Kvetch kvetch kvetch
A bit more on Shermer, in a very level humble non-fundamentalist tone, because it’s not that I want to enforce orthodoxy with a big heavy stick, it’s that…I disagree with him about some things. I’m not trying to expel him into the outer darkness, I just disagree with him about some things. I’ll say what they are, because I feel like it.
[I]t seems to me that believers who accept Newton’s theory of gravity as the means by which God creates stars, planets, solar systems, galaxies, and universes, can just as readily accept Darwin’s theory of evolution as the means by which God creates life.
I said yesterday in comments but will say again – nuh uh. Even after we change ‘evolution’ to ‘natural selection’ and ‘life’ to ‘species,’ still nuh uh. Not just as readily at all, because natural selection is horrible. Gravity has its flaws too, as you’ll notice if you ever fall off a cliff, but compared to natural selection, it’s sweetness itself. Let’s don’t forget what natural selection is, shall we? It’s that thing that makes organisms compete with each other to see who can be first to eat the other. It’s not nice. It’s not kind. If it was all God’s idea, God has a nasty way of doing things. It’s just not true that it’s as easy for a theist to accept as gravity is. Shermer must know this; he must have written in a hurry; but if he did he did – the piece is still there, and it’s worth disagreeing with.
After the bit I disagreed with yesterday, about what ‘works’ in some undefined sense, he goes on to say
if it is your goal to educate everyone on earth to the power and wonders of science (as it is the Skeptics Society and www.skeptic.com) and to employ science to solve social, political, economic, medical and environmental problems (as it is my personal goal), then we need as many people as we can get on board toward a common goal, whatever it may be (starvation in Africa, disease in India, poverty in South America, global warming everywhere…pick your battle).
I didn’t notice it until later yesterday, after I’d already commented, but that’s an incredibly ambitious claim when combined with the rest of what he says. His claim is that we need as many people as we can get on board toward some common goal, any common goal, it doesn’t even matter what common goal it is – and in order to reach this highly questionable goal, we have to do the accommodationist thing. What that boils down to is that the real goal is simply to get as many people as we can on board toward whatever, and everything else is subordinate to that bizarre goal.
I don’t think he actually meant to say that – it’s too absurd. But he did say it, and I suspect that’s because that is what the accommodationist mindset does – it puts the frantic worry about alienating some number of people before everything else, until it finally finds itself exclaiming madly that we have to unite everyone, everyone I tell you! and that therefore no atheists can say anything that might be disconcerting to anyone. It’s nuts – but I think that’s what the thinking is. I think accommodationists are fundamentally allergic to a certain kind (and a certain kind only) of potentially ‘controversial’ ideas. I think their fretting about this ends up eroding their awareness that total agreement about anything is impossible, and that it’s futile to try to rule out disagreement ahead of time, and that the attempt is not only futile but the dire enemy of free thought and inquiry and speech.
Russell urged us to read Shermer’s essay in 50 Voices of Disbelief, so I did. I have to tell you, I have some disagreements there, too. I’m sorry! I’m a noodge! I can’t help it.
For example…he says on p 69
Most people equate ‘atheist’ not only with someone who believes that there is no God (which is technically not a tenable position because one cannot prove that there is no God; that is, you cannot prove a negative)…
Well that’s not right. It’s perfectly tenable to believe things that you cannot prove. It’s rash, and untenable if you like, to claim certainty about such things, but to believe them? Of course not. I believe that there is no invisible dragon sitting on my desk. Can I prove it? No. I believe it nevertheless. Shermer must have meant someone who ‘claims to know’ or ‘is certain’ – but he didn’t say that.
Another item, on the same page:
A second reason I don’t believe in God is emotional: I’m comfortable with not having answers to everything. By temperament, I have a high tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty.
That jumped out at me because he had just finished telling us that he was a devout Christian as a teenager – far more devout than his nominally-religious parents. He goes into some detail about that, and the result is that the claim about his temperament sounds very odd. It sounds self-flattering and unconvincing.
I’m just saying – Shermer isn’t a terribly careful writer. I’ve thought this before, about both his belief books. So I’m not doing some anti-accommodationism bandwagon number by disagreeing with him; I just disagree with him about some things, that’s all.
50 Voices of Disbelief is terrific, by the way. Read Sean Carroll’s piece. Read Austin Dacey’s. Read Tom Clark’s. Read them all.
I have a wish.
I wish people who place themselves on the ‘atheist side of the fence’ would stop saying “I don’t believe in God”. Why can’t they train themselves to say “I don’t believe in *the existence of any gods*”. ‘God’ is a god’s name (I’m tempted here to say “for Christ’s sake!”). If I say “I don’t believe in Jess”, it means “I don’t doubt that Jess exists but I don’t have any confidence in him”, or at least that’s what I believe most people understand by it. “I don’t believe in the existence of people” is fundamentally (ooooh, I used the ‘fundy’ word) different. Personally, I don’t believe in the existence of any gods, demons, ghosts, angels, devils … the list goes on, but to keep it brief I just say “I don’t believe in the existence of any gods”. If anyone ever hears me say “I don’t believe in God”, please hit me over the head with a large piece of 4 by 2!
End rant.
I have not like Shermer’s writings in his books, on the web, in “50 Voices” or anywhere.
“Most people equate ‘atheist’ not only with someone who believes that there is no God”
That is not correct at all. I don’t care what most people equate. Atheism is the lack of belief in any deity. It is NOT a belief.
Ophelia, I disagree with you on the definition of natural Selection. NS is NO ‘It’s that thing that makes organisms compete with each other…”, but is the process that favors characteristics that cause more offspring.
correction:
NS is NOT ‘It’s …
Shermer, it seems is a strange admixture of the careful and the careless. In fact, given his position in his 50 Voices essay (hereafer 50 V), the accommodationism of his latest article is inexplicable.
I haven’t read much of Shermer – none of his books, for example – so I can’t give a definitive answer, but reading his essay in 50 Voices he seems to take a very different slant.
First of all is the rather peculiar idea that you can’t believe that there is no God because you can’t prove a negative. Well, in that sense of ‘prove’ you can’t prove a positive either, in an absolutely strict sense of the word. As philosophers of science will tell you, scientific propositions are not proved, but they possess various levels of warrant and confirmation, until they become as close to facts as we are likely to get (what Dawkins calls a theorum); but even then they are open to revision in the light of new information.
Shermer’s slant, however, becomes clear when he says: “Atheists as well affirm the belief that God’s existence is knowable.” (50 V, 74) This is an exceptionally strange of putting things. What atheists claim is that no known argument or proof that there is a supernatural being (with various familiar characteristics) is sound.
But the reason for Shermer’s taking this approach is soon made clear, for soon after making this claim he goes on to formulate what he calls Shermer’s Last Law, which is that “any sufficiently advanced Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is [would be?] indistinguishable from God.” (50 V, 75) I won’t go into his argument here, which he concludes with a flourish (Q.E.D.). So much for his care.
But then he suggests that it makes sense for the religious to take the whole idea of evolution on board. Here are his words:
Given Shermer’s Last Law, what does this mean? Since any sufficiently advanced ET Intelligence is indistinguishable from God, what does ‘divinity’ mean in this appeal to the religious? For Shermer the terms ‘ET Intelligence’ and ‘God’ are convertible, and so, strictly speaking, we have no further use for the concept of God at all (since the word ‘god’ refers to a transcendent intelligence, and this would be indistinguishable from a natural one). This is not just scepticism, as Shermer says it is (in his strange claim that you can’t disbelieve something because you can’t prove a negative); this is atheism with a vengeance. For even if we had evidence for an incredibly advanced intelligence in the universe, the assumption must be that this intelligence is the product of natural forces, and not a god at all. So it will never be reasonable to believe that gods exist, and it will always make sense to deny that they do.
This, of course, may not be true; but it is surely the strict implication of what Shermer says.
NEBob, I know; what I said wasn’t meant to be a definition of NS, it was meant to say what it was for the purposes of what Shermer was talking about. It was meant to say what it is about NS that makes it much less easy for theists to accept than gravity is.
I am reading “50 Voices” at the moment. I am rationing myself to no more than two essays a day.
I very much enjoyed your contribution Ophelia. I have not yet got to Shermer’s.
Thanks Matt!
Yes, Matt, Ophelia’s contribution is really great. The only bad thing about it is that it was put at the beginning. Once you’ve read it, you tend to say, ‘So why read the rest of the book?’ It’s got to be one of the most dismissive essays ever written about God. One of the good things about it is that God is always it, just it (even though we “know” it’s male)!
We could define ‘intelligence’ at its lowest level as the ability of an organism to respond to stimuli. But as even plants have that, it does not provide much differentiation. Leaving out the plants, we could switch it to the ability to make decisions based on data or information of some kind, ie adaptive behaviour. In the myriad interactions of all the organisms of the biosphere, countless decisions are being made all the time and at every instant, as to what is ‘fittest’ for every given situation and what is not, and from the level of leviathans like the blue whale right down perhaps to single-celled animals like amoebae. Natural selection runs on much the same course, right down to individual molecules in biochemical pathways. To this exent the biosphere has displayed intelligence, and therein lies whatever validity there is in the notion of ‘intelligent design’. The biosphere is forever redesigning itself.
This explains why isolated species which have lived happily in their niches for long periods of time, like say ground-nesting birds on Lord Howe Island, suffer population crashes when a new predator species like the common rat is introduced. If the original ecosystem is to be preserved, (intelligent) human intervention is necessary, ideally involving total elimination of the new predator.
But it does not stop there.
Zoroastrianism was the first monotheistic religion, if the claims of its dwindling band of modern adherents are to be believed. It has survived in little isolated pockets in Iran and elsewhere; but under the intense competition for resources and outright predation manifested by adherents of other faiths, particularly Islam and Hinduism, it
has dwindled like the once-mighty Siberian tiger.
Five people were having a discussion about their separate beliefs: a Zoroastrian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Catholic and Michael Shermer. Shermer said “let’s put aside what we disagree about, and concentrate on what we agree on.” The others agreed to that, and the search for the common ground began. The infallibility of the Pope, the primacy of the Koran and the importance of pilgrimage to the sacred Ganges were quickly eliminated. Finally they found it: ‘we eat, or else we die; we grow or else we dwindle and disappear’.
“That’s it!” said the Catholic.
“God is great!” said the Muslim.
“His name is Ahura Mazda!” said the Zoroastrian.
“All the gods are great, but Krishna is the greatest!” said the Hindu.
“Go ye into all the world and convert the ignorant heathen!” said the Catholic.
“That’s why I’m a columnist,” said Michael Shermer.
Aw, shucks, Eric. [simpers]
“it at least seems possible for some people to take audiences into account without being tempted into slipping into the province of the noble lie”
Of course it does…but does anybody – or at least do most people – really need to be told that? Don’t most people just generally do that anyway? One name for it is code-switching – and everybody does that.
It seems safe to take it pretty much for granted that everybody wants to communicate effectively if she wants to communicate at all. As far as I could tell, Shermer was talking about more than that.
It seemingly matters in the present case when looking at the rhetorical question in parentheses, “what if we don’t have a project apart from telling the truth as we see it?” (contrasted with taking care against alienating those who disagree). The Shermerian response is, “We ought to have this other code-switching side-project, too”.
And I don’t think it’s obvious, because frankly I think the worry expressed in the third paragraph in the above post cuts both ways for me. Sometimes I need to be told something like the above. But sometimes when people tell it to me, I feel justified in saying, “I’m being attacked from all sides for making a banal trivial point and have no energy left to give you anymore so slag off”. And it’s usually a mystery to me when I’m justified in saying the one or the other.
So, uh, in conclusion, life is full of contrasts.