Substance dualism

QualiaSoup has a new video up, a short argument against substance dualism (the idea that consciousness arises from separate kind of mental substance outside the physical world).
(tags: consciousness philosophy dualism qualia)

Theodicy III: Primo Levi versus Francis Collins

Jerry Coyne has been reading Francis Collins's "The Language of God" as well as Levi's works on Auschwitz. Not surprisingly, he doesn't find Collins's theodicy very convincing.
(tags: theology religion jerry-coyne francis-collins)

Rowan Williams' choice | Andrew Brown | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Andrew Brown kicks some righteous ass: "Under Williams, the church that marries two women who love each other is to be thrown out of the Anglican Communion. The church that would jail them both for life, and would revile and persecute their defenders, stays snugly in his bosom. Not even the Archbishop's remarkable gift for obfuscation can conceal these facts forever."
(tags: homosexuality politics uganda uk religion christianity anglicanism rowan-williams)

Discovery Institute: The Mask Falls Away

The IDers at the DI go bonkers about the Climategate emails: "A cabal of leading scientists, politicians, and media concubines have conspired to lie about global warming. The reasons are obvious: power and money. … I’m not sure that the scientific community can or will respond to this debacle in a courageous or ethical way. The ID-Darwinism debate clearly demonstrates that venality and shameless self-interest, as well as a toxic leftist-atheist ideology, runs very deep in the scientific community." I'm adding "toxic" to my standard "neo-sceptical strident fundamentalist neo-atheist" spiel.
(tags: lolxians climate global-warming intelligent-design discovery-institute)

The Punchtape Letters

"My Dear Malware,

Thank you for your latest news. I agree that your bombarding of on-line programming sites with questions about “cascading style sheets” (whatever they may be) and “rounded corners” (as if anyone cared) will irritate and annoy a certain number (possibly even a large number) of programmers, but it seems a lot of effort to go to."
(tags: funny programming computers c.s.-lewis parody screwtape c++)

Creating God in one's own image

Research in the psychology of religion shows that people tend to think God thinks what they think: "People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want. The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God's beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing."
(tags: religion psychology science politics god morality)

Atheism: Proving The Negative: Encyclopedia Entry: Atheism

Matt McCormick's draft of an encyclopedia entry on various arguments for and against atheism.
(tags: atheism religion matt-mccormick theodicy design kalam)

In the Pipeline: Things I Won't Work With

Derek Lowe, a medicinal chemist, has a section of his blog on the subject of really nasty chemicals. Light hearted yet terrifying.
(tags: science funny humour smell chemistry dangerous explosives)

Troy Jollimore on Karen Armstrong’s ‘The Case for God’ - Book Review

"Armstrong may perhaps make a plausible claim in asserting that faith, as understood by mainstream religious traditions before the advent of modernity, involved more than “mere” belief in the modern sense; but if the problem with religious life is that it encourages false, absurd, unjustified beliefs, showing that it does other things as well is not sufficient."
(tags: religion philosophy atheism karen-armstrong apophatic christianity)

Below, you can find my notes, with some hyperlinks to expand on the things I said. ( Read more... ) There was a question and answer session afterwards. I remember some questions along the lines of:( Read more... )

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.

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.

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.

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

You are a product tester and frequently bring your work home. Yesterday, while dressed in a flame resistant suit (up to 3,000 degrees) and carrying the latest model fire extinguisher, you discover your neighbor's house is on fire. As the flames quickly spread, you stand and watch your neighbor's new baby burn to death. Which of the following best describes your behavior?

1. All-powerful
   
2. All-knowing
   
3. All-loving
   
4. Mysterious