Science and Atheism

Here's a comment I made on Hemant's blog in reply to another. (The other guy's remarks are in the block quotes.)

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Like some religious leaders, many scientists have forged evidence in support of a noble cause.

However unlike religion, science has a built in system that tries to minimize human error or outright corruption. A scientist has to make his methods clear and repeatable by others.

To me this behavior suggests to me that atheists are just as susceptible to self-deception as the rest of us.

I don’t think most atheists would disagree with you. But I bet most atheists have skeptical mind sets and at least try to keep their self-deception to a minimum. I’m not sure supernaturalists put in so much effort to question their own beliefs.

I know many atheists to whom evolution is a surrogate religion, because they too believe whatever their authority figures tell them, and like mainstream religious people, they easily turn emotional when their beliefs are being questioned.

How are you defining “religion” here? Geologists and astronomers also get upset when creationists say their research is garbage. Do we now say geology and astronomy are “religions”? Most, but actually not all, atheists accept evolution. This acceptance comes from a wealth of data, books, education, and also personal research. I think this is quite different from the religious model of a single authoritative source like the Bible.

Atheists are very prone to be as unscientific as creationists are, because atheism rules-out the existence of something which or someone who can not be
proved nor disproved.

If you talk to most atheists they are not saying they have proved God doesn’t exist. They just don’t believe a god exists because the positive evidence isn’t there. I’m not sure if you’re religious, but I constantly hear religious people and creationists overuse the word “prove”. I think the only people who are proving things are mathematicians. Scientists can disprove theories, everything else is provisional with varying degrees of acceptance based on the quality and quantity of evidence.

In addition I would like to suggest that even a renowned scientist like Richard Dawkins is in fact religious, his book “The God Delision” proves it.

How does his book prove that? And again how are you defining religion? I think the commonly accepted view of religion is that it has some supernatural element. If you broaden the definition to be just closely held beliefs and rituals, then baseball is a religion too.

Agnosticism appears to be about as close as you can get to being non-religious and objective…

I have a feeling you think atheism means 100% faith there is no God. Dawkins defined that as a 7 on his scale of belief. But even he said he was just a 6, which he called a defacto atheist. Some might want to insist that is really agnosticism, but then Dawkins and I would also be agnostics about fairies in our gardens which just sounds silly.

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As a side comment to what I wrote above, I think many discussions about "science" go of course for the same reason discussions about "god" do since these words mean different things to different people. In a single discussion "science" shifts from meaning a body of knowledge, to a method of finding things out, to the actual community of working scientists. However unlike defining "god", defining "science" for a particular discussion shouldn't be that difficult.

People who criticize science often say things like "scientists don't know everything", "science isn't always right", "science has it's limits", etc. But who ever claimed the opposite? Scientists are people and the scientific community and the methods they use tries to minimize human error as much as possible. The bottom line here is, how are we going to find answers to the questions important to us? What methods will we use to find cures to diseases, learn about distant stars, uncover the past history of the Earth, or even why the sky is blue? Science is our best tool for answering questions like these.

For other more philosophical questions like "what is the right thing to do?" or "what is beauty?" maybe science can't find the answers currently, but I wouldn't rule it out completely. However, if we can't use science to find and verify the answers, what exactly will we use in its place? How will we know any answers we find are correct? I don't see any alternatives to the scientific method.

The Other End

Last year I listened to an interesting podcast interview with John Shirley where he talked about his new book that he was working on at the time. That book, The Other End, has finally come out and I read it over the weekend. It's a great antidote to all those nasty Christian rapture books. In the pattern of Ken McLeod calling The Singularity "the rapture for nerds" I think the "end" in The Other End is like the rapture for atheists.

If the end of the world were to come as described in this book, I don't think any atheists would complain much. Some of the elements in the story seemed to be plucked from my own day dreams about people really waking up to what is going on around them. Looking up a name in the book lead me to this interesting Wikipedia page about an imperfect creator god.

Another book I zipped through over the weekend was Steven C. (not J.) Gould's latest Jumper novel, Griffin's Story. The first, Jumper and it's sequel Reflex are definitely near the top of my all time favorite books. They are making a movie based on Jumper due to come out in 2008. As expected the movie's plot has diverged quite a bit from the original books. In Griffin's Story, Steven Gould took the interesting tactic of making it consistent with the movie, and not the original world of the first two books. I thought that would annoy me, but the inconsistencies were minor and didn't bother me much. I finished the book way too quickly and I certainly hope he plans to write more Jumper books in the future.

Definition Wars

My last post recommended an essay by Theodore Drange. Although the essay was interesting I was having some trouble agreeing with his definitions of atheism and agnosticism. I prefer the definition described in Matthew's essay here. I thought I would ask Matthew his opinion but there didn't seem to be any contact information. So I decided to e-mail the only other atheist Matthew active online that I know of, Matt Dillahunty, who is president of the Atheist Community of Austin. (Check out their podcasts and videos!)

It ends up they are not the same Matthew, but Matt D. was kind enough to write me a detailed critcism of Drange's essay. I will take the liberty of quoting a small section of his e-mail here with regard to the proposition "God Exists" (ignoring the first option of noncognitivism):

2. The individual accepts the proposition
3. The individual does not accept the proposition.

Note that this does not mean that the individual accepts the contradictory proposition. That proposition is separate. I do not believe that any other option exists. Someone can BE noncommittal, by refusing to state what their position is - but they either accept the proposition or they don't. There is no other option.

So I will continue to use "atheism" to mean "non-theism", because that term is more useful. I also think it is more politically expedient to make atheism an umbrella term including all non-believers.

Agnostic Confusion

If you aren't confused enough yet over the various definitions and flavors of atheism, check out the Wikipedia article on agnosticism. Good stuff! There are strong, weak, apathetic and other kinds of agnostics. I found a great quote there by Bertrand Russell:

As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God.

On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

I'm glad to see I'm on the same wavelength as him.

The article also has a description of one my favorite labels in this area, "ignosticism." I see that some philosophers think it is impossible to be an ignostic and an atheist or agnostic at the same time. Hmm. The link to Theodore Drange led me to his essay here, which was probably the best discussion of the various challenges in defining these words that I have read yet. I highly recommend it.

Maybe I could rename this blog "that noncognitivist with regard to god-talk guy's blog"!

Wading In

A few days ago I couldn't help posting part of a previous post as a comment to this post on Scott Adam's Dilbert blog. Other atheists like PZ and Austin have already jumped all over it. Since replying to anyone in the hundreds of comments there is a lost cause I will reply here to the person, "Mark", who wrote the following in response to me:

No, I'd say we're agnostic: we neither believe there is a god nor believe there isn't one. We are without belief. Agnostic. We can
a) remain without belief
b) gain a belief
If we gain a belief, it can be
a) for the "right" god.
b) for the "wrong" god.
c) for no god.
mind you, there are shadings there too.

This reply was referring to my story about people being born atheist, and then choosing to become theist, or remain atheist later in life. Once again people don't realize you can be both atheist and agnostic, and insist on defining the umbrella term of atheism as the specific kind of atheism, called strong atheism. Also Mark's definition of "agnostic" isn't correct, which actually refers to knowledge not belief.

However I wonder if we can be born agnostic, since to be agnostic means to claim you don't have knowledge about something. I don't think babies can do that. But babies can lack belief, and be implicit atheists. It isn't until the person replies "No, I don't think so." in response to a theistic claim that they become explicit atheists, though not necessarily strong atheists.

And before you comment or send e-mails, YES we atheists are changing the meaning of "atheism" as it is commonly used. So what? The whole point of the change is that it makes more sense philosophically and the word becomes more useful. Besides the word has changed in the past. The Romans were calling early Christians "atheists" for crying out loud.

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Update: I should have said "correcting" not "changing". See Austin's comment below for clarification.

Quotes - #1

A while ago I got Jack Huberman's book The Quotable Atheist. In this series of blog posts I will give you my favorite quotes from the book (page numbers included). Here we go with the first one:

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p. 13
Susan B. Anthony

"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

Born Atheist

I actually did get to the NYC Atheists table on Saturday but I don't think I have enough material for a full report. Instead I will just write the little story I tell to define atheism. I'm often using it because I am arguing with these "militant" agnostics over semantics.

Everyone is born an atheist. How could we not be? We know nothing about any kind of gods or supernatural deities. These atheist babies grow up, learn to talk and start communicating with other people. At some point young people hear a story about a god. If these baby atheists believe the story, they are now theists. If they don't believe the story, they remain atheists. In other words, atheism is the default position.

So many people disagree with this definition. They think atheism is the "faith" that no gods exists. They claim I (and most other self described atheists) are changing the definition. I don't know if we are or not, but it doesn't matter. This basic definition of equating atheism to non-theism is more useful. Making atheism equal so called "strong atheism" makes the word useless.

Anyway, it all depends on the definition of "god" under discussion. First I'm an ignostic. For the purpose of argument over vague descriptions of gods I am an agnostic. For definite god models based on ancient myths I am an atheist.