In this issue: more Alpha, more de-converts copying me, and more liberal Anglicans doing the Devil's work. Yes, it's time to close some more browser tabs before Firefox seizes up completely.

Beta

Chat continues over on my previous posting about Channel 4's documentary on the Alpha course. I found Jon Ronson, the documentary maker, had been on Alpha himself back in 2000 and written about it for the Graun. The link comes via Metafilter, where there's some discussion of the article and of Alpha, into which I've dipped my toe.

I de-converted before it was fashionable

Jamie Frost sounds like he had a experience of Christianity at Oxford which was similar to mine at Cambridge (except, of course, the Cambridge one was just better). He went to St Ebbes, which is the Doctrinal Rectitude Trust church in Oxford, as StAG is in Cambridge. He was, and is, a science student. He also left Christianity, and his tale (of struggling to keep the faith, being buoyed up by emotional sermons and then realising he didn't have reasons to believe) sounds awfully familiar. He writes about it in a meaty essay (I think it's even longer than mine), which is worth a read.

The link to Frost's essay came to me via the indefatigable Steven Carr, who helpfully posted it to the Premier Christian Radio discussion forum.

OK, so I've been watching The Wire

Yeah, so after the Templeton boys got lit up in a drive-by by PZ, I heard it was going down over at the Premier Christian Radio discussion forum, so me an' my boy Carr grabbed our nines and mounted up. I done showed that Richard Morgan (who used to be tight with the Ditchkins crew before he snitched to the Christers) how we do it, then I had interesting discussion on epistemology [You seem to have slipped out of character - Ed], and shit. [Better - Ed]

Bishops Gone Wild

Those crazy Anglicans and their schisms: I can barely keep up these days, so I don't usually bother. One thing caught my eye: Ruth Gledhill reports that Bishop Greg Venables, of the Fellowship of Mainstream True Christians Except If You're Gay, had said of the fight against the godless liberals that "We must remember we are not fighting flesh and blood. This is about principalities and powers."

If you weren't a CU Bible Study group leader, you might not be able to complete that quote. It ends "and spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms". Yep, liberal Christians are in league with the devil. John Broadhurst, Bishop of Fulham, allegedly said "I now believe Satan is alive and well and he resides at Church House." As Roy Zimmerman would say, "That was out loud, did you know that?"

Prompted by Rowan Williams saying that neo-atheist fundamentalists aren't attacking the religion ++Rowan actually believes in, the Barefoot Bum has a good bit on the role of the term "faith" in discussions with believers.

Getting killed on the next zebra crossing

The argument goes something like this: religious faith is sometimes taken by atheists to mean "belief without evidence" (Dawkins says as much in The God Delusion, for example). "Ah, no," say believers, "that's not what faith means, our belief is based on the evidence". There follows an interlude for examination of this evidence, which turns out not to be so impressive. "Did we say based on? We meant compatible with," say the believers. "That's not good enough", says the Bum, "all sorts of things are compatible with the evidence if you're prepared to add ad hoc stuff to shore up the core beliefs you really don't want to get rid of, but then those core beliefs are held without regard to evidence". "But," say believers, "you yourself have some core beliefs you hold without regard to evidence". "Well," says the Bum, "I don't think so, but anyway, you've just conceded that I was right about faith, haven't you?" "Oh dear," say the believers, "we hadn't thought of that", and promptly disappear in a puff of logic.

Six impossible things before breakfast

The believers' final attempt to parry the Bum is similar to an apologetic argument I've seen, whereby the believer says "If you have an unevidenced belief that your senses aren't under the control of the Matrix or of a cartesiandaemon, why not round it off by believing in my religion?" This is an odd argument: the believer mentions beliefs you might doubt if you're a radical sceptic (you'll recall that you risk becoming a radical sceptic if you're a university-educated Catholic), but which most people accept because it's impractical not to. It turns out that belief in gods is something we can get by without. (On a related note, the folks over at Iron Chariots have a reasonable article on the proposition that atheism is based on faith).

Three parts of faith

There's another thing missing from the popular atheist definition of faith. At least for Christians, faith has an element of trust as well as acceptance of facts. After all, even the demons believe.

Over at Parchment and Pen, C. Michael Patton separates faith into three parts: content (faith in what?), assent (affirmation that the content is true) and trust (the part that the demons lack). Patton blames the lack of assent (which requires an examination of the evidence) for the loss of faith of the ex-Christians he's encountered. He goes so far as to say that the statement "You ask me how I know he lives, he lives within my heart" is stupid. Patton seems quite different from other Christians, who say that the main reason they believe is the internal feeling of God's presence, what they call the witness of the Holy Spirit. One can perhaps forgive atheists for using "faith" in a way Christians don't like if the Christians themselves aren't sure what it's about.

The virtue of faith

A thought which should occur to anyone who reads Less Wrong: you can make people reluctant to give up religious faith by making them think that having faith is virtuous. And this is what we find: in Christian philosophy, the theological virtue of "faith" is holding on to belief in the face of doubt. But hang on, where is the virtue in this? Chopping and changing all the time would be impractical, but it's hard to see why it's wrong. I suppose that conceiving of a religion as a relationship with God makes faith seem virtuous, because then we apply our notions of faithfulness within a human relationship. But these notions do not apply to facts about the world (even the demons believe), and to think that they do is to fall victim to a cognitive trick (since if the facts of religion are not correct, maybe there's no-one to have a relationship with). Rather, say:

If the sky is blue
I desire to believe "the sky is blue".
If the sky is not blue
I desire to believe "the sky is not blue".

Ken again

Andrew Brown went to the lecture on God and evolution by Ken Miller, the one which robhu mentioned in the comments last time. Brown was impressed by Miller. I commented using the same arguments as my previous posting.

The wonderful thing about standards is

In other news, top geneticist Francis Collins has started his own Christian apologetics site, Biologos.org. Collins is a theistic evolutionist. He's got answers for those awkward creationist questions (mentioned last time) on evolution and the Fall and death before the Fall. Not just one answer, in fact, but several, which could all equally well be true, because as far as I can see there's no possible way to chose between them on the basis of evidence (except possibly on the evidence of a strong inner conviction, I suppose). Still, several answers are better than one, right?

Atheists can be wrong too

The usual suspects in atheist blogland are having fun with Biologos: here's Jerry Coyne, P. Z. Myers, and P. Z. Myers. The latter P. Z. Myers refers to a post at Evaluating Christianity. Myers says this article at Biologos is making the argument that evolution is impossible because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a (badly mistaken) argument that is popular among creationists.

This is unfair to Collins, who knows the creationist argument is wrong. Collins is actually making a God of the Gaps argument. The low entropy condition of the early universe is an unsolved problem in physics, as Sean Carroll explains in Scientific American (Carroll commented at Evaluating Christianity confirming this). Unsolved problems in physics are fertile ground for Christians looking for something for God to do.

I hope Myers will issue a correction, because I think it's important to get stuff like this right.

Richard Carrier recently debated with William Lane Craig. That's them in the picture, you see (I'll leave it to you to decide which one's which). The topic was the Resurrection of Jesus. You can listen here, though the audio is a bit crappy, or watch the debate on Youtube.

Carrier doesn't think he did very well. He correctly says that he was a lot less organised than Craig and couldn't keep up with all the things he'd need to rebut. As I've previously noted, Craig has a lot of arguments and a very polished delivery.

( Summary of the arguments )

So much for Craig, what about Carrier? In Are You a Solar Deity?, Yvain cautions against theories which can be applied to anything (the specific example Yvain uses is related to religious myths, in fact). Some of Carrier's examples of myth seem a bit of a stretch. He needs to do more work to show that the gospels are generally unreliable, more than he has time for in a debate, it seems. He's written a book outlining his theories, but I don't think he's carried out a Spot the Fakes test. I'm not convinced the gospels are mostly myth.

On the other hand, the gospels do contain mythologised history based on Old Testament passages. Christians without a prior commitment to Biblical inerrancy recognise this, as do other readers. For example, scribb1e noticed when she read through the Old Testament. (If you're an inerrantist, you can accommodate this evidence into your web of belief in other ways, for example by saying that the OT passages were foreshadowing). Craig concedes this for the sake of argument, but says we still extract history from unreliable sources. True, but historians don't extract belief in miracles from other sources either, do they? The apologist is right to argue that the gospels should not be treated more strictly than other historical documents, but historians don't believe that Vespasian cured the blind, either. Without the presumption that the source is totally reliable, they're going to treat miracles as the unreliable part.

That steers things back into the territory of the Ehrman vs Craig debate I've mentioned previously. When you've watched enough of these debates, you realise there are standard openings, like in chess. If you're an evangelist and someone says to you that historians don't accept your religion's miracle, you counter by accusing the historians of metaphysical naturalism and hence of begging the question. Your sensible sceptic will say that this has nothing to do with grand philosophical statements about how everything supervenes on the physical, and more about the way everyone, even Christians, agrees that miracles are pretty uncommon. You need a lot of evidence to back up a miraculous claim, and in the case of the Resurrection, if you really start with a low prior probability, there just isn't enough evidence.

Notice that Craig never puts numbers into his equation when he's beating Ehrman with it (not that this would have helped Ehrman, because he's an arts graduate, poor soul). Craig doesn't seem very sure what his prior would be. Barefoot Bum and I argued about this, because I'd not noticed Craig talks about it in two places in the Ehrman debate: at one point he says it's "terribly low" but then, as the Bum notes, he later says "That Jesus rose naturally from the dead is fantastically improbable. But I see no reason whatsoever to think that it is improbable that God raised Jesus from the dead." Craig's argument seems to be that there's sufficient evidence to believe in the Resurrection if you already believe that God is the sort of God who'd do something like raise Jesus from the dead. That seems fair enough, but as an evangelist, shouldn't Craig be concerned with how people come to believe in that sort of God? Not by examining the evidence for the Resurrection, it seems.

Still, Craig duffed Carrier up. Let's not lose heart: over at Evangelical Agnosticism they talk about the rare atheists who don't get duffed up by Craig. Paul Draper did well, and is well worth a listen. Also, Craig's debating with Christopher Hitchens on 4th April, which will be entertaining, if nothing else.

A while back Andrew Brown over at the Grauniad posted a list of the 6 Points of New Atheism. There was a bit of a bun-fight among the atheists about this, because, though Brown's an atheist, he was criticising Dawkins Our Leader. It got even more fun when Dawkins turned up in the comments. (My own contribution was to treat the 6 Points as one of those LJ quiz memes: I score 2.5/6 for New Atheism, which makes me slightly more Old Skool than New, I suppose). It's a bit like that Southpark episode where the Unified Atheist League fights the Allied Atheist Allegiance. What's the fuss about? Here's part of it.

Most Christians say God is omniscient and omnipresent. Yet the Christian woman whom Yellow blogged about, the one who wrote to a Christian problem page with her self-pleasuring problem, clearly doesn't really believe God is present and watching her all the time. But she at least believes that believing those things is virtuous for a Christian. The philosopher Daniel Dennett calls this latter sort of faith belief in belief.

This doesn't just apply to religion. palmer1984 posted a poll which suggest similar things apply to moral beliefs. It is virtuous to say that we should care for people in other countries as much as we do for those in our own, but most people don't really believe it.

Some people, especially those with a scientific education (or a certain sort of evangelical Christian background), think of belief as affirmation of a set of propositions. To those people, it's obvious that these propositions should not be internally contradictory or conflict with reality. But, as Saunt Yudkowsky observes "it is a physical fact that you can write "The sky is green!" next to a picture of a blue sky without the paper bursting into flames". The same applies inside our heads. Dr Vilayanur Ramachandan's fascinating experiments on anosognosia patients seem to show that explaining why a belief is valid and changing your beliefs are separate systems in the brain.

I take Yudkowsky's point that speaking of belief doesn't capture the psychology here precisely because "beliefs" are often taken to be propositional sentences, but our brains don't deal in those much. Instead of talking about what someone "really believes", I suppose he'd prefer to say that the woman speaks-as-if she believes God is omnipotent and omnipresent, but, at least in some instances, behaves-as-if God is not.

Brown says he's annoyed with neo-atheist rationalist fundamentalists sceptics because neo-atheists think that all brains work like theirs or can be convinced to do so, but that thinking is wildly optimistic. This is the point of Brown's Freud vs God post, which you should all go and read. See you in 5 minutes.

Back? Brown's getting this stuff from Dennett and from anthropologists who study religion, such as Pascal Boyer. Boyer details his views over at a sceptics' website, where he tells sceptics off for their narrow understanding of religion. Another anthropologist, Scott Atran, does a similar thing on edge.org, responding to Sam Harris and others in the wake of the Beyond Belief conference back in 2006.

The anthropologists say that religious beliefs should not be understood as propositional statements about the world, however much they resemble them. What of God's omnipresence and omniscience? One thing religious people do with this belief is check whether an action is morally right by imagining what their model of God would think of it. This might be done retrospectively, if a religious context provokes thoughts of God. They certainly don't anticipate-as-if God is in the room and watching.

Brown has linked the ideas of the anthropologists with the observation that most people don't try to formulate coherent propositions on anything, including religion. I don't know whether the anthropologists would agree with this, I'd need to read more of their stuff to tell. It's clear that most religious people do try to draw a map of the real world. As Yudkowsky illustrates with his dragon-believer example, 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; or as heroes of the faith for showing such belief, like the monks and martyrs. I'd paraphrase Brown's argument as "most people don't see the virtue of having one map for all occasions, or of being able to articulate it".

Of course, if you're a religious believer, you might find the anthropologists' approach a little patronising. Some of you seem to have beliefs which are propositions about how the world is. As I said over on robhu's journal a while back, Dawkins at least does believers the courtesy of taking them at their word. What do you think?

Inasmuch as there's an atheist movement (Dawkins for Pope!), it seems pretty male dominated, both online and off. So, what about the atheist women? They're out there, and this is a post to link to some of them.

• Greta Christina is gay and atheist, and draws some parallels between the two. Atheism seems to be a lot harder in the USA than it is here. Greta writes about how to be an ally to atheists in the same way that you might speak of being an ally to any other disadvantaged class of people.
  
  
• Mathurine (not her real name, for obvious reasons) is an ex-Muslim woman. She wrote a three guest posts over at Tree Dreamer: one the hijab, another on making atheist communities friendly to ex-Muslims, and another answering atheists' questions on Islam.
  
  
• Lily originally blogged at Leaving Eden, writing about her experiences as a closet atheist at Wheaton College, a Christian college in the USA. Since graduating, she's been blogging as Peaceful Atheist (I've mentioned her before in my posting on doubt). There's an article over there specifically on women in atheism.
  
  
• No Longer Quivering is the blog of two women who were once part of the Quiverfull movement. As Salon explains in an article about them, that means that as well as accepting the standard evangelical stuff on male leadership, they also rejected birth control and sought to have as many kids as possible. They got out, and are blogging about how they feel about it.
  
  I traditionally googlebomb the word complementarian with a link to Houseplants of Gor. Of course, there are differences between the Gor series and the Bible: one is a historically-based fantasy which, although some people have found it rich enough to base their lives on, undoubtedly advocates a patriarchy based on the "natural roles" of men and women; and the other is a set of books by John Norman.
  
  
• Deborah Drapper isn't an atheist. She's the Christian girl who was the subject of Deborah 13: Servant of God, a BBC documentary about her and her family (the link goes to a post on the Dawkins site where you can watch it on Youtube). She's something unusual in this country: she's part of a large family (there are hints that they subscribe to the Quiverfull idea) and home-schooled. I was reminded of her after No Longer Quivering because of the point in the documentary where she explains that she belongs to her father until she marries someone.
  
  Deborah comes across as bright, articulate and a firm believer in evangelical Christianity. Her blog has been inundated after the screening of the documentary, but I hope she'll continue to write. Her father also has a blog where you can find out about how the EU is part of the coming world government of the Antichrist, and that the King James Version of the Bible was inspired by God.

Dawkins Our Leader was on Minnesota public radio. I was interested because some people on the radio station's live blog of the interview were saying that Kerri Miller, the presenter, was too aggressive. I don't think she was. Dawkins isn't a Muslim or Christian in need of molly-coddling lest he accuse people who disagree with him of being disrespectful. Her directness got quite a few interesting responses from Dawkins:

Deism is Wrong but Respectable. There was a bit of fuss on some Christian blogs about this when he said it in the Dawkins/Lennox debate. It seems as if people have an idea of Dawkins as the Pope of Atheism. His arguments are soldiers and any concession towards theism is a sign of victory for God. As Ruth Gledhill found, he seems the opposite of the Pope of Atheism in person.

Theism is Ignorant and Infantile. Dawkins feels no shame in referring to popular theism as a belief in an imaginary friend. Rilstone says this metaphor is actually pretty close in some ways, so it's not clear why so many Christians get upset about it.

Dawkins wonders why sophisticated theists bother to call themselves Christians when they don't believe in any of the uniquely Christian stuff (virgin birth, water into wine, even resurrection in some cases). He shows a touching faith that a Church of England clergyman would accept this stuff (he's talking about Polkinghorne, whose theological position I don't know).

Theist scientists like Francis Collins show a double-mindedness that Dawkins finds curious. Not everyone is convinced that single-mindedness is a virtue, though, as recent convert Sam Harris argues: "If Francis Collins wants to believe that the historical Jesus was actually raised from the dead and still exists in an ethereal form which renders him both clairvoyant and mildly disapproving of masturbation, these beliefs do not even slightly detract from his stature as a scientist."

Mysteries exist to be solved, not celebrated. Dawkins says he has faith (I'm looking forward to seeing the first theist quote mining of this statement), not that the mysteries will be solved, but that trying to solve them is worthwhile. The greatest mystery he's aware of is the subjective experience of human consciousness.

What of the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus? Dawkins reckons the evidence is poor. Like evolution, we have to rely on the clues that remain. Those for the resurrection aren't very good.

Will Dawkins be an atheist on his deathbed, without hoping for an afterlife? Probably: minds and brains seem to be linked, there's no reason to think you can have a mind without a brain.

Why has Dawkins written The Greatest Show on Earth? Not to reach the dyed-in-the-wool Creationist, but the people who haven't thought about it yet, the same people he hoped to reach with The God Delusion.

Wandering around the web recently, I found Prisoner of Narnia, an article by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker from 2005. It's about the life of C.S. Lewis, and the enduring attraction of the Narnia books.

The link to the article came from Daylight Atheism, where they liked this bit:

A startling thing in Lewis's letters to other believers is how much energy and practical advice is dispensed about how to keep your belief going: they are constantly writing to each other about the state of their beliefs, as chronic sinus sufferers might write to each other about the state of their noses. Keep your belief going, no matter what it takes — the thought not occurring that a belief that needs this much work to believe in isn't really a belief but a very strong desire to believe.

It's that belief in belief thing again. This has also come up in my sporadic discussion with apdraper2000, where he's asking why I spend so much time blogging about theism. If you want to know what my motivation is, you can read the thread.

Of course, any Christian worth their salt would be able to you that the reason it's so hard to keep believing in the existence of God as compared to say, believing in the existence of atoms, is because the world is currently a hostile place, where the believer is a footsoldier in a cosmic battle, facing the flaming arrows of Original Sin, Satan, Dust, the BBC's blatant bias, the Patriarchy, the Illuminati, New Labour, Zionists, and Communists. Let us waste no more time on the naive idea that if you keep having to shore up your belief in something, it just might be because you're wrong.

Rather, it's the article's insight into Lewis's psyche which is interesting. Gopnik portrays Lewis as a mystic who saw Christianity as a way to keep the magic, the joy of life, real. I was reminded of Jesus in John's gospel, promising life in all its fullness.

Cardinal Manning agonized over eating too much cake, and was eventually drawn to the Church of Rome to keep himself from doing it again. Lewis didn’t embrace Christianity because he had eaten too much cake; he embraced it because he thought that it would keep the cake coming, that the Anglican Church was God’s own bakery. “The story of Christ is simply a true myth,” he says he discovered that night, “a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

It sounds like Lewis might have agreed with my contention that scriptural religion is lived fan-fiction, although, of course, he'd have said it was fan-truth.

Gopnik says that the believer and unbeliever can agree on the importance of imagination and stories as a way to reach the parts that both institutional Christianity and a narrow materialism do not reach. The final couple of paragraphs are particularly good, and we learn a lot about Lewis and Tolkien along they way. Definitely worth a read.

Edited: I changed "it just might be because it's bollocks" to "it just might be because you're wrong" after a Christian found the former form offensive. I'm recording that here so it doesn't look like I'm hiding something.

I'm talking about doubt in a few places at the moment. The feeds of my comments don't cover stuff outside LJ (I was using CoComment, but decided that was too risky), so here's where the action is:

Over at Hermant the Friendly Atheist's place, top Christian evangelist Lee Strobel turns the tables on us, and invites other Christian authors to ask atheists hard questions about atheism. You can see my responses over there. Greta Christina has some good thoughts on the questions.

The most interesting questions were Plantinga's stuff on whether having brains which evolved means we can't trust them, and Mike Licona's question: what would make you doubt your atheism?

Lily the Peaceful Atheist (by the way, what's with all these atheists being nice and fluffy? I want to be a fundamentalist atheist rationalist neo-humanistic secular militant like my hero, Richard Dawkins) talks about doubting atheism in a two part posting (part 1, part 2). She's not impressed with Strobel and friends, but rather, talks about the "emotional doubts" of the ex-Christian: the fear of death, and the feelings evoked by Christian music. I understand those sorts of feelings, having had them myself. Still, I'm enough of a scientist (and enough of an evangelical) to want facts rather than emotion.

I said that I ought to be able to doubt atheism, and also other long held beliefs. The problem with saying "I want to doubt" is that it's a noble statement, but if that's all it is, it's useless. As gjm11 says, half the problem is knowing what to doubt. With that in mind, I thought I'd ask you lot:

What should I doubt?
This doesn't have to be religion/atheism, of course, although you're welcome to suggest that if you like (<evil grin>).

Here's a list of stuff I think about religion, philosophy, science and politics, so you can tell me where you think I could be wrong. Anonymous comments are allowed edited: but please sign yourself with some kind of nickname so I can tell you apart from other anonymous commenters.

( Stuff I think. Prepare to be alienated. )

So, fire away :-)

In other news:

• I've brought out this old icon in honour of disgraced pastor Ted Haggard, who was all ready to make a comeback (as it were) until fresh revelations emerged recently. I've mentioned him before, but somehow neglected to mention that Ted Haggard is Completely Heterosexual (Roy Zimmerman = Tom Lehrer for the Naughties).
  
  
• I've been contributing to some threads over at Unreasonable Faith, the blog of Daniel Florien, an ex-Christian. Daniel asks other ex-Christians whether believing was a complete waste of time (you can see my answer). He's also posted about the Ehrman/Williams discussion on Premier Christian Radio, which I've mentioned previously, so I stuck my oar in. There are a few Christians with a strong inner conviction that the Bible is inerrant on there, so I responded to one of them.
  
  
• There's a meme doing the rounds on LJ where you get very angry about something called "cultural appropriation", or get very angry about people getting angry about it. The threads I've seen have largely involved the sort of people who use the word triggering to mean "a bit upsetting" (see also Monstrous Vegiment), so I've stayed out of it. However, livredor linked to an interesting post by nextian about the Jewish attitude to Christian readings of the Hebrew Bible, which reminded me a bit of Karen Armstrong's take on it in The Bible: the biography. livredor also has some discussion on her LJ.
  
  
• scribb1e and I watched Maverick last night. I somehow managed to miss it in 1994. It was funny, in a gentle sort of way.
  

Mattghg and Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, both linked to Matthew Parris's article As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God.

Parris is an atheist who writes admiringly not just of the work done by Christians in Africa, but of the changes conversion brings about in people, supplanting a tribal mindset he regards as unhealthy.

Matt also links to (but rightly criticises) a response to Parris by Stephen Noll, who writes for something called Anglican Mainstream. Noll's article makes a couple of good points and then veers off into a parody of the Daily Mail, telling Parris that he should reflect on how atheism has lead Britain into darkness, and rounding off with the threat of the UK being over-run by Islam. I've not really been keeping up with who's been anathemising whom in Anglicanism lately, because it's all a bit tedious, but I'm assuming that something called "Anglican Mainstream" is actually a fundy schismatic organisation, much like a "People's Republic" is always a communist dictatorship.

It's odd that Noll thinks Theodore Dalrymple supports his claims about Britain, because in the article Noll links to, Dr Dalrymple doesn't prescribe a dose of God: he says Brits were civilised and are now being un-civilised by intellectual activity and legislation (presumably they believed in God throughout the civilisation phase), and speaks fondly of a time when Brits regarded religious enthusiasm (a term which once referred to evangelicalism) as bad form.

Strangely enough, I've already quoted Dalrymple in a statement which will probably get my Dawkins Club membership card confiscated, namely, that faith groups in prisons are OK if they introduce prisoners to a culture which is less broken than the one they belong to already. This pragmatism is a reflection of my devotion to the ideas of Neal Stephenson, I suppose. (Of course, the faith groups needn't be theistic: Buddhism can do the job, too).

It's an annoying fact that religions are better at spreading than rationality is, as Andrew Brown points out. Christianity, or at least the right sort of Christianity, certainly isn't the worst belief system out there. If a dose of God will displace tribalism or nihilism (which, pace Noll, isn't equivalent to atheism), it seems like the lesser of two evils, to me.

Is it inconsistent for me to say this and also write stuff about how Christianity is wrong? I don't think so: I'd always want to help someone to become a rationalist, which is the goal of the stuff I write. But I'm trying to be realistic about the prospect of that happening to someone who's starting from less than zero. Evangelical Christianity is infectious and can create in some people a tremendous valuing of truth per se. We can use that :-)

Alex Byrne in the Boston Review addresses the existence of God, pointing out that modern debates echo those of Hume and Paley (he of the watchmaker). Byrne talks about the Ontological, Design and Fine Tuning arguments for God.

The article is interesting because it addresses some weak responses to these arguments, from Dawkins's The God Delusion. As gareth_rees said, the popularisation of this debate will hopefully encourage everyone to consider whether the reasons they have for their positions are good ones.

In other news, Father Christmas (who really does exist, otherwise who's bringing all those presents, eh?) brought me Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett, Bitches; and Bart Ehrman's God's Problem (about the Problem of Evil). I expect I'll be posting about those once I've read them.

Dawkins has published the complete interview he did with Derren Brown for the Enemies of Reason programme: it's available on YouTube (in several parts, but that link is to a playlist which should play them in order). It's mostly Brown talking about the techniques used by mediums, with occasional questions from Dawkins. I'm a fan of Brown, so I enjoyed it.

Like all the best people, the inestimable Mr Brown is an ex-Christian. The final part of the video re-iterates the first chapter of Tricks of the Mind, where he describes how he turned to rationality. He learned about hypnosis, which his fellow Christians claimed would allow in demons (keen students: from the teaching on demons in Matthew 12, or otherwise, show that this is What The Bible Says [5 marks]). He got into stage magic and learned how psychic powers were a con, and that believers in it were only interested in evidence in favour of their beliefs (this is what he calls "circular belief" in the book and video), and would discount or forget the evidence against them.

The young Brown realised this circularity applied to his own Christianity as much as it did to the believers in the psychics. As Brown says, it's hard to see a difference between these sorts of claims, other than that religious claims have a certain gravitas from having been around for a long time. After all, you could probably construct plausible reasons for the psychic "misses" or why the people who are in contact with aliens can't provide a proof of the Goldbach conjecture, just as you can for why God is silent (in fact, variants of "it doesn't work because of your scepticism" and "you wouldn't believe me anyway" are already common to all of them).

These beliefs rely on rear-guard actions against those who explicitly deny them, coupled with a personal conviction that the belief must be true. There's little positive evidence in favour. We saw this in the case of Christianity, recently, when looking at Keller's reasons for faith, much as Brown found when he investigated his former faith for himself.

Both Brown and Dawkins seem surprised that people don't actually want to know that psychics have been debunked. Randi debunked Peter Popoff, but Popoff is still pulling in the donations. Although I'm occasionally irritated by Andrew Brown's "New Atheists: UR DOIN IT WRONG" stuff, I think he's right to say that most people don't think the way Derren and Dawkins do, whether they're theists or atheists:

It’s not natural to suppose that our emotions should be in line with our intellectual representations of the world and consistent and coherent over time: but as an ideal it’s tremendously important. Even as an ideal it has to be transmitted by a culture: as a discipline, it needs years of education and of practice. You might call it thinking for yourself, in a rather silly clever way, if by that you meant not independence from society, but using thinking as a tool with which to build yourself. Getting to that point is just about the central task of education, moral as well as intellectual, which means that almost everyone pays lip service to it. Yet the evidence suggests that most people, certainly most believers, don’t entertain it as a serious possibility. But neither do most unbelievers.

It's all a bit depressing really. Perhaps Plantinga is right and rationality doesn't necessarily have a survival value.

robhu made a post on the Two Ways to Live presentation, which summarises the important points of evangelical Christianity. That particular posting's intended to be evangelistic without getting de-railed by knowledgeable atheists, so I've move my original comment on it from there to here at Rob's request. This posting remains open for whatever discussion you'd like to have on it (as do most of Rob's), subject to my comment policy. Here's my comment:

Serious points about the video, rather than silly ones, in no particular order:

The video doesn't summarise Christianity, it summarises evangelical Christianity. You won't find many universalists or liberals agreeing with it, and I think the Catholics would at least take a different slant on it. So I think it's a mistake to leave out the "evangelical" qualification when talking about TWTL, unless you really do think those people aren't Christians (which I don't think you do).

( And another thing... )

Stuff I found on the web, probably on andrewducker's del.icio.us feed or something.

Psychology Today on ex-Christian ex-ministers and on magical thinking

Psychology Today has a couple of interesting articles, one on ministers who lose their faith, and another on magical thinking. Quoteable quote:

"We tend to ignore how much cognitive effort is required to maintain extreme religious beliefs, which have no supporting evidence whatsoever," says the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. He likens the process to a cell trying to maintain its osmotic pressure. "You're trying to pump out the mainstream influences all the time. You're trying to maintain this wall, and keep your beliefs inside, and all these other beliefs outside. That's hard work." In some ways, then, at least for fundamentalists, "growing out of it is the easiest thing in the world."

That sounds sort of familiar. I'm not sure I'd consider myself an ex-fundamentalist, but I did find that giving up removed the constant pressure to keep baling.

The stuff about moral contagion in the magical thinking article reminded me of Haggai 2:10-14, where it's clear that cleanness (in the Bible's sense of moral and ceremonial acceptability, rather then lack of dirt) is less contagious than uncleanness. There's possibly a link here to the tendency of some religions to sharply divide the world into non-believers and believers, and to be careful about how much you expose yourself to the non-believing world (q.v. the unequally yoked teaching you get in the more extreme variants of a lot of religions).

Old interview with Philip Pullman

Third Way interviewed Pullman years ago. It's the origin of one of his statements on whether he's an agnostic or an atheist, which I rather like:( The quote ) This isn't really a surprising statement, but, like Ruth Gledhill's discovery that Richard Dawkins is a liberal Anglican, some people seem surprised that atheists aren't ruling out things which some people would regard as gods. The point is that there's no decent evidence that anyone has met one. Deism is a respectable position, I think (although I'm not sure why you'd bother with it), but religions which claim God has spoken to them are implausible because of God's inability to keep his story straight.

The walls have Google

The thing about blogging is that you never know who's reading. Someone called Voyou makes a post ending with an aside which is critical of A.C. Grayling's response to Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion. Grayling turns up in the comments to argue with them.

(I keep turning up more conversations about the Eagleton review: see my bookmarks for the best of them).

"Compact of hypocrisy and secret vice"

Yellow wonders whether or not he should sign the UCCF doctrinal basis in this post and the followup. Signs point to "not". Si Hollett reminds me of myself in my foolish youth.

Things that caught my eye on the web recently:

• marnanel supplies the ultimate version of all those "which local dialect do you speak?" questionnaires that people have been doing lately.
  
  
• Zarf, otherwise known as Andrew Plotkin, gives us LOLGRUES. Makes a change from cats, I suppose.
  
  
• scribb1e thought I'd like The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus. Some of them are good, some of them are typical "the church is the people, not the building" Christian greeting-card verse (but as cartoons!) The artist shows some signs of creationism, but as I'm no longer a Christian, I don't have to do my "please get off my side, you're making it look stupid" bit.
  
  Inevitably, the cartoon with the most comments is the one about gay marriage. Inamongst the usual godhatesfags stuff (or rather, God hates the faggotry but loves the fags, naturally) there were a couple of links to interesting interviews with N.T. Wright (no relation), the Bishop of Durham. There was also an interesting comment from Tyler on just what Paul did mean by arsenokoites (the word translated by the NIV as homosexual offenders, about which there's considerable debate as it's a novel coinage as far as we know). Tyler points out that the Septuagint puts the two words that Paul has used in his portmanteau word right next to each other in everyone's favourite bit of Leviticus (scroll down a bit for the Greek). So it looks like you practising gays (or even those of you who aren't practising because you've got very good at it) are pretty much out as far as Christianity goes. Have you considered atheism?
  
  
• If your internet connection comes from BT, Virgin Media or Carphone Warehouse's Talktalk service, you should be aware of the evil that is Phorm, a cunning plan to intercept all your web browsing and use the knowledge of what you're interested in (from your web searches) to display targetted advertising on collaborating websites. Richard Clayton has spoken to Phorm and has technical details of how the system works. It's a horrible hack, in all senses of the word.
  
  Talktalk aren't all bad though: they just told the British recording industry to get stuffed in a highly entertaining way. The BPI are now threatening to sue.
  

robhu linked to a post on convert_me in which pooperman realises he's an atheist after reading Dawkins, Dennett and Harris. There's some interesting reflection on the origins of scriptural literalism, which is related to the stuff about science and truth in my last post. pooperman writes:

Basically, Harris' has ceded--on behalf of religion, apparently--the hermeneutic of scripture to the fundamentalists. What Harris fails to understand is the scriptural basis for a more-moderate and more-metaphorical (as well as through the changing lens of historical contexts) interpretation of much of scripture. Also, Harris presumes that the literal approach to scripture is more-primitive, more-fundamental--that the "first" believers in these ancient religions understood and interpreted the texts in a straightforward and unquestioningly literal way. ... There is a good chance, IMO, that Harris has this completely backwards. It is entirely possible that religious moderation is more primitive, and that literalism is a more modern corruption of religion--a corruption from the outside, not from within. What is the source of this corruption? It is reasonable to suggest that the rise of science and the increasing rhetorical value of the "objectively true" that science (and, more to the point, engineering) has infected the religious mindset and caused some of the religious to prematurely devalue the indirect truths and insights of a beautifully-complex metaphorical image and to seek to replace these images as images with a direct, parsimonious, and straightforward representation of Truth, without sacrificing the images themselves. The literalists have, I think, slit their spiritual wrists with Ockham's razor.

I've often heard that evangelicalism is a modern heresy, but I've never seen the historical evidence for it. Does anyone have any references for that idea?