GCU Dancer on the Midway

Evangelicalese: the author reminisces

2009-11-18T01:21:01Z

scribb1e enjoyed Valerie Tarico's article on evangelicalese, and even watched the video Tarico linked to, of Susan Hutchison speaking at a prayer breakfast. If you'd like a shorter example of more of the same, here's evangelical Christian Peter Vadala being interviewed on Fox News about how he was fired for telling a lesbian co-worker that homosexuality was "bad stuff" after the co-worker repeatedly provoked him by mentioning her fiancée. Intriguingly, Vadala once wrote a "Christian musical": urbaniak has the full story, including a copy of the termination letter from Vadala's former employer and links to MP3s of the musical.

Trigger Warning: watching the videos may provoke flashbacks for ex-evangelicals. To aid your understanding while watching them, here's a brief glossary of terms I remembered from my misspent youth:

Prayer breakfast: An easy one to get you started: it's a communal breakfast where you pray. My former church had "men's prayer breakfasts". I never found out what went on at them, as I regarded getting up before 9 am as an abomination before the LORD ("Woe to them that rise up early in the morning", as Isaiah 5:11 says).
Speaking the truth in love: There's a well known provision of the Highway Code which says you can park where you like as long as you leave your indicators on (well known, that is, to drivers of white vans). Likewise, in evangelical circles, the rule is that you can be as rude as you like as long as it's done "in love". A reference to Ephesians 4:15.
Lifestyle: You'd think this might mean "the way someone lives their life", but in fact it always refers to having sex in a way God disapproves of (such as outside marriage, which obviously includes gay sex, as gays can't really get married).
Convicted: What you feel when God tells you you've been doing something bad, like not telling off a so-called homosexual for brazenly flaunting their so-called engagement. Traditionally, one is convicted by the Holy Spirit, a reference to John 16:8.
Struggling with: Regularly enjoying something, and then feeling convicted (q.v.) about it afterwards. Always to do with sex, e.g. "struggling with pornography". (I also liked revme's definition).
Bad stuff: That's a new one on me, though it does follow in a long tradition of using understated words for things you really deeply disapprove of. When I was a lad, those things were "dodgy", but that may be a Britishism.

Let's not accuse of all Christians of being unreflective about this: Adrian Plass does a fine line in sending up this sort of jargon, as does Stuff Christians Like (Crafting the perfect Christian dating profile is particularly excellent) and Stuff Christian Culture Likes. Back in my misspent youth, I even had a go myself. Still, Vadala could do with a dose of Plass, I think.

Link blog: christianity, religion, science, humour

2009-11-16T20:11:35Z

'Good Reasons for 'Believing' in God' by Dan Dennett: Dennett talks about why it's sensible to profess belief in God. He lives up to his reputation of being a bit fluffier than Dawkins.
(tags: daniel-dennett philosophy religion atheism)
Valerie Tarico: Christian Belief Through The Lens of Cognitive Science: Part 6 of 6: The final part of Tarico's series, which links to the others. "Despite its boundaries, cognitive science, does offer what is rapidly becoming a sufficient explanation for the supernaturalism that underlies organized religion."
(tags: christianity science religion brain psychology cognitive-bias cognition)
WHY DOES THE UNVIERSE LOOK THE WAY IT DOES: A Conversation With Sean Carroll: "Inflation does not provide a natural explanation for why the early universe looks like it does unless you can give me an answer for why inflation ever started in the first place. That is not a question we know the answer to right now. That is why we need to go back before inflation into before the Big Bang, into a different part of the universe to understand why inflation happened versus something else."
(tags: physics cosmology big-bang universe inflation string-theory)
RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags - Stack Overflow: "If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes." Quite right: you should use Beautiful Soup like everyone else does.
(tags: funny programming humour xml parse lovecraft stackoverflow regexp regex html)
The Disenchanted Naturalist’s Guide to Reality: Alex Rosenberg argues that scientism is a good thing, and puts forward a very reductionist naturalism which he applies to consciousness, morality and a bunch of other stuff philosophers like to worry about. His fellow naturalists disagree in the comments (notably, Richard Carrier and Tom Clark produce good arguments against him).
(tags: naturalism philosophy science reductionism morality consciousness)
Riffs: 11:14:09: Patrol Magazine and Evangelicals Who Won’t “Get Over It”: "It is astonishing that so many intelligent Christians seem to believe there is a deficit in emphasis on evangelism and scriptural literalism, and that, if the hatches are just battened down on a more solid “worldview,” evangelicalism can resume explaining the universe to new generations of believers."
(tags: evangelicalism christianity)
I’m Belle de Jour: Former blogging prostitute Belle de Jour reveals her real identity to the Times. She was an impoverished PhD student.
(tags: culture sex identity anonymous science prostitution)
What Stormtroopers do on Their Day Off: Funny photos of stormtroopers at play.
(tags: humour funny scifi images starwars toys photo photography)
Valerie Tarico: Speaking Evangelese: Tips for Politicians: Tarico's article on evangelical jargon phrases and dog whistles. Some of these sound familiar
(tags: evangelicalism christianity politics religion jargon language)
Experimental Theology: Christians and Torture: Part 6, Hell and Torture: Richard Beck over at Experimental Theology has been doing a series of posts on Christian and torture. His survey said: "Christians who believed in a horrific and never-ending hell were more likely to endorse torture. As God tortures so we torture." Unsurprising, perhaps, but interesting to see it backed up by research. In the comments, Beck notes the correlation is not strong, but is significant.
(tags: hell torture politics religion christianity morality)

Argument, authority and batshittery

2009-11-14T17:56:34Z

Following on from my link to The Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy, londonkds wonders how legitimate it is to say "This person has previously shown themselves to be ignorant/misinformed/lying/batshit on this subject on several occasions, therefore I have better things to do with my time than to rigorously investigate all their arguments this time". I've replied on the original thread, but I thought I'd create a new post with my reply in:

Reminds me of Yudkowsky's stuff on reversed stupidity and the follow up, Argument Screens Off Authority.

If someone is reliably wrong (a well informed liar), you can learn something by listening to them: you just increase the weight you give to beliefs which contradict what they say on topics where you know they tend to lie. But this might not be useful, if you already strongly believe stuff which contradicts what they say.

In practice, the people are ignorant or batshit haven't carefully studied how to be wrong. There are more ways to be wrong than right, so they probably are wrong, but you don't learn anything by listening to them, because their statements aren't tangled up with the truth at all. As Yudkowsky and brokenhut say, you can decide not to listen to such people because life is too short, but that decision shouldn't influence your opinion on the truth of their argument (though it's hard not to be influenced in practice). So I think your quoted statement is a justifiable one as long as you don't append "and I'll believe their argument less as a result".

Suber's stuff on logical rudeness covers the case where your belief that they're batshit is because of some theory you hold which includes explanations of how all critics of the theory are batshit (examples exist in evangelical Christianity, atheism and feminism, that I've seen). ISTM that such a theory can't be used to dismiss critical arguments, though it can be used to explain why so many people apparently don't believe the theory.

(You can comment on the original post: I've disabled comments on this one to keep all the discussion in one place).

Link blog: debate, funny, game-theory, humour

2009-11-13T00:03:10Z

Mitchell and Webb - Stalin Vs Hitler (arguing the moral toss): "Welcome to Arguing the Moral Toss". You know who else said that: Hitler!
(tags: hitler stalin mitchell-and-webb funny video youtube morality humour debate)
The Redheaded Skeptic: "Notes on the journey from minister's wife to atheist". Laura from Arkansas was married to a Baptist pastor who sounds like a real charmer. She writes about the emotional side of her transition to atheism.
(tags: atheism christianity religion de-conversion fundamentalism complementarianism)
The ad hominem fallacy fallacy: What is, and is not, an ad hominem argument (for example, insults aren't, unless they're part of an argument).
(tags: logic philosophy argument language fallacy writing debate ad-hominem)
The Loitering Presence of the Rational Actor: A review of "The Bounds of Reason: Game Theory and the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences" by Herbert Gintis. The reviewer goes into examples of where human behaviour deviates from economists' ideas of rationality.
(tags: rationality economics cognitive-bias game-theory prisoners-dilemma)
pshift man page: The manual page for the paradigm shift utility on Unix. An oldie, but a goodie.
(tags: funny unix paradigm kuhn)

Link blog: philosophy, morality, science, video

2009-11-05T16:54:46Z

Why the Big Bang Singularity Does Not Help the Kalam Cosmological Argument for Theism -- Pitts 59 (4): 675 -- The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science: Paper on whether the Big Bang supports theistic arguments for creation ex nihilo, and particularly the Kalam argument. Notably, the author points out that if the singularity in the past requires a Creator, surely singularities in the future (such as black holes) require a Destroyer.
(tags: science religion creationism kalam bigbang big-bang Singularity philosophy)
August and Everything After (San Francisco, 2004): Adam Duritz singing the Counting Crows song whose lyrics are on the album cover of August and Everything After (but which doesn't appear on the album itself). There are a couple of live versions of this: this one's better because the crowd aren't yelling through it.
(tags: counting-crows adam-duritz music)
Gastronomic Realism—A Cautionary Tale: Loeb's charming paper comparing Moral Realism and Gastronomic Realism (the idea that some foods are simply better than others, independent of individual tastes).
(tags: philosophy morality food realism gastronomic don-loeb system:filetype:pdf system:media:document)
“The Collapse Of Intelligent Design”: Ken Miller demonstrating why ID is not backed by evidence. Miller's a Catholic, not a neo-sceptical atheist neo-rationalist.
(tags: ken-miller intelligent-design id evolution creationism science biology dna)
Don Loeb – Moral Irrealism: Philosopher Don Loeb in conversation about moral irrealism, the view that there are no moral facts independent of our beliefs about them. Touches on whether introducing a God would help moral realism: Loeb thinks not.
(tags: philosophy morality atheism don-loeb)
Mr. Deity and the Identity Crisis: "any time anyone's said anything comprehensible about the Trinity the Church has declared it a heresy." - Gareth
(tags: funny video religion christianity trinity mr-deity)
The Non-Expert: IKEA by Matthew Baldwin: A walkthrough of the various levels of the IKEA game: "As you continue through the main SHOWROOM you will see groups blocking the walkways while chatting and others moving against traffic. These people should be killed immediately."
(tags: funny humour culture parody games ikea furniture shopping)
David Nutt: Governments should get real on drugs - opinion - 04 November 2009 - New Scientist: David Nutt's opinion piece in New Scientist.
(tags: drugs science badscience government law medicine politics david-nutt)
A life changed by evidence: Series of videos by a former evangelical Christian explaining why he became an atheist. Well produced and informative stuff. The chap makes a palpable effort to show how he was a Christian and how, for much of the time before his deconversion, he thought the things he was learning could be incorporated into Christianity rather than working against it.
(tags: video youtube de-conversion christianity evangelicalism bible morality)

God and physics or Who is this Kalam person, anyway?

2009-11-04T00:22:46Z

Over at Ex-apologist's blog, the former apologist links to a paper and a response to it which straddle the boundary between physics and theology. I'm a sucker for this sort of stuff. The paper is J. Brian Pitts's Why the Big Bang Singularity Does Not Help the Kalam Cosmological Argument for Theism, and the response comes from William Lane Craig, who revitalised the Kalam argument for the existence of God.

There are some real physicists reading this, so I'd be interested to know what you think of this stuff. I've left a comment over on the ex-apologist's blog, which I've pasted below:

I love this stuff: it combines physics, philosophy and religion. I don't think Craig's response addresses Pitts's paper terribly well: they appear to be talking past each other. I have a physics degree gathering dust and a passing acquaintance with the philosophy of science, and I don't find Craig terribly convincing (but then, I'm also an ex-Christian atheist, so I wouldn't, would I?)

Craig seems to have misunderstood Pitts. Craig says the Kalam does not rely on a singularity but merely on the universe having a finite age, but as a matter of fact, Craig does appear to argue that the Big Bang singularity represent divine intervention, so Pitts's Cosmic Destroyer argument seems to have some force. When Pitts makes this argument, he accepts, for the sake of the argument, Craig's own claim that the past singularity of the Big Bang represents God's creative intervention, and asks why someone who accepts that claim would not also say that God intervenes destructively in black holes. The idea that God would do so probably seems silly to Christians, but Pitts says that on Craig's own argument, this feeling of silliness isn't well motivated. On the other hand, if the feeling of silliness is correct, perhaps Craig is wrong about singularities. A third possibility is for Craig to find some way to distinguish between the singularities, but Craig does not address this directly in his response.

Pitts's thoughts about possible other theories aren't necessarily an expression of Pitts's theological commitments (whatever those may be). The reference to van Fraassen is a clue (and the fact that this stuff is published in a philosophy of science journal): Pitts is talking about the arguments between scientific realism and more empiricist philosophies of science which owe something to logical positivism, such as van Fraassen's own constructive empiricism. He's taking a middle position: the unobservable objects posited by theories are meaningful but we ought to be careful about how far we believe they are real (van Fraassen says we can have no grounds to do so, though, contra positivism, we can accept that our theories meaningfully make such claims about unobservables; realists say there are grounds for believing in unobservables). Craig appears to be quite a bit more of a realist about General Relativity than Pitts, or indeed than working physicists like Sean Carroll.

The references to Bach-Weyl and so on are waved away (I'm no expert, but I think in that specific case, rightly, since as far as I can tell Pitts is talking about an early, failed attempt at a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism), but the possibility of a theory which does not give lengths (durations) to curves should worry Craig, unless he is completely committed to GR. What does it mean to say "the Universe began to exist" on such a theory, or if the universe looks like Carroll thinks it does? Dennett: "What Professor Craig does, brilliantly and with a wonderful enthusiasm, is he takes our everyday intuitions—our gut feelings about what’s plausible, what’s counterintuitive, what couldn’t possibly be true—and he cantilevers them out into territory where they’ve never been tested, in cosmology where whatever the truth is, it’s mindboggling." (thanks to Daniel Fincke for that one).

Link blog: richard-dawkins, science, funny, psychology

2009-10-29T10:01:19Z

Give us your misogynists and bigots: Dawkins on the Poaching Pope. "Whether one agrees with him or not, there is a saintly quality in the Archbishop of Canterbury, a benignity of countenance, a well-meaning sincerity." How strident!
(tags: richard-dawkins catholicism religion christianity anglicanism pope)
Triple negatives and Conservapedia’s support for Hitler « Gowers’s Weblog: Gowers shows that Conservapedia's article on Richard Dawkins proves that Conservapedia is evil, using MATHS.
(tags: funny mathematics maths conservapedia richard-dawkins morality)
Out of LSD? Just 15 Minutes of Sensory Deprivation Triggers Hallucinations: Interesting stuff. Reminded me of Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World", where he talks about how common hallucinations are.
(tags: psychology science hallucinations wired brain neuroscience)

Dancing: Pat pp Bruce: Waltz, Clive: Waltz

2009-10-27T01:29:13Z

Pat pp Bruce: Waltz

Start facing diag wall about half way across a short side.
Spin turn, turning lock across corner (end in pp, ready to move diag centre on new line)
Running weave.
Back, side, cross (sway to R to lead cross).
Double reverse spin.
Forward, side, cross (sway to L to lead cross).
Back, side, rotate to throwaway oversway.
Recover and chasse out.

Clive: Waltz

Start facing diag wall at the beginning of a long side.
Two steps of a natural (forward R, side L), stretching L side up, step back R (back diag centre) and pivot to face diag centre as you lower. Clive was dancing this as "bouncing off" the full extent of the stretch into the pivot, I think.
Open telemark (end in pp ready to travel diag to wall)
Open natural (cross over her, right shoulder back on step 3)
Back under body (L), heel pull (pull R heel in and push it away to the side, then put weight on it), curve walks L, R to end OP facing back diag wall with sway to R (1,2&3) (she has a heel turn followed by the curving walks)
Back L, heel pull R, forward L, to end facing LoD
Double natural spin (like double reverse, but opposite feet): forward R, side L starting to turn, turn and lower onto L leaving RF free). You're going to step OP on her RHS with your RF, so you need a bit of body rotation at the end to put her a bit more on your RHS than usual, but not too much.
Wing (forward R on her RHS, draw LF to RF without weight for 2, 3)
Chasse to R (in St C's this is across the new LoD on the short side),
Weave ending.

Link blog: robin-hanson, anglicanism, roger-zelazny, life

2009-10-21T22:52:03Z

Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock? - life - 19 October 2009 - New Scientist: Of course not, God did it. Still, it's a fascinating theory, and a well written article from New Scientist.
(tags: evolution life science dna research biology ocean bacteria abiogenesis)
Zelazny, "A Rose for Ecclesiastes": Zelazny's classic short story.
(tags: roger-zelazny ecclesiastes SF scifi mars)
The death of death… « The Saint Barnabas’ Blog: The blog entry of the Anglican priest and goodwill diplomat who's been railing against secular funerals and Tina Turner songs at religious ones, who found himself reported on in the Torygraph and Daily Fail. Choice quote: "Whereas the best our secularist friends (and those they dupe) can hope for is a poem from nan combined with a saccharine message from a pop star before being popped in the oven with no hope of resurrection." Well, Christians certainly have the *hope* of resurrection, I suppose. And we can all agree that Tina Turner is a bad thing.
(tags: religion death funeral christianity anglicanism secularism)
Overcoming Bias as it Suits Us: When Eliezer met the feminists: an old thread on mswyrr's LJ which got started when Robin Hanson wondered why the Overcoming Bias community was so male. It's an interesting precursor to the Pickup Artist debates over on Less Wrong.
(tags: feminism cognitive-bias overcoming-bias eliezer-yudkowsky robin-hanson)

Losing My Religion or The Truth About CICCU: talk to CUAAS

2009-10-19T23:29:19Z

The talk to CUAAS was surprisingly well attended, given I spoke at the same time as Jo Brand, who I met on my way to the loos (we exchanged nods, as one speaker at the Cambridge Union does to another: it is not the done thing to make much of these things). I'm not sure how many CICCU people turned up, since they didn't make themselves known to me (apparently one woman was frantically making notes during my sermon, a well known evangelical habit, so I suspect there were a few). I spoke too fast, but people in Cambridge hear fast, so that's probably OK.

Below, you can find my notes, with some hyperlinks to expand on the things I said.

"The Truth about CICCU"?

Not my tabloid headline, blame your committee :-)
No toe-curling tales of secret rituals, alas.
In fact, none of this stuff is a secret.
But if you're not a Christian, you might be curious about just what "those people" get up to, and why.
And if you're a here as CICCU person wondering what I'm going to say, you'll find out some stuff I wish I'd known as a CICCU member.
- Not just that God isn't real, either :-)

Who I am:

Came up in 94, Churchill, NatSci (physics) for 4 years.
- That means I'm incredibly old and all this stuff could be out of date
- But I had a look at the CICCU website and things sound familiar, so...
Lived and worked in Cambridge after that, going to the church I went to as a student.
- Gradually lost my faith during 2002.
- Still interested in talking about religion and trying to understand it.
  - As well as taking the mickey occasionally.

How I got in

Parents sent me to a church school because of the "ethos".
Followed a friend to Christian Union meetings there.
Read the entire New Testament as a sixth former, decided it sounded true.
So, I came up Christian already, but didn't have a church.
Went to CU meetings at Churchill because a "Christian Union" sounded like a good thing to be in, just like the ones at school and sixth form were.

What it was like

I have my old emails. Everyone should keep theirs. So....
Initially, I just went to the college CU meetings, not the central ones in town.
College CUs got together, sang songs, prayed, read the Bible.
- Though CICCU appointed the college reps, the individual CUs were friendlier to non-CICCU Christians than the central meetings.
Also got into a "prayer triplet": meeting up with a couple of other guys to pray for each other and discuss what was often quite personal stuff. Nearest thing to a confessional in the evangelical world.
Everyone was friendly but over the course of the first year I began to feel that CICCU weren't where I was:
- I had gay friends and I knew CICCU disapproved of homosexuality (though not of being friends with gay people: how else to evangelise?)
Prayer triplet wanted me to go to one of the churches in Cambridge and stick with it. I was a bit shy of churches, but started going to St Andrew the Great.
- St Andrew the Great is one of the churches in Cambridge that gets lots of students.
- It's Church of England, but conservative evangelical:
  - Evangelical: not just "in favour of converting people" (though that too): Bible inerrancy, personal response to God, substitutionary atonement (Jesus died in our place, paying the penalty for sins). See the CICCU Doctrinal Basis.
  - Conservative: not politically (necessarily) but not given to things like speaking in tongues, prophesy in the church and so on. Emphasis on finding what God wants through Bible reading and prayer.
- I thought StAG was good
  - Preaching was, and is, more interesting than sermons at middle of the road churches
- But more "fundamentalist" than I was.
  - They're not fundamentalist really, they're evangelical, but I wasn't very theologically sophisticated at that point.

Turning point: at the end of the first long vacation, went to CU "House party" in Derbyshire. (Churchill plus a couple of nearby colleges)
- Mix of God stuff and walking, playing games and stuff.
- The Bible stuff was impressive: the guest preacher had done a lot of thinking about the book we were reading.
- The people were also impressive: I wanted to me more like them.
Decided to start reading the Bible by myself regularly, and praying.
Generally felt more committed to Christianity (and gradually became more evangelical).
Started going to the central meetings in town.
- CICCU is a big name in some Christian circles, so they got people whose books I'd read and who were good speakers.
Briefly stopped worrying about how to get women to like me, which is tricky for a first year NatSci.
- Then started worrying about how to get Christian women to like me.

Someone obviously noticed I'd got serious, because I was asked to lead Bible studies for my college's CU in my third year.
- Met other UCCF staff worker and study leaders to study the passage ourselves, went back to college and lead the group.
- The "right answers" from the UCCF guy tend to win out because it's hard to get anyone else to say anything at all (they're shy), not because no other answers were tolerated.

CICCU missions
- Happen in Lent term.
- There's a mini-mission on off years, and a big one every 3 years so every undergrad gets at least one big one.
- Have always caused a bit of controversy, some years more than others.
- Usually someone says something stupid about gay people, or someone gets offended by finding a gospel in their pigeon hole.
  - Handing out copies of a gospel to your friends is incredibly nerve wracking. Personally I don't see the need to get offended by that: it's a free book.
  - On the other hand, as an atheist I'd press them on the stuff about gays as hard as possible: it's not nice (unlike the "permanently nice" image Christians have), and it's not even what all Christians think. I get the impression a lot of evangelicals are secretly embarrassed about it.
- I dragged friends to a few of the events, but none of them converted, fortunately.
Strategy varies: either "gospel is magic" or trying to look at "worldviews" (one CICCU mission when I was an undergrad was even called Paradigm Shift).
- CICCUs current web pages suggest "gospel is magic" is fashionable again. Also, flares are in this season.
- Note that Christians who believe Romans 1 often think that philosophical or theological arguments are a smoke screen for people who don't want to admit that God exists and they should worship him.

Summer holiday camps
- Run by Christian organisations, for churchy kids and friends.
- Usually sort of activity holiday combined with telling the kids about God stuff.
- Practically compulsory for CICCU members ("strongly encouraged").
- I found a programming/electronics one called LiveWires, which was great.
  - Not at all like "Jesus Camp", if you've seen the film.

How it felt.

It can't be all bad, or no-one would do it, right?
It feels good to be part of a group dedicated to what you think is a worthy cause.
- To the extent that Christians evangelise, they're acting in your interests, according to their beliefs.
Christians are not all stupid (just mistaken). CICCU's brand of Christianity was intellectually satisfying (but closed, of which more later).
- Seriously studying the Bible turns out to be interesting.
- Being taught by big names at the top of their game, likewise.
- CICCU's version of inerrancy allows some parts of the Bible to be myth (in the technical sense) rather than reportage.
  - Did not require you to be a young earth creationist. I was a theistic evolutionist.
A lot of worries about whether you're doing enough/your best.
- The evangelical anthropology is deeply pessimistic about human nature.
- You can find forgiveness, but only by admitting you're basically bad.
- Christians always think everyone else around them is a better Christian (or at least, I did).
Tension between piety and worldliness.
- It would be possible to spend your entire social life doing Christian stuff (CICCU explicitly told us not to: how else to evangelise?).
- Whether/how much to drink.
- Fuss about trivia: Halloween formals.
- Guilt about sex, inside and outside relationships.
  - Relationships with non-Christians are a big no-no, but people do it (usually the Christian women, much to my annoyance).

These are people trying to find their way in the world.
- "Strident" pronouncements may hide insecurity.
  - Though sometimes people really mean them, so it's best to engage with the arguments.
Most Christians doubt.
- But exercise "faith" in the sense of "trust" in a person.
- "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life."

Why I got out

Real life comes as a shock for many student Christians. CICCU/StAG knows this. To graduands, they say:
- Many of you will "fall away". (Possibly apocryphal) UCCF surveys give numbers like 50% after 5 years. So...
- Get into a "church where the Bible is taught".
- Don't get into relationships with non-Christians.
Of course, I stayed at StAG and got into a relationship with a Christian woman.

But CICCU had taught me that the most important thing was whether Christianity was true, and I slowly became convinced that it wasn't.
Christianity rests on facts: "facts, faith, feelings"
The truth shouldn't depend on who you're with.
- Why is it that so many Christians give up if Christianity is so obviously true?
- "The devil made me do it": is he stronger than God?
- Altemeyer, The Authoritarians, chapter 4:
  Their families will say it was Satan. But we thought, after interviewing dozens of "amazing apostates," that (most ironically) their religious training had made them leave. Their church had told them it was God's true religion. That's what made it so right, so much better than all the others. It had the truth, it spoke the truth, it was The Truth. But that emphasis can create in some people a tremendous valuing of truth per se, especially among highly intelligent youth who have been rewarded all their lives for getting "the right answer." [Is this sounding familiar?] So if the religion itself begins making less and less sense, it fails by the very criterion that it set up to show its superiority.

Here are my reasons. There are others, but these are the ones that did for me:

Evangelical morality is sensible in some places and horrible in others.
- obvious: homosexuality
- less obvious: anthropology that says everyone's really bad and deserves Hell.

Is God really good? The OT is a problem, the NT perhaps (surprisingly) more so:
"The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief-call it what you will-than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course." - A. A. Milne.

In the hope of keeping him quiet for a few hours Freddy & I have bet Randolph 20[pounds sterling] that he cannot read the whole Bible in a fortnight. It would have been worth it at the price. Unhappily it has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud `I say I bet you didn't know this came in the Bible "bring down my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave"' or merely slapping his side & chortling "God, isn't God a shit!" - Evelyn Waugh, writing to Nancy Mitford. "Randolph" is Randolph Churchill.

Evangelicals think the OT massacres are history, and that the Bible accurately records God commanding them, and even telling Israelites off for not finishing the job properly.
The other nations around Israel were brutal too, but can an omnipotent God do no better than to have armies slaughter men women and children?
The NT is popularly seen as fluffier, but Jesus talks a lot about Hell, as does Paul. As for the book of Revelation...
- Some respected evangelicals (John Stott) believe that non-believers will be destroyed rather than punished eternally.
- Some (C.S. Lewis) have adopted a Buddhist idea where "the doors of hell are barred from the inside". But this seems to conflict with the judicial model of substitutionary atonement. Does God judge us or not?
- If you push evangelicals, they'll tell you you're going to hell, though they might fall back on one of these ideas.
- Hell makes God seem vindictive (since failing to worship him is the biggest sin), arbitrary (since some people get better evidence than others), and incompetent (since he relies on fallible humans, who do a bad job of evangelism).

Problem of suffering
- Freedom of action is a good thing, but we all recognise limits.
- Some suffering just seems gratuitous: diseases, natural disasters.
- Christians don't have any good answers, they just have a "possibly, therefore probably" argument: God could possibly have a reason, and that'll do for us.
How do I know what's good without God? Well, how do you know with God (Christians disagree, as do other theists)?
- Everyone has the problem of where you start from when deciding what is moral, and this includes Christians, whatever they may tell you. Unnecessary suffering seems pretty bad to most people.
- Assume C.S. Lewis is right and that our moral sense somehow does come from God. But we think it is immoral not to lift a finger to help someone, especially when doing so would have little or no cost to us. Contradiction: either Lewis is wrong, or God isn't good.

Where's God?
Conservative evangelicalism tells you not to expect too many supernatural experiences, the Bible is sufficient.
- But why not? Can argue about "free will", but does God care less for your salvation than for the Apostle Paul's?
Evangelicals hate the term "religion" to be applied to their beliefs. True (that is, evangelical) Christianity is a relationship with God, not a religion (by which evangelicals mean "empty rituals trying to earn God's favour").
- But this "relationship" is odd. One party doesn't talk much, and when he does, the people he's talked to disagree radically about what he said. As Carrier says, this is not what we'd expect if God really wanted a relationship with us.
- "Free will" doesn't work here: Christians actively want some communication from God (especially in the painful throes of doubt).

In the end, during an on-line debate with another Christian about some point on the Bible, I realised we were debating about a book, and God either wasn't there or didn't care. I stopped going to church in early 2002.
It took me over a year to get from there to the point where I'd call myself an atheist.
- Leaving is hard: sometimes you still want there to be a God.
- You have told friends you're a Christian.
- You've even got Christian friends. And girlfriends...
  - That relationship didn't last (partly because my faith was waning), and when it was over, I realised there was nothing keeping me from admitting my position any more.
So here I am.

What I wish I'd known

Some of this stuff is blindingly obvious now, and yet...

I got in because I read the NT and it sort of made sense to me, so:
- Don't believe everything you read.
- Ask yourself why you feel something is right.
- The NT has pretty good manuscripts. Most variations are insignificant, but the mere fact of variations ought to give inerrantists pause (see Bart Ehrman's books), plus some stuff does seem important: the earliest gospel account of the Resurrection is textually doubtful.
- Even if a book describes some things accurately, it has not necessarily got all of them right.
  - It is not necessary for atheists to suppose that Jesus never existed. Arguments are not soldiers.
- Evangelicals like to accuse non-Christians of treating the Bible differently from other ancient literature. Herodotus writes history and has dragons in it. Should be believe in dragons?
- Evangelicals like to say that the origins of Christianity are best explained by the Resurrection, so we cannot treat such accounts differently from other history without begging the question (that is, assuming what we want to prove, namely, that there was no Resurrection). Lessing and the ugly broad ditch:
  "We all believe that an Alexander lived who in a short time conquered almost all Asia. But who, on the basis of this belief, would risk anything of great permanent worth, the loss of which would be irreparable? Who, in consequence of this belief, would forswear forever all knowledge that conflicted with this belief? Certainly not I."
  This, then, "is the ugly broad ditch which I cannot get across, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make the leap." "Since the truth of these miracles has completely ceased to be demonstrable by miracles still happening now, since they are no more than reports of miracles, I deny that they should bind me in the least to a faith in the other teachings of Christ."

In fact, evangelicals have not explained why we should treat the Resurrection stories as true if we don't also accept better attested miracle claims. (Fatima miracle of the Sun, 1917, accompanied by visions of Mary: should we become Catholics?).

I got further in because evangelicals had an impressive system for interpreting the Bible.
- This method seems completely obvious to evangelicals. You probably won't have much luck convincing them otherwise.
- Satisfying but closed:
- Evangelical Bible overviews (such as the one I taught) assume a unity in the Bible. This glosses over a lot of differences.
  - See liberal Christians or Ehrman again.
- It's anachronistic:
  - Not the way the church was doing it for many years (allegorical interpretation, see Karen Armstrong, despite her bad rep among atheists). When did true Christianity start again?
  - Not the way the NT writers interpret the OT (see Peter Enns).
- It's always possible to make inerrancy work (Quine), however odd it looks from the outside.
  - But it forces you to adopt some twisted interpretations. It's ironic that people with so much reverence for the Bible end up doing it so much violence.

I stayed in because I thought it was right to trust God, that such trust was a virtue.
- But this transplants our intuition that we should trust friends onto someone whose very existence is in question.
- We should not change our minds for bad reasons. If we're depressed, it may look as if God's not there, and if we're happy, we may think he is. But...
- We change our minds less often than we think, because we see ourselves as fighting for our chosen side (atheists are not immune to this). Eliezer Yudkowsky:
  Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can. Do this the instant you realize what you are resisting; the instant you can see from which quarter the winds of evidence are blowing against you. Be faithless to your cause and betray it to a stronger enemy. If you regard evidence as a constraint and seek to free yourself, you sell yourself into the chains of your whims.
- Yudkowsky is good. Read his stuff.

I stayed in because I didn't know what was outside.
- People who aren't your friends if you leave weren't your friends anyway.
  - Not that this is necessarily a failing on their part: we all have acquaintances we wouldn't see if we didn't do some particular activity.
- Your world does not collapse into chaos if you leave.
  - Unless you're prepared to really work at it by being stupid. So don't do that then.
- If there isn't a God, then this, here, now, is what a world without a God looks like. Eugene Gendlin:
  What is true is already so.
  Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
  Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
  And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
  Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
  People can stand what is true,
  for they are already enduring it.

There was a question and answer session afterwards. I remember some questions along the lines of:

Why didn't you realise it was nonsense, you're a scientist? What about carbon dating?

I wasn't a young earth creationist, and neither the CU nor my church said I should be. In fact, YEC and ID weren't particularly popular among Cambridge evangelicals back then (though some people did believe them). I don't know whether British evangelicalism has changed under the influence of America in recent years.

The problem is not so much that intelligent Christians directly contradict science, but that they make up additions which aren't backed by evidence.

Was it OK to have doubts as a CICCU person?

Yes. Churches and CUs expect it, things like prayer triplets provide an environment where such doubts can be expresssed. What they don't really expect is for people to doubt successfully. At the end of it all, they should still come out an evangelical.

What's the disagreement I've noticed between CICCU and college chapels?

It's historical: CICCU got very evangelical in response to the SCM's liberalism. College chaplains didn't like CICCU because of demarcation. Still, it depends on who's running the college CICCU group and who's running the chapel that year: sometimes they get along just fine.

Would you agree now that Christianity isn't intellectually satisfying?

Yes and no. Yes: borrowing from Kuhn again, evangelical Christianity is a paradigm in which it's possible to get useful things done, according to the paradigm's ideas of what is useful. Those things are satisfying: learning more about the Bible is intellectually satisfying, seeing people become Christians is emotionally satisfying, and so on.

No: because I wasn't satisfied, and I've yet to be convinced that any Christian arguments hold up. (My questioner said he'd kept going to CICCU talks thinking this time he'd hear a good argument. I think I rashly praised Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, which caused a bit of a stir: maybe there weren't that many CICCU people there after all).

On Craig: has someone won a debate if they're wrong?

You can admit Craig wins debates without thereby being compelled to become a Christian. His opponents aren't wrong (IMHO), they just fail to make their case (usually). As scribb1e said later, you don't call something a proof in mathematics if it's invalid, even if the result turns out to be true. Arguments are not soldiers, again.

Consider yourself lucky you got out so young. Do you feel relieved? Do you miss it?

I miss aspects of it: the working towards a common cause already mentioned; the singing; the feeling that everything's under control. But yes, I was very relieved not to have to struggle any more with it. I think I wasted an awful lot of time worrying about stuff which wasn't worth worrying about. I'd hate anyone else to do the same: hence the web page.

Thanks to CUAAS for inviting me and giving me pizza. I had fun, and I hope my listeners did too.

Edited: Rave reviews continue to pour in. Well, William liked it, anyway, and has some observations on "atheist societies" to boot.

I'm giving a talk to CUAAS tomorrow

2009-10-18T17:27:59Z

I'm giving a talk to the Cambridge University Atheist and Agnostic Society tomorrow, Monday 19th October, at 7.30 pm in the Union Society building (the one behind the Round Church). Apparently it's £1 for non-members, a bargain if ever I saw one.

I'll cover some of the ground covered by my Losing My Religion essay, with a bit more of a Cambridge focus. I think they're hoping for some dark secrets about CICCU, which is unfortunate, because as far as I know there aren't any (anyone who knows different is invited to leave a comment below), but I'll do my best.

Edited: I've blogged my notes and what I remember of the Q&A after the talk.

Link blog: christianity, religion, philosophy, cambridge

2009-10-14T09:35:05Z

Atheism, Reason, and Morality: Responding to Some Popular Christian Apologetics: D Gene Witmer on how best to response to Christian presuppositionalists. I ran into one of them online recently, which was fun.
(tags: religion presuppositionalism apologetics christianity philosophy rationality logic induction morality system:filetype:pdf system:media:document)
God is not the Creator, claims academic: In a sense, this isn't news: a lot of the religions that were contemporaries of Judaism had a creation story involving gods making order out of chaos rather than creating the universe from nothing, though I'd previously read that this was referred to in the Bible more obliquely than the this new theory suggests (e.g. water + Leviathan symbolises chaos in Psalm 74). If this idea catches on, it'll be interesting to see the new ideas the Abrahamic religions come up with to harmonise this with science :-)
(tags: religion bible history christianity creationism creation god chaos)
Plantinga: Religious Beilef as Properly Basic: A nice introduction to Plantinga's ideas. I've not read his books, so I don't know how accurately they're summarised, but it seems to fit with what I've read elsewhere.
(tags: belief philosophy plantinga epistemology christianity religion alvin-plantinga)
PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness: Peter Watts talks about a paper which claims consciousness arose out of the need to chose between conflicting motor impulses.
(tags: consciousness science scifi sci-fi peter-watts)
Demon ready to kill in city church: Magus Shadee (Wiz 5, Necromatic) apparently cast Summon Monster in the big Catholic church in Cambridge. Local clerics of Papem, god of guilt about sex, say they'll summon the City Watch, though it's not clear what they'd do about it. I'd've thought the clerics would be better off casting some defensive spells of their own.
(tags: woo-woo christianity cambridge occult paganism witchcraft)

Christian Presuppositionalism: buh?

2009-10-11T22:44:16Z

I recently had a random encounter with a proponent of Christian presuppositionalism, over on the Premier Christian Radio forums. Presuppositionalism is a pretty odd position: not content with pointing out the evidence in favour of Christianity, as most Christians do, the presuppositionalist apparently reckons that unless you presuppose the existence of the Christian God, you can't possibly make any sense of the world at all. The original thread the discussion was on got very convoluted (not helped by Ning's limit on thread nesting depth: if you ever want to start a social network, don't use Ning, it's crap). I started another one over here. My initial posting is below, for my reference and also because I'd like to know what you guys think of it. I'm an amateur philosopher, but I know there are some pros reading. Here's what I said:

I'd like to clear the decks a bit rather than arguing in circles. I'm kind of new to presuppostionalism. I used to be a reformed evangelical, but more of an evidentialist (now I'm an atheist, as you might have gathered). Here's what I've managed to glean so far:

Presuppositionalism (as advocated by Sye, at least) seems to be the position that it is necessary to presuppose that the Christian God exists in order to make any sense of the world at all. On this view, the Christian God is the only possible explanation for various stuff which we need for the world to make sense, like logic, mathematics, and our apparent ability to reason from specific cases to general cases ("all the copper we've seen conducts electricity, so all copper conducts electricity"). (This sort of reasoning is usually referred to by philosophers of science as "induction", but note that it's not the same thing as "proof by induction" technique you may have learned in maths lessons). I'll refer to these things as "logic and stuff".

The method of attack used by the presups (I'm now going to start using this abbreviation to save me from RSI) is to present the only possible alternatives as Christianity (of the reformed, inerrantist sort: liberals presumably need not apply) and radical scepticism, the belief that knowledge is impossible. You can see this method at work on the previous thread here, and in Sye's responses to Stephen Law, an atheist philosopher. This is a bold claim: not only is the Christian God an explanation for logic and stuff, but it's the only possible one.

Sye himself doesn't appear to have an argument that Christianity is the only possible explanation. On Law's blog, he asserted something called "the impossibility of the contrary", but never made an argument in detail that the contrary is in fact impossible. Instead, his tactic is to attack whatever other possible position his opponent prefers, or, if his opponent won't commit to a single preferred position, to attack them on the basis that they are using logic and stuff without sufficient grounds to believe that it produces true results.

David Snoke, a Christian professor of physics, has written a critique of presup from a reformed Christian perspective. It's an interesting article: Snoke also goes into the history of presup ideas and various schools of thought within presup. I'm guessing Sye is more taken with Cornelius van Til than with Alvin Plantinga.

Of course, as I don't possess the Holy Spirit, I'm unqualified to judge Snoke's Biblical arguments. Instead, here are a few problems I see with presup:

1. Presups have not established the impossibility of the contrary. If presups were merely to claim that the contrary was unlikely, it might be possible to make an argument if presups could defeat all other known possibilities, but an argument to establish impossibility requires ruling out unknown possibilities as well.

2. Presup does not in fact remove the problems of knowledge that it claims to, so not only doesn't establish itself as the only way to avoid radical scepticism, but doesn't establish itself as a valid way to do so. Examples:

2a. Presups claim knowledge from God by revelation, but have not accounted for disagreements among Christians. Presups claim that the presup position itself is a revelation from God, but it seems God has not given this revelation to Christians like Snoke (and Richard Morgan, in the other thread). A presup might claim that God gives different revelations to different Christians, but this seems to further undermine their position (see below).

2b. Presups claim that non-Christians actually know the Christian God exists but suppress this knowledge. (Other Christians, for example, Richard Morgan and Karal (whose replies seem to have disappeared), disagree, another instance of problem 2a). While it's possible for people to be deluded, presups have not explained how a mere mortal could shut out the revelation of an omnipotent being. Why not, as Carrier says, expect that "Even if we rejected it, we would all at least admit to each other, "Yes, that's what this God fellow told me."?

2c. Presups claim that non-Christians have no grounds to trust the evidence of their senses, memory or reasoning, but this is also true of presups. Whether the presup claim is that God's reveals himself to their senses (by reading the Bible, say) or directly into their minds, someone with control of the Christian's senses or with the inner workings of their mind could still deceive them (for example, by making what are apparently revelations from God). In this, the Christian is no better off than the non-Christian. Worse, even if God exists, according to Christians, humans cannot understand all his motives. Though he is generally in favour of truth, God might give a false revelation if it served his own purposes, just as God apparently allows suffering for some greater purpose despite being generally in favour of relieving suffering. So the presup cannot have absolute confidence in the truth of revelation even if it comes from God.

2d. Preups claim that the Christian God makes induction work, but I'm not quite clear what the actual claim is here. Do they claim to have a solution to the New Riddle of Induction, for example?

3. Presups claim that the Christian God is the only possible explanation. There does not seem to be a good reason why other sorts of God would not do.
3a. Sye mentioned that Allah will not do because the Quran contradicts itself. Yet he also claims that non-Christians cannot interpret the Bible correctly. If this is a legitimate move, surely a Muslim could claim that a non-Muslim could not interpret the Quran correctly (they might even add "How do you like your argument now?") In fact, Sye's reference to the contents of the Quran seems to be an evidential objection to Islam, not a presup one at all (but I won't grass him up to the Presup Doctrinal Rectitude Council if he doesn't want me too).

4. Worse, it's not clear that some atheistic views won't do as well as presup. In the other thread, I suggested Platonism, the view that logic and stuff exists necessarily and non-physically, and that this stuff governs the universe, and is perceptible to humans either because humans have some faculty that allows them to perceive it, or because humans evolved in a universe so governed (the second of these is probably weaker, but it's a line of retreat in case the perceptual argument doesn't work).
4a. Sye asks whether logic and stuff reveals itself, on this view, or whether humans perceive it autonomously. On Platonism, I take it the latter is true, because logic and stuff is impersonal, not a personal God. This seems to remove part of objection 2c, namely, that God might chose to deceive us, since impersonal stuff cannot chose anything. It also does well against the equivalent of options 2a and 2b, since if perception of logic and stuff is a human faculty, it may be weaker or non-existent in some people, and logic and stuff cannot be said to have chosen to allow this to happen.
4b. Sye asks for an example of such perceptions. I'd say that the truth of modus ponens is something we can just see to be true, and on Platonism, we just see it using this faculty.

To sum up, presup seems a vain attempt to avoid the problem that every theory of knowledge has to start somewhere (or be circular or infinitely recursive, I suppose) by grounding the starting point in God. However, I think I have more confidence that, say, logic "works" than we do in why. I drive my car without knowing what's under the bonnet, and, unless there's a Cartesian daemon deluding my senses, it apparently still gets me from A to B. I might claim that it runs on petrol (gasoline) or on batteries or on some as yet unknown technology, Sye might claim it runs on God. Yet the world is as it is: my car runs on something, and if it isn't God, it's something else.

Department of dirty hacks: the link blog script

2009-10-07T22:11:39Z

As promised, the link blog stuff is now working. It's pulling links and descriptions from my Delicious bookmarks and posting them to LJ in batches of 10 or more, or when there's stuff to be posted and nothing's been posted for 4 days. Let me know if it becomes annoying.

Here comes the science

It turns out there's a PHP script called Delicious Glue to do this, but that would involve using PHP, so no (gateway drug: next thing you know, you'll be using Perl). It looks like that script also doesn't cope with the brave new world of Unicode terribly well, doesn't tag the LJ post using the tags from Delicious, and doesn't support the elaborate posting scheme described in the previous paragraph. Also, it wasn't invented here.

So I did it in Python. Mark Pilgrim's excellent Universal Feed Parser module does much of the heavy lifting. Posting to LJ using XML RPC turns out to be surprisingly easy using the built-in xmlrpclib. Most of the faff comes in getting it to persist state between runs of the script, which I'm doing using pickle. Here's the code: you'd need to be a programmer to adapt it for your own use, but if you are, it shouldn't be hard. I'll probably run it daily using cron.

Link blog: religion, christianity, de-conversion, politics

2009-10-07T21:31:10Z

What Is Evil For The Darwinist, Ctd: Andrew Sullivan posts some well-reasoned letters from readers on the question of what a non-theist would call "evil" (presumably responses to the old "how can you say God is evil when you don't have a basis for morality?" question). Bizarrely, he then describes them as showing "contempt" for religion. There's no pleasing some people. The letters are good, anyway.
seek and ye shall find…. but what?: “If you REALLY had been a Christian you would have never de-converted.” vs the observation that many de-converts are former Christian ministers.
(tags: de-conversion religion christianity)
Buddhism and the God-idea: Interesting. I liked: "Whether we call those superior beings gods, deities, devas or angels is of little importance, since it is improbable that they call themselves by any of those names."
(tags: buddhism god religion)
Why it's so hard to quantify false rape charges. - By Emily Bazelon and Rachael Larimore - Slate Magazine: False accusations probably account for 8 to 10% of all accusations, though the research isn't conclusive, and it's not clear how this compares to false reporting of other crimes. Interesting story about the falsely accused man who found support from his girlfriend who had been raped some time ago: emotions were similar on both sides.
(tags: feminism research rape crime)
Justice with Michael Sandel - Home: Harvard has put Michael Sandel's justly popular "Justice" course on the web. Well worth watching.
(tags: education philosophy morality ethics video community politics harvard justice)
Messy Revelation: Why Paul would have flunked hermaneutics: Susan Wise Bauer in Christianity Today, writing about Peter Enns, who noticed that the NT authors don't interpret the OT the way evangelicals would. I liked this bit: "This is the exactly the kind of exegesis that terrifies most evangelicals. The man who admits that meanings can be "read into" Scripture stands on the fabled slippery slope, right above a sheer drop-off, while below him churns a sea of relativism, upon which floats only a single overloaded lifeboat, captained by a radical feminist gay & lesbian & transgender activist who is very anxious to make the final decision about who gets pitched overboard."
(tags: bible hermaneutics peter-enns christianity religion paul old-testament)
What’s so great about being an ex-Christian? Intellectual integrity.: This sounds familiar.
(tags: ex-christian de-conversion atheism christianity religion)
Omnipresent G-d (LORD_YHWH) on Twitter: God's on Twitter, with some new commandments. I don't know why these atheists complain about divine hiddeness. "My word is a knife made white by heat, such as that which one uses to cut pastrami." - wisdom for us all there.
(tags: god yhwh religion funny satire christianity judaism twitter)
Science, Pseudoscience and Bollocks: An interesting essay which talks about the demarcation problem in science and argues that we should be against creation science because it's wrong, not try to argue about what science is. I'm shocked he referred to a Christian belief as "bollocks". I got told off for that once.
(tags: bollocks science pseudoscience epistemology empiricism logical-positivism karl-popper popper creationism dover)
Thunderbirds will grow a generation of mad engineers: FAB, Mr Ellis.
(tags: warren-ellis thunderbirds tv)
On The Possible God Of Philosophy And Cosmology Vs. The Personal, Historical God Of Faith: Camels With Hammers links to Dennett's remarks on hearing William Lane Craig's cosmological argument, and then talks about the gap between the source of the universe (which we should properly be agnostic about) and the gods of major religions.
(tags: daniel-dennett dennett william-lane-craig craig cosmology kalam philosophy physics)
Rock-Bottom Loser Entertaining Offers From Several Religions | The Onion - America's Finest News Source: Cruel but funny
(tags: onion religion funny satire humour)
"A Different Way of Knowing": The Uses of Irrationality... and its Limitations: Greta Christina talks about "other ways of knowing" and their uses, as applied to the theism/atheism debate.
(tags: religion epistemology science atheism greta-christina empiricism)
Understanding Sarah Palin: Or, God Is In The Wattles: Peter Watts gives his grand theory for why religion hasn't died out. It's all about preventing free-loading once societies get above a certain size.
(tags: peter-watts religion evolution sarah-palin politics psychology signalling)
Whence Rationality?: Some responses to the evolutionary argument against naturalism. The point that evolution is unlikely to come up with the sort of elaborate errors Plantinga mentions is new to me.

The Devil went down to Cambridge OR Attacking the Darkness

2009-10-01T22:59:48Z

The ever-reliable Cambridge Evening News reveals that dark forces are gathering in Cambridge: "Magus Lynius Shadee, self-named King of All Witches, has announced he will open in the city centre by December 24" (I don't know what it means for a magus to "open in the city centre", but I'm not sure I want to stick around to find out). Local church leaders aren't too pleased about this, and warn of bad juju.

This set me thinking about the time the vicar at my former church told us that educated Cambridge Christians hadn't taken the stuff in the Bible about demons seriously enough. Basic theism is all very well at first, but inevitably you move on to the harder stuff. Initially, you're all "everything that begins to exist has a cause" but before long you start thinking that the Resurrection is pretty good evidence for Christian theism (after all, as the Christian sort of God exists, it's likely that he would raise Jesus from the dead, therefore the Resurrection is not terribly unlikely; therefore, given the New Testament evidence, the Resurrection happened; therefore the Christian sort of God exists).

Tragically, for some people even that's not enough. Not satisfied with a Trinity, they crave other supernatural beings. From there, it's a slippery slope to "I had doubts about the validity of that Resurrection argument / fancied that boy/girl/sheep / had a bit of a funny turn late at night: SATAN DUNNIT!"

When I was a lad, the school Christian Union leaders told us Dungeons and Dragons was a doorway to danger, a gateway into Satanism. I'd like to suggest that Christianity is a gateway to Dungeons and Dragons. This isn't a completely new idea: arkannath suggested it in the comments of one of my old posts, which you might also enjoy.

Father David Paul's (Cleric level 1, patron: Papem, god of guilt about sex) warning that "People who go to these things often end up with mental problems" is best read as a caution to people with poor Will Saves. Rev Ian Church is clearly some sort of adventuring cleric (level 3, patron: Jeebus, god of circular arguments) on a quest to put a stop to Shadee (Wizard level 5, necromancer). Our hero has tracked the villian to his underground lair, wherein "there were several ritual and seance rooms and what really struck us was the intense and extreme cold in the rooms". Church (by the way, am I alone in thinking that naming your cleric "Church" is only one step up from calling your characters "Bob's fighter 1", "Bob's figher 2", and so on? Not sure what the DM was thinking with "Shadee", either) neglects to mention how he turned several undead and avoided some tricky pit traps while he was down there, but we can assume he's just being modest. There were plenty of XP given out that day, I can tell you. Still, it looks like Shadee escaped, and now the campaign is coming to the streets of Cambridge. The local peasants are pretty excited by the prospect.

Meta: link blogging and ads

2009-09-24T23:52:27Z

Link blog?

I keep a sort of mini blog over at Delicious. It's a collection of links I want to save, plus a short description. On LiveJournal, there's a feed of it at pw201_links, but there's no point posting comments there, as I won't see them. andrewducker regularly posts batches of his links to his LJ, and they often create some interesting discussion. I wondered whether I should do the same, or whether that would mean death was too good for me, as it is for those people who use Loudtwitter to post their "tweets" to LJ. I'd probably post links once a week or in batches of 10, whichever happened sooner. What do you think?

View Poll: #1462193

LJ links up with Google ads

As you might have seen over on news, LJ have formed a partnership with Google, allowing users who pay for their journals to place Google ads on them and earn a bit of money (LJ itself probably makes money off people who sign up, they're not taking a cut of the money for people viewing the ads).

I won't be doing this, as the small amount of money I might make from ads isn't worth the annoyance to my readers. As someone whose comment I can't find said, it looks like LJ have done this to keep up with other services like Wordpress, who offer ads as an option. SUP bought out LJ because LJ apparently is blogging in Russia, so perhaps this is part of a trend. I hope they might do more "serious blogging" stuff as opposed to social networking stuff: I'd like to see LJ on my own domain working properly, comment feeds (so I don't have to do it myself with Python scripts and gaffer tape), Google Analytics, and a pony.

Of course, the best thing about news postings is the hordes of whining commenters and the responses mocking them for whining. Pages 6 and 7 are particular rich in put-downs and image macros. It's interesting to see that the "bugger off to Dreamwidth" response is getting popular: DW has made a name for itself as the place where you flounce to because The Man is keeping you down, Man. Fandom folk are pretty self-aware, so they mock this stereotype themselves. All good fun.

LJ New Comments: Dreamwidth support updated

2009-09-23T20:41:14Z

I've produced a new version of LJ New Comments which works with Dreamwidth again: looks like they changed how comments are marked up at some point.

Experimental Theology: Freud, James, Summer and Winter

2009-08-31T16:27:32Z

Richard Beck, an Associate Professor and experimental psychologist at Abilene Christian University, writes a blog called Experimental Theology. It's full of his research and his reflections on the psychology of religion, and is well worth reading. Beck, a Christian himself, is happy to use psychological tools to study belief.

Beck recently finished a series of posts entitled The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience. In this series, he talks about two ideas of the psychological purpose of religion, those of Sigmund Freud and William James, and relates the results of some experiments he did to test these ideas.

Tell me about your mother

Freud wrote a book called The Future of an Illusion. In it, Freud argues that religion is a narcotic, not in the social sense of Marx's famous saying, but rather, psychologically. Religion provides consolation in the face of uncertainity and death. In describing this psychological purpose, Freud does not argue that this means religion is necessarily false (see logical rudeness), but he says (and Beck agrees) that this consolation is suspicious: "We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be."

James wrote a book called The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he speaks of healthy-minded believers and of sick souls. The healthy-minded believer is an optimist, who lives by "averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good". There are good things to say about living like this, but ultimately, James thinks healthy-mindedness functions as an anaesthetic. In this, James's view of the healthy-minded believer is similar to Freud's view of all believers. But James doesn't stop there. Sick souls, he says, don't find consolation in religion and are convinced that "the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world's meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart". For Beck, the laments found in some of the Psalms come from sick souls. Beck cites Mother Theresa, whose letters show she felt a spiritual emptiness for much of her life, as another example.

Is Freud right? Experiments done to investigate Terror Management Theory suggest he is. Christians were primed to think about their own deaths and then ask to evaluate essays they were told were written by a Christian and a Jew. They were significantly more likely to denigrate the Jewish author than Christians who evaluated the essays without the death priming. In the face of death, believers exhibit what the theorists call "worldview defence".

It is not the healthy who need a doctor

But, says Beck, these experiments failed to distinguish the healthy and the sick believers. If James is right and the sick souls exist, they should be less likely to defend their worldviews when primed with thoughts of death. Beck came up with what he calls the Defensive Theology Scale, a set of questions designed to rate how much Christians think God gives special insight and protection, answers even mundane prayers, and guides events in their lives. People who have these consoling beliefs score highly, and are healthy-minded, in James's terminlogy, or Summer Christians, in Beck's. It turns out that when the death priming experiment was re-run, high DTS scores correlated with worldview defence in the face of death. The sick souls, those Beck calls the Winter Christians, did not react like their Summer counterparts: they didn't feel the need to defend their worldview even when primed to think of death.

There's much more in Beck's essays (for example, the correlation between healthy-mindedness and belief in an active Satan), but you should read them for yourselves.

Worshipping tables

Reading Beck's stuff, I'd classify my former belief as healthy-minded or Summery. It's pretty hard for an evangelical to be anything else: sick souls don't have a personal relationship with Jesus, and aren't inclined to blame sin and Satan when things get tough in their faith. Perhaps there's some lingering remnant of evangelicalism in me, because I can't quite see the point of being a sick soul and still being part of a worshipping community, even if you've had a religious experience which leads you to think there's a God. Terry Pratchett writes that witches don't believe in gods in the same way that they don't believe in, say, tables: they know they exist and have a purpose, but don't feel the need to go around saying "O mighty table, without whom we are naught". God seems inscrutable to Winter Christians, so, as Daniel Fincke asks, Why worship someone with mysterious motives? (in the posting, we also see the important contribution of Chef from South Park to defeating various Christian theodicies). I'll have to read more of Beck's old posts to see whether he addresses the question of what motivates Winter Christians.

Drama, science, evolution, morality - the usual

2009-08-28T00:41:30Z

Link roundup and browser tab closing time...

Expel the evildoer from among you

If you're not reading back over my old entries (why not? I used to be much better before I jumped the shark), you might not have noticed that there was some LJ drama over the last one. robhu conclusively won the debate on whether complementarianism is sexist by the cunning ploy of banning me from commenting on his blog: an innovative rhetorical tactic, and undeniably a powerful one. But it's not over yet. I've realised that he may have made a Tone Argument, which might enable me to reject his ideas out of hand and advance three squares to the nearest Safe Space, so I'm awaiting the results of a steward's inquiry. It's possible I may have too many Privilege Points to make a valid claim for Tone Argument, but I'm hopeful the powers that be will see things my way.

Could out-consume Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Down on the Premier Christian Radio boards, they're talking about science and religion again, specifically whether science can ignore the possibility of God's existence. I've been sticking my oar in, as usual.

Red Ken again

When I reviewed Ken MacLeod's The Night Sessions, I reckoned that he had something to do with Christianity himself at one point, as the observational humour was too keen to come from a total outsider. It turns out he's the son of a Presbyterian minister. At an SF convention in 2006, MacLeod spoke about his childhood, discovering that creationism was wrong, and the social contract. This old speech of his was linked from his recent blog posting on the changing meaning of evolution. MacLeod says a change occurred in the 1970s when Jacques Monod and Richard Dawkins introduced a thoroughly materialistic theory. This replaced older ideas that evolution is progress up a sort of secular Great Chain of Being, ideas which C.S. Lewis grumbled about, though not for the same reasons as the biologists. "Evolutionary Humanism was no doubt troubling enough to believers, but at least it wasn't a vision of blind, pitiless indifference at the heart of things." It's the latter vision which MacLeod says has so riled modern creationists. I'm not sure whether he's right, but it's an interesting speculation.

Morality

Some people argue that if there's no God, you can't have real morality. We've discussed this previously here (and also here). The debate seems to boil down to which definition of morality you find psychologically satisfying, since as far as I can tell it has no practical consequences: almost everyone thinks that Bad Things are Bad, whether or not they also think there are moral absolutes.

Anyway, Jeffrey Amos over at Failing the Insider Test has an interesting post specifically about the idea that morality shows there's a God. Firstly, he argues that all moral systems have the problem of where you start from, so the Euthyphro dilemma isn't introducing a new problem for theists. Nevertheless, it does show that the problem isn't solved by introducing God, either. Secondly, he argues that a theist must either say that God's ideas of morality are not similar to ours, in which case pretty much everyone is wrong about morality and once we allow this, it's no stretch to say that they might be wrong about it in a different way (for example, maybe true morality doesn't have to be absolute). Or a theist must say that God's morality is similar to ours, but this runs into the problem of pain: a God whose morality was similar to ours wouldn't allow there to be so much suffering in the world. The standard response that God allows suffering for inscrutable reasons doesn't help: if God is inscrutable, how can we know his morality is similar to ours? The second prong of the second argument isn't new (gjm11 makes it here, and I doubt he was the first), but I think Amos's article states it very clearly.

Being uncomplimentary about complementarians

2009-08-15T20:53:33Z

Readers: in a recent thread on robhu's journal, Rob said I had misrepresented complementarians (of which he is one). I'm not sure how many of you click the links in my postings and have noticed that I occasionally have a joke with them, but to be clear, on the occasions where I have linked the word complementarian to Houseplants of Gor, I did not mean to imply that complementarians are the same as Goreans. Unlike Goreans, complementarians do not believe that women are intrinsically inferior to men and should naturally be their slaves. They believe that men and women are equal in status and dignity, but should occupy different roles in relationships like marriage, with women submitting to men's loving, self-sacrificial leadership. You can find a summary of complementarian beliefs in the Danvers Statement on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

Despite the complementarian assertion that men and women are of equal status, I find complementarianism problematic because it seeks to perpetuate a hierarchy with men in a position of power over women, and claims that this sort of hierarchy is normative. While I should probably be cautious about comparing historically oppressed classes for fear of being called problematic myself (this being one of the worst things that can happen to you on LJ, as some of you will know, second only to being accused of "fail"), I'd note that replacing "men" with "white people" and "women" with "black people" in complementarian statements would not result in something many of us were happy to sign up to (with the possible exception of Rudyard Kipling, who was big on loving, self-sacrificial leadership). To be clear, I am not saying the complementarianism is racist (I'm saying it's sexist), but I believe the analogy is appropriate as members of both classes were and are oppressed as a result of being born into a particular group.

While there are important differences between them, complementarians and Goreans are similar in that both advocate a male-led hierarchy and claim it is the correct and fulfilling state of all male/female relationships. As such, the two philosophies are, shall we say, equal in status and dignity, with complementarianism certainly not deserving more respect merely because it originates in a religion.

Hope that's cleared things up. Must go, scribb1e's just finished cooking my dinner.

Update: Expelled!

Edited to add: So, Rob didn't like my analogy and banned me from commenting on his blog.

Of course, I didn't chose the analogy at random. The question at hand was whether complementarianism should be considered sexist. I think it should. If similar statements to those complementarians make about women were made about another historically disadvantaged group, like black people, we would rightly consider them discriminatory against that group. Likewise, there have been times when sentiments we'd now consider discriminatory have been couched in terms of self-sacrifice and serving the disadvantaged group, as Kipling's poem illustrates.

Is complementarianism as bad as racism or sexism at its most horrible? No. It is patronising rather than hateful, and I'm not sure how much harm it does. There are much worse examples discrimination around today. I suppose what irks me about complementarianism is that it pretends to righteousness (that, and the fact that I was once taken in by it). Were the early Christians ahead of their time in their attitude to women? Quite possibly, but complementarians are behind theirs.

If anyone feels the analogy was taking things too far, I'd be interested to discuss it.

Pining for the fjords or I Was A Twentysomething Matt Redman Fan

2009-08-15T16:36:29Z

Friends have been playing with Spotify, which it turns out has a whole load of Matt Redman songs (imagine U2 singing about how Jesus is their boyfriend, and you've got it). I heard Redman at Soul Survivor when I went, many years ago. Though the charismatic services were a little bit scary at first, the whole thing fired me up to the extent that I alarmed my parents on my return by saying I was thinking of training for the ministry (I could have been the next John W. Loftus). At one of those services, I ended up wondering whether I should ask for prayer for healing. Looking back, I can perhaps understand how the Neumanns thought it was better to pray than phone an ambulance. The question of what, if anything, God is up to these days is a tricky one, and it's easy to get it wrong.

Praise the Prophets

A while ago, the Word of Dawkins came unto me, and the Spirit of Rationality rested upon me, and I spake forth, saying: "most believers already know what excuses to make for the apparent absence of dragons or gods, even as they claim belief in them, so they're keeping a map of the real world somewhere. The believers without the map are the ones other believers regard either as shiny-eyed lunatics, like the folk who don't go to doctors because God will heal them." Prophetic, no? (You may say that I'd read about similar cases in the past, but I think you're bringing a question-begging assumption of metaphysical naturalism to my text).

Rowan Williams has a map. He recently told everyone not to expect God to do much about global warming (by the way, Newsarse's version of the story is good fun). Likewise, in the Neumanns' situation, most Christians would call a doctor. So, I don't think God is going to stop global warming or heal diabetics (much less amputees), and, for the most part, Christians don't either. Of course, I don't attempt to excuse the absence of the dragon by telling the story of the man on the roof of his house in the flood. But when you consider what we anticipate will happen, we're not so very different after all.

Wasted youth

When I was a Christian, it seemed there was an unspoken understanding on these matters. God made all that is, seen and unseen; Jesus did all those miracles you read about in the New Testament; the statistical likelihood was that Jesus would, in the fullness of time, come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and bring fresh supplies of lemon-soaked paper napkins. God could do anything. Still, right now, you were more likely to see answers to prayer about work stress and for courage to evangelise your friends than answers to prayers for people to be healed of cancer. Or at least, it was best not to be too surprised that prayers for the big stuff might be "answered in a different way". (That is, if someone dies, they don't have cancer any more. No, really, this is not a joke). There were people who asked annoying questions about why God didn't do more, dissatisfied customers if you will, but I just found them irritating. God obviously existed, so why couldn't they just realise that?

The Neumanns did without this tacit understanding, which is unfortunate because having the understanding means you have the map: it's what allows Christians to get along in polite society without, say, being jailed for killing their children. Rather, just as Elijah did, the Neumanns anticipated-as-if God would act. They believed Biblical promises on prayer, as reiterated by their supporters here and here.

So what went wrong? Well, regular readers will know that God isn't real, though Christians can hardly say so. The usual excuse won't do, alas: it can't be that the Neumanns lacked faith. A family with sufficient faith to gather to pray around their ailing child as she lies on her deathbed is surely an example for Christians everywhere, even the ones who believe in doctors. Likewise, even if God has provided doctors, it seems mean-spirited for God to penalise the Neumanns for not using them: which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? We must look for better excuses.

Things not seen

Perhaps those Bible verses aren't intended to be the promises they seem to be (though they seem pretty clear to me, so if you encounter this argument, I hope you will chastise the person making it for twisting the Scriptures). Perhaps, as the Neumanns apparently believe, God foreknew that the kid would eventually turn away from Jesus, and took her home early to prevent it (though I'm disappointed by their liberalism, in that after their child died, they didn't slit the throats of the local pastors and turn instead to Baal, Satan or Dawkins, which would have been a more biblical response). Still, both these explanations are at least possible, and if the maintenance of your belief is itself a virtue, that possibility should suffice. As recent convert Sam Harris says:

These people [that is, neo-militant rationalist atheists like Jerry Coyne] are simply obsessed with finding the best explanation for the patterns we witness in natural world. But faith teaches us that the best, alas, is often the enemy of the good. For instance, given that viruses outnumber animals by ten to one, and given that a single virus like smallpox killed 500 million human beings in the 20th century (many of them children), people like Coyne ask whether these data are best explained by the existence of an all knowing, all powerful, and all loving God who views humanity as His most cherished creation. Wrong question Coyne! You see, the wise have learned to ask, along with Miller, whether it is merely possible, given these facts, that a mysterious God with an inscrutable Will could have created the world. Surely it is! And the heart rejoices...
Of course, one mustn't carry this sublime inquiry too far. Some have asked whether it is possible that a mysterious God with an inscrutable Will works only on Tuesdays or whether He might be especially fond of soft cheese. There is no denying that such revelations, too, are possible - and may be forthcoming. But they do not conduce to joy, chastity, homophobia, or any other terrestrial virtue - and that is the point. Men like Coyne and Dennett miss these theological nuances. Indeed, one fears that these are the very nuances they were born to miss.

Perhaps God is not deceased, but merely pining for the fjords. This, too, is possible. And the heart rejoices...

Dawkins: a bit like Jesus

2009-08-08T13:52:45Z

Some theists are not far from the Republic of Heaven, it seems. Even now, I have hopes that they may turn to rationality.

First, there's Terry Eagleton, who said in an interview in New Humanist that "If Dawkins has emancipated people, freed them from the religious closet as it were, then all credit to him. Loath as I might be to compare Dawkins to Jesus Christ, in this he resembles the heroic figure in the New Testament who comes to sweep away all the fetishism and sickness and cynicism of the neurotic religionists."

Secondly, Richard Morgan (a Christian re-convert who was formerly a regular over at Dawkins's site) has suggested that New Atheism may all be part of God's plan. I have encouraged Richard to return to Dawkins in this thread. I said:

I wonder just how many de-converts who return to Christianity were ever really atheists at all. I mean, they may have looked like atheists, but were they proper atheists, like I myself am? How could they have been? Remember, posting on the Dawkins site doesn't make you an atheist any more than going to McDonalds makes you a hamburger.

It is clear to me that these people never really had a personal relationship with Dawkins (by which I mean they read his books and sort of felt they must be true: obviously one should not be atheologically naive enough to expect any sort of clear two-way communication in a personal relationship. I did once email him, and I have every confidence he read it, plus I once got a comment on my blog and an email from Jerry Coyne, which is practically as good, surely?)

Speaking of atheological naivete, these people's ignorance of atheism is shocking: they formerly believed in a caricatured Dawkins who advocated biological determinism and "scientism"; and they departed from orthodoxy in their concentration on Dawkins to the exclusion of the other Three Persons of the Horsemen. Doubtless some of this reflects the parlous state of teaching in atheist communities other than the ones I'm in, but I think these people have some responsibility to educate themselves. Had they even read more sophisticated atheological works? Are they familiar with Dennett on belief, Hume on miracles and on design, or Loftus on "the outsider test"? Surely not.

Richard, even now it is not too late for you. Just screw up your face and try harder, dammit.

If you've been moved by what you've heard here, there'll be someone waiting in the comments section at the end to engage in rational debate with you. Thanks.

Let the little children come to me

2009-08-02T18:33:48Z

Neumann's jury — six men and six women — deliberated about 15 hours over two days before convicting him. At one point, jurors asked the judge whether Neumann's belief in faith healing made him "not liable" for not taking his daughter to the hospital even if he knew she wasn't feeling well.

Neumann, who once studied to be a Pentecostal minister, testified Thursday that he believed God would heal his daughter and he never expected her to die. God promises in the Bible to heal, he said.

"If I go to the doctor, I am putting the doctor before God," Neumann testified. "I am not believing what he said he would do."
Wis. jury: Father guilty in prayer death case, MSNBC News.

Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.
James 5:14-16

I believe that God uses us lowly humans to enact his healing. God works his great plan through intermediaries. Sometimes, he does things himself, and that is where religious experiences come from. Things like burning bushes or bright lights that knock people to the ground on Damascus roads are of God to be sure. But, so is a doctor healing a patient. Again, God uses us humans to enact his healing and his will.

Prayer doesn’t work on its own. Ever. It requires medical intervention. Prayer is only a supplement to competent medical care.
Cory Tucholski, Josiah Concept ministries

They believed that God would heal their daughter as Jesus said, “All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye received (Greek in all manuscripts) them, and ye shall have them.” As with this verse the key to their faith is that we are already healed if we believe it. (1 Pet. 2:24) who his own self bare our sins in his body…by whose stripes ye were healed. Christians around the world and throughout New Testament history have received healing in this way when they held fast their faith, even when they could not get it in any other way.

They were attempting not to be double-minded, for which the scriptures say we will not receive (James 1:7,8). They believe that God even used their weakness to take their daughter home and that like many she may not have chosen to stay faithful to the Lord if she had been raised up in this increasingly corrupt society. (Isa. 57:1) The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart; and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil [to come].
David Eells, helptheneumanns.com

"None of them lie, Inspector. There are no lies in religion. There are apparent facts that are illusions. There are words to be taken figuratively. There are ideas that are symbols of deeper truths. There are no lies. The people who sent me to the Middle East told us we would destroy an Evil Empire. They didn't lie, either."
The lieutenant, The Night Sessions by Ken Macleod

Ruth Gledhill on Camp Quest: atheist camp?

2009-07-30T23:10:08Z

Ruth Gledhill has written about Camp Quest UK, which describes itself as "the first residential summer camp for the children of atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and all those who embrace a naturalistic rather than supernatural world view". She doesn't seem to approve, and spends much of the article telling us how good Christian summer camps are, before giving way to Celestine Heaton-Armstrong, a theology student who writes excitedly but a bit incoherently about the evils of Dawkins and his involvement in the camp. Dawkins! Can anything good come from there?

When I was a Christian (although, of course, not a real one), I used to help out on a LiveWires, a Scripture Union holiday for teenage Christian geeks, and good fun it was too. If you've seen Jesus Camp, you might come away with a terrible impression of such places. I, like many Christians, would object to a camp which used psychological manipulation or put the fear of Hell into children, but thankfully that was not my experience. It was a lot of hard work for the leaders, but very rewarding too. But for the deficiency in my current beliefs, I'd probably still be helping out. It's nice that someone has started a camp for the rest of us, though.

So I'm not quite sure what Gledhill and Heaton-Armstrong's objection to Camp Quest is. It seems to be that the organisers pretend to be neutral but are in fact anti-religion. The evidence for this is that the UK organiser, Samantha Stein, is "in stark contrast" to the camp's stated policy of accepting people of any faith (I'm not sure what it means for a person to be in stark contrast to a policy, but never mind); that Stein read about the American version of Camp Quest in a footnote in The God Delusion; that the camp will teach children that religion and science are incompatible; and, worst of all, that Dawkins, a neo-strident fundamentalist atheist neo-sceptical rationalist, is involved (although not that involved, as it turns out).

I suppose that Camp Quest might be anti-religion, in the same sense that a Christian camp is anti-atheism. Looking at their web site, I'm not sure Camp Quest do pretend neutrality. That does not seem to contradict a policy of welcoming people of faith, in the sense of, say, allowing them to attend, being courteous to the when they get there, being willing to discuss things with them, and so on. I hope that Camp Quest would extend the same courtesy to theists as LiveWires did to the non-Christian teenagers who attended.

What if Camp Quest does teach that, say (so as not to use a vague term like "religion"), Christianity and science are incompatible? In one sense, they'd be wrong, but in another, where "science" is extended (perhaps over-extended) to cover good cartography, they'd be correct. Let's have no more of this non-overlapping magisteria nonsense: Christians shouldn't believe it, and neither should the rest of us.

What's Dawkins's motivation for giving a donation, if it isn't to ensure that the kids on the camp will be forced to participate in The God Delusion study groups nightly before bed? Camp Quest's organisers say they want to teach children how to think rather than what to think. Perhaps Dawkins, arch-enemy of religion, is confident that if people were to think critically, they'd be less likely to be religious. That was true in my case.