Dispatches from the Creation Wars

Heh, tablet form. Excellent pun. I'm not big on moral codes. They seem to be more of a distraction than anything. But as far as such things go, it's a pretty good one. At least it's fairly consistent with my values.

Posted by: Abby Normal | March 16, 2010 9:47 AM

I'm not sure I like them that much. I mean, they're better than the bible, but how hard is that?

As a comparison, here are the "ten offers of evolutionary humanism" by Michael Schmidt-Salomon:

1) Obey neither foreign nor local "gods", but the ethical ideal of lessening the suffering in the world. If you have science, philosophy and art, you don't need religion.

2) Be fair to your neighbour and to the one furthest away from you. You don't have to love everybody, but respect that every human being has the right to follow his own ideas of a good life and a good death, as long as he doesn't harm another's interests in the same.

3) Don't be afraid of authorities, but be brave enough to use your mind! (Sapere aude, you know)

4) Don't lie, cheat, steal, kill – unless there's no other way to further humanistic ideals. Not lying under the Nazi regime, for example, was unethical.

5) Stop moralizing. "Good" and "Evil" don't exist, but only humans with different interests, conditions and experiences.

6) Don't immunize yourself against criticism.

7) Never be too sure of yourself, but also doubt the doubt itself – our modern knowledge may turn out to be wrong, but you should also stand up for what you believe. Just be open for the better argument so you neither follow dogmatism nor relativism.

8) Don't follow tradition blindly, but use information from all sides before making a decision.

9) Enjoy your life because it probably is the only one you get.

10) Dedicate yourself to a "greater cause", become part of the tradition of those, who want(ed) to make the world a better and more hospitable place.

from here

Posted by: Patrick | March 16, 2010 10:15 AM

There's a certain irony in Will Wheaton exhorting others to not be dicks.

Posted by: gary l. day | March 16, 2010 10:35 AM

Hard to take Hitchens over Carlin on this one.

Posted by: FishyFred | March 16, 2010 11:07 AM

bullfighter @ 6:

I am rather tired of people making this assertion and never coming up with a single valid example to back it up. Please support or retract.

Not enough time for a convincing argument nor will I retract merely because I'm unable to defend my position at this time. I will note one of Hitchens' books claiming Thomas Jefferson was an atheist as one illustrative example of his making an argument where it was clear one of the foundations of his argument was not well-understood by him; I concede that one observation alone is insufficient. The point I'm making here isn't merely that he got Jefferson's views on God wrong, it's that he was posing as an expert on Jefferson where he was at best a neophyte coupled to his willingness to buttress his argument with a point that was not valid.

Here's a basic rule I've developed about such posing, with considerable help from DaveL here. My argued rule which is generally presented here and not fine-tuned to Hitchen's argument:

If a person makes an argument using assertions that are not generally accepted and which they haven't validated are true: is it a lie regardless of the veracity of the assertions? Yes, at a minimum the person is lying regardless of the accuracy of their assertions given that they're insinuating to their audience a certain subject(s) expertise they don't possess. At worst if the assertions are not true they're also lying about both the assertions and therefore the validity of their argument.
It should also be noted that if their assertions are not true, the result to their audience is the same regardless of whether they're consciously lying or lying by remaining willfully ignorant on the very assertions they raised.

bullfighter - Actually I'm surprised that people in this forum aren't cognizant of the fact that Hitchens and Dawkins often go down a rhetorical rabbit hole where its difficult for them to dig out. I admire both guys and consider their arguments, but I in no way find them "A team" material in terms of the quality of their arguments. As advocates yes; but that requires a different set of standards where the quality of the argument can be less optimal if other qualities are superior.

A second example is Hitchens' recommendations on improvements to the Ten Commandments we see here. While I don't have a problem with it given the context I framed his article in my previous comment, he does open himself up to criticism when he could have easily foregone such merely by either framing his points better or foregoing his own recommendations if he was too lazy to come up with a more defensible set, these obviously aren't. This sort of sophomoric sloppiness is one you don't see Sam Harris do. I easily predicted he opened himself up and sure enough Patrick @ 3 pounced. I'm a big believer in not providing your opponents ammunition; Dawkins and Hitchens have yet to learn that lesson or don't perceive such failures as critical to their standing.

Posted by: Michael Heath | March 16, 2010 11:29 AM

“Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not sinful - just stupid).”

Posted by: chilidog | March 16, 2010 11:43 AM

@Michael Heath: I hadn't read your comment (I was busy translating, I guess), or maybe I wouldn't even had posted the ten offers. But I do think that if Hitchens goes beyond criticizing the ten commandments and postulating his own, I'd rather he either spends more time honing them or he clarifies that these are ten he "came up with on the spot" as a means of showing how easy it is to do better than the bible.

I mean, even in Hitchens's case I can think of at least one command that should be clarified in a similar way that "thou shalt not steal" should, i.e. there are situations where that might not be so bad.

I have kind of tired to Hitchens, too, because he likes to go for the throat even when none is presented, i.e. sometimes he insists on certain arguments that he clearly brings up every time even when other arguments, or simply refraining from these, would be better. And while he's fun to watch, I don't think he really considers an opponent's arguments as well as he should. There's a reason why in this British debate that made the rounds a short time back, it was Stephen Fry who really impressed, not Hitchens. As for Dawkins, he's a scientist, and sometimes you notice that. I don't like Harris, though I can say the one debate with him I listened to, he was excellent.

Posted by: Patrick | March 16, 2010 12:21 PM

@Patrick "Stop moralizing"
How on earth is it possible to lead an ethical life and avoid "moralizing" in some way? Even in this list of commandments, Michael Schmidt-Salomon moralizes against obeying gods, lying, cheating, stealing, immunizing yourself against criticism, being too sure of yourself, etc.

Posted by: Sorcha | March 16, 2010 12:45 PM

I don't think Hitchens is worthy of "A team" status when it comes to debates between atheists and religionists.

Depends on the venue. In a long-form scholarly debate, I tend to agree with Michael Heath. If you want someone to go on Fox News for sixty seconds and defend the atheist position, though, Hitchens is your man.

I think it is exactly because of his willingness to fiercely pursue an argument with a weak or poorly-understood foundation that he is able to acquit himself so well in the fast-paced fact-lite world of cable news and other forms of mainstream media. He makes his point fast, furious, and forcefully, with no apologies, no equivocation, and no caveats. He tends to be difficult to take out of context, because each statement (when he's on these types of show) is fully self-contained. There's no nuanced case-building, just raw talking points delivered with passion and fury.

He's also damn entertaining in that context. His appearances on CNN, and later Fox News, in the days following Jerry Falwell's death were epic.

I agree overall though. And some of Hitchens' views on politics are downright disturbing. He's not someone I would look to for enlightenment, or for a bulletproof argument. Just entertainment.

Posted by: James Sweet | March 16, 2010 1:21 PM

Michael Heath "I don't think Hitchens is worthy of "A team" status when it comes to debates between atheists and religionists."
In debates, Hitchens is good when he's operating in his narrow band of "All good morality comes from God/s/-slash-You can't be good without God" polemics. Then all he needs are his twenty or so anecdotes about people behaving badly.
On TV he's good, because his quips and barbs are ideal for that format.

"Mainly because I find he lacks the knowledge of history and science to make optimal arguments..."
I hate to say it, but he's self-righteous and that makes him lazy. I don't think he researched William Lane Craig's arguments at all before he debated him, for instance.
He confuses good (but anecdotal) counters against a specific subset of arguments as refutation of all arguments. Which is why, after the first round, he steadily lost ground (and, irritatingly, repeatedly weaseled his way out of it, unconsciously I think, by attacking arguments Craig wasn't making).
But that's tangential. Probably.
More tangentially, even with Hitchens' weaknesses, most anti-Hitchens worst insult against him appears to be pointing out that he's a (functional) alcoholic.

bullfighter "I am rather tired of people making this assertion and never coming up with a single valid example to back it up. Please support or retract."
I, meanwhile, am rather tired of stairs.

Patrick "There's a reason why in this British debate that made the rounds a short time back, it was Stephen Fry who really impressed, not Hitchens. As for Dawkins, he's a scientist, and sometimes you notice that. I don't like Harris, though I can say the one debate with him I listened to, he was excellent."
The Intelligent Squared debate? Fry was good.

James Sweet "And some of Hitchens' views on politics are downright disturbing. He's not someone I would look to for enlightenment, or for a bulletproof argument. Just entertainment."
He's the kind of guy you want in opposition but not in charge. He's Ron Paul.

Posted by: Modusoperandi | March 16, 2010 3:04 PM

Sorcha @ 15: "How on earth is it possible to lead an ethical life and avoid "moralizing" in some way?"

The list Patrick was quoting implicitly defines the word "moralizing" as meaning classifying people into the categories "good" and "evil." This is distinct from classifying ideas as "good" and "bad."

Posted by: Miko | March 16, 2010 3:30 PM

Michael Heath @9:

You have not done anything to support your original assertions, which were

1. that Hitchens "lacks the knowledge of history and science to make optimal arguments" in debates between atheists and religionists; and

2. that Hitchens and Dawkins are "sloppy thinker[s] who [make] arguments using points [they don't] fully understand".

I think it should be obvious that you cannot support (1) by merely showing that Hitchens doesn't know some historical or scientific fact; you must also show an example where it led to his using a suboptimal argument in a discussion. You are free to consider it ridiculous to write that Jefferson was an atheist (but more about it later), but it is far from clear that such writing hurt Hitchens' position in a debate.

As for the "second example", why his present article on the Ten Commandments would even be an example supporting your assertion is completely unclear.

To support your assertion (2), you have to show that both Hitchens and Dawkins are sloppy thinkers who argue points they don't understand. This assertion has become a cliche among self-appointed critics of Dawkins, and as far as I can tell, every one of them has only proven that they, rather than Dawkins, don't understand what they are talking about.

I am especially puzzled by your comparison of Hitchens and Dawkins to Harris, whose arguments are generally much weaker and based on less knowledge. And I will provide a concrete example: almost all information about Islam that Harris relied on in The End of Faith comes from Bernard Lewis, hardly an unbiased source. (I think Harris has improved since TEOF, and I am more often than not in agreement with him, but I am often unwilling to defend his arguments because they are too weak.)

Finally, the somewhat off-topic bit about Jefferson and atheism. I don't know in what context Hitchens wrote that, but I can imagine contexts in which such a statement can be defensible. It is probably true that most of Jefferson's contemporaries would have considered him an atheist if they had been aware of his beliefs. And one can probably speak of belief in historical context, relative to generally accepted dogma of the time. (An analogy might be one's position on race - e.g. Lincoln was a pretty abhorrent racist by today's standards, but definitely progressive in his time.)

Posted by: bullfighter | March 16, 2010 4:04 PM

bullfighter @ 23 - your entire rebuttal is either an argument from ignorance (your own), where I have absolutely zero desire to inform you, e.g., the extremely well-known Hitchens gaffe on Jefferson (in this forum as least given Ed posted on it), or a misrepresentation of what I previously concluded. Why should I respond to someone who originally demanded I retract a personally held opinion where no compelling evidence argues I should? Especially when Patrick's first comment perfectly validated my observation arguing for Hitchens' intellectual sloppiness.

You want to bring it, fine, bring it; but a demand insisting someone "retract" a mere opinion without providing any reason to do so is not very compelling. In fact it reminds me of the blonde whining everyone should just leave Britany Spears alone.

Posted by: Michael Heath | March 16, 2010 4:20 PM

Michael Heath @25: It appears that either you have temporarily forgotten how to read English, or I, perhaps guided by divine providence, wrote my last few posts in Aramaic.

You describe as my "entire rebuttal" an argument that I consider at best marginally relevant, and I thus relegated it to what was essentially a footnote in my post (and clearly introduced it as such). I have no desire to turn this into an argument about Jefferson's beliefs. What relevance could such an argument have? However, I was curious what that "extremely well-known gaffe" was, so I looked around and found both Ed's post and the Hitchens-Brenner exchange, as well as various reviews of Hitchens' book on Jefferson. And I concluded that Ed rather stretched what Hitchens had written, and you stretched it further, so that "Hitchens' gaffe" is better described as "Heath's misstatement".

Sorry, but I do not accept the explanation that your assertions are merely a "personally held opinion". Especially not when you (gratuitously) added Dawkins to your criticism. It fits too well in the pattern I've seen dozens of times in the press and on blogs - asserting that Dawkins is sloppy or doesn't understand what he attacks, but not providing any reasoned support for the assertion. So even if you came to this line of non-argument spontaneously, you are still acting as a disciple of a dogmatic school - until you start providing actual arguments.

Posted by: bullfighter | March 16, 2010 5:14 PM

Michael Heath "I enjoyed their debate partly because of that and also because I was learning rather than reliving the constant drama of fisking false assertions on the theist side like we almost always encounter."
Again, it's been a while since I read it, but it sounds like both sides actually cared what the other side thinks.

"Re your point about it being written, another reason I even considered it."
There are bad written debates (Lukeprog v Vox Day comes to mind, where Luke started out knowing little if anything about Vox's unique theological bent and Vox, being Vox, acted like Vox. They may have improved as the "conversation" continued, but I lost interest in watching them fall into the rabbit hole of semantics too quickly to care), but I continue to agree that written is a much better format for dialogue, vice dual monologues that happen to share a similar if opposing theme.

"[Hitchens is] fine in interviews on TV, not so good on a panel."
No. Hitchens is great in TV's talking heads format and good, if limited, in panels. He's got a number of prescripted quips and, as long as the other guy is foolish enough to follow his lead, he appears more well-prepared and smarterlike than he really is. Also, in book form, he never seems to use citations (at least with god is not great), which makes him come off as the crabby opinion of one man instead of crabby and journalisty (which, as with much I've written, Firefox insists is not a word). In other words, the less I heard from him, the more I respected him, which really is not how that should go.
Some people are narrow but deep, others wide but shallow, Hitchens' is an odd mix of narrow but shallow but somehow it works anyway as long as he has some control over the reins or he's in a format where his polemic won't be expected to vary and this is somewhat of a run-on sentence so if you read out loud you probably got light-headed a while ago and hit your head on your desk. On an unrelated note, when you wake up your wallet may be missing.
Oh, and someone stole your car.

Posted by: Modusoperandi | March 17, 2010 1:15 AM

Abby Normal:

I'm not big on moral codes. They seem to be more of a distraction than anything.

In the words of Esme Weatherwax, good and evil are of little use to someone with a strong sense of right and wrong.

Posted by: James K | March 17, 2010 2:19 AM

Valhar2000 asks:

Why is it okay for me to have a conversation with a friend in a restaurant or a train, unless that friend happens to be somewhere else and we're using cell phones?

Perhaps because you talk far louder on your cell phone than you do when talking in person coupled to the staccato bursts of noise experienced by bystanders when someone is talking on a phone rather than two people talking in person.

Posted by: Michael Heath | March 17, 2010 7:17 AM

Debates are stupid anyway, who cares.

Posted by: ChrisZ | March 17, 2010 1:00 PM

Many of these boil down to "Be kind."

Posted by: Paul Murray | March 17, 2010 9:30 PM

Just to spice it up a bit..

Whip out your phone for an "emergency call" on a train in Japan and start talking on it (for legitimate reasons.) Lemme know how that goes when you get back to the states.

Also entitled, "How My Blackberry Almost Got My Ass Kicked By 10 Midget Old Ladies."

Posted by: Buffoon | March 19, 2010 1:36 AM