a US state declared an specific Christian denomination the official state religion?

Since those listed above actually did happen, we could then take this into the speculative realm and come up with any number of absurd actions a state/federal legislature could come up with and question whether it would be “good”.

If obeying the law (and the law itself when written in democratic societies) is “good”, and those laws constantly change, are you then saying that good itself is always changing in definition? This is not encouraging. It troubles me like living in a building designed by an architect with one definition of a yard, but built by a contractor with a different definition of a yard.

Jason: “What about laws passed preventing northern abolitionists from helping escaped slaves by saying they were trafficking in stolen property?”

Religion doesn’t help you here either Jason - these laws were passed by people who used the bible as justification for them (and there are MANY passages to back them up). If you are against slavery, and say it’s not just because of the law of the land, you can’t claim you’re against it because of the bible either.

@ Steve P
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I suppose that ultimately, morality is not based on some fiat that this or that is “right” (why *should* it be “right”?) but upon trust. God is eternal, has no need of an input of energy, never gets rickets and cannot understand nut allergy or agoraphobia … he just goes on being and is always and in every way perfect—in fact, God is the personification of the eternal free lunch. We contingent beings are in a totally different predicament. We find that we happen to exist, and existence is genuinely “poor, nasty, brutish and short” (Hobbes) for the vast majority of sentient beings (including most human beings, quite a lot of the time). Entropy ensures our final destruction, no one can live for ever.
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But we humans have a deal. The deal is a conscious expression, in a self-conscious animal, of an evolved pattern of behaviour: You look after me, and I will grow up to contribute to society and have children. Or, we care for others and are cared for in our turn. (I think your question about the elderly and the disabled was based on the assumption that reciprocity is a mere tit-for-tat affair, but of course it is something that involves the whole of society, so there is no philosophical difficulty about our habit of caring for the helpless. Here I give just one more aspect of the principle of fairness I discussed earlier).
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Trust is built in to this system: a child trusts its parents—and, indeed, adults generally. It has to, because it wants to survive. In trusting, and in finding that its expectations are met, a child grows and becomes an adult who in turn is able to be trusted. Of course, the natural system isn’t always perfect—things can go wrong—but by and large it works pretty well. And it’s all natural, no supernatural additives. In order to function in society, we have to trust one another. Even if the trust is not always justified it remains a necessity. This is in itself quite sufficient to give us the impression that morality is in some way an independent reality. It is not, it is our own creation, or at least our own pattern of behaviour, but it constitutes a law that we have to abide by in order to live together, as we need to do. In other words, the “law” is an expression of the reality and the necessities of our existence.
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It would appear, then, that the universe has, in us, evolved a moral law. Our manner of relating to one another presupposes the acceptance of such a law: not its *prior* existence, but its necessary contingency. Instinct prompts us towards reciprocity, and because it is instinct, it feels “right”. Hence the problem of the *absolute* nature of the good—the “problem” is a by-product of self-awareness.
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Of course, we worry that if morality is not absolute there is nothing to prevent us pursuing our advantage at the expense of others, wherever it is possible to do so. But those who believe in the *absolute* nature of the moral law must reckon with the simple fact that people do behave in such ways regardless of the law, and it makes no difference whether that law is absolute or contingent. Because another aspect of our self-awareness is the realisation that it is possible to cheat; having a God in heaven has never stopped people from doing that. Hellfire and damnation have never stopped criminals, nor ordinary people who very occasionally and very quietly break some rule or other. And yet, in a society where most people no longer believe in hellfire and damnation, people on the whole are not more immoral than they were before. Human behaviour remains consistent, regardless of religious belief or the lack of it. Atheists continue to believe in kindness and honourable dealing, just as theists do, while theists continue to cheat and squirm, just like atheists. We are just human, and this is how we are.
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Being self-aware, we reflect on our actions and discover that it is possible to expand the need to trust and to extend our sense of fairness to new and even unlikely situations—and with hindsight or the observation of others discover that we generally do this quite unconsciously, as when (for example) an astronomer describes the asteroid Deimos (if it is an asteroid) as having been “unlucky” in being “captured” by the gravity of Mars (New Scientist, latest issue). Poor Deimos, we think, happily pursuing its own course around the solar system and then to be trapped in an endless treadmill of orbital repetition around a second-rate planet for ever and ever! How tough is that? Yet it’s just a chunk of rock, a mere twenty-eight kilometres across! But in reading the description of Deimos—its topography, its chemistry and so on—we come to think of it almost as a person. And there is no point in saying “how foolish”: we do it, and we can’t seem to help it, and in fact it is really quite remarkable that we can even see that it is foolish to personify such a thing!
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Unfortunately, we often do not see that we do this, and I think that this is the case with God and the “absolute”. We have created them by projecting our evolved emotional, psychological and verbal patterns outside ourselves, to other aspects of the world. It is part of our evolution from unselfconscious animals to selfconscious human beings. Evolution takes a long time, so it is not remarkable that religion has been around for a long time. Also, evolution is not progressive, so we had better accept that we might never become any better at understanding our universe and ourselves than we are now.
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I haven’t touched on the limits of self-sacrifice. Well, I think that the question is answered, by implication, somewhere in the foregoing. But, to be specific: we have to choose how far we are going to go, and that must depend on the importance to ourselves of the beloved person. People make the most extraordinary sacrifices for the person or the principle that they most love. There is no point in saying that “the importance to ourselves” implies selfishness, because we are selves—that is a simple fact—and we have little else to go on. Complaining about it seems grossly unfair, especially when people really do give their lives, without hope of reward, for causes they believe in or persons they love. I would be very surprised if most theists did not come to a similar conclusion.
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This brings me to a question I need to ask you and the other theists contributing to this thread. It is the one implied by Archbold and which I have discussed at some length from my point of view. Andrew Ryan has already asked a version of it, and I notice that he has as yet gone unanswered (something which he reasonably complains about). Like Archbold, you ask what I base my morality on, as though you assume that my concept needed to be justified in a way that yours does not. This is only a blog, not a book, and it is not possible to deal with every aspect of a question except in a piecemeal fashion, but nevertheless I think I have said quite enough about my position to give a pretty good idea of how things work and how I answer your questions and meet your objections, and it is high time that you said something about yours. I have not questioned your morality, because, given my own, I assume you will behave in a moral way for reasons I have indicated, however you try to justify them to yourself. But now it is necessary to ask how you justify your view of morality. What gives you the right to question mine? Mere belief cannot justify anything, and people who think it can need to be hospitalised; nor is it clear how God, if real, can justify a moral code. I and others have already pointed this out, and now it is your turn to explain.

Gordon Willis,
Do you blog or write?
please provide link.
you are a great writer, and would like to read more.

Dear Joe,
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Thank you for that. That’s a real compliment. Oddly enough, someone said something similar two weeks ago. Unfortunately, writing is something I have only just “discovered”, if I can put it that way, and it has not been very long since I realised that I have anything to say about anything. I have posted quite a lot of comments on the Richard Dawkins site, but these have become hard to find since they made some changes there.
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As I don’t want to publish my email address to the world I suggest that you sign up (if you are not already a member) to the Richard Dawkins site
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http://forum.richarddawkins.net/
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and send me a personal message. I can send you links to my better comments. If you wish to comment or discuss anything I would be very appreciative.
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Gordon.

Joe - I forgot to say that my user name there is the same as here.

Thanks GordonWillis for your explanation of morality. Can I rightly assume that it follows John Locke’s theory of morality. If so, could you explain your theory of knowledge for Locke’s morality is based on his theory of knowledge, that is empiricism which can be reduced to skepticism (see Hume who was a logical consequence of Berkeley-Locke) For Locke, the simple ideas are reality, and we can’t know the very nature of man – just can know each particular man. His theory of substance is very weak indeed (what must support the qualities). We can intuit our existence and from this he says that we can demonstrate God’s existence. (for non-being doesn’t exist, therefore he makes a few logical step to deduce that there must be an eternal being (for non-being never existed) and from this idea of eternal being comes the ideas of most knowing and most powerful.

Then as well I would just like to point out that you deny the existence of any transcendental reality in man. If you share the same theory of knowledge of Locke, how do you account for the reflection of the ideas? What is it done by – a sheer instinctual process? As you said we as humans have self-consciousness, but how is that? And what makes us have rights over animals: for if we are just material (as you imply in that quote “We contingent beings are in a totally different predicament. We find that we happen to exist, and existence is genuinely “poor, nasty, brutish and short” (Hobbes) for the vast majority of sentient beings (including most human beings, quite a lot of the time). Entropy ensures our final destruction, no one can live for ever.”) then what makes us different? Just because we assert ourselves over them? If we say we have rights, then animals just have as much rights as we have but are suppressed by man.
Also you quote Hobbes. Hobbes had a purely mechanicalistic interpretation of bodies (including men and politics and he reduces physical and mental events to motion) yet he does allow God’s existence as perhaps the cause of all motion and existence. Of course he is really just an agnostic but an agnostic is very different from a atheist. My difficulty is that there are atheists who claim that God doesn’t exist. For me agnostics at least say that we can’t know if God does or doesn’t exist – positivism: for me it is more rational but I would love to hear what you have to say.
Thanks.

As to a response to jmc, I just wanted to point out that an Atheist denies God’s existence. Agnostic posits that one can’t know if God does or doesn’t exist and this is a big difference. If one wants to prove or disprove God’s existence then one must take a philosophical stance. For example I could say, if having proved that a God does exist, that Zeus (as I understand him from Greek literature) couldn’t be the same as God. Unicorns, being material by definition would have to be shown (physically to exist) but have the possibility for existence (vs. a Necessary non-contingent being)
Barry, I’m sorry I wasn’t clear but your interpretation of what I said is wrong in that I do not doubt the existence of the universe as it is (this would be skepticism) – I know it exists: but I say that one must belief what was before the big bang: if there was nothing, then how did existence come about (physicists don’t allow that something can come from nothing: cause and effect which is a base for the scientific method) As you rightly say “Scientists don’t speculate about what happened before the Big Bang because scientists don’t know what “existed” before the Big Bang. But religionists? THEY are the ones who do the speculating.” But are you equating philosophers as the same as religionists? For there are many philosophers who have tried to understand why the world exists.
“We don’t know what existed before the Big Bang or why the Big Bang occurred. But to say some Invisible Entity must have started it all is sheer speculation.” But how do you explain your existence? I just happen to be, and before me my parents, and before that my parents, and then way back some apes, and then some animal, and then some living cell…But where did these come? By chance? Then what is the base for your morality? We’re just the same as any old tree, plant, or animal. For if we aren’t substantially different (we really are just a type of ape which is a type of fish) then why do we have rights, good and bad, etc. Isn’t all just instincts. I would accept an instinctual explanation of morality if I were a materialist. But then why is there culpability since moral responsibility is based on freedom which is denied by deterministic interpretations such as reduction to instincts. I do agree that man has instincts but I would assert that man has more than just instincts in his behavior.
“No example will be forthcoming because religion is totally and utterly contrary to science.” I disagree for science is based on material observation. Religion is worships the very cause of all existence which is non-material (spirit). Thus there are 2 completely different realms but have the same root: existence. Science can’t study what doesn’t exist. Religion worships the cause of being, Being itself. Thus “Can anyone give me an example of where religion stepped in to explain something about how the world and the universe works and functions?” is answered: for religion believes in the God that philosophy (studies the ultimate causes) proves (or some disprove) to be true. Philosophy allows us to have science. For if you deny the principle of non-contradiction: (a thing cannot be 2 different things at the same time and in the same respect) then science is unable to proceed for 1+1 could equal 2 or 3 or 9 or all of them at the same. Also, if you deny the cause and effect, then you are left at formulating from particular facts a theory which might or not be true (positivism) and can’t be said to be correct or false just more or less useful in scientific discovery. And so if I can’t say “evolution’s true (or false)” but just that it is more useful right now. Also the theory of gravity, of heliocentricity, of relativity aren’t true or false, just they help me to explain a fact and that’s all. Thus there isn’t universal knowledge and I am stuck with just a particular fact that is correct but can’t be true or false.
Thus I just wanted to say, sorry that I got long-winded, that science is not everything. In fact, Göddel´s theorem shows that there can’t be a self-founded science. (Philosophy is not founded on itself but on reality, science must use mathematical propositions, mathematics uses propositions based on reality (the whole is greater than the part) which it can’t prove, etc). Thus a statement like ‘what isn’t science (here I mean physics and biology) isn’t true’ is a false statement. [I know you didn’t say that but I am just taking this from your “religion is based on made-up stuff—the “existence” of “souls” that go to “heaven”, to cite one laughable example—whereas the scientific method is not.]
Thanks a lot though for the contributions to the blog for it has become quite enjoyable to read it and quite a discussion. Sorry to blog so early in the morning but since I don’t have much time got to do it when I can.

Barry, Sorry if this is long but I think it explains better than me science and religion
Confusing friend and foe is a mistake that also bedevils the relationship between science and religion… It is however no laughing matter as such confusion potentially has serious consequences. In Colin Blakemore’s recent article, “Science set to win the match?” (Otago Daily Times, May 15, 2009) religion is presented as the opponent of science in a ‘metaphysical chess match’ in which science has driven religion into a corner with nothing to do and nowhere to go.

There seems to be some confusion here between metaphysics and physics or science in general. This mistake is so huge it is easy to miss it in the rhetoric of Prof. Blakemore’s piece. Science, he tells us, has destroyed all religious explanations and is set to win the metaphysical contest. But science is not metaphysics, it advances are irrelevant to the metaphysical questions of the meaning of life or the existence of God. In fact there is no conflict of any king between science and religion: they are friends not foes.

Prof. Blakemore makes a number of metaphysical mistakes and reaches illogical conclusion. Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNG’s structure, he states, shows that life is just a chemical process. All the artistic, and yes scientific achievements of mankind, all the heroic endeavor and sacrificial love of men and women down the ages are reduced to nothing more that the random bumping of atoms.

Quoting Richard Dawkins he declares Darwin’s theory of evolution ‘removed the main argument for God’s existence’. But the origin of life is not the main argument for God’s existence. The bible’s account of creation in Genesis is about the nature of mankind’s relationship to God, not a proof that God exists. Nor is an alternative scientific account of how things came to be as they are. Aquinas, 600 years before Darwin, wrote: “Creation is not change.” Evolution is our best understanding of how things change from one form to another. They Bible tells us why there is something rather than nothing. Its message is that we are created to be objects of God’s love.

Modern science is a child of Christianity – it grew up in a Christian culture. Christianity’s claim that ‘human rationality is a gift from God’ is a profound metaphysical statement that Prof Blakemore misunderstands completely. Astonishingly, he claims that recent research in brain science has shown that free will and conscious intentions, including sin, are illusions created by brain function. So our thinking is nothing by physics and chemistry in the brain.

This is scientifically doubtful and metaphysically nonsense. Martin Heisenberg, also a biological scientist, point out the scientific flaw s in such claims in his article “is free will an illusion?” in the scientific journal Nature (May 14, 2009). The problem of rationality was recognized by J.B.S. Haldane, the great evolutionary biologist who admitted that if thinking were just the motion of atoms in our brains we have no reason to believe our thinking to be true, and no reason to believe our brains to be made up of atoms. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, the materialist cuts off the brain he is sitting on.

I would add that the validity of our reason cannot be established by an argument based on evolution alone. If reason is in doubt you can’t use reason to defend it. The existence of rationally points beyond itself to an underlying rational principle.

There are no knockdown proofs one way or the other to the “God question”…. The great danger in reducing spiritual and moral values ot illusions is that moral warnings may be ignored when it’s politically expedient.
Einstein, the greatest scientist of the 20th century, was neither a believer in a person al God nor an atheist, but he observed, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”. Science and Christianity need each other if we are to car for each other and our planet. The evil that men do can’t be dealt with by science, least of all by imagining sin to be an illusion… Faith has a solid rational basis; it’s the conflict between science and religion that is an illusion.
By Prof Paul Ewart, head of the department of atomic and laser physics in the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University.

Just a few isolated and random comments for JC (funny initials!). I would spend more time making this cohesive and flow better but I can’t spend much time with this right now.

“They Bible tells us why there is something rather than nothing. Its message is that we are created to be objects of God’s love.” But this is just an assertion, not a statement based on anything that was discovered or worked out via reason. Nobody knows why there’s something instead of something, least of all the fallible individuals who wrote the Bible. As for love, affection and altruism among human beings these can be explained in large degree by evolution. 

As for the conflict between religion and science, do keep in my mind that religion is an assertion-making business: “We have souls.” Yeah? How is that claim determined? “Telepathy, otherwise known as prayer, is a force in the universe.” And on what evidence is this claim made? (Prayer is just nothing more than talking to yourself, not always a bad way to spend your time.) “There is a heaven.” Again, how would anyone know this? And so on. Religion traffics in wishful-thinking; science does not.

“The existence of rationality points beyond itself to an underlying rational principle.” I’m not sure what you mean here. The notion of rationality, as we conventionally defined it, emerged from evolution, didn’t it? But I do understand your underlying contention. Something very weird is going on in the universe and it’s happening on this particular orb we call Earth. It’s called life. But here’s an extra oddity. Dinosaurs lived for about 200 million years. Human beings have been around for 500,000 years, tops. So if there were a Supreme Being (there isn’t; I’m just having fun here) logic tells us that this Being loved dinosaurs more than human beings or that this Being loved dinosaurs for an awful long time and then said, screw it, I’m bored, let me kill them all by a fun meteorite and then start over with smaller organisms. And then—get this—human beings didn’t emerge until a very long time after that. This suggests that the Supreme Being is a slow poke who just took its time. You might come back to me and say, well, our notion of time is different from God’s notion—and then we go off the rails as talk of God tends to do because we just end up asserting and fantasizing.

Yes, science is a child of Christianity, but where science has taught us many things that are true about the world, I’m still waiting for a truth to emerge from Christianity. I haven’t heard one yet. The reason I haven’t is because faith and belief are not the methods and tools by which we discover what’s true and false about the world.

I have no idea how “faith has a solid rational basis.” Maybe it depends on the meaning of faith. I have “faith” that the earth will not suddenly finding itself hurling into the sun tomorrow or that a meteor of a kind that wiped out the dinosaurs is not coming our way anytime soon. I suppose you could call that faith, but it’s a kind of faith borne of reason and rationality. I have reasons, complex though they may be to express, why I believe a meteor is not going to hit us anytime soon. But as soon as religious people start talking about faith, my mind shuts down. Why? Because religious faith is, again, based on sheer assertion and wishful-thinking. “We are objects of God’s love” or “God loves us” or however you want to phrase it makes no sense to me in exactly the same way that the phrase “The green ideas are sleeping furiously” makes no sense.

How do I explain my existence? Well, let’s see. My father inserted his John Thomas into my mother. That’s the cheeky, flippant answer (sorry, couldn’t resist). Your main question remains a good one: why IS there life? After eons of inorganic matter in the universe why, after 13 billions years or so did life emerge in this planet, first as single-cells, then to more complex creatures such as dinosaurs, which lived for about 200 million years and then us? We don’t know. Nobody knows. Richard Dawkins doesn’t know. All we know is that something happened, some chemical admixture occurred which, fantastically, resulted in organisms that replicate. It’s a fascinating, mind-boggling story, and I insist that Christianity adds nothing to the wonderment and only confuses us with our petty, human-projected notions of a Super Being that started it all. That’s what irks me about Christianity. It all sounds feeble to me. None of it makes any sense, and when I say that I mean precisely that: the opposite of sense, which is non/hyphen/sense.

As for morality, no, we aren’t “just the same as any old tree, plant, or animal.” We are substantially different, no question about it—but this difference does not give us intellectual permission to just start making stuff up, which is exactly what Christianity does.  There are no “revealed truths.” There are no “revelations.” There are only things we discover to be true and false about the world, and if something confronts us that we don’t understand or can’t comprehend such as what was going on before the Big Bang then it is our duty to remain silent and be humble about the matter. Yes, there is something special going on with us and we tend to call it self-consciousness. This is why humanity long ago invented the idea of the “afterlife”. As far as we know, we are the only creatures capable of recognizing our mortality and so in the face of that unpleasant horror, we invented the idea that we get to live forever. Funny—and sad.

Yes, philosophy allows us to have science, but consider these two phrases of yours: “Science cannot study what doesn’t exist.” Agreed. “Religion worships the cause of being, Being itself.” But if we don’t know what the “cause of being” is (why life exists at all), what is there to worship? Ah, but here we go. You’ve just stepped into Andre Comte-Sponville’s world. Again, you really ought to read Comte-Sponville’s book if you want to understand atheist spirituality. Your wording here suggests to me that you’ve tip-toed toward the philosophy that Comte-Sponville argues for. do check out the book and you’ll see what I mean.

Oh, another book: “The Mysterious Flame” by Colin McGinn. I actually reviewed this for a now-defunct London magazine many years ago. The book still holds up. McGinn argues, to put this simply, that there’s something very strange about consciousness and free-will and that there might be some kind of quantum aspect involved to explain them. That sentence hardly does any justice but do look up the book. I think you’ll like it.

Finally, you make a good point when you say that evolution is useful right now, your point being (I think) that something else might come along that would turn evolution on its head or remove it from our syllabus as respectable intellectual enterprise. I agree. But it just so happens that the case for evolution, as an explanation for HOW life works on this planet, not why it exists at all, is getting stronger and stronger all the time. Check out Jerry Coyne’s “Why Evolution is True.”

And with that I’ve got to go.

Thanks, jc. It is kind of you to say that. I don’t think I should try to answer all your questions here, as I am not sure that they are all particularly relevant to this blog. Obviously, I had better start a blog of my own. I don’t wish to be accused of taking over someone else’s. As it is, this will be another longish post, and I apologise. I had better say that thinking on these matters is a new departure for me and what little I have read of Locke is on the level of “Introduction to Philosophy” (though I have read a number of philosophers, theologians and Christian apologists). I used the Hobbes quote because everybody does, and I said “Hobbes” because people I know think it was said by Shakespeare. Also, I am not trying to build a philosophical system. I prefer to accept that reality is actually rather messy and is not there simply to oblige us. Instead I am trying to reply to Archbold’s assumptions, because they are assumptions, unexamined, commonly held and, in my view, pernicious. For now, I am waiting in the full expectation that some theist will come along and blow my little ship out of the water.
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I have been working out an idea, starting from a scientific viewpoint rather than a philosophical one, that human morality has its roots in our nature as contingent, evolved beings. I have started with the idea that things have happened for various reasons which are the province of science (Big Bangs, evolution and so on) and here we are. I can’t think of a better place to start. Having to start by dealing with the opinions of this philosopher or that, however interesting and useful in itself, sidetracks one’s own thinking and distracts one from working things out properly for oneself.
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The survival of an organism depends on that organism having the inherent ability to cope with its environment. There is probably a range of abilities in fact, among which is what we call “instinct”, which I think of as patterns of behaviour, or tendencies towards them, which are inherently part of the organism: “wired in”, if you like. I have tried to show that the basic patterns of human interaction spring from this instinctual base simply because it seems to me that it does. Human behaviour seems to be remarkably consistent, and tends to be resistant to systems of morals, such as religious ones (one of the reasons for the perception of “sin”, I think). The efforts of religious authorities, revolutionary socialists, fascists and so on to impose a morality generally create so much agony and slaughter because “human nature” has a natural basis which cannot simply be ignored and which will always assert itself. I dislike what I consider arrogant attempts to produce and impose ethical systems (!) but my concern here is to undermine Archbold’s assumptions by trying to show that we have morality already and to try to discover what it actually is and how it comes about. I dare say other considerations will arise in due course.
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As regards any particular moral question, such as our relationship to animals (or the other animals), this is one of those questions which humans in general are trying to answer, in one way or another. This suggests to me that (a) human morality has been strengthened by selfconsciousness in the way that I have mentioned before, and we have discovered that the notion of fairness can be transferred away from ourselves (even to celestial chunks of rock, apparently); and (b) we have the security, even the luxury, to spend time considering such matters as a result of having developed a more secure way of life. Such questions can only be decided by general agreement, not by the discovery of some absolute standard. In the case of animals, we need to know in scientific terms what our exact relationship is and whether, for example, a greater degree of consciousness makes a difference, before we can decide what we think about it. An analogous problem is the use of human beings as slaves, so much a general practice in early societies (and some not-so-early ones, too).
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The existence of selfconsciousness is a scientific question. I have no idea what causes it, but I doubt if it is a transcendental mystery: why should it be? There is evidence that other animals possess it (a factor in the above-mentioned debate, of course, because selfconscious beings are “more like us”), and there appears to be good reason for thinking that it is a product of the activity of the brain.
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Yes, there are atheists who “believe that God does not exist” (I have read this definition somewhere). I am one who does not believe that he does. This is not a mere quibble. I see no reason to believe that God exists. I can’t prove that he doesn’t, but, as people are forever pointing out, I can’t prove that Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot doesn’t exist, and you can’t prove that there is not a paper-clip on my desk which becomes a very small beetle whenever the room is empty. So I disagree with people who are dogmatic about God’s non-existence. It isn’t reasonable. On the other hand, I do think that the problem of God is the same as that of the celestial teapot—that is to say, the idea isn’t reasonable—with the one difference that for reasons I’ve mentioned earlier a vast number of people believe in God, and this is the sole reason why atheists look so odd.

To Gordon Willis.

Yes, the more science demonstrates that we share a remarkable degree of attributes with the “lower” animals, the more the case for religion is weakened. Animals don’t just eat, sleep and defecate as we do. They also have emotions and feelings. We seen countless animals of other species engage in what we call altruism. Elephants seem to know what death is and can sense the finality of it all. These and many other things are roads that ought to lead us away from the human-centric notions of Christianity.

Yes, ditto for “sin”. As I said in an earlier response, there is no such thing as “sin” in the world—but there is disagreeable behavior, offensive behavior, atrocious, people-killing-people behavior. But none of these are “sins” because there is no such thing as “sin”—except in the minds of religious people who feel it necessary to clothe our natural, evolution-derived morality in religious garb.

To Barry Lyons
Re sin: Yes. Sin isn’t just doing the “wrong” thing or not doing the “right” thing. It’s about not being the “right sort” of animal. Our innate tendencies don’t fit the pattern religion has created. With or without religion most people live their lives by striving for accommodation with the neighbours. Religion (as Authority) raises the whole thing to a metaphysical plane and imposes impossible demands, sometimes by force. And it can’t succeed. So we are as we are and “sin” is “original”. It’s not only religion that does this. Communism, Nazism, whatever, all represent some attempt to impose an ideal. The result is misery. In recent times, the western world has managed to tame religion. The Pope can complain about “Avatar” but he can’t have the film-makers hauled before the Inquisition and he can’t launch a holy war against pantheism.
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To JC: Further reflections on your post to me and comments on part of your reply to jmc: (and I am sorry to miss out chunks again but really there is so much to think about and only so much time).
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Our idea of Rights embodies our notion of fairness. We claim them not by assertion of some other reality but from one another, usually by making a case that a claim is just (= is thought to be fair). If rights were self-evident people wouldn’t have to keep arguing about them. Why has there been slavery? Why do women still get a raw deal? We animals have spent a long time learning to be something more, and it is very hard work because we are still animals, after all. The assertion of a “right” to something makes us a little more self-aware. Of course it isn’t just instinct, because our self-awareness comes into play and we can make choices. (For that matter, if you consider a humbler animal, it makes choices too, because instinct is often a tendency towards a particular behaviour: context plays a part too.) But I do not see why there should be a mystery about this. If we have an instinctive drive towards fairness, required by our need to survive and interact, that makes as good a standard as any: better, in fact, because it is something we all share and can understand.
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It seems to me that the traditional problem has been that people are conservative creatures and when a new idea pops up there is a strong tendency to look for precedent to see what to think about it. Simply considering the matter afresh is very hard for all too many of us, especially if a new claim looks likely to upset our assumptions or require a change in behaviour. So out come the holy books or whatever and the Pope gives his opinion to guide the faithful and so on. There is an *assumption* that moral claims are God’s business, but they really are ours. They are about deals, about getting on together, about improving our lot, about caring for one another.
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Re “Being” (very quickly, I’m afraid): You worship Being. To me, “being” just means “there it is”. Talking about “existence” means pointing out that something is “there”. To say it has “no existence” or “no being” is to say it isn’t there. There is no independent “property” called “being”. If there were, it would have to exist! I think it only exists in words. Just a thought, probably rubbish.

Ah, the arrogance of good Christians!  It’s nice to be part of a group who knows it all, isn’t it!

In Christian themes of preaching, murder is abortion, murder is the death penalty, murder is euthanasia and murder is massive civil war.  But how I see what is not murder is preventing pregnancies from happening before they happen.  Every time there is another human life coming into the world means every human adds to the greenhouse gas emissions of global warming by turning on light switches.  This uses extra fossil fuel by burning resources to make electricity not to mention the extra water consumption used to generate it.  Every time we turn on a water tap we use the world’s major natural resources something there’s not enough of for the entire world because we use more water quicker than it can come from the sky and using more electricity quicker than man can produce it.
  In over populated, over crowded, over growing and developing countries like China, Brazil, Japan and Europe, have extremely growing Christian communities in many religions especially countries like Brazil, Mexico and Europe and even USA has strong Catholic backgrounds in it through Christopher Columbus which have extremely powerful and religiously dominant Catholic backgrounds.  Then why are they the leaders of the world in prostitution and pornography with sexually transmitted diseases??  Is it not the Catholic Church and other religions who insists and impose to control and curb prostitution and pornography??  If the Christian themes of preaching to go and multiply, produce and increase the population numbers of the world and have extra children in large families, then there’s no other natural way to multiply increasing population numbers than to make love, have sex and give birth naturally and romantically.  From this practice of having sexual intercourse, it maybe that the Christian communities such as the Catholic Church may not be as imposing against prostitution and pornography as what we originally thought of.  Are the Catholic Church saying that pornography and prostitution is accepted and okay to have in the world’s religious community??  Or are the Catholics changing their image and accepting pornography and prostitution and updating, adjusting with the modern times??  Or are the Catholics realising they’re losing their supporters and trying to change their image to bring back their supporters to be Catholic worshipers once more??  This took most of the wind out of their sails since from the destruction of the Holy War on Terrorism making the world’s Catholic society look like midgets.  Can this be possible??  And is that the result??

Wow—Barry & Gordon & jc have far more time on their hands than I do.

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I suppose one of the things I find amazing is that there is so little sense of history among many who would just reject religious belief out of hand.  (I’ll put Barry in that category if I may, and incidentally, Barry, you write more coherently when you’re not stoned, as far as I can tell.)

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What I mean is this—whether we acknowledge it or not, we are the heirs, especially in Western culture, of an enormously rich and varied heritage, that gives us so many of the assumptions that we take for granted and call “rights” or “morality”.  I will be the first to admit that there have been all sorts of wrong turns and tragic mistakes, and Gordon’s points about the imposition of any sort of code of conduct are well taken.  However, an examination of “reality” as we see it today does not automatically lend itself to the belief that all human beings being created equal.  We pay lip service to this, and it’s enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, and later found its way into other standard principles of human rights.  But it’s certainly not obvious to the casual observer.

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So in contrast to those who reject religion entirely, I would argue (as I think Archbold partly does), that minimally there is at least a heritage of altruism, defense of the weak, etc. that is owed to our religious history, even if you refuse to accept the articles of faith behind it.  That’s why I would say atheists can manage to be just as arrogant as Christians; they just pontificate from different sources.

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So in partial answer to Gordon’s query about my sense of morality, I’ll try to offer some practical examples, in case I wasn’t clear enough.  (BTW, Gordon, you do write very well.)  I don’t think it’s inherently obvious, or even makes sense biologically, that we should reach out and help the people of Haiti.  I don’t think it’s obvious that Stephen Hawking should have an inherent right to life.  I don’t think it’s obvious that women should be treated with equal dignity and respect.  I don’t think it’s obvious that an elderly person should be cared for when he or she is unable to care for him- or herself.  I don’t think “reason” or “science” alone would bring one to the conclusion that all human life has innate value, and ought to be protected.

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My position would be that, again, even absent any sense of faith or belief, that the Catholic Christian moral code, as articulated and refined over the centuries, often in response to various changing circumstances, does much to inform all human beings with an ethic that would not otherwise come naturally to them.  (Of course, it is my belief that one is missing the much bigger picture of our existence and the meaning and ultimate end of human life, if we stop at just the moral sense.  But I can understand that things like salvation, eternal life, etc. are more clearly about faith, and will be rejected as nonsense to some people.)  But it strikes me as arrogant and preposterous that from our self-centered 21st-century perspective, one would think of ALL religion and religious history as something to be emancipated from, rather than at least a little bit grateful for.  And for all the hardship and oppression wrought in the name of Christianity over the centuries, I find it hard to believe that an “atheist materialist” or “secular humanist” worldview would have gotten us any closer to some sort of utopia.

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Human nature, as Gordon points out, seems destined to failure in living up to any absolute moral standard.  In Catholic circles, of course, we identify that nature as “Original Sin”.  What to do with it or about it is another matter.  As someone asserted earlier, we are born atheists.  But we are also born pretty darn selfish.  My 3-yr-old son wanted very much to get into his sister’s birthday cake before the celebration this weekend.  As a human being, it’s an understandable urge.  But to what do I owe my response as a parent in insisting that he wait?  We didn’t have an entire conversation about fire and brimstone, nor did we appeal to our hyper-evolved sense of generosity and altruism.  But the fact that we could have any conversation about it at all is pretty remarkable.  When things get more complicated than the ethics of birthday cake consumption, our faith gives us a context for better understanding our place in relationship to God and to one another.

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And (again, without having read Barry’s oft-recommended “Little Book”) where it seems to me atheism falls apart is that its logical conclusion seems to be basically nihilism.  Witness Geoff’s comments, for example.  Can we agree at all on any human code of conduct that gives any meaning to life, humanity, or civilization?  Is there any reward to self-sacrifice, or is all for naught?  We’re meaningless carbon-based life forms spinning around on an insignificant dust speck in a remote corner of an ever-expanding universe.  One day, with our help or not, it will come to an end, and that will be that.  Not a very compelling narrative for spirituality, morality, or for me to give anything of mine to help Haiti.

@GordonWillis
The questions I put there aren’t side tracking the question. Really, if one tries to explain rationality, that is epistemology, in a coherent way but isn’t materialist, then one must posit some type of non-material existence. For the process of abstraction (having concepts) can’t be material for that would be a contradiction (a non material material thought). If one is a materialist, then there aren’t universal truths. Thus one has to follow Hume’s position that we only know the particular and this leads to skepticism and thus denies scientific knowledge as true (for when one did the experiment it was true but one never knows if it still is true). Thus the explanation of a theory of knowledge is based on an explanation of a theory of how things exist, metaphysics.
Therefore, one can posit any kind of system of morality (including coherent materialist system, or even nihilist systems) but the problem is that there might be contradictions in the entire system, based at the root of one’s understanding of reality. Therefore when I asked if you could set forth how you explain the way that we know, I wasn’t making an off the topic question. Rather, it is at the root of the question of whether all is just material or not. By saying that there is non-material in man, doesn’t necessarily lead to the fact that God must exist either.

Steve P,

You took the bait! I’m writing a book about marijuana (mainly) and so as a sort of field test I wanted to see, after making a tossed-off remark, if someone would say something derogatory or critical. You took the classic route, claiming that marijuana leads to incoherent thought. Excellent. But this is a subject for another time and a another blog.

When you suggested there’s “so little sense of history”, I’m wondering if that should be translated into “so little knowledge of theology” or did you really mean history? I see no reason to be concerned with the details of certain personages to make my points.

As for theology, well, that’s a general a waste of time, no matter who the theologian is. The problem with theology is that all of it proceeds from a position of make-believe. Why take seriously some subject that purports to say something true and valid about the world if the starting point of discussion is a fantasy? This is how it works. First, posit out of nowhere a Supernatural Being who’s responsible for the existence of the universe, and then build on this fantasy by adding other made-up ideas such as “sin” and “soul” and “heaven” and how you can “pray” to this god for forgiveness (you know the drill), with none of these having any relation whatsoever to the real, lived world. That’s what sad about a clique of theologians getting together to talk about some issue. They think they’re discussing weighty matters when instead they sound like a group of conventioneers going on about “Star Trek”. All I’m basically saying is this: as soon as any theologian starts using the word “god”, I’m outta here.

Bait, shmait—I was simply going by the number of word omissions, punctuation mistakes and such in that post (not to mention the fact that you were rambling about books rather than staying on topic).  Compare the following:

Apart from the enjoyment that comes from responsible recreational use—I happen to be stoned right now as I type these words—it be used to make clothing, plastic (cannabis is 100% biodegradable), oil and a replacement to wood (deforestation could become a thing of the past).

As for other books, apart from the two I’d mentioned earlier, how about a book by A.C. Grayling that’s in keeping with the general tenor of this argument? Here you go: “Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God.”

How about Alain de Botton? Here’s a graceful writer who never fails to charm. “On Love” is a pretty good novel by him, but I tend to like his nonfiction, particularly “Status Envy” (I haven’t read his new yet about work).”

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to most of your other posts, which are more clearly written, and with almost impeccable grammar and syntax.  (unlike my own sober writing)  I’m just sayin’, pot doesn’t make you more articulate.  Just going on the empirical evidence, which I know you can appreciate.  Writing while high definitely does not make your case any more convincing.

As far as the rest of my point, I do mean history and not theology.  An objective look at the world does not tell us that all human beings are created equal.  Or that a “handicapped” person should be given a shot at life.  Or that an elderly person is worth anything when he or she needs to be cared for as a child.  Or that we should lift a finger to help Haiti.  These ideas were not developed in a context of atheist materialism, but rather under the guidance of the very faith you so vehemently reject.  So even if you can’t bring yourself to subscribe to the more transcendent aspects of belief, I would think you’d give a little credit to being the beneficiary of centuries of thought grounded in the Christian faith.  My point is we’re a pretty self-centered ungrateful generation, who seems to think we’ve come up with all these brilliant ideas on our own.  We’re standing on the shoulders of giants, and I am baffled that you and others can’t acknowledge that many of those giants were formed in the Christian faith.

You may have missed an earlier post by someone else who had asked a question about other things to read. Hence, the reason for my list of books. (And, yes, there are a couple of damn typos there.)

Wanting to lift a finger to help those in Haiti is a form of altruism, and the roots of altruism are explained by evolution, not by religion—and certainly not by Christianity.

Yes, many notable people with Christian backgrounds have been spurred on by their faith to do good. But this doesn’t mean that Christianity is necessary in order to be good.

“These ideas were not developed in a context of atheist materialism, but rather under the guidance of the very faith you so vehemently reject.”

Religious America was supporting slavery for centuries - and using the bible as justification - and I don’t think you can credit religion for giving rights to women or gays either. Often religious institutions have to be dragged kicking and screaming into granting rights to others, usually by a secular society.

The US Constitution is a wonderful document, but it didn’t give equal rights to blacks. And it was a secular document anyway - no reference to God in there at all, which was quite deliberate by its authors.

noted on the book suggestions.

But my point is that even the urge to help, even if somehow evolutionary in its roots (which I think may be doubtful), still is defined in our day as somehow “good”.  You say so yourself in “people spurred by their Christian faith to do good.”  And I understand how you want to divorce the NECESSITY (or ability) of being good from being Christian, but I’m arguing that even the idea that it is “good” or “right” or “just” to be altruistic is rooted in Judaeo-Christian definitions that have shaped our language, culture, and standards.  If you could somehow totally obliterate all references and all existence of this part of our history, and have some alternate reality for 2010, I am saying that the lot of humanity would be much poorer as a result.  But so many people today simply want to act as though this same history is really at the heart of all the ills of humanity.  I just don’t see how that is consistent, other than simply seeing the world through a lens no different than us religious people are accused of doing.

“But my point is that even the urge to help, even if somehow evolutionary in its roots (which I think may be doubtful), still is defined in our day as somehow “good”.”

‘Good’ is a concept that is useful and therfore common to all cultures, regardless of their religion. If you doubt the evolutionary roots of altruism, how do you explain that it is seen in all social animals, especially primates, none of whom have religion?

Altruism is exactly what one would EXPECT social/tribal animals to develop, as it aids the survival of the group, and hence is passed on in the genes.

“but I’m arguing that even the idea that it is “good” or “right” or “just” to be altruistic is rooted in Judaeo-Christian definitions”

It’s in most religions, and again we’d expect this - religions that taught people just to look after themselves wouldn’t thrive so much, because the cultures that practiced such religions wouldn’t thrive, just as religions that practiced not having more than one child wouldn’t thrive. Again, this is evolution in practice!

Andrew, I think that is one of many tragic mistakes in history and a terrible mark against anyone calling themselves Christian.  Especially because even the slavery mentioned in Biblical times was a different animal than that of our own American brand of slavery.  (For example, it was not based on racial superiority, but rather on conquest.  In the same way, you could say that lots of people perverted science in order to justify slavery, positing that Africans were obviously inferior and therefore worthy of enslavement.)

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And to acknowledge and work with a “difference” between the sexes is not the same thing as promoting inherent inequality.  Here again, science would seem to clearly show that women are indeed not the equal of men.  But instead it is St. Paul who says “In Christ there is neither slave nor free, Jew nor Greek, woman nor man…”

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Religion being responsible for all the ills of society is really a tired old argument with little basis in reality.

“you could say that lots of people perverted science in order to justify slavery, positing that Africans were obviously inferior and therefore worthy of enslavement”

Yes, thank God for Darwin, who showed it wasn’t true.

“Here again, science would seem to clearly show that women are indeed not the equal of men.”

Not the equal? What do you mean? Different - of course! But not the equal? Do you mean to say not equal in worth?

“Religion being responsible for all the ills of society is really a tired old argument with little basis in reality.”

I agree - it’s up there with religion being responsible for morality, equality etc.

“it was not based on racial superiority, but rather on conquest.”

And yet slavery it still was, and still clearly condoned by the bible. I’m glad that you are against slavery, but you can’t say that it is because of the bible that you hold this position.

There you go, Andrew.  God and Darwin, working in tandem.  I’m satisfied… ;)

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I’ll check in later!  Peace & all good.

It would be wrong to say that religion is responsible for all of society’s ills. But many ills CAN be blamed on religion, particularly war. No, not all wars, but many wars are rooted in religious disagreements (to put it mildly). See pages 81-82 of the paperback edition of “Letter to a Christian Nation” for a long list.

Yes, a world without Christianity would mean a world without Bach’s “Mass in B minor.” That’s okay, gorgeous though that work is.

Hello Steve P. Nice to have you back and merci du compliment. I hope, by the way, that I do not come over as arrogant and pontificating, but if I do I apologise and I will try not to do it.
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My point about the imposition of codes of conduct are to highlight the disparity between the ideals and the actual capabilities of mere mortals. Ideals seem to be invented in the abstract, without reference to human nature except to the extent that the latter is a faulty thing that has to be improved. The deliberately ruthless Khmer Rouge tried to do it with the utmost violence; an intentionally benevolent theory (Marxism) leads to the most extraordinary excesses of ruthlessness and suffering; and Christianity, the religion of love, has one of the bloodiest histories of any religion. And my point about Sin was not that human beings must fail to live up to an absolute morality but that an absolute morality is a failure because it is stupidly and arrogantly imposed on beings who cannot hope to live up to it.
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All idealistic codes must fail when confronted with the simple fact of our nature as contingent beings, as animals, however self-aware and however much we strive to better ourselves. Of course, we do better ourselves, but we do so in the day-to-day business of our lives, which the “authorities” so despise: in the habits of kindness and compassion, looking in on the old woman next door, a child pitying a dead bird, and even just doing the washing and being honest about our tax returns. The millions of decent women who work so hard for their families are not regarded as the stuff of saints even if they should be—they’re just women after all, and whatever claims the Church makes for its being the source of altruism and compassion are shown to be a lie simply by an examination of its historical attitude to women. Yet it is most often women who make it all work. Nevertheless, women remain somehow “outside”, suspicious, anomalous, tempting… Idealism is judgement, not compassion. In the form of religion, it may have a lot to say about compassion, about its necessity, and even its absolute nature, but it is founded in the accusation of sin and worthlessness and guilt, and the much-vaunted love for poor weak humanity seems extraordinarily like hatred.
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I suppose now I’m being “strident” and “arrogant”. Well, no, I’m not. This is what I care about, that’s all. I’ve spent some time arguing that our moral impulses do in fact spring from our animal nature, and that over time the addition of self-awareness leads to moral claims, claims of “rights”, which advance our intuitive notion of what is fair (even though, as I say, they are not self-evident). They even underpin those projections which we call religion and all its dubious claims and pontifications. I realise that as blogs progress our cherished posts retreat further down the page and into a kind of oblivion, but it’s five to midnight and I don’t want to say it all over again. Somewhere it’s there, and as far as I can tell my little ship is still afloat.
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Re selfish 3-year olds. Why reason with a three-year-old? Distractions, stories, games (preferably in another room)… In any case we don’t stop being selfish, but we do learn to behave. One of the ways we learn is by being trusted. By learning that we are “all right”, that we “belong”. If you are there when your son needs you, if you say you don’t know when you don’t know, and if what you do say turns out to be true, he will trust you and will learn from you. It’s not hard: you don’t need God in order to care for your son—your own love will do.
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It’s hard to discuss the value of tradition and history with people who see everything in no other terms. (For that matter, I suspect that what I have said about bringing up children will seem foolish to anyone who thinks that there must be some “ultimate” reason for “why” we should care about our children.) I suppose it must be conditioning, but religious people seem to see through a veil of interpretation, as though between the eye and the world the sacred vision always obtrudes. No doubt this is something for which sincere believers devoutly strive. So of course you must think that anyone who tries to see with their own eyes and not the eyes of presupposition is ignoring the richness of culture in all its manifestations. I doubt if there is ever going to be any possibility of communication on such a point.

To jc.
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Thank you for explaining so carefully. I think, though, it would be side-tracking in a way, if only because your questions require another line of approach and I don’t think I am very well equipped to sustain two lines of argument at once. However, I do appreciate the compliment you are paying me and I promise to find time to think about what you are saying.
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Regards,
Gordon.

SteveP writes: “And (again, without having read Barry’s oft-recommended “Little Book”) where it seems to me atheism falls apart is that its logical conclusion seems to be basically nihilism.  Witness Geoff’s comments, for example.  Can we agree at all on any human code of conduct that gives any meaning to life, humanity, or civilization?  Is there any reward to self-sacrifice, or is all for naught?  We’re meaningless carbon-based life forms spinning around on an insignificant dust speck in a remote corner of an ever-expanding universe.  One day, with our help or not, it will come to an end, and that will be that.  Not a very compelling narrative for spirituality, morality, or for me to give anything of mine to help Haiti.”
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I wasn’t going to join this conversation as the atheists are doing so well on their own, but I felt compelled to do so after reading the above. I think this is one of the most crucial problems with the religious view of morality. It seems to argue that faced with the absence of a God and the promise of “reward”, some people would simply refuse the claims of justice and compassion for its own sake, unwilling to help others unless salvation, forgiveness, etc. was on offer. This reasoning would almost discourage people from random acts of kindness unsanctioned by God lest there be nothing to gain!
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Personally I see nothing wrong in Professor Dawkins’ project. The ultimate point is that Haiti gets the aid it needs regardless of the source, and if some feel it unconscionable to give to a religious charity which might entangle proselytising with necessary assistance, then an atheist organisation is a pretty good solution.

Steve P: “there is at least a heritage of altruism, defense of the weak, etc. that is owed to our religious history, even if you refuse to accept the articles of faith behind it.”

I still don’t see that you’ve demonstrated this at all. One could equally argue that a heritage of oppression and denial of rights is owed to religious history. Just yesterday the Pope attacked Britain for defending the rights of gays. And the power of the Catholic church in Ireland, together with the automatic deference it gets from the police and legal system there, allowed it to condone and support decades of child abuse.

The Muslim world has given us stunning architecture and art. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without the Taj Mahal or the music of Nasrat Fateh Ali Khan. Equally, I love much of the music inspired by Christianity - particularly Dvorak’s Mass in D.

The British Empire commited its share of atrocities, and it achieved amazing things too. It’s a similar story when you look at the history of America.

So there are good and bad things that come out of most cultures, religious or otherwise.

Science is secular - it depends on the notion that we can attempt to find a non-supernatural cause for phenomena. So if you are against secularism you are denying the millions of lives saved by science. In fact, Norman Borlaug alone is said to be responsible to saving perhaps a billion lives using science.

Hermionesotter, it’s not about the reward.  It’s about the atheist tendency to just gladly take on the assumptions that we take for granted, and argue that they are simply living out their evolutionary destiny.  If there is no transcendence, no meaning, no purpose, nothing but survival of the species, you have no justification for any of the noble ideals for which decent people want to be known.  Does sending a check to Haiti make release a few endorphins in my brain, so that’s why I do it?  Because if I use science and reason, in many ways, it makes more sense just to allow for some thinning of the herd.  That seems to be Geoff’s point.

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We can argue all day that the Christian practice doesn’t match up to the Christian system of beliefs.  There’s ample evidence for that, and Gordon does his best to demonstrate that it’s pretty much impossible.  (Incidentally, imposing the Christian life kind of misses the point.  I admit that hasn’t stopped misguided people from trying.)  But on the atheist side, there is a disconnect between the ideals and the belief systems as well.  Follow the logical conclusion to the materialist worldview, and you have no justification for why anyone should follow any sort of moral life, certainly not on a global scale.  Just ask Peter Singer.

“Does sending a check to Haiti make release a few endorphins in my brain, so that’s why I do it?” 

No, because you feel empathy for other human beings - you understand their suffering, and figure it doesn’t cost you any real hardship to do something to relieve the suffering of others. Why is a God necessary for this? If you didn’t care about the suffering of others, why would the existence of a God make a difference to this? You’d just be a selfish person who happened to believe in God. And there are certainly plenty of those in the world! What I mean is, you would ALREADY have to accept ideas such as fairness and altruism BEFORE you accepted that God’s morality was the right one. Otherwise you’d just see God as a dictator giving you crummy rules.

“Because if I use science and reason, in many ways, it makes more sense just to allow for some thinning of the herd.”

How does this follow? What reasoning would say that ‘thinning of the herd’ would be positive? By what calculation is it positive? Do you mean positive for the remaining humans? This would still require you to put value on those remaining humans, and if you can place this value why wouldn’t you also place a value on the Haitians’ lives? I genuinely don’t see how you reach this conclusion. And again, even if you DID have this ‘thinning the herd’ mentality, I don’t see how believing in God would alter it.

Gordon is correct when he says “our moral impulses do in fact spring from our animal nature.” Perfect, and it means we don’t need some ridiculous religion such as Christianity to tell us why we feel an impulse to be good.

And there isn’t a shred of nihilism to be found in Andre Comte-Sponville’s view. For a fuller view on his thinking (after you get the atheist spirituality book), you may want to look into “A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues: The Uses of Philosophy in Everyday Life.”

“you have no justification for any of the noble ideals for which decent people want to be known”

You can’t see any non-God reason for wanting to be thought well of by your peers? Really? And as for ‘no meaning’, why can’t our lives have meaning? I enjoy my life, I have goals, I have friends, I have family. My life isn’t meaningless.

Lots of the first-person singular there, Andrew.  Sure, it’s meaningful for you, but in any grand scheme of things, you’re just a collection of molecules waiting to return to oblivion.  Is there a purpose to life or not?  You don’t want to admit of transcendence, but it’s what you’re all about.  And you just don’t want to call it God.  Fine by me, but stop borrowing from religion to give purpose and meaning to your life.

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Barry, I’d say the same to you.  I know Comte-Sponville abhors nihilism.  But that’s because he’s being inconsistent.  He had some great “spiritual” experience, felt the great inter-connectedness of all things, etc.  I don’t care if you don’t want to call it God, and I don’t care if you believe me when I call it God.  But again, you’re taking for granted an entire way of looking at the world, bequeathed to you by Western civilization, and trying to divorce it from this materialist approach that can’t give any of the meaning you so desperately want to wring out of it.  We’re infinitesimal specks on a rock hurtling through the darkness, so Carpe Diem.

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Look, I know we will go back and forth on the logical inconsistencies of one another’s beliefs.  I sincerely appreciate what I think has been good conversation, and I’ll continue to check in for anything new.  Sadly, if this life is all I’ve got, there are some other things I have to get to! :)

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And I’m glad for the education, the thoughtfulness, the courtesy, and the suggestions for further enrichment.  Plenty of rubbish to be had on all sides, so this recent interchange has been a breath of fresh air.  I acknowledge that I have much to learn, and I pray (if that’s okay with you) that you’ll be open to the promptings of God in your own lives.  Live long and prosper! ;)

“We’re infinitesimal specks on a rock hurtling through the darkness.” Sounds about right to me.

“Lots of the first-person singular there, Andrew”. 

What a bizarre complaint Steve! You ask ME if MY life has meaning, so obviously my answer will be in the first person. I wouldn’t presume to be so arrogant as to speculate about the meaning in other people’s lives - I’ll leave that to you.

“Sure, it’s meaningful for you”
Right, so you withdraw your original point.

“You’re just a collection of molecules waiting to return to oblivion.”
Perhaps you didn’t properly read my previous post when I explained the meaning in my life. Or perhaps your short-term memory isn’t so good.

“Is there a purpose to life or not?”
We went through this already.

“Stop borrowing from religion to give purpose and meaning to your life.”
I missed the part where I did that. Perhaps you just made it up…

I am getting a little tired of people who keep reiterating the same points about “inherent value” and assuming that that is what all atheists are assuming in their turn. For the sake (I hope) of clarity I have listed the points that I have argued already and some points and developments which are I believe implied in my argument. I hope this will be of some use.

1. We do not cooperate or help one another because it is inherently right to do so. We do it because we are social animals, and it is in our nature.
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2. We have evolved in such a way that we need to interact with one another. Interaction requires caring for the young, a system of negotiation (making deals for this or that), a whole battery of behaviours concerning domination and submission, attack and defence, and compromise.
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3. Negotiation and compromise are linked with the drive towards what I have called “fairness”.
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4. Social interaction also requires a “theory of mind” (what is the other person thinking or feeling?.
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5. Theory of mind requires empathy. So we know how the other person feels. Thus we are able to make an identification between the self and the other.
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6. At some stage self-awareness seems to be required—and lo! we are self-aware. I would imagine it evolves from the theory of mind in combination with social interaction (so this point should in some way be included in 5, perhaps). Perhaps it some sort of reflex from the discovery that as we have an idea of what is happening in someone else’s mind, so they have an idea of what is happening in ours.
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7. Self-awareness enables us to detach ourselves from the immediate situation and reflect upon it. Thus we are able to calculate what is in our best interests and make demands on the rest of society.
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8. We can also experience demands made upon ourselves.
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9. We are also able to experience that, when we act in accordance with our social instincts, we gain approval or some other reward, such as gratitude.
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10. Gratitude (as an example) forms a bond of mutual advantage between the giver and the receiver.
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11. Empathy, approval, gratitude, etc etc ensure that we look after our own and respond to people in trouble.
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12. The system is merely natural and can go wrong: the theory of mind and self-awareness mean that we can cheat.
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13. Cheating is socially dysfunctional and creates opposition from the other animals in the social group.
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14. When we are prompted by instinct to cooperate, self-awareness records the pleasurable sensation of obeying an instinctual prompt and anticipating a social reward. We say that something feels “right”.
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Comments on the last:
At an early stage in our evolution, we do not analyse this sensation. We come, after a time, to assume that rightness is inherent in cooperative actions. This is a natural error of analysis. We do not have as yet a concept of instinct and we seek for some external explanation of it.
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Our ability to empathise and our unconscious social instincts prompt us to identify in some way with other parts of our world. We can imbue with human feelings anything from animals, storms and rocks to carvings and teddy bears.
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The history of religion suggests a progression from animism through idol worship to the personification of “right”. In fact, the earlier elements are not discarded but reworked into each new development. I think this is what one might expect from the continuing evolution of a social species towards an increasingly self-aware societal one.
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The social nature of our species and the pressure of established custom and belief ensure that codifications of social interaction (laws) become associated with the abstract “other”.
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I could go on, and some bits require more thought, but this is long enough. The problem with this discussion is that no matter how often I and others point out that morality is explicable in terms of the nature of our species theists keep on returning with the same question of how we “justify” what we do, why we “should” do it unless it is “intrinsically” good. The point is not that we *should* do something like being moral, but that we do it anyway. It is the *fact* that we do something that requires explanation. The mere fact of our doing something does not require to be “justified” in the sense of being shown to be “inherently right”. I have also tried to show why I think we develop a feeling that “right” is intrinsic. This becomes a question of fact: is it factually true or not? If it is not, then by all means prove that something else is. Merely making the same demand as before does not prove anything except that the essential point has not yet been grasped. What I am saying, to be as clear as I can, is that the question whether good is intrinsic is the question you are begging. I have already asked you to explain this. You also need to explain how God comes into the picture and what is the nature of “justification” and of “meaning”. If you do not try to do so, this discussion will grind to a halt.

Something occurs to me which I at least find interesting and maybe you will too, though surely it has been said before. Pondering jc’s questions I thought about the idea that the brain creates a model of its environment. A point to be included at no.6 below is the speculation that self-awareness results from a process whereby the self becomes included in the model.
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jc, your questions kept me awake most of last night and continued to occupy my thoughts all morning when I should have been thinking of something else. I haven’t got very far, but I’m still working on it…

Gordon,

Thanks for that excellent summary. Yes, you are correct. You can point out time and again that we evolved to be moral and all that goes with it and yet theists will react as if you (and others) haven’t said or explained anything. Amazing.

As for me, I like to distill things down even further. There is no evidence whatsoever for “telepathy” and yet billions of people believe they can transmit messages via the mind to some unseen Supernatural Being who exists somewhere beyond time and space. Theists call this form of communication “prayer”. How come only a few of us think this is crazy?

Barry

Barry,
The thing is, we may mean nothing to the stars or even to the earth beneath our feet, but wonder and kindness and love and compassion belong to us, and they mean everything to you and me.

Regards,
Gordon.

Gordon,

Great sentiment. There’s really nothing to add to it.

Barry

Why are atheists good without God? Easy, it’s called social evolution. We started to care for another because we are all mortal and may need the same some day. If you looked at nature you’d see why love and compassion are important.

Your argument of ‘why be good without God’is ignorant at best.

One of the main problems of door-to-door Christian Jehovar’s Witnesses preaching is the fact that their victims are in the shower when the door knocking Christians come to the front door and viewing the naked all of all their victims which is sinful for door knocking Christians and being labelled as dirty minded, door knocking, perverting, peeping toms which they deserve to be branded for a bad sinful label as that.  This is a typical example from what happens constantly and repeatedly in every suburban area and should be stopped.  TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.  That is how Agnostics become Atheists from the harder Jehovar’s Witnesses preach which agnostics feel forced against their will to accept it, from the more atheism Christians inflict and the stronger atheists will become.  Far too many suspiciously acting people hang around the suburbs to be picked up by police where crimes of theft and house-breaking takes place in all suburbs.  Door knocking Christians will pervert to convert and provoke, torment and aggravate until non-believers accept what they fanatically and forcefully keep pushing religion down the throats of atheists.  From that result non-believers force it all back in (defence NOT offence) to keep their well being and avoid stress, tension and frustration.  And they have the nerve to call themselves Christians.
  NOWHERE in the book of law, that it says it’s illegal to walk around your OWN accommodation fully naked.  Everyone does that, I’ll bet even Christian people do that naturally by automatic habit.  It’s not sinful for individual nudity in their own privacy.  It’s only sinful if your privacy is invaded by intruders.  Your own private accommodation is your own private quarters and should be respected and valued as such by all.  Just before the Jewish pass-over time each year, Jehovar’s Witnesses will try to desperately, fanatically, impatiently force feed and impose Jehovar into the lives of non-believers and cradle snatching Christians from other churches into their own church in large numbers of persistent and insistent door knocking Christians of different types.  Everyone is entitled to their own frustrations and their own opinions, but fanatic, desperate, impatient, imposing Christians are really bad examples of door knocking severe frustrations.  Door-to-door Jehovar’s Witnesses and other door knocking Christians should be stopped from door-to-door preaching.

No one knows exactly what existed before the big bang that created the universe.  First of all, Satan was known as Lucifer but Lucifer got renamed to Satan.  No one knows the real reason why or the truth of why he was labelled Satan and so much hatred against him apart from recorded information which was written by Jehovar himself and why Lucifer wants so much revenge back at against Jehovar probably to rightfully claim back what was rightfully Lucifer’s properties in the first place otherwise there would not be so much anger of highway robbery.  If anyone were house broken into and crimes of theft, destruction and invasion, anyone will be extremely frustrated and leaving so much furious anger and therefore willing to fight and claim back for the benefit of their own property.  Thus the same with Lucifer who is now Satan.  Jehovar using Lucifer’s own properties to fight Satan with whereas Jehovar may have had nothing but to be Lucifer’s right hand assistant.  But the dirty trick was Jehovar may have reversed that to be the opposite.  No recorded history ever recorded before the big bang apart from what Jehovar was the first to announce may have been the psychopathic spirit to create so much anger, fury, rage, hatred and revenge.  Disasters like these do not just happen on its own without a cause for it.  A dog does not bark at anything unless it points at what it’s barking at.  Lucifer should have been aware of the theft break-in to take his property.  Otherwise there would never be so much revenge for that reason.

Geoff,

Why do you go on about Lucifer/Satan? This guy is just a made-up character that someone created log ago. Dracula, Dr. Frankenstein, Lucifer/Satan, God, The Wizard of Oz, Alexander Portnoy, Huckleberry Finn, none of these names have any correlation to the real world except as examples of our kind’s boundless energy to create literary characters as expressions of yearnings and desires. Really, you’ve got to get a grip on yourself and stop getting worked up over the idea that a couple of these above-mentioned names—you know which two I’m talking about—have any correlation with the real, lived world. All religion, no matter its roots, is based on fantasy.

Enjoy. I thought that this might help to back up that perhaps Dawkins might have an agenda…

“He became the apostle of scientism, the ideology that says everything in the universe has a materialist explanation and must answer to the rules of empirical scientific evidence; to believe anything else is irrational.

A second’s thought tells one this is absurd. Love, law and philosophy are not scientific yet they are not irrational. So it is scientism that seems to be irrational.”

“Books taking his arguments apart on his own purported ground of scientific reason have been published by a growing number of eminent scientists and philosophers, including mathematicians David Berlinski and John Lennox, biochemist Alister McGrath, geneticist Francis Collins, and philosopher and recanting atheist Anthony Flew.”

Dawkins preaches to the deluded against the divine
March 16, 2010 12:00AM

Melanie Phillips

LIKE revivalists from an alternative universe, 2500 hardcore believers in the absence of religion packed into the Global Atheists Convention in Melbourne last weekend to give a hero’s welcome to the high priest of belief in unbelief, Richard Dawkins.

The bestselling author of The God Delusion was similarly fawned over by the Australian media, which uncritically lapped up everything he said.

This was even after (or perhaps because) he referred to the Pope as a Nazi, which managed to combine defamation of the pontiff with implicit Holocaust denial.

By comparison, Family First senator Steve Fielding may feel he got off lightly when Dawkins described him merely as more stupid than an earthworm.
For someone who has made a career out of telling everyone how much more tolerant the world would be if only religion were obliterated from the human psyche, Dawkins manages to appear remarkably intolerant towards anyone who disagrees with him.

The fact is, however, the shine has come off Dawkins. For sure, he remains a superstar for the legions who loathe religion. But, nevertheless, a strong feeling has developed in less credulous quarters that he has gone too far.

While he was writing about the “selfish gene” and the “blind watchmaker”, he received a respectful reception even from those who might have disagreed with him but were nevertheless impressed by the imaginative brio and dazzling fluency of his argument. But then he left biology behind and became the self-appointed universal crusader against God. Flying the flag of Darwinism, he went to war against religion on the grounds that any belief that did not follow the rules of scientific inquiry was prima facie evidence of imbecility or insanity.

He became the apostle of scientism, the ideology that says everything in the universe has a materialist explanation and must answer to the rules of empirical scientific evidence; to believe anything else is irrational.

A second’s thought tells one this is absurd. Love, law and philosophy are not scientific yet they are not irrational. So it is scientism that seems to be irrational.

As for Dawkins’s claim that religion is responsible for the ills of the world, this is demonstrably a wild distortion. Some of the worst horrors in human history - the French revolutionary terror, Nazism, communism - have been atheist creeds. And although terrible things indeed have been done in the name of religion, the fact remains that Christianity and the Hebrew Bible form the foundation stone of Western civilisation and its great cause of human equality and freedom.

Through such hubristic overreach, Dawkins has opened himself up to attack from quarters that, unlike the theologians he routinely knocks around the park, he cannot so easily disdain.

Books taking his arguments apart on his own purported ground of scientific reason have been published by a growing number of eminent scientists and philosophers, including mathematicians David Berlinski and John Lennox, biochemist Alister McGrath, geneticist Francis Collins, and philosopher and recanting atheist Anthony Flew.

These have itemised his many howlers, sloppy assertions, internal contradictions, unscientific reasoning and illogicality. His responses to these stellar intellects are fascinating. He claims they cannot possibly have meant what they wrote, or they are senile, or their scientific credentials are somehow obviated by the fact they are practising Christians.

Indeed, he seems almost to believe that, since everyone who believes in God is stupid or evil and Christians are stupid and evil because they believe in God, those who oppose him must be Christian and can be treated with contempt.

I had first-hand experience of this when, addressing an audience of US atheists, he accused me of “lying for Jesus” by misquoting him. This came as something of a surprise since I am a Jew. Moreover, far from me misquoting him, which was not the case, he had in fact ascribed to me words that had been written by someone else.

This anecdote raises in turn the most intriguing question of all about Dawkins. Just why is he so angry and why does he hate religion so much? After all, as many religious scientists can attest, science and religion are - contrary to his claim - not incompatible at all.

A clue lies in his insistence that a principal reason for believing that there could be no intelligence behind the origin of life is that the alternative - God - is unthinkable. This terror of such an alternative was summed up by a similarly minded geneticist as the fear that pursuing such thinking to its logical ends might allow “the divine foot in the door”.

Such concern is telling because it suggests a lack of confidence by the Dawkins camp in its own position and a corresponding fear of rigorous thinking.

To stamp out the terrifying possibility of even a divine toe peeping over the threshold, all opposition has to be shut down. And so the great paradox is that the arch-hater of religious intolerance himself behaves with the zeal of a religious fundamentalist and, despite excoriating religion for stifling debate, does this in spades.

An illuminating example was provided by an atheists summer camp for children last year in Britain that Dawkins backed. The children who took part were to be taught to be critical thinkers, yet all discussion of religion was ruthlessly excluded.

Far from opening young minds, this was shutting them in the ostensible cause of reason.

Such indoctrination is a hallmark of the fundamentalist who knows he is not just right but righteous. So all who oppose him are by definition not just wrong but evil. Which is why alternative views must be howled down or suppressed.

This is, of course, the characteristic of all totalitarian regimes, including religious inquisitions. Which is why Dawkins can lay claim to being not the most enlightened thinker on the planet, as his acolytes regard him, but instead the Savonarola of scientism and an intolerant closer of minds.

Melanie Phillips’s new book, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power, will be published by Encounter, New York, on April 20.

Copyright 2010 News Limited.

<http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au>

Yes, Richard Dawkins does have an agenda: to rid the world—by argument, not by force—of superstitious nonsense and claptrap, of which Christianity, one of the world’s oldest cults, is the chief exponent.

When Dawkins says that the idea of God in “unthinkable” he says this not because of any “terrifying possibility” that he might be wrong; he says this because the idea of “God” is dumb, one of the dumbest (but helpful early on) ideas in the history of the world.

I like this bit that comes from a recent piece I read about him: “Dawkins then discussed how at first human gratitude was directed towards imagined gods, but as humans evolved they came to realize that this was not justified and their gratitude is more and more turning towards the universe itself, and our duty to nurture and care for those parts of it within our power.”

Exactly.

I hope Professor Dawkins will not object to my posting his comment made recently on his own website.
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Comment #469963 by Richard Dawkins on March 17, 2010 at 1:42 am

If Melanie Phillips, who is a notorious British journalist, had actually attended my talk in Melbourne (instead of reading some secondhand tittle-tattle about it) she would know that my “Pope Nazi” was not referring to Ratzinger. The context was a question about new candidates for sainthood. The pope that is currently up for canonization is Pius XII, and it was him to whom I was referring as ‘Pope Nazi’. I think they are still ratifying his ‘miracles’, but I’m up the Murray River with a paddle (steamer) and not in a position to look up the Monty Python-style details.

It would be unfair to call Ratzinger a nazi, since he was young when he joined the Hitler Youth, and boys of his age didn’t have much choice.

My remark about Senator Fielding was not public, but I made it in a private conversation to Robyn Williams, one of Australia’s Living National Treasures. Robyn subsequently made it public in his speech at the conference, which I don’t mind, but I wouldn’t like it to be thought that I had publicly insulted any earthworm. I made the comparison, not because Fielding is religious (as Melanie Phillips implies) but because he thinks the question of whether the Earth is billions of years old, or only thousands, is a matter of personal opinion rather than objective evidence.
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Richard

Barry,
I tend to agree that we don’t need religious fanaticsm of the pushy church forcing religion down our throats which angered and motivated atheists from agnostics.  Since the holy war on terrorism took a lot of wind out the sails of the church and made atheism stronger.  That’s why I support more of anti-religion against Christian churches.

Barry,
I tend to agree that we don’t need religious fanaticsm of the pushy church forcing religion down our throats which angered and motivated atheists from agnostics.  Since the holy war on terrorism took a lot of wind out the sails of the church and made atheism stronger.  That’s why I support anything more of anti-religion against Christian churches.

Geoff,

My overarching view is to condemn the general evilness of ALL religious faith be it Catholic or otherwise. Why do I use such a strong word as “evil”? Because this damn Christian cult propagates false ideas about the world that are demonstrably not true—and, to me, spreading such false ideas, particularly with regard to human sexuality, is a form of evil.

I still think that Richard Dawkins’s essay that he wrote in the days after September 11, 2001, says it best. The essay is called “Religion’s Misguided Missiles” and it’s easily found on the Web.

Barry

Hello,
  In this rapidly growing economic community of today, there’s more sick people than doctors can handle it, there’s more people than job opportunities available and there’s more homeless people waiting in line for pensions and public housing when they cannot get them.  When widely multiplying families produce a family of more than two children per married couple then it will extend and produce over crowded classrooms and will produce unemployment from not enough money to support young starting families.
  There’s probably no mistake about the beautiful feeling of young people having sex but when young people love to have sex and multiply like rats, mice, rabbits or other kinds of animals, then there’s always the problems of pregnancy, therefore women’s hysterectomy operations and men’s sterilisations are badly needed.
  Australia is the smallest continent and cannot take the strain overload of over crowded families to over populate Australia’s untouched environment on this beautiful green planet.  Asia has 1.4 billion people but that’s the largest continent on Earth and cannot take anymore excessive birthing to over crowd the world anymore than it has done already.  Australia will be the same as Asia with it’s problems of population explosion if we don’t control our birth giving to excessively over crowded families.  The world would be a better place of environment if men and women have free and easier to get sterilisations and hysterectomies (before pregnancy takes place) and can have sex as many times as they like, enjoying it without pregnancy, and (that is not murder).  Young people need to have sex and more sex.  It’s perfectly natural and healthy for young people to be sexually active because there’s not one teenager that’s not sexually on heat, there’s nothing wrong with it, there’s not one child who’s a virgin.  There’s no crime against young people having sex, but there is crime in destroying this beautiful green planet Earth.  When extra people are born in large families and are new migration settlers, more housing estates and shopping centres are built to house extra new people, this means logging extra untouched forests destroying what ever we have left in our untouched environment adding more noise pollution, more air pollution, more water pollution, more fuel consumption, more fresh water consumption and extra used plastic bags because human activities add to the greenhouse gases of global warming all because religious families like to have large families of about 10 or 15 children per family.  3/4 of this planet earth’s surface is covered with water, only 1/4 land, man cannot live or walk on water, so where do extra new people live?, on land of course, and what damage to our planet Earth are large families and women who are addicted to giving birth doing to our beautiful green planet Earth??  Why populate the world anymore than it has been already over populated??  If there were no wars, no deaths, no abortions, no euthanasia and no natural disasters and if everyone were meant to live indefinitely for 6,000 years, then there would be no place on earth safe for anything living, it would be a situation of kill or be killed for survival with something like around 10 trillion people.  There would be no food, no water, no clothing and no shelter, very similar to the science fiction movie that made high protein green crackers from human flesh because Earth will run out of land-space for cattle grazing, farming, water storage and recreation.  So if we have to save our beautiful green planet Earth, then disastrous risks have to be taken to half the population of the world to save it.  The Catholics can’t take their own medicine back what they give out because they want the world’s population numbers to multiply and yet they don’t like war disasters of losing billions of people from the population fighting over personal space and privacy so the Catholics chase their own tail by the encouragement to multiply the world’s population.  When politics and religion are mixed, then young people will lose trust and respect in both politics and religion and rebelliously retaliate, fighting back at victims of society the only (easiest) way (they) know how with youth aggression and youth crime turning the streets into a riot environment.

During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s of the UFO sightings were supposed and said by the Christian church as sightings of the devil who made these UFO sightings.  In another few decades to come yet the Earth human race are going to re-unite with some of those alien beings from other regions of our galaxy who made those UFO sightings in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.  Are Christian churches going to label them as niggers too??  If they do name the inter-galactic alien races as different races or being anything different is asking for inter-planetary and inter-galactic civil war, a recipe for disaster.  It took thousands of years for the human race to accept each other of international races but those civil wars and international differences were basically started by the religion of the white Christian churches and differences from everyone of the black, white, Chinese and Indian races but never the less we have come to an alliance agreement of peace so that we can all travel in space together as one equal human race.  We are all equal including potentially inter-galactic alien beings from other solar systems.  That’s why we can’t afford to take the religion of the Christian churches to re-unite with the alien beings to share our technology and learn from alien alliances who may have more advanced technologies than us which they’ve been longing to meet God the creator of the universe since the birth of man to search for inter-planetary life-forms because of the friction of racial differences they have had for centuries, this (will) conflict with aliens either primitive or intelligent life-forms.  The six major basic chemical compounds presumed to exist in all regions of the universe are oxygen, hydrogen which is H2O water the food of the universe and the others which are nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane gas and CO2.  All of which makes our own Earth a liveable and breathable environmental atmosphere full of life.  Our Sun which formed other planets in our solar system was formed out of those same major basic chemical compounds that also formed other suns out of that would have come from the same nuclear chain re-action the big bang which created the universe (the same chemical source).  Therefore if all Earth life contains DNA animal and vegetable life-forms, then the chances are that man, animals and vegetables share the similar DNA as other life-forms throughout our galaxy if not the universe.  So why do we find so different with conflict with our brotherhood of our future social communities, societies and cultures which the Christian churches and religions have conflicted with for thousands of years on Earth??

The amount of violence that is displayed on TV shows and movies along with drug use, horror and coarse language and often permitted by the Catholic Church who they are dead against anything to do with adult lust and yet they don’t accept sex references, adult themes and nudity which is pointing out to the community of young people that drugs, killing, murdering, shooting massacres, serial bombings and destroying are quite alright.  Half an hour after a kick boxing, Martial Arts movie has finished, ten year old juveniles run out into the streets swinging sticks and nut-chucks pretending they’re little ninjas and Bruce Lee and Jacky Chan type of Kung fu heroes to impress their friends or girlfriends or frighten their enemies who they hate and want revenge from and Martial Arts kick boxing movies are fuelling the feud.  This is ignoring their own Martial Arts instructors who can teach them the self-control, self-discipline, self-defence and self-confidence in public to be just like their favourite movie heroes if they didn’t watch Bruce Lee, Jacky Chan movies only if kick boxing entertainment wasn’t available so much.  Young juvenile males have to develop their own style of Martial Arts expertise like everyone develops their own style of pen hand writing from a teacher or instructor.
  In one way or another, sex scenes, adult themes and nudity are not quite as offensive as what’s thought of whereas it teaches teens how to love whereas drug use, horror and violence are worse whereas that teaches teens how to destroy.  Sex references and adult lust on TV provides a sensation of sex education if sex education was not in the classroom where the students treat sex education as a laughing giggling joke matter rather than a serious learning subject.  The only reason why they giggle and can’t keep a straight face, they already know how sex works and assault and insult the school teachers.  Why have sex education in the school curriculum when they already know about it and how to do it??  Their main sex education curriculum is in their own home comfortable entertainment where there are no trembling sexual child abuse and pressure stress.  School students learn better from examples rather than diagrams on the classroom blackboard, text books or questions and answers.
  Such a religious practise in politics is fairly dishonest and disloyal to the community.  So which is better to be screened on TV shows and internet between sex references, adult themes and nudity OR Rambo Commando, grenade throwing, rocket launching and ninja Martial Arts type of kill death action packed violence which is teaching our young juvenile males how to be raging, negative, cut throat, murdering, criminal snipers???

The Big Bang Theory 15 Billion years ago which constructed the universe would only be 30 Billion light years in length and width.  Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light at 186,000 miles per second therefore one radius half of the universe at 15 Billion light yeas and the other half 15 Billion light years therefore 30 Billion light years in all directions.  It is not the universe itself that is infinite, it’s the vacuum of deep space that is infinite.  The Big Bang theory happened at the speed of light and sucked out into deep space at also the speed of light and the universe keeps expanding at the speed of light.  Two giant atoms hit at a head on collision course together in the giant vacuum of space with nothing else around it so the faster it sucks out into deep space and the faster it explodes.  If the giant nuclear explosion happened that created an array of solar systems within their array of galaxies which is our one small universe, how many other giant nuclear explosions may have happened to construct other universes which containing an array of galaxies which contain an array of solar systems which could be somewhat jillions of light years away??  That’s the infinite part of the universe or I should say universes.

A few days before Easter Weekend many of the door knocking Christians especially Jehovah’s Witnesses try to cradle snatch victims into their own church and steel people and get them away from their own families and their own religious beliefs which is discrimination against their own original traditional family religious cultures which is similar to the stolen generations of the Indigenous and Aboriginal race which caused so much grief, anxiety and frustration into finding their own way back to their original traditional families.
  The Christian churches have taken on the decision to merge financial business into their Christian cultures and financially selling their cult bible from door-to-door to make cash more like a business financially than a caring religious church to help people and come to their aid which no longer happens anymore unless influenced by their belief but helping another church belief or cultivated religion they refuse to help except let them die in the street from a race of a different colour.  And yet it’s suppose to be that the church is suppose to help (ALL) people but since Christian churches are financially hungry to sell their bible for cash they only help themselves and not all people just their own church belief and they have nerve and the hide to call themselves “Christians”.  The belief that doesn’t take part in the destruction of holy brawl of holy war will inherit life to last and that’s a religious belief that remains neutral a religion between religions as non-believers or non-Christians in other words Atheists or anti-Christians is a holy religion who preserves life on this dieing planet.