The Intelligence Squared debate on atheism as fundamentalism

On the other hand, the mere fact that I acknowledge these things and wish to amend them should prove immediately that New Atheism is not a form of fundamentalism, for I am an avowed New Atheist and yet the former paragraph should be apparent as the very opposite of fundamentalism.

But rather than expound upon my own views here, since I watched it thoroughly I'd like to go through point by point and review what the speakers had to offer.

Richard Harries

"What God do we have in our minds when we say we believe, or we do not believe?"

Yes, exactly! That's the whole point! The entire issue can be captured in this question. If your God is Einstein's God as nature, we agree. At least on all questions of metaphysics, science, nature, and ethics, we have no significant differences. Perhaps we disagree about something strategic or linguistic, in that you call "God" what I have no problem straightforwardly calling "the universe"; but that's rather trivial, all should acknowledge. But on the other hand, if your God is the Creationist's God who made the world in seven days and wrote a book about it, now we have a problem. Not only is our disagreement nearly total, your position is objectively and demonstrably false. (Harries freely admits this—though he fails to mention that 40% of Americans claim to believe in such a God.)

"Fundamentalism doesn't only take a religious form; it also took a political form in Soviet-style Communism."

Yes, that would be atheist fundamentalism. Are you accusing us of Stalinist purges? Presumably not. Thus, you have just shown how New Atheism differs from the obvious example of atheist fundamentalism!

"[New Atheism] ignores the fact that the greatest philosophers in Western society down the ages for 2000 years or more have either been religious believers or have had a philosophy which points to religious belief."

We ignore this so-called "fact" because it simply isn't true. Yes, there have been religious philosophers, mostly Christian (Augustine, Aquinas, Lewis, Kierkegaard—indeed I'd count Jesus), a few Muslim (Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi), a few Buddhist (Confucius, Siddhartha Gautama); but the majority of philosophers in Western society and others have been at least deist if not atheist. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Epicurus (Not fair, Jesus wasn't born yet? Why'd God wait so long then?); Hume, Kant, Mill, Locke, Nietzsche, Dewey, Rawls, Singer, Appiah. If we add scientists—Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein—and political revolutionaries—Jefferson, Marx, Woolstonecraft—the scale tips even further against theism.

"They ignore the fact that the great inspiration behind Western art for countless centuries has been the Christian faith, and it continues to be so."

This is indeed a fact; but I'm not convinced New Atheists ignore it. I can look at the Pieta and the Sistene Chapel and see something of great beauty and craftsmanship; I'm sure Dawkins can as well. But why isn't it enough that Michaelangelo is great—why why must we posit a God who is even greater? Why must the greatest sculptor also have the best metaphysics? I can only speculate what Michelangelo might have achieved if he were sculpting the beauty of modern science with the power of modern technology—an interactive hologram of the human genome, or perhaps an LCD-illuminated mural of the Horsehead Nebula? Would that my hands were steady enough and my funds grand enough to create such a project! (Shakespeare, by the way, appears to have been a bisexual atheist.)

"Is it not true that if you're really convinced of your case, you face your opponent's strongest argument?"

No, I don't think it is true. Honest argumentation faces the arguments actually presented. If you present a terrible argument for an absurd position, it is not my responsibility to repair your logic and rescue the "essence" of your claims—whatever that might be—from their surrounding nonsense. If it's your baby, then you save it from the bathwater, for all I see is dirty water. When there are millions of people around the world saying the Earth was made in seven days 6000 years ago, I have a right—nay, a duty, as does everyone—to object to those claims, as presented, against those who present them. When there are no suicide bombers, no burqas, no circumcisions, no teabaggers, no Creationists, when the world is free of these most absurd and evil ideas, then we can talk about what sort of theological and abstract God it might be reasonable to believe in. But as long as these evil absurdities are propounded as mainstream discourse, we New Atheists will continue to resist them.

"But can you remember the kind of God that is pictured in [His Dark Materials]? A kind of wizened old human being, nothing better? As a young child once said, 'I never believed in that kind of God'; and nor do Christian believers."

Maybe you don't; but there are definitely people who do. Mormons explicitly claim that God is a Homo sapiens male—they say he impregnated a Homo sapiens female (Mary) through sexual intercourse, something only a Homo sapiens male could do by definition. Moreover, even more mainstream Christians seem to think of God as something like a bearded old man in the sky. They'll usually admit that doesn't literally make sense, but whenever someone depicts God in this way it is immediately familiar to them. (Indeed, that's how God is depicted in the Sistene Chapel!) Indeed, they would surely be offended if I depicted God as an acid-drooling xenomorph or a giant cockroach; they might even object to the depiction of God as a glowing energy without form or texture. They say God made human beings in his own image and likeness; what can that mean except that God looks very much like a human being?

"What would happen if they actually moved away from a focus upon that Creationist God to a focus upon what we might call the God of classical Christian theism?" [He jumbled his words a little—"Creationist God upon what we might call the classic the God of classical Christian theism"—but I think this is what he meant to say.]

What is this "classical Christian theism"? Catholicism? As practiced now, or by Thomas Aquinas? Calvinism? Jews for Jesus? Maybe Harries wants New Atheists to focus on the most plausible, reasonable conceptions of God; but these are not recognizably Christian (they are deistic or pantheistic). If we use the most plausible forms of Christianity, we might debate with Anglicans or the sort of progressive Catholics who don't really believe in transubstantiation and banning condoms but nonetheless love the ceremony of Mass (basically they are closet Anglicans). But even these aren't really that plausible—they're still based on notions which are demonstrably false—and they aren't that important an influence in society. What a progressive Catholic says has basically the same authority as what an atheist says—both to progressive Catholics, atheists, and everyone else. I adore Ken Miller for his defenses of evolution, but he doesn't seem to be convincing Creationists any better than Dawkins!

"'People sometimes ask me, Where was God in Auschwitz? I believe that God was there himself,' [rabbi Hugo Gryn] said, 'violated and blasphemed. The real question is, where was Man in Auschwitz?"

I don't know what sort of God that is... but it certainly isn't theistic. A God who can be violated and blasphemed by human beings is a God who is weaker than human beings, or at least no stronger; we can violate a forest, we can violate one another—but if God is so much more powerful than we are, it ought to be impossible for us to violate him. Furthermore, if God was there and did nothing, what sort of God is that? Gryn surely sees that there is much that human beings could have done to end the slaughter—but God, allegedly so wise and powerful and good, did nothing? Why? Finally, of course, where was Man in Auschwitz? Indisputably there, right there the whole time, doing the acts, suffering the acts, ignoring the acts, supporting the acts, resisting the acts! There is no Man but men. Human beings committed the atrocities of the Holocaust, just as human beings suffered those atrocities. These are the cold, dark, bloody parts of human nature we cannot afford to ignore.

A.C. Grayling:

"What happened on that date [9/11/01] I think changed the nature of the debate for people on either side of this confrontation."

Understatement of the century? A plausible candidate at least.

"People who have a religious commitment say this about people who share their views. They say you don't understand our position, what it's like to have a commitment, what it means to us. And that's an odd thing for them to say, because of course, the great majority of people who are not religious used to be—and have become non-religious because they have given up the commitment that they were led into as children, taught at school, taught by their community, church, mosque, or synagogue—they have given it up sometimes with a great deal of difficulty and pain."

Precisely. Yes, we know all about the story of Jesus and how he died for our sins; like you, we heard it in church growing up, and now continue to hear it continually from people trying to convince us of it. But do you know, Christian, of the story of Appollonius of Tyana? Of Zoroaster? Are you familiar with the tales of Zeus? Of Ammon-Re? How well do you really understand Islam? What about Buddhism? And you may think you know what atheism means—but do you really understand why we believe it?

Grayling goes on to explain the distinction between atheism (lack of belief in supernatural entities) secularism (the political policy of separating religion from government) and humanism (the system of moral philosophy based upon naturalistic accounts of morality). This he explains clearly and concisely; but I think he ommitted something quite important. What I think he ought to have mentioned here is that nearly all ethical philosophers for all of history have been humanists in this sense—Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Hume, representing all the major schools of thought in ethical philosophy. Even the Christian theologian Richard Swinburne agrees that there are moral truths which would exist without God. Grayling rightly criticizes religious discourse for excluding humanism as a viable option, but he doesn't go far enough; we ought to be excluding non-humanism as a viable option, for Divine Command theories of ethics have been thoroughly refuted and are almost universally rejected by the philosophical community. This is not to prove the nonexistence of God; it is to prove the existence of morality with or without the existence of God. If there is such a thing as a settled question in philosophy, this is one.

"Religion, and religious organizations, have every right to exist and every right to have its say. But it has no greater right than any other self-constituted, self-elected interest group in society. A church is like a trades union or a political party or the Women's Institute or the Boy Scouts: It has instituted itself, and it's there to put [forth] a point of view, and it's entitled to do so. But as it happens, all through history, still in our own country [the UK] today, and in many places in the world, religious organizations have a very privileged place in society, they have an amplified voice, much greater thann the voice of other organizations in society, with the exception of the political parties that succeed in getting their candidates into the legislature."

Yes! Yes! 10¹² times yes! Indeed, note that those political parties were elected; citizens voted on them. Citizens don't vote on Imams or the Pope! Religious organizations may form and people may join them, and they may speak whatever they wish—and we may tax them and criticize them and boycott them just as we would with any other organization we disagree with! This is what we are asking for as New Atheists. That, and that people might actually be persuaded to join our own interest groups. But we're no more "angry" or "aggressive" or "disrespectful"—let alone fundamentalist—than the Republican Party or the Social Democratic Party or the ALCU or the Boy Scouts or any other political and social organization.

Charles Moore

"There is a certain absurdity, I think, in all these debates on this subject, because great minds have wrestled with them throughout history."

Very true. Yet, are we really debating between the schools of thought held by the great minds of history? Are we comparing atheism, deism, and pantheism? Are we comparing different models of the evolution of human cognition? Are we asking about which ethical and meta-ethical theories to adopt? No—we're arguing about whether the Earth is 6000 years old. There are far too many people saying too many far too stupid things for us to concern ourselves with these nuances. In a group of 10 philosophy majors, I'll happily debate the merits of Mill's utilitarianism compared with Kant's deontology. I'm sure Dawkins would be glad to spar over spandrels and adapationism with other biologists—and maybe he does. But this is not what we do in public, because it isn't what is needed in public. There is too much irrationality that we must deal with every day to be worried about giving proper attention to all the various nuanced theologies—it would be like worrying about the alignment of your tie-pin as you wade waist-deep through swamps with fighter planes strafing at you from above.

Moore then compares the "light of reason" to a searchlight—a clever but rather weak analogy to begin with; it seems to rest on the idea that we're only using a little bit of light, and only in particular places. He then keeps going with the analogy—the searchlight is in a concentration camp, tracking down prisoners. He goes on further and further until the whole thing basically looks like an excuse to compare Dawkins to a Nazi. Alas, this resulted in substantial applause.

He quotes Einstein: "There are the fanatical atheists, whose intolerance is of the same kind as the religious fanatics, and comes from the same source: They are creatures who, in their grudge against the traditional opium of the people, cannot bear the music of the spheres."

This would indeed be damning—were there any reason to believe it. I have great respect for Einstein, but I honestly have never seen an atheist fanatic. I have seen atheists who are similar to religious moderates—even in their faith-based certainty about ridiculous things—but even these are the minority. I have seen atheists with cruel and evil extremist politics. But I have never seen an atheist who thought that he had absolute knowledge; I have never seen an atheist who thought it justified to kill people for believing the wrong things. Maybe such atheists exist; but if they do, I've never seen nor heard of them, and they certainly are not representative of New Atheism.

"Surely what we find so unattractive about fundamentalism is its attitude that it discloses to the truth, and to other people."

Agreed! Continue.

"First to the truth: Instead of the truth being something that expands the mind, fundamentalists turn it into a harsh and narrow test to which humanity is forced to submit."

Maybe... that depends what you mean by "test" and "submit". If you mean that human beings ought to believe things that are true and reject things that are false, then I would agree with that—and it's also clearly not fundamentalism. On the other hand, if you mean that there is a particular book which represents the pinnacle of knowledge against which all ideas must be tested, then yes, that's fundamentalism.

"'Natural selection explains the whole of life,' says Richard Dawkins, 'and anything else is wrong.'" [He's suggesting this is fundamentalist.]

Well, yes. That's true. The evidence is in on this question—natural selection is the greatest show on Earth, the only game in town. Just as gravity is inverse-square and the Solar System is heliocentric. These are demonstrated facts; they aren't up for debate.

"The fundamentalist's attitude to those who do not accept his truth is at best pitying, and at worst, murderous. He thinks such people must be defective; they must be stupid, or deluded—Richard's book is called The God Delusion—or evil."

This is a good point. There is something distasteful about saying that one's opponents are defective and delusional. However, t annoys me that Moore elides the distinction beween "pitying" and "murderous"—those are quite different attitudes indeed. I am pitying of people with Alzheimer's disease and people with neoplastic cancer. I do not think they are evil, and far from thinking they deserve to die, I think they are dying undeservedly! I similarly am pitying of people with schizophrenia—they are surely defective and delusional, but they aren't evil, and I'd never suggest we should harm them in any way.

And then, if the disagreement is intense enough, what other option is there? If I really believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun (I do, of course), and someone else really believes that the Sun revolves around the Earth, what are we to do? Should we just "agree to disagree"? Perhaps I should offer all the evidence, and we should carefully examine it together—what if my opponent still refuses to accept heliocentrism? What am I to say, if not, "You're delusional?" This is the state we are in with regard to Creationists—we have shown them the evidence, gone through it carefully several times, answered their objections, responded to their questions, answered the same objections again—and they still refuse to believe us. What are we to do now? They believe things that are not true, despite having abundant evidence to the contrary; they're delusional!

Moore then made this weird joke about a Clue game, "Reverend Greene did it, with the Bible, in the nursery!" and received much applause. Not sure what point he was trying to make.

"For the fundamentalist, there can be nothing to be learnt from those with whom one disagrees; and this makes these debates so terribly sterile. When I read the The God Delusion for example, I find many arguments very well-put, exposing many fallacies, but I never find any sense of mental quest—I find hard intelligence, yes, but no subtlety, no imagination about other ways of thought, no humility."

This is indeed true (at least of the The God Delusion), but I'm not sure what it proves. When I read a physics textbook I don't see a lot of "imagination about other ways of thought", but no one complains that we haven't respected the views of people who don't believe momentum is conserved. We've stated the facts, and the evidence that supports them; we've explained the theories, and the means by which they were proved; and that's what were supposed to do if we really want to answer a question scientifically. As for the "mental quest", that's what goes into writing the book—it's not usually what's found in the book once it is complete. Some authors include more of their quest in the final product than others; but listing all the books you read and detailing the nights you lay in bed thinking about meta-ethics doesn't make for very interesting reading.

On the other hand, maybe some of these questions are more complicated than that. Or maybe we should be more respectful to other people's views, just as part of respecting them as human beings. Yet it's intensely frustrating to live in a world where so many people believe so many incredibly stupid things; it can drive one to the depths of misanthropism (George Carlin?) and equally to questioning one's own sanity (the question that made Einstein hazy). We care too much about this universe, this planet, this species—and our families, and friends, and ourselves—to sit idly beside and watch insanity destroy them. It is out of a deep respect for human potential that we so angrily deride human reality—we hate so much what is because we can imagine so much greater.

"It's part of our opponents' fundamentalist position that they don't really distinguish between fundamentalism and other forms of religious belief. Just as followers of bin Laden will say that all infidels are damned, so these hyper-atheists say that all religion is equally contemptible."

For once, I agree, and I think New Atheists should take note. We are too eager to criticize "religion in general", too ready to take down "belief in God"—when we really ought to be criticizing specific beliefs and specific reasons for believing. All religions are contemptible—but they are not equally contemptible. Anglicans may be fuzzy-headed and believe silly things, but they're like the kind of mild schizophrenics who occasionally hear voices but don't listen to them. It is Mormons and Muslims and Creationists I fear; they are the ones upon whom we must focus our energy.

On the other hand, some New Atheists do try to do this—Sam Harris especially talks about these distinctions all the time, to the point of sometimes seeming an apologist for Jain and a bigot against Islam. Yet religion has such power in our discourse that criticizing one is seen as criticizing all—that if people say out loud that Mormons are insane, suddenly the Presbyterians and Lutherans are angry. The one exception I know is Scientology, because it is not yet considered a mainstream religion. Give it half a century or so, and if it's still around and religion still has the respect it does (if I have my druthers neither condition will hold), I bet $1000 (2050 dollars US) that criticism of Scientology will invoke responses of "atheist fundamentalism" just as well as criticizing Christianity.

"They seem entirely unaware that literalism was attacked by St. Augustine, who did not believe that the world was created in six days, nearly 1500 years earlier."

True; then again, Augustine believed the world was created in essentially its present form n a single instant—hardly more plausible. He rejected Hellenistic archaeology and geology that suggested the Earth was more than 6000 years old. (Why does that number keep coming up? Is that just the longest time-span the human brain can handle?) And while Augustine did defend a natural theology, his approach seems to have been abandoned for, well, The Middle Ages. Would that natural theology had remained the approach for that whole period; but then, there would never have been a Middle Ages, we would have skipped straight to the Englightenment.

Around here, Moore also mentions something about scientists being 'bored by what they already know' and thereby making knowledge a conquest and not a joyous journey; Dawkins soundly refutes this notion later.

"Is it really the case that human beings are less valuable because they are stupid, or ill-educated, or poor, or sick, or disabled?"

Well, let's remove "poor", "sick", and "disabled" from the start; no one is suggesting that. Nor is it clear to me that Dawkins is committed to a view that people are less valuable because they are stupid or ill-educated. But I'm willing to say that. I think people are less valuable—yes, less morally worthy—insofar as they do not know things and are unwilling or unable to learn them. Only slightly less—certainly not enough to justify arbitrary harm to them—but yes, less. Given the choice of two levers, one which would kill Sarah Palin and the other of which would kill Stephen Hawking, I would pull the one that kills Palin, with very little hestitation. This is not to say that it is good to kill Sarah Palin—it's bad, it's terrible—but it's clearly less bad to kill Sarah Palin than it would be to kill Stephen Hawking. (Given the choice to kill Sarah Palin or a dog, I would with some hestitation kill the dog. I guess this means I rate her slightly above dogs.) Indeed, if we move beyond stupidity and ignorance to evil and tyranny, there are some people so terrible that they actually deserve to die. Hitler and Stalin were on this list in the past, and Robert Mugabe and Kim-Jong Il are on it today. I'd sooner kill Mugabe than swat a fly—the former is good, the latter merely permissible. Human value does admit of gradations.

Moore himself admits this: "The African peasant woman who sacrifices herself to save her starving child stands higher, in some important sense, than the President of the Royal Society."

Here he is endorsing a scale of human moral worth—he just doesn't think intelligence is important. But given the choice of saving one of two people, both of whom were equivalent in their moral goodness, but one of whom was smarter, wouldn't you save the smarter one? Wouldn't the world be better off, at least a little bit, if you saved the smart one? I might even be willing to agree that intelligence in the hands of an evil person (Moore mentions Mengele) is in fact a bad thing. I'm not sure this is right—my intuition is that intelligence is still a virtue, but in this case is outweighed by deeper evils—but it does make some sense to say so, since an intelligent villain can thereby achieve more villainy. But to say that intelligence has no value, that a good person is not made better by being smarter? This is extremely implausible.

And here Moore says something quite silly indeed: "The prisoner, whose faith Professor Dawkins looks down on with such disdain, understands something about the human predicament which is denied to those who worship only success."

Really? People who hold up liquor stores have a deeper understanding of the human condition than professional philosophers? If that's true, then we should all commit some petty crime so that we might go to prison! Or why stop at petty crime? Plenty of people in prison have committed terrible, terrible acts—assault, rape, murder. But many are Christian—so clearly they understand something about human nature that "success-worshippers" like Dawkins don't. I'm not saying everyone in prison deserves it; I'm not even saying that we cannot learn and grow from mistakes and suffering. I'm merely saying that mistakes and suffering are in themselves bad things—and that moral evils are always by definition bad things. Moore does not seem to understand this. Moreover, if the statistics were reversed—if people in prison were more likely to be atheist—I'm sure we'd never heard the end of how "atheism causes criminality".

"Why do such religions put such store in the young, in the weak, in the poor, in the very old?" Perhaps because they are the opiate of the masses? People who are helpless are both more desperate for hope and more gullible in the face of charlatans?

"I think it because we can see the greatness and the littleness of man."

No, theist, you have it backwards. It is scientists who truly understand greatness and littleness; and the better one gets at science, the more one rejects holy books. Your petty "greatness" is the sort of thing that can be achieved by a single person, or at best a society of millions—all on a single planet; but you ignore the billions of stars in each of billions of galaxies which stretch to horizons so vastly distant that the mind-bogglingly fast takes mind-bogglingly long to traverse them. This greatness we know in science is so incredibly great that we can only begin to grasp it mathematically; our brains simply cannot hold what 10²⁶ meters is meant to express. Conversely, your silly "littleness" is enormous compared to the bacteria, which are themselves incomprehensibly more enormous than the atoms which comprise them. These too are enormous compared to the nuclei within them, which are enormous compared to the quarks which compose them, which are enormous compared to the hypothetical strings which may ultimately animate them. If 10²⁶ meters of greatness was too much for our minds, how much worse then is 10^-35 meters of littleness. We live in a thin sliver of reality between the millimeter and the kilometer—the whole of reality exceeds this scale by 10 times the logarithm. What is our measly 10^-3 littleness and 10³ greatness compared to the 10^-35 littleness and 10²⁶ greatness of the universe?

"We know that a world run by members of MENSA would not be a better place."

Well, most of the people in MENSA are people far too proud of themselves who happened to score well on a test; they aren't necessarily smarter in any real sense than anyone else. But a world run by scientists? A world where the National Academy of Sciences would be in charge of education, where the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would be in charge of environmental policy? I think it'd be a lot better actually. Not perfect, surely—but could it really be much worse?

"Instead we are attracted by paradox. We recognize truth in sentences that say, 'Only when you are poor can you be rich.' 'Only when you are weak can you be strong.' 'Only when you die can you live.' "

Deepities! They seem profound because they are logically ill-formed! Either they are to be taken literally—in which case they're clearly false—or they are to be taken as metaphor, in which case they really aren't that interesting. Only when you have no money can you live a fulfilling life? Hardly. Only when you have no power can you show strength of character? Not really, no. Only when you have shuffled off this mortal coil can you experience true existence? Neuroscience begs to differ. Your "attractive paradoxes" have no deeper substance than "Nothing is better than eternal happiness, a saltine cracker is better than nothing, therefore a saltine cracker is better than eternal happiness."

"We do not abandon the power of reason, but we are aware of the ineradicable incongruity of our existence."

Life is mysterious, therefore Jesus was born of a virgin and rose from the dead? I don't follow, sir. I'm fairly certain any atheist would agree that life is mysterious.

"When Professor Dawkins sees two pieces of wood traversing each other at right angles, perhaps he sees only a plus sign, or perhaps he sees only the wood; but a Christian cannot see the plain wood, this plain wood, without seeing the cross upon which Jesus suffered and died!"

Excuse me, Mr. Moore, but we live in a Christian culture too. We see that symbolism. It may not affect us in the same way, but we do see it. When I see an astronomically improbable crescent moon, I see the Muslim symbolism in that too. Two equilateral triangles, one vertically inverted, superposed? Yeah, we understand The Star of David too. Do you recognize the Masonic imagery on the US dollar? Would you know a figure of Ganesha if you saw one? What if you see a bearded Nordic man holding a large hammer—do you not immediately think of Thor? I'd also recognize the symbolism in a boy with a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead, the symbolism in a wide-eyed deformed creature holding a shiny gold ring, and the symbolism of a young prince holding a skull eye-to-eye—these do not make Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and Hamlet factually true or worthy of worship. If like these latter the Bible is a book of compelling stories with artistic and ethical value, then act like it!

Richard Dawkins

"Fundamentalism means different things to different people, but I think there are two elements that are common. First is blind obedience to a holy book regardless of evidence, and this is what Richard Harries meant by 'impervious to facts'. And the second is extremism."

He goes right to the heart of the issue, defines terms in a clear and uncontroversial way—and proceeds to demolish the other side on those grounds. Truly excellent debating form.

"There is no holy book of atheism, and there never could be. Atheism is not a belief system, there's no catechism of atheism, no thirty-nine articles, no Torah, no Qur'an. There is no book, only publicly verifiable evidence; and that's anything but fundamentalist, because it contains a commitment to change as new evidence comes in."

Wow, he just demolished their entire claim in about 30 seconds. Fs are X, As are not X, therefore As are not Fs, Modus tollens QED. You could stop there, Dr. Dawkins—but of course, they gave you more time, so do tear into your hapless prey.

"It's not really that we're bored by what we already know, but that we're so excited by what it leads onto, which is what we don't know—we want to roll up our sleeves and get down to knowing more."

Yes, exactly.

"Gaps do not provide a license to fill them with any old stuff that we happen to make up—and most certainly they don't provide a license for any old stuff that happened to be made up by a tribe of ignorant desert nomads that just happened to get into some holy book or other."

This received massive and entirely deserved applause.

"In fact, if we're going to throw around accusations of dogmatic over-certainty, the boot is on the other foot—with a vengeance. Even nice, middle-of-the-road vicars and bishops are profligate with their certainties. They'll go into the pulpit and tell the congregation, 'God wants us to do X' or 'God doesn't want us to do Y'; how do you know? When did you ever hear a priest say, 'I think the balance of probability suggests that God wants X'? When did you ever hear from a pulpit, 'We're waiting for further evidence'? "

Again, much and deserved applause. Dawkins started with demolishing the claim "atheists are the new fundamentalists"; he is now very close to having proved the counter-claim "even moderate religion is more fundamentalist than atheism."

"Let me turn around to the other meaning of fundamentalism, extremism."

"When was the last time you hear of anybody who blew up anything in the name of atheism? Not blew something up and happened to be an atheist, but blew something up in the name of atheism?"

Even if there were any examples, it wouldn't really tarnish the rest of us—but as Dawkins expected, I couldn't think of any. There have been Communist suicide bombers and even republican terrorists (think French Revolution); but "Die, Christians! There is no God!"?

"They [the 9/11 terrorists] believed it because it followed logically from what they had been taught in their faith schools."

I'm not sure if that's true or not, but I think the burden of proof is on Muslims to explain why "72 virgins in heaven for martyrs of Jihad" doesn't logically justify acts like 9/11—it certainly seems like the sort of thing that would.

"There is no logical pathway leading from atheism to violence."

Indeed not; and we should emphasize this, and be prepared to justify it.

"There are certainly logical pathways leading from religion to violence."

At least some religions, yes, it would seem so. Again, let's be careful not to talk so much about "religion in general".

"The nearest we [New Atheists] get to violence is in the words we use."

Indeed. And so at worst—at the very, very worst—you might be able to justify a claim that we are as bad as Ray Comfort and Ken Ham. But you have no basis—not in the least—to justify the claim that we are nearly as bad as Al Qaeda or Scott Roeder; let alone Hitler or Stalin, with whom we are more typically compared.

"New Atheism speaks clearly. This used not to happen: Atheists were supposed to know their place, to shut up, and respect automatically religious faith. I love a quotation from Johann Harley who said, 'I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous ideas.' So entrenched is the assumption, implictly accepted for centuries by religious and non-religious alike, that religion must automaticallybe respected that even clarity is heard as offensive—as fundamentalist indeed."

That pretty much sums up this issue—and finishes nailing the coffin of the opposing position.

There was then a question-answer period, but essentially the same points were reiterated.

One questioner took her opportunity to simply introduce the Euthyphro dilemma; as much as I am a fan of this dilemma, in a question-answer period you should be asking questions and expecting answers. Another offered the dumbest kind of fine-tuning argument based on, well, no evidence.

There was one amusing exchange however, which I'd like to recount.

Moore: "Is it fundamentalist to say there is no God? Did you notice that atheist bus campaign that they had? On the side it said, 'There's probably no God.' And the reason they said that, I think, is they realize they're in a bit of a muddle about this, because they could only truthfully say according to their own position that there's probably no God, because if they said, 'There is no God', they would be making a a statement of faith, and of course they feel that they musn't do that. So they're actually in a bit of a muddle about what it is they're talking about."

Moderator: "Richard is not in a muddle!"

Dawkins: "What could be more fundamentalist than saying 'There's definitely no God'? We demonstrated our lack of fundamentalism by saying the proper scientific thing—'There's probably no God." (Actually, I'm not sure even "There definitely is no God" is fundamentalist; in common practice "definitely" doesn't mean "to absolute logical certainty", but just "beyond all reasonable doubt". If I say "gravity is definitely real", no one accuses me of fundamentalism.)

Moderator: "So, does that mean there may be a God, logically?"

Dawkins: "There may be a leprechaun!"

Harries: "You can't let Richard get away with that! That's a ridiculous remark! No! That is a ridiculous remark! You cannot confuse the God of classical theism which has animated the whole of Western philosophy with a leprechaun, and I'm surprised at you!"

Moderator: "Anthony says you can!"

Grayling: "Firstly, with great respect to Charles Moore, he was rather confused about the atheist bus campaign. We did want to say 'There is no God' on the bus, and at the time the Advertisers and Standards Committee required us to insert a 'probably' there despite the fact that the very many theist adverts on buses say things like 'Jesus saves' and so on entirely uniequivocally. But allow me to point out something about Richard's remark about the leprechaun, which does remind me of the old Irish lady who was asked if she believed in leprechauns and said, 'I do not, but they're there anyway'; and I have to remind Richard Harries that he is an atheist and would be quite unequivocal about the gods of Olympus, Aphrodite, Ares, and the rest, and the Norse Gods—"

Moderator: "And people who didn't believe that were called atheists, weren't they?"

Grayling: "They were indeed."

Moderator: "This is a debate! So I'm going to ask Anthony if he saw a leprechaun, what would you then say?"

Grayling: "Well, I would try to imitate an Irish accent and say, 'Hello!'"

Other gems:

Moore: "I don't think I was arguing for a subtler, more nuanced form of Christianity; I was arguing for a more mainstream classical form of Christianity." The same mainstream classical Christianity of the Crusades and the Inquisitions?

Harries: "Earlier on, Richard made a wonderfully telling point, I thought, when he said he'd never heard from a pulpit the remark, 'on the balance of probability'. Well, I can honestly say, I think I've read nearly all your books, and I've never read the statement 'on the balance of probability there might not be a God'."

Dawkins: "What about the bus campaign?"

Harries: "I'll eat my words if you can point to that. They're so definite!"

Dawkins: "Well, I can. Chapter 4 of The God Delusion is called 'Why there almost certainly is no God'. I have put forth a 7-point scale, from 1, total certainty there is a God, to 7, total certainty there is no God, and I place myself as a number 6.5."

Moderator: "So, Chapter 4, verse 2; do you want to come back on that?"

Harries: "Well, that's not quite the same thing as 'the balance of probability'. It's 'almost certainly probable' is not quite the same as 'the balance of probability'." Notice the extreme backtracking!

Dawkins: "If by that you mean that we should be saying 50%, I'm certainly not happy to go to 50%."

The summations were entirely redundant, except for one thing: Harries is simultaneously committed to both theological abstraction and mainstream Christianity. The only way he can manage this is by an excellence of doublethink in which he actually claims that mainstream Christianity is theological abstraction: "In that sense, the early Christians, as I said earlier," No, he didn't say it earlier. He said nothing remotely similar earlier. "were atheists. They didn't believe in deities. They believed in the God of classical Western theism, who is not an existence in the world of existence, not a thing in the world of things, but the grand goal of existence in whom all things exist. John of Damascus in the eighth century, great bastion of orthodoxy in Christianity, said, 'What God is in himself is totally incomprehensible and unknowable.'"

Consider this reading of John 3:16: "For [the grand goal of all existence in whom all things exist] so loved the world that [the grand goal of all existence] gave [the grand goal of all existence's] one and only Son, that whoever believes in [the Son of the grand goal of all existence] shall not perish but have eternal life." Is it not the most utter nonsense? It might even be word salad! And what is Christianity, if it rejects John 3:16? On the contrary, Christianity is defined by John 3:16!

Harries doesn't specifically cite the source of that statement, so I was unable to find it in what little I could get of the works of John of Damascus; that doesn't mean he never said it, so let's presume he did. Even so, John of Damascus was an obscure Arab Christian theologian in the eighth century AD—hardly a founding influence in classical Christianity. He also wrote extensively against Islam, which raises serious doubts about the claim that he doesn't think God is an "existing thing in the world of existing things"—for the only differences between Christianity in Islam are in details that presuppose the personal and indeed human character of God.

The Michigan Daily published my essay on Ray Comfort and Darwin

First of all, there's the campaign itself, handing out copies of the Origin of Species. This is remarkably odd; it seems to be based on the idea that the original words of Darwin are important to evolutionists in the same way that the original words of Jesus would be to Christians or the original words of Muhammad would be to Muslims. This is blatantly wrong; evolutionary biology has advanced considerably since Darwin, and false or immoral beliefs espoused by Darwin do nothing to undermine the credibility of the Modern Synthesis. If Darwin made errors about heredity and held racist beliefs, so much the worse for Darwin; but evolution still happened, and natural selection was still the primary force. One might as well publish a version of Newton's Principia Mathematica with a preface saying "See? Newton didn't know about the Big Bang and thought women were inferior to men! This proves that gravity is a lie!" This is the level of scientific argumentation to which Ray Comfort has reduced us.

Then, like most Creationist fare, Comfort continues with statements that are at best highly misleading and in many cases outright false.

Most significantly, Comfort elides the distinction between mutation and natural selection, a distinction which is absolutely critical to evolution. He cites evidence that mutation is random and non-directional (p.22, p.26), and then tries to make it sound like this implies that natural selection is random and non-directional. This is patently false: mutation is random, natural selection is non-random, and evolution requires both. This is the sort of elementary error that could have been corrected by reading the Wikipedia article on "natural selection" or skimming the introduction to any textbook on evolutionary theory.

Next, Comfort claims that the transitional organism Pakicetus was found only as a skull (p.15)—this was true of the first fossil, but in 2001 a much more complete skeleton was found that verified Pakicetus as a transitional form. Moreover, other fossils of the land-mammal/cetacean transition have been found, including Ambulocetus, Remingtonocetus, Rodhocetus, and Dorudon.

Comfort also quotes a great deal out of context. He quotes Darwin about the complexity of the human eye (p.28-29), but fails to quote the following paragraph in which Darwin explains this complexity in light of evolution (this is in the Origin itself, on p. 150 in Comfort's edition). Several times Comfort quotes Stephen Jay Gould as challenging Darwinian evolution (p.18, p.23); Gould devoted his entire career to supporting Darwinian evolution. Comfort cites Roger Lewin as criticizing macroevolution (p.26); Lewin has written several books defending macroevolution, especially the evolution of human beings from apelike ancestors. Comfort cites the Archaeoraptor hoax (p.14) as if it undermines the huge body of evidence found since on other feathered dinosaurs like Shuuvia, Sinosauropteryx, Sinocalliopteryx, Yixianosaurus, and many others. Comfort even quotes Richard Dawkins—yes, Richard Dawkins—as if he were supporting Creationism (p.39); one might as well quote Ken Ham in support of evolution.

Worst of all, Comfort makes a disingenuous and inflammatory association between Darwin and the Holocaust. He asserts that Hitler was Darwin's "famous student" (p. 35), when in fact there is no evidence that Hitler had even read Darwin and substantial evidence that Darwin would never have supported anything like Hitler's genocide. Yes, Hitler used (and abused) evolution to support his claims. The Nazis also used a bastardized version of germ theory to support their agenda—by Comfort’s standards, this ought to discredit modern medicine. Hitler also believed the Earth revolves around the Sun—does that make heliocentrism immoral?

Comfort suggests that readers Google the phrase "Social Darwinism" (p.31), as if the mere use of the word "Darwinism" implies that such policies are a direct consequence of Darwinian evolution. Just as Christian Science is neither Christian nor scientific, and the Democratic Republic of Congo is neither democratic nor republican, Social Darwinism is hardly social and scarcely Darwinian. Social Darwinism was nothing more than an attempt to graft modern scientific authority onto ancient racial prejudices.

Indeed, traditions of racism, misogyny, ethnocentrism, and anti-Semitism have existed in European society for centuries. Such views can be found in the writings of the Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas, some 600 years before Darwin (we might say 600 BD). Genocides were committed by Julius Caesar (1900 BD) and Genghis Khan (700 BD); Christians engaged in genocide during the Crusades (600-800 BD) and the Conquistadores (100-400 BD). Where were Comfort's "Judeo-Christian values on the sacredness of human life" (p.38) in these cases? Genocide has been part of human history from the beginning; we can no more blame Darwin for genocide than we can blame Newton for rape or Einstein for murder.

Patrick Julius and Ewan Compton are officers of the University of Michigan chapter of the Secular Student Alliance, part of an international coalition of student organizations dedicated to promoting science and secularism in public policy. They can be contacted at juliusp@umich.edu and comptone@umich.edu.

The Grand Canyon Problem

This is the dilemma between non-sentient things that we nonetheless value and sentient beings who are indisputably valuable in themselves. Because the Grand Canyon is a paradigm case, I will call this the Grand Canyon Problem.

First of all, consider the question, "Is the Grand Canyon valuable?" My intuition is that it is, that indeed this value is of a moral kind, such that it would be morally wrong for someone to arbitrarily destroy the Grand Canyon. I don't think it's just that the experience of seeing the Grand Canyon is valuable—even if before destroying it we created a highly accurate holographic simulation, it would still seem to me that we have destroyed something of value.

Yet, if the Grand Canyon has moral value, how does this moral value rate against the value of sentient beings? If we could save human lives by destroying the Grand Canyon, how many would we need to save for this to be worth doing? On the reasoning that the Grand Canyon is a "mere thing", then even a single life should be enough---but then, we should already have done this!

For, it is most definitely the case that the Grand Canyon kills people. Wikipedia reports 600 deaths attributable to the Grand Canyon since 1870, which represents an average of 4 people per year. Now, some of these clearly aren't the Canyon's fault; 48 suicides and 23 homicides could have happened anywhere. The 242 deaths by aircraft crashes are ambiguous, as are the 25 deaths due to freak errors. But 53 falls, 65 deaths by exposure, 7 flash flood fatalities, 79 drownings---that's 204 deaths---are all clearly attributable to the Canyon; they wouldn't have occurred had the Canyon been paved over. (Many of these deaths might have been preventable without destroying the Canyon---but let's presume that some of them could not have; otherwise, the dilemma disappears.)

Now, 204 deaths in 140 years isn't really that many. (Indeed, ladders kill that many in a year, and automobiles that many in two days.) Had the Grand Canyon killed 2 million people, we'd probably all agree that it should be leveled. But it hasn't killed 2 million people; it's only killed a few hundred. So, the question becomes, How many people does it take? [If you, like me, pictured Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard saying that, followed by the word "Admiral", you are officially a geek.]

How many people must a "mere thing" kill or cause to suffer before this justifies its destruction? How great a "mere thing" must it be before it is worth more than a human life? Just how valuable is the Grand Canyon, anyway?

I don't know. And this troubles me. I am uncomfortable both with the reasoning that people are always more important than mere things---hence, holograph the Canyon and pave over it---and with the reasoning that the Grand Canyon is so great that it justifies a few deaths every year---hence, that some non-sentient things have more moral value than human individuals.

Any ideas?

Why the Chinese Room argument may work—but doesn't matter

Moreover, the presumptions here really are only those of computationalism—we already know that any computation can be performed by a wide variety of hardware, and indeed that any finite computation can be reduced to lookup tables (if A, do B and goto C). So doesn't it follow that if understanding Chinese is just computation, then Searle with his lookup tables must understand Chinese?

Scale arguments seem to miss the point. Unless Churchland can explain why computing in sub-second time makes consciousness but computing over several billion years doesn't (in the same way that indeed moving a magnet 10 times per second makes weak radio waves and moving it 1 billion times per second makes light), her "luminous room" counterargument can't work.

Yet it's important to understand what role scale does play here. Searle's argument cannot be used to undermine the Turing Test. This is because any entity which can pass a Turing Test must pass that test in real time—at the same rate of computation and response that a human being would. Given that the lookup tables for all possible 30-minute human interactions, written in 12-point font, would take up more space than the observable universe and require up to 90 billion years between steps, Searle's room of file cabinets can't possibly pass a real Turing Test. At best it could pass a highly-structured form of the Turing Test in which all the questions were known in advance—something I could make a Python script to do. And if we were to encode the full set of lookup rules more efficiently, say on a neural-network architecture of billions of microchips, saying the resulting entity—the resulting AI—wouldn't be conscious simply begs the question. Even with the Chinese Room notwithstanding, it's fair to say that any entity which passes a real Turing Test is conscious. (In fact, most people when asked agree that fictional AIs like Data from Star Trek: TNG or Romi from Andromeda would be, if real, conscious; I think this is precisely because these AIs pass a real-time Turing Test with flying colors.)

Inversely, this also explains why Dennett's evolutionary argument against zombies doesn't work. It could well be that zombies are possible, they're just so inefficient that they would never evolve. In his argument, Dennett presumes that zombies are "a bit simpler"—but in fact there is every reason to think that they would be vastly more complicated. A conscious human brain can do things in seconds which would take lookup tables billions of years. It could be that we have a choice between making real consciousness and simulating it—and it's easier to make it for real. I'm not committed to the idea that zombies are possible; in fact I don't think they are—but you can't prove this with evolutionary arguments. Evolutionary arguments merely prove that zombies are, if possible, inefficient.

As for the Turing Test, it's important to note that we aren't saying that anything which can't pass isn't conscious; the Turing Test was always meant to be a test of sufficiency for conciousness, not necessity; even Turing would have agreed that dogs and people with severe aphasia are conscious despite being unable to pass any kind of verbal test. And because of this I do think that Searle's argument does something to undermine computationalism, since it at the very least seems very counter-intuitive to say that the 90 billion light-year file cabinet system is conscious, but just a very slow, inefficient sort of consciousness that isn't smart enough to pass a Turing Test. I'm not sure whether that's true or false, but I agree it's very counter-intuitive.

So, I ask Searle: What else would be needed? What are these "causal powers" that neurons have which allow them to make consciousness?

Searle never answers this question, probably because he knows how trivial it makes his argument. Whatever the "causal powers" are, they are either physical or non-physical.

If they are non-physical, then despite all his claims to the contrary Searle is committed to substance dualism—and all the problems that substance dualism entails. This cannot be seriously considered credible in an age of neuropsychology; the brain and mind are too closely connected for us to posit any kind of non-physical "soul".

Otherwise, the "causal powers" must be physical. If they are physical, then we could create an artificial system capable of replicating them. Searle is right to say that a computer simulation of rain isn't rain—but surely we can't say that a machine which pours drops of water from the sky isn't making rain? Now, it could be that the "causal powers" are so closely tied to brain chemistry that we will end up synthesizing serotonin and making synthetic neurons that are actually alive. The resulting artificial brain would be indistinguishable from a natural brain—and hence our AI would be more like an artificial human. But how plausible is this really? Other biological functions are not so closely tied to their chemistry. An entity which intakes and outputs air is respirating, whether it has lungs and a diaphragm or an electronic pump. An entity which takes in light and carbon dioxide and makes sugar is photosynthesizing, regardless of whether it uses chlorophyll or photovoltaics. An entity which copies itself is reproducing, whether it uses sperm and ova or an electronic blueprint and construction apparatus. Biology happens to work well under carbon chemsitry—but carbon chemistry is not necessary for biological function.

Indeed, even within the human brain there are differences in neural structure and chemical composition—some neurons are serotonergic, others dopaminergic, still others GABAergic, and so on. Different animals have different chemicals in their brains—human serotonin receptors aren't the same as dog serotonin receptors. If nothing else, we ought to be able to construct an AI brain that has significant differences in chemical composition from any animal brain, even if for some reason it must in fact be pink and squishy. But is it really such a stretch to think that it need not be pink and squishy, that a network of silicon chips could work just as well?

Perhaps there is something more to consciousness than mere computation; but whatever else is required, that is surely something we could replicate in an artificial entity. Searle's "strong AI" is a straw man—artificial intelligence of even the Data and Romi sort remains possible under any physical account of consciousness.

Utilitarianism is not cold

This is a common intuition, and I don't think it is completely without foundation; but I am convinced that it is ultimately mistaken. While it might seem unconscionable to allow (e.g.) rape, murder, genocide in order to achieve some greater good, ultimately this revulsion comes from a failure of imagination regarding just how great that greater good would need to be. To justify a genocide, it would not be enough that the world would be better off without the targeted group; rather, it would have to be that without the genocide a far more terrible outcome would have occurred, like the total destruction of human civilization. Further, there must have been no other way to prevent such a terrible outcome---otherwise we ought to take that other path.

There is a kind of utilitarianism that is cold; the most naive Benthamite act-utilitarianism seems quite cold. If all we are measuring is subjective pleasure versus subjective pain, we ignore not only aesthetics and honesty, but indeed autonomy and death! To a Benthamite utilitarian, a painless death is morally neutral, and there is nothing wrong with benevolent slavery. Indeed, under such a philosophy something like the Matrix---a false but pleasant reality imposed upon us through delusion---is not only permissible, but good; it may even be obligatory. This seems quite cold indeed, but it is dangerously close to a straw man; no serious modern utilitarian would defend these notions. Indeed, nearly all utilitarians today agree with John Stuart Mill, and adopt a system of consequences that includes not only pleasure and pain simpliciter, but also the "pleasure" of aesthetics, the "pain" of fearing death, the "pleasure" of autonomy, the "pain" of dishonesty. One could argue that these experiences aren't really pleasure and pain, but in fact something broader, like attractive and aversive emotions generally (in fact, I would argue precisely this); but the point remains that serious utilitarianism today considers this broad range of experiences and not a simplistic calculation of subjective pleasure versus subjective pain. If the sense of coldness came from Benthamite utilitarianism, basically the argument is one of guilt by association.

Moreover, it seems to me that the other moral theories on offer are not only just as cold---they are in fact significantly colder. They value the wrong things, and turn a blind eye to suffering when preventing it would require us to sacrifice our moral righteousness.

In the first case, virtue theory values something like "human flourishing" or a "completeness of character" above all else. As such, a virtue theorist is committed to saying that if I must allow a million people to suffer and die in order to preserve my completeness of character, I not only may do so, in fact I ought to do so---it would be wrong of me to sacrifice my character to save that million people. What could be colder than that?

In the second case, deontology demands that we obey moral rules under all circumstances, without exception or hesitation. A deontologist is committed to saying that we must never break the rules---never kill an innocent person, or in Kant's infamous case, never even tell a lie---regardless of how many people must suffer as a result. Pacifism is a particularly extreme deontology in which the rule is literally "thou shalt not kill"; killing human beings is absolutely forbidden regardless of the circumstances. It's not hard to see how a nation of pacifists would be rapidly invaded and exploited by foreign powers.In essence, deontology values clean hands over all else: Regardless of whom it hurts, I must never dirty my hands with evil actions. This doesn't seem as cold as virtue theory, but it still seems quite cold!

On the other hand, one could devise a virtue theory or deontology that didn't have such terrible consequences; the most obvious way would be to define the virtues and rules such that they are based upon the predicted consequences. But once we've done this, aren't we really talking about utilitarianism anyway? If "virtue" is that which will make one likely to do good, and the "rules" are heuristics that are likely to produce good outcomes---that's utilitarianism! It's a nuanced Millian sort of utilitarianism, but that's what utilitarians have been advocating anyway.