Pharyngula

Posted by: Rorschach | September 2, 2010 9:11 AM

The God Delusion was a calm and measured book, and Richard Dawkins' talks are polite, rational events.

But he disagrees with believers, which obviously makes him strident and militant !!

Posted by: MosesZD | September 2, 2010 9:12 AM

I get so tired of the "Dawkins is polemic" crap. I've read a bunch of his books. It's like being savaged by a smart, wet noodle. If he was any more polite and considerate he'd be apologizing every paragraph for pointing out the obvious.

And yet douches like Moody, and now Plait, run around with their finger pointing. Much of which is unattributed because (1) it doesn't exist and (2) if they did, they get their ignorant asses handed to them.

Posted by: Reginald Selkirk | September 2, 2010 9:16 AM

Reuters article

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing..."

Posted by: Sastra | September 2, 2010 9:25 AM

I think one of the reasons Dawkins is so vilified (when Hawking isn't) is because Dawkins comes right out and says he wants to change people's minds about God. He doesn't back off and play the acceptable game of "I don't care what you believe as long as you don't interfere with science." Nor does he genuflect towards faith, and reassure people that he respects it and wouldn't want to "take it away" from anyone -- live and let live, let's agree to disagree, and so on.

As far as I know, Hawking hasn't gone at religion directly. He's reactive, as opposed to proactive, and hasn't contributed to the gnu atheist arguments against the value of faith itself. Judging by the reactions, such arguments are far more dangerous to religion and religious thought processes than a "measured" scientific chipping away of God's domain. The religious are too used to incorporating new discoveries into their theology, insisting that they always make God even better, by making faith more necessary. Undermine the idea that faith is a disciplined virtue, though, and you lose the ability to see spin-doctoring as intellectually respectable.

They fear that, and rightly so.

Posted by: hyperdeath | September 2, 2010 9:33 AM

Posted by cervantes:

Hawking most likely sticks to exposition of cosmology so it doesn't make them so uncomfortable.

You raise an interesting point.

One of the difficulties Dawkins faces, is that clueless objections to aspects of evolution have a certain amount of "intellectual" respectability. For example, when Mary Midgley or Alvin Plantinga spew their ignorant, rambling, incoherent drivel, they are lauded as being deep, insightful, philosophically sophisticated thinkers. Whilst flat-out anti-evolutionism has zero academic respectability, more subtle forms are respected. Therefore, many of Dawkins critics are given opportunities to sneer at his supposed unsophistication.

With cosmology, on the other hand, there is very little in the way of "academic" opposition. Therefore, critics of Hawking will have much less to hide behind.

Posted by: Peter Ashby | September 2, 2010 9:40 AM

I used the term 'Devil Dawkins' in arguing with Mark Vernon when he took over Andrew Brown's blog on CiF Belief. I wanted to start a book on every instance of him or Brown ritually genuflecting to ward off the devil Dawkins by invoking him egregiously in every article. Brown must have been reading because he has scrupulously avoided spurious Dawkins references since. So it is possible to shame these people into not going down that path.

Posted by: 42over0 | September 2, 2010 9:44 AM

But what created gravity?

I'm as Gnu Atheist as they come, but this "solution" to the existence of the universe is no solution at all, as it presupposes the (pre-)existence of certain physical laws. Hawking offers no explanation for why those particular laws of physics, or even any laws of physics, exist. It's like being asked "Why are there chickens?" and saying "Because there are eggs."

Perhaps Hawking's argument is a bit more encompassing than a one line quote from a Times article would lead you to believe. It's just a possibility.

Posted by: grudgedk | September 2, 2010 9:52 AM

It looks to me as if they are trying to mollify their readers by setting up a Saint Hawking while reassuring everyone that they can still beat up on Devil Dawkins.

But what created gravity?

Posted by: Sajanas | September 2, 2010 10:00 AM

In several of his other books, Dawkins has called creationists ignorant and idiotic, though the God Delusion was by far more measured in his language than in books where he is addressing creationists (and lets face it, they are ignorant idiots).

Frankly, I'm sure if Hawking had to put up with the kind of assholes that bother evolutionary biologists all day, he's probably call a spade a spade too.

Its curious just how much Hawking we have these days. I recently read The Black Hole War, by Leonard Susskind, which describes how Hawking made a lot of assumptions about black holes that were gradually proven false. Assuming the book isn't super partisan, it seems like Hawking's illness, while not preventing him from thinking, does prevent him from collaborating and conversing, which really holds him back from making real advances today. His best work was made back in the late 70s and 80s, when he was still able to participate better, and I wonder if his recent forays into science popularization haven't been because its harder for him to be involved in the leading edge of theory anymore.

Posted by: ibyea | September 2, 2010 10:03 AM

What a dobule standard. If you ask me, Hawkings said the same thing Richard Dawkins would have said. So I don't know how Dawkins is strident and Hawkings is, quote: "voice of reason." If you ask me, both of them seem equally expressive in their beliefs that there is no god.

Posted by: Gregory Greenwood | September 2, 2010 10:07 AM

Sastra @ 7;

As far as I know, Hawking hasn't gone at religion directly. He's reactive, as opposed to proactive, and hasn't contributed to the gnu atheist arguments against the value of faith itself. Judging by the reactions, such arguments are far more dangerous to religion and religious thought processes than a "measured" scientific chipping away of God's domain. The religious are too used to incorporating new discoveries into their theology, insisting that they always make God even better, by making faith more necessary. Undermine the idea that faith is a disciplined virtue, though, and you lose the ability to see spin-doctoring as intellectually respectable.

I think you are on to something here. Rightwing theists love 'Invisible Hand' explanations, whether it applies to Adam Smith's Invisible Hand of the free market that is always twisted by libertarians and other (often religious) types to explain the spooky supposed super-efficiency of the free market that renders such things as universal healthcare not only unecessary but evil (remember Palin's hysterical flailings about 'death panels'?), or the supposed 'Invisible Hand' of god that is allegedly responsible for the creation of everything yet conveniently leaves no glowing, divine fingerprits.

When a theist listens to Hawkings say that god is not necessary they can smile and say;

"Well, god may not be scientifically necessary, but that is not the same as proving there is no god. He moves in mysterious ways, you know. Part of the genius of god is that there is no obvious signpost pointing to him, that is what gives faith its value blah, blah, blah for those who have faith, no proof is necessary, for those who lack it, no proof is possible, blah, blah, blah..."

This is not as easy a trick to pull off when you face the ultra-polite Professor Dawkins who all the same points out that religion has caused endless harm throughout human history and continues to do so, and that if, despite the absence of any and all evidence, god does somehow exist then he/she/it has committed innumerable crimes of omission by allowing all manner of unnecessary suffering in the world, a great deal of it inflicted upon the innocent in his/her/its name. If one proclaims the existence of an 'Invisible Hand' deity, then the 'hand' here would necessarily be not only 'invisible', but also either impotent or belonging to a being that is evil.

This leaves theists with no wriggle room. They are confronted with both the ridiculous and pernicious attributes of their religion, and they do not like that, not one little bit. So, rather than actually engage with Dawkins on a basis of reason and logic (where they know that they would get oh-so politely eviscerated), they find it easier to try to demonise Dawkin's as a shrill, gnu atheist 'militant' no matter how polite and well measured his debating style is.

Posted by: KG | September 2, 2010 10:09 AM

Sajanas,

There's also the fact that Hawking is now 68. Not many theoretical physicists make significant contributions in their 60s.

His illness may also make it harder to attack and insult him in the personal terms used against Dawkins. Not much of a compensation for near-complete paralysis, admittedly!

Posted by: Gregory Greenwood | September 2, 2010 10:12 AM

Tulse @ 6;

But what created gravity?

Gravity? How the f**k does that work!?

I am sorry, Tulse, but I couldn't resist.

I know, I am weak...

Posted by: gussnarp | September 2, 2010 10:19 AM

@Tulse - I'm not sure it makes sense to ask why there are certain laws instead of others, or why there are any laws at all. Sure, we want to, we don't want a black box, and if we can actually find gravitons and muons and bosons to explain why things work the way they do, we should certainly do so, but when science fails to find an answer to the final "why" in the chain of "why"s I don't think for a second that we must insert something there. The final answer is either: "that's just the way it is because it is, the laws are fundamental and there's no sense in asking why they are there because they just are," or: "Goddidit." The second answer seems to satisfy some, but it really is no more satisfactory than the first. In fact, I think the first is more satisfactory by Occam's razor. God is a far more complex explanation than fundamental laws. And most importantly, fundamental laws provide a framework for understanding and testing that actually works, unlike god.

/incoherent rambling.

Posted by: gussnarp | September 2, 2010 10:23 AM

@#24 - But has your unscientific sample of people who find Dawkins strident actually read many of his books or just seen the media's representation of him?

Posted by: bcoppola | September 2, 2010 10:28 AM

OK, a serious comment: why is "polemical" bad? Isn't polemic an ancient and honorable form of rhetoric?

Could it be that some consider Dawkins "strident" simply because he's a really good polemicist?

Posted by: sqlrob | September 2, 2010 10:29 AM

Was anyone in physics ever positing that god was a necessary condition for the universe's existence? I think not

Newton comes to mind. Other than that, not really.

Posted by: qkslvrwolf | September 2, 2010 10:30 AM

NPR, of course, reported this morning that Stephen Hawkings had decided that science does think that god must exist, because there is evidence/room for "spontaneous creation".

I hate NPR.

Posted by: Skeptic | September 2, 2010 10:31 AM

I have The God Delusion. It is a well-argued case against religion. In places it is impolite. There are times it is improper to be polite.

Posted by: Paul W., OM | September 2, 2010 10:37 AM

While Sastra puts forth a reasonable hypothesis about Hawking's "measured" rhetoric vs. Dawkins, I think the answer is much simpler.

They've heard them both speak, and like dogs, they don't notice what's actually being said.

Hawking gives new meaning to "measured tone."

Posted by: hyperdeath | September 2, 2010 10:39 AM

Posted by: (googlemess) I actually agree with the majority of stuff Dawkins says, but the majority of people I've spoken to here (i.e. the UK, not Pharyngula) see him as unnecessarily strident.

Do they give examples?

In my experience, the majority of people who accuse Dawkins of being "strident" are either:

1. Completely unfamiliar with his works, and are just parroting what they've been told.

2. Indirectly telling him to shut up (and to stop criticising their religion) as is summarised by this article. As one of the comments puts it, many of these cautions against stridency amount to "please make it easier for us to ignore you".

Posted by: Tulse | September 2, 2010 10:44 AM

I'm not sure it makes sense to ask why there are certain laws instead of others, or why there are any laws at all.

Why not? We do so all the time for the other sciences, and often we determine that those laws arise because of properties of entities at a lower reductive level -- aspects of psychology arise because of biological properties, biological aspects are cause by properties of chemistry, and chemistry arises due to physical properties. The problem is that such reduction stops with physics.

when science fails to find an answer to the final "why" in the chain of "why"s I don't think for a second that we must insert something there

Of course not -- I most definitely was not arguing for a god-based explanation, as it has even more problems. My only claim is that physics can't be used to explain why physics exists.

Posted by: Tulse | September 2, 2010 10:48 AM

Was anyone in physics ever positing that god was a necessary condition for the universe's existence? I think not

I would think that, until the past century, many physicists were likely to be conventionally religious.

Posted by: hznfrst | September 2, 2010 10:54 AM

The answer to the question of "why are there physical laws" is that it's the wrong question;
the right or at least equally valid question is "why not?"

To ask why anything exists is probably unanswerable if you go deep enough. The Big Bang is very likely to have been a quantum fluctuation of "nothing" (which happens to consist of equal amounts of both positive and negative energy), but then you have to ask why quantum physics is the way it is.

Laurence Krauss gave a great talk about "A Universe from Nothing," which I highly recommend. He describes a perfectly-balanced nothingness as being the most *unlikely* state of things out of an infinite number of other possible states, like a pencil balanced on its point: possible but extremely unstable.

So we live in a chaotic, roiling universe which is practically everywhere hostile to life, but now and then comes up with a planet such as ours where we can torment ourselves with these questions.

Posted by: Sastra | September 2, 2010 10:59 AM

When religious people say that science can't answer the "why" for the laws of physics, it sounds like they are still looking for another underlying explanation. They aren't. Otherwise, you have an infinite regress of such "why" questions -- and deep down, they know that.

They are looking for a different kind of explanation. They want a psychological one. Furthermore, they want a satisfying psychological explanation -- that is, one that satisfies them, personally, as showing them their significant in a significant universe.

Once they are satisfied, they stop. No infinite regress. Asking any more "why" questions is put into the category of impudence and arrogance, like when a child demands accountability from a parent.

Posted by: Andyo | September 2, 2010 11:07 AM

Posted by: Rey Fox | September 2, 2010 10:38 AM

And it's nice to see Hawkins throw the gauntlet down. He had always seemed rather cagey on the existence of God issue.

I think not so much. Even as far back as A Brief History of Time (1988, but I read the 1998 updated edition) he didn't say "THERE IS NO GOD OMG!!!", but he did make it fairly clear that, when he say "God", he was referencing sayings about "God" by Einstein. And we know how Einstein felt about it.

He also tells an anecdote where the catholics invited scientists to the vatican:

At the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the Pope. He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference—the possibility that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death!

That book was the one that started my atheist ball rolling, btw. Way before Harris and Dawkins.

Posted by: KG | September 2, 2010 11:14 AM

It's like asking why pi is the ratio of a circle's diameter to it's circumference. It just is. - gussnarp

Not at all! That's only the ratio in Euclidean geometry - in spherical geometry it's anything between 2 and pi (including 2 but not pi in that range) depending on the circle, in hyperbolic geometry I think it can be any finite value greater than pi depending on the circle. As to why it has the value it does in Euclidean geometry, I think that follows from the much deeper truth that e^iπ+1=0 - but at that point, my sketchy knowledge of maths runs out completely!

Posted by: Gregory Greenwood | September 2, 2010 11:15 AM

Googlemess @ 24;

Um, in what way is Dawkins' style not polemical?

Strictly speaking, Professor Dawkin's style is polemical as the term is correctly applied. Unfortunately, 'polemic' is often used as a shorthand for 'militant', 'shrill' or, indeed, 'dickish'. This is especially the case when the phrase is used as a descriptor of Dawkins by theists.

He is one of the very few public figures who represents a religious view...

I think that should be a 'view on religion' lest we end up with confusion relating to the old theist claim that 'atheism is a religion too!'

...and he represents it more strongly, and more evangelistically than most do.

While I can see the temptation to use the term 'evangelist' in relation to a cogent argument for reason, I do not think that this is the correct term. Dawkins is simply expressing the position of reason and science, evangelism, in its usual usage, requires that one implores or even demands belief in an unevidenced, transcendental phenomenon. All Dawkins asks is that people accept scientifically understood reality.

Arguing very strongly and persistently against the status quo (CoE) in a very public fashion is polemics, regardless of how polite you are when doing it.

Just because something is the status quo does not make it right, and polemnicism is not always brash or unjustified. The Civil Rights movement in the US went very much against the status quo and was every bit as polemical as Dawkins, and yet few people would claim that it was unjustified.

I actually agree with the majority of stuff Dawkins says, but the majority of people I've spoken to here (i.e. the UK, not Pharyngula) see him as unnecessarily strident.

The validity of someone's argument is not weakened just because the majority consider that person 'strident'. The same could be said of almost every free-thinker and progressivist in history; they have all been seen as 'strident' because they discomfort the privileged 'elites' of society. Whether one tone-troll or a million, their argument is no more persuasive.

I am also a Brit, and I know first hand that there are those among my fellow British citizens who see 'good manners' as the ultimate virtue that trumps unimportant little things like actually dealing with reality rather than fantasy, and their standard of 'good manners' is ludicrously high, to the extent that one can be 'strident' simply by demurring from the majority position. I have little time for such people.

Posted by: https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmVT1LBhwmO9ej9LNg7a5e9d-AVJ8ezfmE | September 2, 2010 11:16 AM

Why do people assume 'polemic' is a bad thing? It means that one is arguing passionately; nobody needs to be ashamed of that. Or have the 'tone police' managed to convince everyone that arguments delivered with energy are always intimidating and therefore evil?

Posted by: stevieinthecity#9dac9 | September 2, 2010 11:22 AM

Indoctrinating children into a deluded belief system is child abuse. It impairs a child's ability to see the world as it really is and it takes years to deprogram them.

And it was "The root of all evil?" and it wasn't his choice to name the series that.

Posted by: Tulse | September 2, 2010 11:26 AM

I do think there may be an end point beyond which we simply can't reach back, and we may be nearing that point.

I agree, but that's why I find Hawking's claim deceptive at some level. He's not actually answering the question of "why something rather than nothing", if one includes the laws of physics in that "something". I'd be much happier if he simply said "We cannot know why the universe exists, but we can explain almost everything else about it."

Posted by: gussnarp | September 2, 2010 11:29 AM

I think hznfrst says it better than I did:

The answer to the question of "why are there physical laws" is that it's the wrong question;
the right or at least equally valid question is "why not?"

Posted by: gussnarp | September 2, 2010 11:36 AM

@KG #53 - I think my ignorance is starting to show. I'd better not get into any more technical details of this argument, because if my math knowledge doesn't go very far beyond the Euclidean, my physics and cosmology will make me look even worse...

Posted by: Andyo | September 2, 2010 11:56 AM

Katharine, I've never read anything from Hawking that indicates or even suggests he's religious. What you probably thought was based on deceptive quote-mining by religious people. You know, the same thing they do to Einstein. It's good that Hawking is unequivocally stating his view now too, cause the religious love to pull a Lady Hope on famous scientists. Einstein didn't have such a chance.

Posted by: christophe-thill.myopenid.com | September 2, 2010 12:16 PM

Talk about a scoop. What physicists, since the beginning of the 19th century, have ever needed the God hypothesis?

(By the way, nitpicking, nitpicking, it should be je n'ai pas eu, not je n'avais pas which denotes a continuous past).

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 2, 2010 12:27 PM

Hmm, some of the commenters here are saying Dawkins is sweetness and light and utterly polite, how could anyone ever think he is too strident, while others are saying yes, he's strident, and that's just what those dumb theists and the culture need to hear. Pick one, I say.

who in the fuck have you been hanging out with in the last year, Nick?

Mooney?

hint: Strident vs. Direct

look up what those two words mean and get back to us.

Man, after seeing your hitpieces on PT and some of your other comments over the last year, you have actually LOST ability to reason as a grad student instead of gained it.

How does THAT work?

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 2, 2010 12:30 PM

I'm not sure which specific statements you're referencing

This is the article Nick is basically directly spouting the Discovery Institute's strawman of:

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/118

Alas, poor Nick, I knew him well.

Posted by: Lambert | September 2, 2010 12:42 PM

they must really hate Richard Dawkins at The Times

No surprise there really. The Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch, biggest born again fundie in the business.

Posted by: Hurin, Nattering Nabob of Negativism. | September 2, 2010 12:48 PM

Dawkins' opponents always refer to his (entirely fictional) "polemical style" because they find his application of blunt, dispassionate, reason upsetting, and would rather dismiss it as anger. Its no different than when the theists accuse us of rejecting god because we "hate him and want to continue our sinful lives without submitting to his authority". Disbelief based on reason is not OK because it is valid disbelief. They'd rather think of us as spoiled and irrational children.

Hawking will get the same treatment if he continues needling them like this. He hasn't yet, because people already have a picture of him as being calm and scholarly, and don't generally associate him with atheism.

Posted by: AJ Milne OM | September 2, 2010 1:21 PM

I'd add about the Dawkins piece on child abuse, that this is, I guess, as good an illustration of what I was saying above as I'm likely to get...

That is: what he's saying absolutely needs to be said. It is, in fact, something that occurred to me long before that article appeared--that much of the psychological manipulation of children (tho', keep in mind, they're not the only targets, either) within religions is pretty horrific, easily arguably abusive... And not just the threats of hellfire, tho' those, sure as hell, if you'll pardon the expression, do get the attention.

And if you need to say that (and someone does), it's hard to picture saying it especially gently. Dawkins does about as well as I think you could fairly expect...

But to the religious, the idea itself is so awful--or at the very least one they really don't want to hear. So it's hardly relevant how Dawkins says it. They consider him 'shrill' all the same. Or they're going to insist they do, in an attempt to shut this kind of discussion up.

Had a funny experience of exactly this, too, just recently. Got me thinkin' again about how generally sick it really is.

Some crazy sect or other--some fundie church--left a circular at my door a little while ago. Slipped it through the mail slot. It was classic fire 'n brimstone shit. Do you know where you're going, how do you feel about eternal torment, etc... With pictured flames, I think I recall, tho' I'm not quite sure--just threw it out, as usual, without that much of a glance.

I've got kids. One of them can read more than well enough to get the gist of that, the other would have to struggle, might still...

Found myself thinkin': y'know, if one of them had picked that up, I'd have been spending some time explaining how, in fact, these people are just trying to scare you, and you mustn't let them, and I'm sorry you even had to see that, but there really are people in this world with such awful lack of scruples they'll try to pull this nonsense on others. And yes, they're really just disgusting manipulators, trying to scare you into joining them. Words, I'm sure, at least to that effect, if a little more set for the younger audience...

And contrast that behaviour with, say, almost any other interest group, trying to sell shit. Who else would have the cheek to pull a hard sell so threatening? The smoking industry got their asses in serious trouble for marketing to kids, a while ago, and it's not like they were threatening to burn them alive, exactly.

And most groups, stuff even close to the line, it doesn't happen, because they're not so fucking full of themselves, don't have that sense of privilege, and know what would be said. Approve of this standard or no, I can't imagine the local strip clubs daring to canvass a neighbourhood like this one with scantily-clad flesh dropped through the mail slot, quite regardless of what else was on the brochure. Someone would say: umm, tho' it's technically legal, long as it meets certain minimal decency standards, it's still kinda not done, assholes, what with kids around, and there'd be outcry, and they'd have to stop...

Hell, when you consider the gist of the evangelicals' message, it's fucking bizarre anyone puts up with it, bizarre they don't get more pushback. It's a bit like the fucking mob expecting they can come by with nicely printed brochures, sayin': we wants our protection money, see, or you gets some torture...

So from where I'm coming, Dawkins' statement about this was more than merely necessary--put about as gently as you can say it and still say the minimum that needs to be said. It is only religion's absurd sense of privilege that leads to this outcry. Regardless, they need to hear this, whether they fucking like it or not.

Posted by: gussnarp | September 2, 2010 1:32 PM

@AJ Milne - I may be wandering even farther off topic here, but your thoughts reminded me of something. I too have children who are young enough that I feel I need to protect them from religious imagery and thoughts. Too young to understand that religious people lie, or devoutly believe things that simply aren't true. My son went to a day care that was just down the street from a women's health clinic. There were routinely anti-abortion protesters outside the clinic, with huge and very graphic signs. How does one explain a picture of a bloody chopped up baby to a 3 year old? What kind of nightmares does that give a child? I found an alternate, albeit longer, route to day care, but why is it that religious people think that violent imagery (whether on posters or simply described) in the name of their religion should be promulgated to the youngest, most impressionable children, but would surely protest the slightest glimpse of a female nipple on TV?

Posted by: dahduh | September 2, 2010 1:35 PM

Oh, give 'em a few weeks and they'll justify beating up a guy in a wheelchair.

Posted by: Andyo | September 2, 2010 1:42 PM

OMG, I liked Greene's books better than Hawking's. Not him! Not Templeton. Where did you hear this? If he gets a Templeton prize I will be angry.

Posted by: Ing: PhD Trollologist | September 2, 2010 1:50 PM

you're misusing laws to imply externalized boundaries for what are intrinsic properties. Again the "what's norther of the north pole"

Posted by: Ing: PhD Trollologist | September 2, 2010 1:56 PM

Tulse is full of shit. If physics can in theory one day get the pre-plank and figure out what the origin of our current state was than all the intrinsic properties would be due to that. insinsting on asking WHY WHY WHY at that point is being dense for the sake of having some reason to shoe horn in god.

AHA we can't know everything so my god is as valid *sings hamster son and waddles off a cliff*

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 2, 2010 2:12 PM

"Did the Universe need a creator?" The answer he gives is a resounding "no".

How is he overselling THAT, Tulse?

I rather think you must have somehow projected Sandi's thinking onto the issue? You seem to be implying that Hawking said the study of the universe PROVES god does not exist. Do you see that stated in the above quote? I sure don't.

None of your infinite regression requires postulating a creator, ergo you are in violent agreement with Hawking and the rest of us.

Posted by: nigelTheBold, Minister of Spankings | September 2, 2010 2:24 PM

Again, why those "intrinsic" properties?

Because it had to be something. Otherwise it'd be nothing, and we wouldn't be here.

It could've been something completely different, and some other set of intelligent beings would be asking, "But why those intrinsic properties?"

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 2, 2010 2:34 PM

It still demands some pre-existing laws and/or constraints, and doesn't explain the origin of those laws.

I repeat:

It wasn't ever part of his position to explain the origin of laws.

LOOK AGAIN at exactly what he said.

you're wrong in thinking he doesn't have the evidence to back that up. I know you would say that the evidence supporting evolutionary theory precludes the need for the god hypothesis, right?

how is this different?

it's not.

Posted by: stevieinthecity#9dac9 | September 2, 2010 2:43 PM

Courage? They had been programmed since childhood to believe that martyrdom was an acceptable way to go out.

It's child abuse. Some are mild forms some are very detrimental. Either way it's abuse.

Posted by: Ing: PhD Trollologist | September 2, 2010 2:47 PM

Sorry confused people and threads. Mixed you up with Sandi somehow.

Posted by: Tulse | September 2, 2010 2:48 PM

It could've been something completely different, and some other set of intelligent beings would be asking, "But why those intrinsic properties?"

So the properties arise completely at random? What is the universe of possible properties (in other words, what variables are there)? And what determines what variables there are?

It wasn't ever part of his position to explain the origin of laws.

Fine, but then he is not explaining "why there is something rather than nothing" (or rather his definition of "something" is very restrictive and doesn't include the fundamental laws of the universe).

As I suggested above, this is analogous to math: with some assumed axioms one can derive the whole of mathematics, but one can't use math to justify the axioms themselves, to explain "why there is some math rather than no math" -- the axioms are taken as a given. Likewise, if we take certain physical laws as a given, we can explain how the universe arose, but doing so does not explain the origin of those laws themselves.

To be absolutely clear, I am not a theist of any variety, but if I were, I would say that Hawking has not shown why a god is not necessary to start things off. (I think it is trivially easy to show that a god has exactly the same problems, of course.)

Posted by: Ing: PhD Trollologist | September 2, 2010 2:55 PM

"...it was just another in a long-line of post-9/11 reactions; everyone from every end of the spectrum, from atheists to fundamentalists, interpreted it as confirming what they already thought."

You know if two positions are binary exclusive, even if both sides do that one of them IS going to be right.

Posted by: Ing: PhD Trollologist | September 2, 2010 3:00 PM

it's no better than Christians arguing that atheism is child abuse because it tells them their existence is purposeless or some such.

How many atheists encourage sending gay children to camps to be brainwashed?

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 2, 2010 3:09 PM

How many atheists encourage sending gay children to camps to be brainwashed?

indeed.

It's amazing to watch Matzke prop up the same strawman as the Discovery Institute.

He's making not stamp collecting into a hobby.

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 2, 2010 3:15 PM

What? You were a "fan" of Midgley's critique???

yes. You must have missed his post about in on PT.

*shudders*

read, if you want to get even more pissed off at Nick:

http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2010/06/in-defense-of-m.html

Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | September 2, 2010 3:23 PM

Noted. Nick Matzke does not see it as all abusive, saying to children: 'Believe the following or you're going to be tortured for all eternity... and here's a nice little properly visceral description of burning flesh dripping from your own bones to drive it home.

Anyone see Louis CK's show this week? Pretty much tied into that, or at least something equally sinister.

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 2, 2010 3:50 PM

heh, I can imagine Nick growing up in a household where all ideas are considered equivalent, and must be given a fair shake at all costs!

Nick: "Mom, I met a flat earther today, but the world is round, should i laugh at them?"

Mom: "Now, Now, Nick, I'm sure this person was brought up to believe that the earth is flat, and has their own reasons for thinking so. Who are we to criticize. You should instead go back and laugh at those mocking his beliefs, and fight for the underdog!"

yeah, a LOT of Americans I grew up were indeed brought up with this idea that somehow all ideas are equivalent, and fairness lies "in the middle somewhere". I'm still not sure where this meme originated, but it sure has fucked up political debate.

instead of giving a speech on fairness, the fictional Mom here should have been instructing Nick on the fallacy of the argument to moderation.

sometimes, ideas are just... wrong.

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 2, 2010 3:58 PM

forget where I left my clutchin' pearls...

*struggles to avoid saying obvious comeback line*

suffice to say it has something to do with checking your underwear, and leave it at that.

:P

Posted by: nickmatzke.ncse | September 2, 2010 4:25 PM

oops, I left out a blockquote tag, reposting.

I'm wondering if the guys in the evo dept at Berkeley have changed so much from when I was a grad student there, that they too wouldn't be mocking Matzke for equating research into the psychological impacts of religion as "exaggeration and demagoguery."

Dawkins didn't cite any research, he cited one anecdote. And all we've gotten here is anecdotes. I expect there is plenty of research showing various benefits of religious upbringing, if we want to move this a discussion of what the research says (as if parents are under any kind of obligation to consult research before deciding/not deciding to make these kinds of decisions).

They sure would have been when I was there. In fact, I'd say those guys had as much influence on my realization that religion is malignant as anyone before or since.

Seriously Nick, what do folks in IB have to say about your opinions on Dawkins, I wonder?

No one really cares that much, I imagine, we mostly focus on science and education. I have grad student friends in the department who are anti-religious, who are Christian, Muslim, agnostic, whatever. We seem to get along without accusing each other of the equivalent of child abuse or fundamentalism or Nazi-like beliefs...this kind of charge is easy to toss around in print, but it's pretty impossible when you know people who are religious who are your friends, who are perfectly decent people and good scientists.

I've only met one serious Dawkins fan among the faculty, but I've met several who think that Dawkins' anti-religion crusade hurts, or at least doesn't help, the cause of evolution education.

I know George Barlow isn't around any more, but he wasn't the only anti-theist around.

So? Are you attempting an argument from authority or something? This would be very hard to assess without knowing who you are -- I appear to be rare in putting my real name beside my comments here...

Posted by: nickmatzke.ncse | September 2, 2010 4:35 PM

What? You were a "fan" of Midgley's critique???

Read more carefully. I became a Midgley fan back in the 1990s. This does not commit me to endorsing any particular thing she has said lately. Her current stuff makes a lot more sense if read sympathetically in view of past 15 or so books on these topics, but explaining that to an unscholarly audience which mostly likes throwing bombs is apparently impossible.

So, you're brain-dead, then, as well as intentionally dishonest?

Really aiming high here, aren't we? I thought you guys valued reason above rhetoric? Every cheap insult is a data point against that view.

Can I have a different NCSE please?

You'll be happy to know I haven't worked there since 2007, and my views are my own and do not represent NCSE's.

Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | September 2, 2010 4:43 PM

daveau @ # 28: Was anyone in physics ever positing that god was a necessary condition for the universe's existence?

From Neil F. Comins, Heavenly Errors: Misconceptions About the Real Nature of the Universe -

In an effort to prevent the universe from collapsing, Newton deduced (not entire correctly) that all these dimmer stars [seen only through telescopes] were farther away. Generalizing from all the dim stars he saw, he proposed that the universe was infinite in extent and that stars are distributed evenly throughout it.

The assumption of an infinite universe and a smooth distribution of stars provided Newton with an explanation of how the stars, and therefore the universe as a whole, could remain unmoving and therefore last forever. His law of gravitation predicted that the forces of gravity among the stars in a perfectly smooth and infinite distribution would cancel one another out, leaving all the stars fixed in their places. Newton did realize that this situation was highly unstable. The slightest movement of even one star in space would cause the entire system to eventually collapse together. He believed that one of God’s roles was to prevent that from happening.

Posted by: https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawn3x9yGXf-kG2Zh0YEqq9Xwl5PfKpHB1vQ | September 2, 2010 4:51 PM

On the subject of gravity, there's been some interesting recent work which suggests that it's not a fundamental force at all, merely a consequence of entropy. There's been a fair bit of coverage over the last few months, but here's a good explanation.

It will be very interesting to see how this turns out.

Posted by: geralcorasjo | September 2, 2010 4:55 PM

http://digitalcuttlefish.blogspot.com/2010/09/ex-nihilo.html

In the beginning, there was a void,
Which left a lot of folks annoyed.
So Hawking thought he’d take the case
And looked through time and space.

He looked to where it all began—
This thoughtful and inquiring man—
To where some say there must be God
And thought, “well, this is odd.”

“From gravity alone, I see
The Universe that came to be—
There need not be a Guiding Hand;
I hope you understand.”

But those who search in vain for Gaps
Where God may hide, just said “Perhaps
It’s God, creating Gravity,
Through his divinity.”

But comments left on news-sites show
That common people claim to know
Much better than a physics prof
(At whom they point and scoff)

Their knowledge-base approaching null,
Still from the vacuum of their skull
Ex nihilo, opinions sprout
And come a-creeping out.

From ignorance comes solid proof
That God is there—he’s just aloof—
And Hawking erred throughout his book,
They know without a look.

Pure genius Cuttlefish. Very well done.

Posted by: Sastra | September 2, 2010 5:12 PM

nickmatzke quoted in #96:

"My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used."

Here is a question for you:

If God really did command men to fly their planes into the buildings of the wicked, then should these men have obeyed that command? What if God presented them with that command in a way that gave them certainty? What if God is perfect, and would only make such a command for a good reason? What if this world is not the one that really matters, but there is a larger picture needed, to understand what is right? What if we can know things through methods that allow us to transcend this world?

If. Imagine if.

If this is the case, then would they be doing the right thing?

Religion encourages people to answer this question in the affirmative. It also tells people that strong faith is the goal -- a faith that goes beyond what we can know in this world. Never lose faith. Believe. Anything is possible.

But, oh yeah. Be sure to put some brakes on, when things start to seem too unlikely to you. Don't go too far.

Problem. This mindset is dangerous. It can justify literally anything. The fact that most believers pragmatically put on the brakes and try to make their religion reasonable from a secular standpoint is offset, I think, by the underlying desire for a faith that goes beyond reason.

"Bad" people aren't the problem. The system itself is the problem. It has nothing to do with being unable to distinguish nice, moderate, reasonable believers from fringe fanatics. It has to do with realizing that the nice, moderate, reasonable people are nice, moderate, and reasonable by what amounts to chance. Circumstances have lead them to modify their religion with humanist assumptions: make as much sense to an atheist as you can get away with, and still feel part of something "higher."

But, even so, you're still countering one faith-based what-if with another faith-based what-if, and telling people to start from the conclusion and work backwards. God exists. Now see where it takes you beyond the secular world.

Posted by: duanerobertson | September 2, 2010 5:23 PM

Anyone want to wade into the muck and leave some comments on
Fox's site? I don't think I could stomach it.

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 2, 2010 5:25 PM

The notorious "Midgley's critique" of Dawkins to which I was referring, and to which I assumed you were referring, dates from 1979,

yeah, to be "fair" to Nick, he was probably thinking, like I was, that you were referring to his critique of PZ's critique of Midgeley, which I linked to.

you're absolutely right though, Nick's thesis in the article I linked to also tried to portray Midgley as a long-time sage, and the 1979 article was indeed brought up in response in the comments.

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 2, 2010 5:28 PM

Can we set up a Molly-squared program for Sastra?

well, there indeed was a reason PZ chose her once upon a time to fill in for him while he was on a break.

she doesn't get nearly as rattled by insipidity as many of us do.

Posted by: Sastra | September 2, 2010 5:31 PM

nickmatzke.nscse wrote:

I expect there is plenty of research showing various benefits of religious upbringing.

There probably is. The interesting thing, though, is that my guess is that every benefit of religion also makes sense to a reasonable non-religious person. We see the value, and we see how it was derived -- without God needing to exist.

And all the bad things that come from religion do not make sense to a reasonable non-religious person. They may or may not make sense, though, to a reasonable religious person. They are all reasonable, if they know God.

The standards which judge between the good and bad things that come out of religion must be secular standards, if you're trying to find common ground.

It's like someone trying to convince you that there are wonderful things in the world which will always seem evil to you. How could they pull off that trick? Once they've committed themselves to finding common ground with you, they can't commit to persuading you that there's no common ground to be found, for you've no discernment.

Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites | September 2, 2010 5:38 PM

The defense of the religion-as-child-abuse claim as perfectly reasonable and unproblematic just confirms my point -- it's no better than Christians arguing that atheism is child abuse because it tells them their existence is purposeless or some such. "Impolite" is about the most charitable thing that can be said about such claims. It's exaggeration and demagoguery.

Just like those assholes in public health who say that smoking kills. It's no better than pro-smoking lobbyists who say that not smoking kills. It's exaggeration and demagoguery.

'Scuse me: I'm just going to pop into the store for a minute. There are some twelve-year-olds want me to buy a pack of cigs for them.

Posted by: Sven DiMilo | September 2, 2010 5:45 PM

yeah, Quirky's no Spinoza, that's for sure

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 2, 2010 5:47 PM

If the Universe created itself, then the Universe is the Creator of the Universe (or God, by definition).

congratulations, you've just given the universe a new name.

everything else stays the same.

when will you start calling the earth "big blue ball" I wonder...

Posted by: Sastra | September 2, 2010 5:56 PM

Thanks, but I'm a Pharyngulord. That's enough. In future, they should never put tentacles on crowns. Just saying.

Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites | September 2, 2010 6:21 PM

Thanks, but I'm a Pharyngulord.

As I read this, a cold dread—nay, terror—crept down my spine, impelled by the suspicion while in the Galápagos, PZ secretly created one ring to rule you all.

Posted by: Alex the Wonderchemist | September 2, 2010 6:30 PM

I really don't see how this is news:

"Atheist Scientist Professes Atheism - In other news, Pope shits in the woods"

Newsnight on the BBC had a pathetic discussion just now where the presenter asked what caused Hawking to "change his mind" with respect to the idea of God. When I first read A Brief History of Time when I was 14 I picked up that the line "for then we should know the mind of God" wasn't literal. If I, as a sweaty teenager (at the time) could work that out, why can't the entire journalistic team at the BBC?

Posted by: Sven DiMilo | September 2, 2010 6:35 PM

whew!
You munged that one pretty good.

Posted by: Sven DiMilo | September 2, 2010 6:39 PM

...and even after the laborious cut, paste, & edit, I get:

This video contains content from INgrooves, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.

wow. This must be what it feels like to be, like, Canadian or something. Or Finnish. Is that the same?

Posted by: Tulse | September 2, 2010 6:58 PM

This must be what it feels like to be, like, Canadian or something.

Yes, yes it is. Pity us in our media-impoverished sandbox.

Posted by: PominAus | September 2, 2010 7:08 PM

Forgive me if this seems obvious to many but:

Many creationists use the 'how can something come from nothing?' canard.
What the theory of the expanding universe actually states is

'Well, first off, it isn't "nothing", and it didn't "decide" anything. The Big Bang states that all of the matter and energy in the Universe (which is definitely something!) was, in the distant past, packed together in a very hot, dense state'

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2010/08/why_the_big_bang_wont_work_won.php

So the matter and energy was already in existence.

For times in the history of the universe less than 1E-43seconds, quantum mechanics limits our ability to predict or measure the conditions, so we cant see any further back, but it is clear at the point in time when we can make accurate physical predictions matter and energy was already there.

I believe string theory m theory quantun loop gravity work from the LHC and other concepts are making inroads into describing the universe beyond the planck limit and have theoretical descriptions of how the conepts of 'something' can come from 'nothing' bearing in mind that in physics the concepts are not always intuitive.
And this is where creationists fail, grade school 'common sense' thinking is not adequate to describe the wonders of our universe.

Posted by: Antiochus Epiphanes | September 2, 2010 7:46 PM

Sastra #127: The segment that you inserted from nickmatzke#96 is actually a quote from the Dawkins' Guardian article. I suspect that you already know this, but it isn't evident from nickmatzke's post that he's quoting Dawkins (or at least it wasn't evident to me, except that the middle segment seem to make much more sense than the rest of it).

Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites | September 2, 2010 7:48 PM

There is Canadian cuisine? I don't believe it.

It's true. It's like any other North American cuisine based on European cuisine, just much bigger. Where you have florist shops, other Canadian cities have restaurants.

Posted by: Antiochus Epiphanes | September 2, 2010 7:55 PM

Brownian: That's remarkable...all I know about Canadian cuisine is this.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | September 2, 2010 8:03 PM

I cannot bestow upon you the intelligence required to assimilate the information.

Posted by: echidna | September 2, 2010 8:08 PM

but explaining that to an unscholarly audience ... is apparently impossible.

If you were to check the degrees and professions of the commenters on this site, I expect you would have to retract that.

Most people here write like scientists: it's not florid prose, it doesn't need to be, because the evidence and the logic are important. Communicating clearly, rather than dazzling with rhetoric, is the hallmark of scholarly scientific prose. If the logic or evidence is missing or faulty, scholarly scientists rip the arguments to shreds. It's not personal, it's how progress is made. This is the process that keeps people focused on reality.

What you would need to do is explain your point to a scholarly audience which is unimpressed by rhetorical flourishes. This is difficult if the point is weak, impossible if it is bogus.

Posted by: Katharine | September 2, 2010 8:13 PM

but explaining that to an unscholarly audience ... is apparently impossible.

There is a word for this. It is called sophistry.

It is essentially an argument that is all style and no substance.

Posted by: First Approximation, L'esprit de l'escalier | September 2, 2010 8:37 PM

There is Canadian cuisine? I don't believe it

Reminds me of an old joke:

Canada could have had it all. British culture, French cuisine and American know-how. Instead we got British cuisine, French know-how and American culture.

Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | September 2, 2010 8:40 PM

Wait I thought this was the apex of Canadian cuisine?

Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites | September 2, 2010 9:00 PM

You'd be right, Rev. It's damn good stuff (especially when chased with a pint), but I don't see it winning any culinary awards.

Posted by: Al B. Quirky | September 2, 2010 10:10 PM

PominAus says:

the matter and energy was already in existence

the Universe can and will create itself from nothing

Posted by: Tulse | September 2, 2010 11:26 PM

Ain't nothin' wrong with poutine.

Just sayin'.

Posted by: Usagichan | September 3, 2010 12:27 AM

PominAus

Isnt this the sort of quote mining we usually get from creationists?

Al B. Dishonest is certainly a Climate Change denier, something of a religionist (as well as an Islamophobe), and all round illogical irritant - if it is a creationist as well it would hardly be surprising!

Posted by: shjcpr | September 3, 2010 2:07 AM

Alright P.Z., I know I can depend on you and Hawkings to give us the inside scoop on where the law of gravity comes from.

I mean you have already crossed out God so that means you DO have the answer,right?

Wow. This is the momemt.

Drumroll.

Posted by: Caine, ghetto féministe | September 3, 2010 2:33 AM

shjcpr:

Alright P.Z., I know I can depend on you and Hawkings to give us the inside scoop on where the law of gravity comes from.

I mean you have already crossed out God so that means you DO have the answer,right?

Words have precise meaning in science, including the word law. It does not mean "requires a lawgiver, therefor god".

Posted by: Wowbagger, Man-Hating Man of Pharyngula | September 3, 2010 3:04 AM

Usagichan wrote:

Al B. Dishonest is certainly a Climate Change denier, something of a religionist (as well as an Islamophobe), and all round illogical irritant - if it is a creationist as well it would hardly be surprising!

Yeah, ABQ is pretty much a shithead Liar for Jesus™, so your choices are basically to either mock him or ignore him; he's incapable of engaging so you're wasting your time trying anything else.

Posted by: KG | September 3, 2010 3:43 AM

If I, as a sweaty teenager (at the time) could work that out, why can't the entire journalistic team at the BBC? - Alex the Wonderchemist

Journalists are paid not to understand the obvious when it would displease their paymasters or spoil "the story".

Posted by: Anubis Bloodsin the third | September 3, 2010 6:24 AM

And the Hawkings backlash begins...this is funny more then deep and prophetic!...actually it is pathetic but what is new?

Dr Rowan Williams Archbishop of Canterbury said:

'Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the Universe.

Yet it seems that the 'god of the gaps' scenario is the only island left for the jeebus sunbeams.
Certainly every theist I seem to encounter dives straight for the nearest most inappropriate gap they can find when their flaky delusion is threatened.

It is the belief that there is an intelligent, living agent on whose activity everything ultimately depends for its existence.

'Intelligent', by whose standard and how is that to be quantified let alone qualified.
What is the 'intelligence' behind Cancer or War?
'Living agent', definition of 'Living agent' not provided probably handily methinks!
Biological 'life' seems to be the only phenomena in the village, maybe AI in the future but certainly not as related to 'Life' as we know it jim?

On whose activity everything ultimately depends on for existence...Like Bacteria and Viruses and little burrowing organisms of a parasitic bent that eventually kill the host after inflicting a great deal of suffering on the victim.
It would appear that a great deal of money, and very many religious organisations are actively working against 'god' in their attempts at eradicating some diseases in Africa or at the sites of great ecological and environmental disasters like Earthquakes, flooding and Tsunami's!

Physics on its own will not settle the question of why there is something rather than nothing.'

At least that is the forlorn hope of religiotards.
No detail is given as to what else would be required, but that claim stinks of desperation more then wisdom anyway.
Sounds of footies being stamped in frustration and despair and full pouty lips, and forlorn hope.

Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales and one of Britain's top imams also joined the condemnation.

Lord Sacks said:

'Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation.

But whose interpretation?
And how come all interpretations are seemingly at odds with one and other?

The Bible simply isn't interested in how the Universe came into being.'

Then how come Genesis is such a contentious and crap filled load of codswollop?
And why do creationists quote from that scripture and accuse others of betraying the word?
And why has that bollocks touted to be taught in schools as part of Science lessons that apparently deal with explanations?

Vincent Nichols, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster,

'I would totally endorse what the Chief Rabbi said so eloquently about the relationship between religion and science.'

Yeah err...wot 'ee sed!...bring me another choir boy!

Ibrahim Mogra,an imam and committee chairman at the Muslim Council of Britain, said:

'If we look at the Universe and all that has been created, it indicates that somebody has been here to bring it into existence. That somebody is the almighty conqueror.'

Nice choice of language at the end there!
Jihad anyone?

Those comments are supposed to be the combined wisdom of religious authority in the UK.

I never realised just how fucking screwed the religio premise was in the UK, that is like watching a combined synchronized meltdown!

'Rabbits in the headlights' springs to mind!

As for Nichols, I would assume he is waiting for his boss to issue a papal decree, or take out a contract, or maybe both on Stephen Hawking, it is the only response they have left.
Apoplexy in Vatican environs no doubt, plenty of pearls being clutched and Cardinals weeping on all street corners.
They will have no relevant positive comments for sure.
Absolutely priceless...soiled vestments in the Vatican...again!

Of dear...how sad....never mind!

Posted by: Bobber | September 3, 2010 9:23 AM

Journalists are paid not to understand the obvious when it would displease their paymasters or spoil "the story".

Quoted for complete and utter truth.

Posted by: Ing: PhD Trollologist | September 3, 2010 9:43 AM

Al B dumass has to be a troll, no one can actually be that fucking stupid.

Posted by: Sven DiMilo | September 3, 2010 1:56 PM

Child abuse has a legal, criminal, definition

And this is the only possible meaning of those words. Anyone who uses those two words in that order must be referencing a criminal code.

Posted by: Antiochus Epiphanes | September 3, 2010 2:06 PM

Child abuse has a legal, criminal, definition, and thus society & the government put the force of law into deterring it and punishing those who do it.

The name of the relevent chapter in God Delusion is "Childhood, abuse, and escape from religion". It is patently obvious that Dawkins is referring to abuse in a more general sense than this. Further, it is also obvious that it is not simply religious teaching that he finds abusive, but that there are particular aspects of that teaching that engender abuse. Many such examples are offered. What Dawkins recommends is not a law against what you have labeled "thoughtcrime" but a suspension of religious labeling until adulthood, when a person is free to choose for themselves.

So of course, Atheism could be called child abuse based on similar sloppy grounds; however, the only sloppy thinking here is in your own head.

You have created a strawman, and I can't imagine what purpose this serves for you.

Posted by: nickmatzke.ncse | September 3, 2010 2:17 PM

nickmatzke.nscse wrote:

I expect there is plenty of research showing various benefits of religious upbringing.

There probably is.

Thus refuting another commentator who apparently thinks I am not allowed to say such a thing without presenting right here on this blog a thorough review of the peer-reviewed literature.

The interesting thing, though, is that my guess is that every benefit of religion also makes sense to a reasonable non-religious person. We see the value, and we see how it was derived -- without God needing to exist.

And all the bad things that come from religion do not make sense to a reasonable non-religious person. They may or may not make sense, though, to a reasonable religious person. They are all reasonable, if they know God.

I am afraid this is just another variation of the inconsistency that plagues much of current New Atheist argumentation. Whatever bad things some group of religious people does are instantly applied to all religion everywhere, but whatever good things lots of religious people do for religious reasons are no credit at all for the religion side. For atheism, it's reversed.

The standards which judge between the good and bad things that come out of religion must be secular standards, if you're trying to find common ground.

I agree with this. Just be consistent about it, I say. I think a fair, scholarly, assessment of religion would have to acknowledge that it works for many people much of the time, and that their personal involvement in it is nothing like child abuse, Nazis, or 9/11 terrorists.

Posted by: Antiochus Epiphanes | September 3, 2010 2:36 PM

Nick...you have mentioned that you get along well with people with diverse religious backgrounds. Of course most of us do to, because we have to. We are a minority. How do you get along with Kansans? Ever be caught making a sweeping generalization about the people of that state?

You have been very public in your attitudes about what we should be telling our children when it comes to the origins of life, and your public statements have also included ridicule. Are we not allowed to call into question other practices? Why is ridicule inapplicable to those?

Posted by: AJ Milne OM | September 3, 2010 2:43 PM

Necessary correction to the above, (as my own jawbreakers do upon occasion shatter my own mushmilk teeth), that monster that goes nowhere real directly can be shortened well enough to:

'Failing your having an easy answer for that (takes all kinds, even idiots, see again 'terrorizing'), is it reasonable enough to say so, or was Dawkins' statement really so far beyond the pale.'

... in case that wasn't obvious enough.

Posted by: SteveM | September 3, 2010 2:56 PM

re 140:

So there's nothing but custom to stop anyone from getting a second Molly.
Sastra, of course, is due for her fifth at least by now.

The "Molly" is not an award like the Nobel. It is more like a knighthood, it is an admission to an exclusive club. You cannot be inducted into a club more than once (without being expelled fromit inbetween, of course)

Posted by: Sastra | September 3, 2010 3:16 PM

It's also like saying that the good things about astrology should be respected, because without it an awful lot of Geminis would not have done a kind deed for a friend or gotten around to doing a task they've been putting off.

Better than when they use it to decide whom to execute.

Posted by: nickmatzke.ncse | September 3, 2010 6:17 PM

Better than when they use it to decide whom to execute.

More histrionics and hyperbole there.

Posted by: mikee | September 3, 2010 8:31 PM

At the risk of being considered unPC perhaps Hawkings physical disability/struggle against the odds is protecting him from a significant response from the religious right.
Hawkings success in spite of his neuro-muscular dystropy garners him a lot of respect. An attack on him risks a substantial response from the scientific and wider community.

Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | September 3, 2010 8:39 PM

At the risk of being considered unPC perhaps Hawkings physical disability/struggle against the odds is protecting him from a significant response from the religious right. Hawkings success in spite of his neuro-muscular dystropy garners him a lot of respect. An attack on him risks a substantial response from the scientific and wider community.

Posted by: Ing: PhD Trollologist | September 3, 2010 8:46 PM

@214

don't some of the Gay camps actually grab the kid off the streets? So nto only do we have legally allowed mental abuse, but an actual crime that's allowed because the parents gave it the ok.

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 3, 2010 9:00 PM

don't some of the Gay camps actually grab the kid off the streets?

yes.

hell, anyone who has seen "Jesus Camp" and isn't fucking blind can see why any reasonable psychologist would equate this behavior with cultism and thus, mental abuse.

If you bloody need to DEPROGRAM a kid who has been exposed to that nonsense, I'd say that's pretty good support for the idea that it's abuse.

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 3, 2010 9:07 PM

Parents have been inculcating their children, consciously or (often) unconsciously, in their beliefs about vaccines, science denial, etc., for decades. It's pretty much an automatic part of the parent-child relationship. (Somehow they have done it without consulting the latest research, and the species survives nonetheless.)

fixed that for ya, Nick.

READ:

http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~deenasw/Assets/bloom&weisberg%20science.pdf

Posted by: Ing: PhD Trollologist | September 3, 2010 9:12 PM

@211

That didn't' stop Le Rusho Lardo from accusing Michael J Fox of faking it.

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 3, 2010 9:17 PM

Atheism has no dogma because it's not a intellectual basis like religion. It's a trait like "blue" or "spanish". Belief systems can be atheistic, but atheism itself isn't one.

that this needs to be explained to Matzke, of all people, is what is so damn shocking to me.

Posted by: Kel, The Privileged View From Nowhere | September 3, 2010 9:26 PM

READ:
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~deenasw/Assets/bloom&weisberg%20science.pdf

Posted by: nickmatzke.ncse | September 3, 2010 11:56 PM

the profs would have walked out after the first time he equated abuse with "thought crime".

You aren't even getting the basic point right. You are the guys who are trying to make belief in traditional Christianity a thought crime.

seriously, Nick. Why don't you write your responses here up, organize them, and then present them at a Museum Lunch?

I'd pay to see the response you get.

I don't know what saw when you were at IB in Berkeley, but I have seen many talks and announcements of hundreds more, and none of them were ever devoted to atheism, theism, etc. These things are far removed from day-to-day science.

That said, I'd pay money to be in such a discussion with an opponent like you. It would be fun.

Posted by: nickmatzke.ncse | September 4, 2010 12:01 AM

seriously, Nick, are you REALLY going to say that mental abuse doesn't exist?

fuck me, but you're being more obtuse than even I could imagine.

I accept that mental abuse can exist, but I deny that any kind of fair claim can be made that teaching mainstream religion to children fits under that rubric.

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 4, 2010 12:32 AM

And did little more than toss cheap, dumb insults in virtually every other post.

this is pure ad hom nick, don't know where you learned to reason, but for sure it wasn't at Berkeley. You haven't addressed the substance of any response to you yet, let alone mine.

You are the guys who are trying to make belief in traditional Christianity a thought crime.

sorry, Nick, but nobody here said it. YOU did.

read for comprehension. we are speaking of actions, not thoughts. again, look at Dawkins' anectodote. Is Dawkins declaring this to be a thought crime, or is he saying that the terrorism this victim endured is indeed a form of abuse? You've already admitted mental abuse exists, you simply irrationally refuse to extend it to children, apparently.

I don't know what saw when you were at IB in Berkeley, but I have seen many talks and announcements of hundreds more, and none of them were ever devoted to atheism, theism, etc.

oh, you should have been there when Jonathan Wells was a student at MCB.

That said, I'd pay money to be in such a discussion with an opponent like you. It would be fun.

you're in a discussion with me now, in case you hadn't noticed. Well, I should say, I'm putting forth things with support, and you're just flailing away at strawmen, but I suppose one could still call it a discussion, of sorts.

bottom line, you've obviously never studied psychology, and never bothered, not for a single minute, to even TRY to research any kind of empirical support for the your notion that religious dogma is of more psychological benefit than harm.

here are some of the points you STILL have failed to address:

-you falsely equate atheism with religion, with no empirical support for doing so whatsoever. You've been called on this multiple times, and have completely ignored this and repeated the same claims.

-you falsely claim looking at issues of religious terrorism like the use of the hell meme is us trying to construct "thought crimes", when it is obviously nothing of the sort. You built an obvious strawman, and instead of admitting it, act as if it still holds. This is intellectual dishonesty of exactly the same sort the creationists we harangue daily utilize.

-after creating your strawman "thought crime", you then create an inane slippery slope argument that has, if possible, EVEN LESS support.

seriously Nick, step back and look at the arguments you are making!

It's quite shocking, really.

Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | September 4, 2010 12:39 AM

You are the guys who are trying to make belief in traditional Christianity a thought crime.

Either the most dishonest statement on this blog or the dumbest.

Possibly both.

Do you expect people to take you seriously when you say things like that?

Posted by: First Approximation, L'esprit de l'escalier | September 4, 2010 12:51 AM

You are the guys who are trying to make belief in traditional Christianity a thought crime.

Wow, it's hard to say just how wrong that is. It says a whole lot that you have to resort to such dishonesty.

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 4, 2010 1:04 AM

I have concluded that the reason accommodationists are convinced they get along so well with the religious, is they, like the religious, never bother to examine the contradictions.

I say this not just by looking at people like Nick and Mooney, but myself, who about 20 years ago, was in the same mindset of thinking there is no inherent conflict, and religion as a general ideology presented no conflicting issues with science. I'd say the vast bulk of Americans, having been completely surround and immersed in religious ideology and icons for generations, tend to not even bother noticing any inherent problems any more.

It took me about 2 years as a grad student (and exposure to Jonathan Wells) to figure out what was inherently bad and antithetical to science about religious extremism, and about 15 more to finally figure out through much debate and research, that much of even moderate religious dogma is filled with ideas that at best are anchors acting as handicaps to reason, and at worst (like the dogma surrounding the concept of hell), indeed can be viewed directly as mentally abusive.

I'm not a faitheist any more, but only because I spent the time to seriously look at the issues involved, and had others point out my own inconsistent thinking on these issues.

Nick, obviously, simply refuses to do so.

maybe, someday, he will.

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 4, 2010 1:20 AM

...btw that link:

http://www.findcounseling.com/journal/child-abuse/emotional-abuse.html

clearly shows Nick to be absolutely wrong in even his strict LEGAL definition of child abuse.

not only does the AMA have guidelines defining these issues, these things are ACTIONABLE by the state, and in most states whatever organization operates as "child protective services" has the legal obligation to remove children from families that expose them to emotional and psychological abuse.

Posted by: echidna | September 4, 2010 3:38 AM

A non-imaginary converstation between atheist and believer:
Title of article: Religious leaders hit back at Hawking
believer (most recent quote at CNN:

It is evil to say that there is no God. It is even worse to teach other men the same. Those who do so bring themselves into severe judgment with God. Stephen Hawking's neuro-muscular dystrophy should be warning to everyone of the punishment that awaits anyone who treats the existence of God with contempt. God does punish men who denounce his existence. Sooner or later, He will catch up with them

Of course they strike back.. They make billions on this imaginary friend of theirs.. And they can control the stupid public with the belief that this imaginary friend is watching them.. How absurd !

Posted by: Kel, The Privileged View From Nowhere | September 4, 2010 4:27 AM

And if everything in the universe requires a cause, the universe as a whole requires one.

But of course it's just easier to say that "God did it" because that means eternal life for us!

Posted by: Kel, The Privileged View From Nowhere | September 4, 2010 4:33 AM

The public may be semi-educated but they're not stupid.

Next I suppose you're going to tell us how people reject the magic notion of evolution because that something like the eye can form without a designer will strike many people as patently daft...

Posted by: Wowbagger, Man-Hating Man of Pharyngula | September 4, 2010 5:11 AM

Not god of the gaps -- god of the Gap.

Which is still intellectually dishonest, no matter what the number involved is.

Posted by: Kel, The Privileged View From Nowhere | September 4, 2010 5:24 AM

I don't think it's a question of physics or cosmology but of elementary logic. Are you saying trained cosmologists conceptualise a physical force (in this case gravity) as existing prior to the physical universe? How is that not absurd?

Posted by: KG | September 4, 2010 5:45 AM

Because the universe is manifestly a network of cause and effect. If you deny that causal nexus, you're left with a magical, absurd universe in which literally anything could happen at any moment. johnnie-gray

Says the believer who thinks there's a magic fairy who can do anything at any time.

And if everything in the universe requires a cause, the universe as a whole requires one. Am I right or am I right?

Wrong. Fallacy of composition, as was, IIRC, pointed out several centuries ago when Aquinas made the same claim. Do try to keep up!

It's curious ... there seems to be less triumphalism than one might expect from the atheist side

More than you would expect, you mean - don't project your own genuflection to authority onto others. Few atheists are likely to think: "Hawking says it - that proves it!".

The atheist side seems oddly jittery -- could it be they have a sneaking suspicion that Hawking's words about the universe "creating itself from nothing because of gravity" will strike many people as patently daft?

Did Hawking actually use those words? If not, you should not put them in quotation marks. I imagine a lot of atheists are refraining from saying "Hawking's right" until they actually know in some detail what his argument is, and how other qualified experts respond to it. I know I am.

Posted by: Wowbagger, Man-Hating Man of Pharyngula | September 4, 2010 7:07 AM

It's pointing out that science's explanatory power is intrinsically limited.

But you can't support that hypothesis with anything other than 'well, it can't explain ______' - and that's dishonest.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | September 4, 2010 7:14 AM

It's not a question of falling back on God to explain something that science hasn't yet explained. It's pointing out that science's explanatory power is intrinsically limited.

"goddidit" will never change, and is a tool to stop investigation. Used by religions world wide to keep their sheeple stoopid. And an imaginary deity isn't needed for anything, except for psychological comfort for delusional fools. And they never say what caused their deity to come into existence.

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, Quel Dommage | September 4, 2010 7:34 AM

johnnie-gray #250

Esoteric cosmological speculation lacks fossilised dinosaur skeletons to entertain the public ... [ellipsis in original] its abstruse and rarified nature leaves it vulnerable to the suspicion that it's just phantom castles built on clouds of equations.

Arguments from ignorance or personal incredulity are logical fallacies.

Posted by: KG | September 4, 2010 8:03 AM

johnnie-gray,

The point is, you don't put statements in quote marks and attribute them to someone unless those are the exact words they used. A simple rule.

I would say "Being" needs a "ground" because it might just as well not have been.

If that means anything at all, you simply get into the same regress as with causes, unless you can show that the supposed "ground of Being" doesn't need a ground. You don't seem to realise that in "Why is there something rather than nothing?", "something" covers any alleged god as well as the physical universe. As far as has ever been shown, it is logically possible that nothing, including gods, should ever have existed; so for everything real, one can equally say "it might just as well not have been".

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, Quel Dommage | September 4, 2010 8:26 AM

johnnie-gray #265

What we've been talking about -- why there is something rather than nothing.

Not only does nature abhor a vacuum but the vacuum itself is not nothing.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an article considering this question. It starts off "Well, why not?" But we have to dress this up to make it a bit more philosophical. First, we would only even consider this an interesting question if there were some reasonable argument in favor of nothingness over existence.

Gottfried Leibnitz, in his 1697 essay "On the Ultimate Origin of Things", claimed nothingness was "spontaneous" whereas an existing universe required a bit of work to achieve. Richard Swinburne has sharpened this a bit, claiming that nothingness is uniquely "natural" because it is necessarily simpler than any particular universe.

When we talk about things being "natural" or
"spontaneous" we do so on the basis of our experience in this world. This experience equips us with a certain notion of natural, theories are natural if they are simple and not finely-tuned, configurations are natural if they aren’t inexplicably low-entropy.

But our experience with the world in which we actually live tells us nothing whatsoever about whether certain possible universes are "natural" or not. In particular, nothing in science, logic, or philosophy provides any evidence for the claim that simple universes are preferred (whatever that could possibly mean). We only have experience with one universe; there is no ensemble from which it is chosen, on which we could define a measure to quantify degrees of probability.

It's easy to get tricked into thinking that simplicity is somehow preferable. After all, Occam's Razor exhorts us to stick to simple explanations. But that's a way to compare different explanations that equivalently account for the same sets of facts; comparing different sets of possible underlying rules for the universe is a different kettle of fish entirely. And, to be honest, it's true that most scientists have a hope (or a prejudice) that the principles underlying our universe are in fact pretty simple. But that's simply an expression of desires, not a philosophical precondition on the space of possible universes.

Ultimately, the problem is that the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" doesn't make any sense. What kind of answer could possibly count as satisfying? What could a claim like "The most natural universe is one that doesn't exist" possibly mean? As often happens, we are led astray by imagining that we can apply the kinds of language we use in talking about contingent pieces of the world around us to the universe as a whole. It makes sense to ask why this blog exists, rather than some other blog; but there is no external vantage point from which we can compare the relatively likelihood of different modes of existence for the universe.

So the universe exists, and we know of no good reason to be surprised by that fact. I hereby admit when I was a kid I actually used to worry about this idea. That was when I had first started reading about physics and cosmology, and learned enough about the Big Bang to contemplate how amazing it was that we knew anything about the early universe. But then I hit upon the question of "What if they universe didn't exist at all?" and I got frightened. (Some kids are scared by clowns, some by existential questions.)

Fortunately it's obvious the universe does exist (even for solipsists it exists, albeit differently for them than for other people). So my fears are answered and without god.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | September 4, 2010 9:42 AM

It might be that God might just as well have not have been but we are forced to conclude that He does exist because the physical universe exists.

Posted by: Antiochus Epiphanes | September 4, 2010 10:43 AM

In the strict sense it makes no sense to talk about the cause of the universe. Causality requires that one entity is prior to another one...there is a necessary time vector. Time is contingent on space, and did not exist in a singularity (or whatever compressed shit existed at second zero). We can't really speak about the cause of the universe because time didn't exist "before" the universe did.

This at least is my understanding of it. I don't think Hawking is saying that gravity caused the Universe, as much as it was bundled with everything else at second zero.

Posted by: Sastra | September 4, 2010 12:37 PM

johnnie-gray #270 werote:

It might be that God might just as well have not have been but we are forced to conclude that He does exist because the physical universe exists.

I don't see how this follows, because I don't see what God adds to the more basic idea of "the fundamental reality of existence" (henceforth called Reality.) Why does reality exist rather than not exist? Tautology. Whatever is real, really is. So the question is now a non-question. The only questions then are about Reality, not whether there is one, or why it is rather than isn't. If it "is," then it can't be "isn't."

Why did the universe we see arise from the substrate of Reality? Did it? That's a science question, ultimately -- not a sit-back-in-the-armchair and speculate from common sense. The answer is unlikely to look like anything we're familiar with in day to day life.

What does God add? It adds too much. It adds in agency -- non-physical desire, intention that exists at a level that avoids any need for explanation, physical or not. But this is just the primitive intuition of mind/body duality written large: not only does it go counter to our discoveries, but it's a complex, complicated anachronism which has added on all sorts of bells and whistles to "the fundamental reality of existence."

It's a familiar answer. God thought the universe into existence from nowhere the way we imagine things from nowhere-in-particular. A child can see how plausible this is. That's the problem.

Basically, you're claiming that the fundamental reality of existence is a human-like disembodied Mind working on the nonphysical plane of the mental. This is not a simple interpretation, a tautology where the first part of the sentence equals the second part. It requires work if you're going to demonstrate it.

Posted by: Forbidden Snowflake | September 4, 2010 12:51 PM

If that means anything at all, you simply get into the same regress as with causes, unless you can show that the supposed "ground of Being" doesn't need a ground.

Posted by: Kel, The Privileged View From Nowhere | September 4, 2010 6:01 PM

However you conceive it, I don't see how a relationship could be independent of or prior to the universe.

we are forced to conclude that He does exist because the physical universe exists.

Posted by: Antiochus Epiphanes | September 4, 2010 10:29 PM

OK...regarding the sort of tone complaint leveled here by nickmatzke: This seems typical. On one hand, he complained that insult has replaced reasoned argument...BUT when offered reasoned arguments, he only responded to what he perceived as insult. And that kind of irks me, because it seems that if I ever want to get a response out of someone concerned with tone, I actually have to insult him/her. That's not the way I roll*, so I never get a response out of the matzke type. I mean, did he come here for a discussion or did he just want to bait someone into insulting him? I'm not always the most coherent guy in the world, but I offered a couple arguments and was ignored**. The lesson here is that some of the people who complain about tone only respond to tone.

*Though I wouldn't probably ever read comments here if everyone rolled like me.
**sniff**

Posted by: Wowbagger, Man-Hating Man of Pharyngula | September 5, 2010 3:32 AM

johnnie-gray wrote:

We may be stuck with the laws we have, but they are completely arbitrary.

If that's true, why haven't we noticed it? The reason we call them 'laws' is because they're consistent. Or are you implying there's some kind of scientific conspiracy keeping the fluctuating laws a secret?

Posted by: SteveM | September 5, 2010 4:04 AM

ardon me, I thought you were referring to my original post in which I quoted SH's exact words ("Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing"). That said, I don't see how my paraphrase ("[the universe] creating itself from nothing because of gravity") is a distortion. It faithfully reflects the ambiguity of the original.

No, I would not call it "faithful", in fact it removes the ambiguity of the original statement. For example, if Hawking had said, "Because there are automobiles, such as Ford, highways would inevitably be created" is not the same as "Highways were created because of Ford". The latter makes highways explicitly dependent on the existence of Ford, while the former does not.

Posted by: Kel, The Privileged View From Nowhere | September 5, 2010 5:27 AM

But of course. Unless I have trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, how can I possibly know the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon?

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, Quel Dommage | September 5, 2010 6:31 AM

Dania beat me to it.

it might be that the universe exists simply because its existence is possible. And if something can happen, it will happen given enough time

It is possible the universe exists because some intelligence outside the universe said: "Let there be light." It is equally possible this whatever-it-is took a massive dump and created the universe that way. It's also possible the universe just happened to pop into existence without the agency of a laxative-using entity.

You're arguing for a god of the gaps. Since we don't know what happened before 1×10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang, you're trying to shoehorn a god into doing something to create it all. That's an awfully short time for Big JuJu to relieve his bowels.

Posted by: The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge | September 5, 2010 6:52 AM

There is "something rather than nothing" because there couldn't possibly be nothing. If there were nothing, then the values of a number of non-commuting variables would be known exactly (presumably zero), thus violating the Uncertainty Principle. There is the least "something" in the universe that there could possibly be—in fact, if you add it all up, counting gravitational energy as negative, it's probably authentically zero. But it can't be zero everywhere—same reason there can't be any temperature below absolute zero.

Gravity is the geometry of spacetime. Period. There's no reason the basic geometry couldn't preexist what's in it now. It's probably a matter of chance which three dimensions (plus time) decided to blow up to their present sizes and which six (or seven) remained compact, although if more than one were negative (like time) causality would be problematical.

I don't know exactly what Hawking said, because it was filtered through some idiot reporter, but he probably thinks that just as Maxwell's equations just naturally pop out when you solve the equations of General Relativity with a fifth compact dimension, a la Kaluza-Klein, that we will ultimately discover that all the other interactions will be explained by GR working over the other compact dimensions. I suspect he's right.

I also think that the mindset that gravity has to be hauled into the "modern world" and turned into another quantum field theory is inherently wrong-headed. QCD and Electroweak theory may explain the other three interactions, but General Relativity explained away gravity. Explain away the Strong, Electromagnetic, and Weak forces and then we can talk about what theory needs to be "modernized".

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, Quel Dommage | September 5, 2010 8:52 AM

God would be doing His thing before the Big Bang altogether.

Not if, as you claim:

But time didn't exist until the universe came into being. So there was literally no time for it to come into existence.

There isn't time for Big JuJu pull down his trousers and squat before evacuating his bowels.

Special pleading is a logical fallacy. Nobody here, at a skeptic, atheist blog, are going to accept "everything has to follow the laws of causality, except for one thing" as a convincing argument.

Posted by: Iain Walker | September 5, 2010 9:44 AM

johnnie-gray (#270):

Well we are forced to conclude that there must be a self-grounded ground (or uncaused cause) because such an infinite regress is logically impossible.

Supporting argument please.

(#284):

My understanding of the classic first cause argument is that it does not refer to chronology but ontology -- the first cause is what sustains the universe at any given moment of its existence.

That's one formulation of the classic arguments (plural). There are several different versions of the cosmological argument.

The question then, is why we should assume that the universe needs sustaining. Or rather, why reality or the sum of existence needs sustaining. The assumption that without a sustaining cause/force/explanation everything would lapse back into nothingness strikes me as being little more than a gratuitous application of Aristotelian physics to questions of ontology.

I'm not sure the latter [mind/body duality] can be dismissed as a "primitive intuition"; or if it is, it is one that can marshal sophisticated and persuasive philosophical arguments in its defence.

"Sophisticated" in the sense of "elaborate" and "involved" one might grant you. But "persuasive"? Examples, please.

In that case, there's no reason why whatever universe(s?) might spontaneously pop into existence would have the laws of physics and characteristics of the universe we're familiar with. We may be stuck with the laws we have, but they are completely arbitrary.

Hence the multiverse hypothesis, which provides an explanatory context in which the laws of physics that we have can be both arbitrary and unsurprising.

(#288):

Is this starting to sound mad enough for you yet?!

I'm not sure why you bothered quoting this vaguely amusing but rather juvenile slice of rhetoric, since it doesn't appear to be making any serious point. If it is, then it seems to make the error of conflating a version of the multiverse hypothesis with a version of modal realism with some very loose notions of what constitutes a logically possible world. Quite apart from anything else, the existence of an infinite number of universes does not entail that any imaginable state of affairs is realised in at least one universe. It's like arguing that an infinite set of numbers must contain all the prime numbers (which is of course false, as the set of even numbers will suffice to demonstrate).

(#295):

But time didn't exist until the universe came into being.

God would be doing His thing before the Big Bang altogether.

Um, care to resolve the contradiction here?

Posted by: Stephen Wells | September 5, 2010 9:47 AM

We have no evidence that it is even possible for there not to be a universe.

Posted by: Iain Walker | September 5, 2010 9:52 AM

Antiochus Epiphanes (#299):

Ontology (development) also requires a time-vector…developmental events are ordered.

Er, it's ontology (pertaining to questions of existence), not ontogeny (pertaining to questions of development).

Posted by: pete d | September 5, 2010 9:56 AM

j-g @284:

If SH is saying gravity simply came into being along with time, space, etc (as opposed to preceding them) we are left with the question of how something can be its own cause.

There are similar quandaries throughout QM. How can a particle interfere with itself? How can something be both wave and particle? How can a particle overcome an insurmountable energy boundary (tunnelling)? Wierd shit happens at the quantum level. We don't know how, it just does, and it doesn't make any intuitive sense. Why would you think the beginning of the Universe would or should make any sense via any experiential knowledge?

Posted by: Iain Walker | September 5, 2010 10:05 AM

johnnie-gray (#298):

"Before" is to be understood ontologically rather than chronologically.

OK, contradiction resolved, but then you should express yourself more carefully. "Ontologically prior" may be slower to type, but it's less slow than having to post corrections when people take you at your word.

You now have the problem of describing the nature of the universe's ontological dependence upon God (or how God explains the existence of the universe). Because without that, "Goddidit" is no explanation at all.

But you do accept it -- you accept the universe is either self-causing or uncaused.

Or that the universe is just one part of an infinite series.

Posted by: Iain Walker | September 5, 2010 10:08 AM

Antiochus Epiphanes (#307):

Thanks for that. What other people are saying makes more sense.

No worries. And I sometimes get the Sean Carrolls mixed up too.

Posted by: Owlmirror | September 5, 2010 1:19 PM

I can make up dialogues too:

Believer: Have you considered that it can be demonstrated by reason that God exists?

Skeptic: Oh, I doubt that. But I'll listen to your argument, at the very least.

Believer: Well, consider: All matter is made of atoms, which are attracted and repelled by fundamental forces, yes?

Skeptic: Indeed.

Believer: And those atoms are made of smaller particles, and some of those particles are made of even more fundamental particles yet, which also are attracted and repelled by fundamental forces.

Skeptic: So far, you're making a great case for materialism.

Believer: Ah, but consider: The particles and forces must themselves have some sustaining cause. And even if we do not know what that cause is, and even if it has some sustaining cause itself, the regress of that which sustains cannot be infinite.

Skeptic: Oh? Why not?

Believer: Um... because it's logically impossible.

Skeptic: Because you say so?

Believer: No, just because it's logically impossible!

Skeptic: You haven't demonstrated impossibility, merely asserted it.

Believer: But it must be impossible! How can an infinite chain of sustaining energy and forces exist, if we see non-infinite mass and energy levels being sustained?

Skeptic: Hm. Well, I would note that an infinite series can converge on a finite value.

Believer: ...

Skeptic: I haven't seen a good response to that argument so far. Let me know if you find one.

Skeptic: But let's say I concede that possibility that there is some .... whatever .... that sustains every subatomic particle and fundamental force. What then?

[What happens next, of course, is that the high-flown abstruse philosophical discourse gets grafted on to a fucking fairy tale]

Believer: Well, obviously, this must be the Ground of Being, which must be God, Who must have created man, and woman from man's rib, and put them in a garden, with a talking snake, and a magic tree, and the talking snake convinced the woman to eat from the magic tree, making God mad, so He kicked them both out of the garden and let death into the world, and then some thousands of years later felt so bad about this that He became a human and let the human that He was be killed, and then brought this human back to life, and this magically made God able to forgive those that believe this not be tortured forever and ever after they die, and instead go and join with God in the best place ever, but you won't find out whether it's true until after you die and it's too late, so you better start believing now. Oh, and a polity that believes this has the right to defend itself against the internal subversion of those that don't believe it by killing those that say that they don't believe it, preferably by setting them on fire, pour encourager les autres.

Skeptic: Uh.... huh. Because the fundamental sustainer of matter is a magical person?

Believer: Besides, those that say that they don't believe might be possessed by demons! Kill them all; God will know his own!

Skeptic: Well, your logic is inescapable, and I think you should be put into a jacket and room that are similarly inescapable, you homicidal loon. Bye now!

Posted by: Sastra | September 5, 2010 5:22 PM

johnnie-gray #284 wrote:

It's tautological to say reality exists, but I'm not seeing why that tautology invalidates the "why?". If it "is", then it can't be "isn't" -- granted. But it might have been "isn't". Hell, for all we know it might cease to be "is" at at moment.

I'm not sure that complete nonexistence is a logical possibility -- no time, no extension, no space, no state, no affairs -- not even a void. One could even play a game where the "isn't" is the real state of affairs, so that reality is Nothing, and nothing is Reality. Complete and total nothing-ness on this level seems to be incoherent.

At any rate, a God which existed would have to be a subset of the fundamental reality of existence in order to be real, in which case any drawbacks to Reality would apply equally to a mental Ground of Being, in the might-not-exist quandary. Reality would include any and all levels and realms that exist, in whatever form they exist. It is more basic -- and less specific in attributes -- than God.

Yes ... I think you're right that there is an intimate relationship in classical theism between the question of God's existence and the "mind/body duality". I'm not sure the latter can be dismissed as a "primitive intuition"; or if it is, it is one that can marshal sophisticated and persuasive philosophical arguments in its defence.

Sophisticated arguments, yes, and persuasive to minds that evolved to naturally divide the world into the mental and the physical. But science reveals a reality which surprises our common sense. The supernatural seems intuitively plausible because it reflects how things seem to us. Not how they really are.

I highly recommend Bruce Hood's The Science of Superstition: How the Developing Brain Creates Supernatural Beliefs. You will enjoy it, I think.

Posted by: Kel, The Privileged View From Nowhere | September 5, 2010 5:51 PM

. I'm not sure the latter can be dismissed as a "primitive intuition";

Dualism is dead. Of course you could get your brain removed to demonstrate me wrong... ;)

Posted by: Kel, The Privileged View From Nowhere | September 6, 2010 6:42 PM

There are serious conceptual problems with materialism.

How do you know the mental activity isn't causing the brain activity?

Posted by: Wowbagger, Man-Hating Man of Pharyngula | September 6, 2010 7:23 PM

johnnie-gray wrote:

One would need to know more, but it's worth adding that, in the Thomistic view, the immaterial intellect nonetheless requires mental imagery and perceptual experience to function -- hence one might expect damage to the brain to affect the operation of the intellect.

Please indicate which of the following Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) used to validate his theories:
a) CT scan
b) PET scan
c) MRI

Posted by: David Marjanović | September 7, 2010 7:01 AM

How is that any different from the mind arising from the brain?

Aquinas liked making distinctions without differences.

For instance "naked" vs "clothed with clothes only the righteous can perceive", to mix metaphors a little.

Posted by: Iain Walker | September 7, 2010 9:16 AM

Huh. Johnnie-gray seems to have vanished, leaving people replying to non-existent posts. Does that mean he turn out to be Piltdown Man after all, prompting PZ to play Whack-a-Mole with the Banhammer?

I don't suppose I got an answer to any of the questions I raised in #287 and #295, did I? By the looks of things there was some handwaving re the philosophy of mind, and not much else.

Posted by: Ing: PhD Trollologist | September 7, 2010 9:56 AM

One would need to know more, but it's worth adding that, in the Thomistic view, the immaterial intellect nonetheless requires mental imagery and perceptual experience to function -- hence one might expect damage to the brain to affect the operation of the intellect.

Except it doesn't work like that. If you damage a radio you won't get a change in the signal. damage to the brain can cause crucial changes to the person. People have been right assholes who previously weren't with frontal lobe damage, People with memory damage have damaged memories. If there was a signal that was consistent without the brain we shouldn't SEE radically different behavior or the such due to damaged minds.

Besides, if the brain has all the memory storage, and a intact soul can't impose any at all change upon a sociopath mind, what the fuck good is it, how is it different form having no soul, and why the fuck would we even think such a thing exists.

Oh right, you believe in demon possession, so you solve the brain damage by insisting that another unproved unobservable mind signal is hacking into the brain.

Posted by: AJ Milne OM | September 7, 2010 10:08 AM

I don't suppose a single banned troll morphing to come back is really much of a data point on its own, but it's interesting: Hawking's statement really does seem to have got some folk a mite uncomfortable.

I think I sorta get why: combination of the fact that they'd previously had these sorta fuzzy rhetorical statements from him they used to handwave around the actual ramifications of work in his area, and, of course, the general authoritarianism of the breed. Hawking being such a name, it probably stings particularly when he says somethin' they don't figure they can easily spin their way...

Still, honestly, to me, this is pretty much no surprise whatsoever--either from Hawking or from the field in general...

Reminder to those religious folk getting all stressed about this: do check your calendars...

I mean, this is the 21st century. And a physicist has just pointed out, ever so shockingly to the rest of us, that there are no invisible pixies shuffling quarks into position somewhere down at the base of things. Nor did there ever apparently need to be.

Again, not really news, actually. Nice of him to be so clear on it, but I'd almost suggest: it really should have been redundant to say that, and long before now...

The question that sometimes occurs to me is: if you could somehow bring someone into the world without their knowing much (or anything) about the older traditional beliefs imagining gods conducting the thunderstorms, would they even imagine anything like them, now? If you just gave them Hawking's stuff, say, or some other nice pop introduction to cosmology, would some reflex of the human brain (or just some of the human brains) still tend to imagine something with agency behind the physics?

... or is that just the holdover of those older myths, still echoing around the culture? When you've got explanations in such areas without agency, does the brain still expect to find it anyway? I mean, I know there's a certain tendency of the human brain to imagine agency where there isn't, but it's not like it's universal or unstoppable, exactly: there's lots of day to day events that people do seem to perceive as about cause and effect and natural, at least statistically (if not more mechanistically) predictable forces. Most of us don't start looking for leprechauns jostling our elbow when we spill coffee on ourselves, for example, if it's clear enough to us our sleeve snagged on a doorknob...

... so given that, given the current work, would people have any kind of difficulty with what Hawking's saying absent the older traditions it does contradict?

I ask because, again, hearing about this, my response was pretty much... umm... okay... but I thought most of the merely sane kinda already assumed this much, guy. Thanks all the same. And then there's all this apparent discomfiture. Trying to classify it a bit, is all.

Posted by: Sastra | September 7, 2010 11:01 AM

AJ Milne OM #315 wrote:

... so given that, given the current work, would people have any kind of difficulty with what Hawking's saying absent the older traditions it does contradict?

My guess is a strong yes: the existence of the myriad traditions across the world doesn't sound like repeated random cultural accidents, but something common to the human condition. The likelihood is that the brain is in some sense hardwired to see agency, make connections, think teleologically, and organize the world according to a sense that there are invisible essences, forces, and powers beneath the surface. Children intuitively think this way. We learn otherwise as we get older, and our brains develop -- but the original ways of thinking tend to stick around, at some level. If it's not religion, then it's secular forms of supernaturalism such as ESP or Fate. Thinking naturalistically takes some work and sophistication. It goes counter to a lot of very primitive instincts.

Once again, I'll recommend Bruce Hood's The Science of Superstition: How the Developing Brain Creates Supernatural Beliefs.

Posted by: John Morales | September 12, 2010 4:53 AM

Johnnie:

Now electrochemical impulses in the brain are every bit as physical as chalk or ink. So how can intellectual meaning inhere in them any more than in chalk or ink marks?

Because brains create and sustain minds.

'Meaning' is meaningful when referring to thoughts, not so much when referring to whatever phase-space configurations of brain states are associated with them.
(Or, if you like, in the mental realm, not the physical.)

Your question is akin to asking how can audiovisual content inhere in a pattern of magnetisation.

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 12, 2010 4:56 AM

I thought it was concluded JG was another Pilty sockpuppet?

sure looks like it to me.

Posted by: Kel, The Privileged View From Nowhere | September 12, 2010 5:33 AM

Primarily the problem of how what the philosophers call "intentionality" can be grounded in a purely material substrate.

Now electrochemical impulses in the brain are every bit as physical as chalk or ink. So how can intellectual meaning inhere in them any more than in chalk or ink marks?

Yet as good as this is, it means that each generation has to subsequently learn those same acquired skills. So this means the ability to transmit information from one to another. And so on... you should get the idea now.

Consider the art of crushing nuts. Some chimpanzee tribes have learnt to do this, they put a nut in a tree root then smash it with a rock. This breaks the nut shell and gets to the edible morsel of food within. Yet at the same time think of a giant bird beak, one that is used to crush nuts and get in for the same reason. Yet the bird doesn't know that's what it's beak is for, but the chimpanzee has at least a rudimentary understanding of that reason. Humans even more so, our brains are so good at representation of those reasons that we can design tools to do it. The reason we have a nutcracker is exactly the same as the bird's beak, only that the beak was shaped by natural forces while a nutcracker was shaped by intentional design.

Reasons emerge as part of the evolutionary process, it's just that our brains have been selected for being able to represent those reasons. Explaining intentionality isn't such a problem except without an understanding of how evolution works.

Posted by: Philip Legge | September 12, 2010 6:03 AM

If it's possible, it's not absurd. An absurd universe would be one with no laws in which, as I said, "literally anything could happen at any moment". You have just admitted that, according to quantum weirdness, >anything that isn't forbidden by the laws of physics can happen at any moment". In other words, quantum weirdness is part & parcel of the physical universe governed by physical laws. I guess that's why it's called quantum physics. In other words, it isn't exempt from causality. According to your account, "borrowing energy from the vacuum" causes particles to exit a nucleus. Perhaps we don't fully understand or aren't able to fully formulate all the ramifications of this causal mechanism; we may not yet be able to fully integrate it with other areas of physics. But there must be a mechanism nonetheless. Maybe that's why it's called quantum mechanics.

Nothing in your exposition vitiates the need for an uncaused cause.

Yes, it’s damn clear you have no understanding of what you’re rambling about, troll. Just another blatherer ignorant of modern physics, spouting the same old fallacies.

Posted by: John Morales | September 12, 2010 9:03 AM

Johnnie, you write you "don't see how that touches on the problem of intentionality", but then you cover the ground adequately.

Different ontological categories.

In itself, brain activity can no more "give rise to" or "be associated with" meaning than chalk-marks can.

All evidence points to brain activity being the physical source of mind; meaning is a mental phenomenon.

Meaning is only generated when a rational intelligence listens to them and understands them.

You ovestate the case. Many creatures other than humans clearly have mental states, though they may not have "rational intelligence" as we do.

--

Note that you and I are agreed that 'meaning' is only meaningful in the domain of consciousness; where we differ is that this is somehow mysterious. The so-called "hard problem of consciousness".

Posted by: Owlmirror | September 12, 2010 10:57 AM

The Great Desecration involved not only a host

No, it only involved a host. That's the only thing that matters.

Why?

Here we go, once again:

How does nailing a cracker harm you, or any Catholic?

It doesn't pick your pocket (or the pocket of the Church, or of any other Catholic, or of any other human, even).

It doesn't break your leg (or the leg of any other Catholic, or any other human being).

Even in your mythology, it doesn't harm your salvation, or the salvation of any other Catholic.

Even in your mythology, PZ offending God incurs a punishment from God to PZ. PZ, in your mythology, is damned, although he's also already damned because he committed/commits the blasphemy of denying the holy spirit. So why do you care if someone already damned commits an action that further ensures his damnation?

Why does it matter at all?

You of course don't believe that, but Catholics do and you shouldn't be surprised if they react accordingly.

Actually, the beliefs of Catholics about the Holy Cracker, and their reactions to a cracker being nailed, are inconsistent with their stated beliefs in a real all-powerful, all-knowing eternal God. This isn't surprising, exactly, given human over-reaction and over-emotional investment in perceived sacred things, but something is very, very, wrong with these ideas and emotional reactions. Something is wrong inside their heads; inside your head.

Posted by: Iain Walker | September 12, 2010 1:35 PM

It feels a little odd replying to a post I can only see in second-hand fragments, and I'm pretty much echoing what others have already said here, but still ... SIWOTI.

johnnie-gray/Piltdown Man (#null):

Meaning is only generated when a rational intelligence listens to them and understands them.

That's an unduly narrow account. A better formulation would be to say that meaning is generated when information is transferred between information-processing systems, such that the transfer tends to give rise to non-random responses. A bird song has meaning, even though your average nightingale isn't heavily endowed with rational intelligence.

But once you recognise that concepts like "meaning", "purpose" or "intentionality" are applicable first and foremost to descriptions of systems and their interactions, it becomes clearer why your objections to a physicalist theory of mind:

Now electrochemical impulses in the brain are every bit as physical as chalk or ink. So how can intellectual meaning inhere in them any more than in chalk or ink marks?

doesn't hold water. You're committing the category mistake of looking at one level of description and demanding that it exhibit properties that can't be meaningfully ascribed to it, because they are appropriate to a different level of description instead.

Your argument also skates perilously close to the fallacy of composition: even if certain concepts are not applicable to the behaviour of the components of the system, this does not prevent them from being applicable to the behaviour of the system as a whole.

Posted by: Kel, The Privileged View From Nowhere | September 13, 2010 7:33 AM

From a layperson perspective, Alvin Plantinga might have appeared slightly less inept if he didn't rely on outside help for a basic mathematical calculation. ;)

Posted by: KG | September 13, 2010 8:55 AM

I'm not sure that complete nonexistence is a logical possibility -- no time, no extension, no space, no state, no affairs -- not even a void. One could even play a game where the "isn't" is the real state of affairs, so that reality is Nothing, and nothing is Reality. Complete and total nothing-ness on this level seems to be incoherent.

No, there's nothing logically wrong with the idea of the "null universe". It can be succinctly described by a formula in second-order predicate calculus:

∀ P: ∀ x: P(x)

Posted by: Iain Walker | September 13, 2010 11:03 AM

KG (#335):

All predicates are true of all objects. But this can only be the case if there are no objects, as for any predicate P, we can define a predicate ~P, which will hold of an object only when P does not.

Hmm. It seems that the argument is: The world thus described is a possible world, only if it is empty. But that doesn't seem equivalent to showing that an empty world is a possible world - one could simply deny that the world in question is a logically possible one. It's a bit like arguing that there is a possible world in which numbers are green, only if numbers are physical objects in that world, therefore there is a possible world in which numbers are physical objects. But the alternative is to argue that numbers cannot be physical objects in any possible world, therefore there is no possible world in which numbers are green.

So on the face of it, there's something faintly question-begging about the null universe, thus defined - it appears to be logically possible only as long as you assume that it's logically possible.

Possibly I'm missing something here? My modal logic is, I admit, pretty rusty.

Posted by: Iain Walker | September 15, 2010 12:15 PM

Owlmirror (#338):

Of course, Thomas Aquinas was basically writing crossover slash(philoso)fic (Moses+Jesus/Aristotle)...

Hardcore slashfic, at that. Because as Aquinas argued:

(i) Everyone gets fucked by someone else.
(ii) An infinite regress of fucking is impossible.
(iii) Therefore the regress must terminate with an Unfucked Fucker.
(iv) And this we call God.

Posted by: John Morales | September 17, 2010 7:37 AM

Piltdown, it works both ways, you know.

You love to gaze into the Abyss, dontcha? :)

--

PS Don't worry, I just finished writing a comment "defending" Catholicism, in my special way.

Like you, I seek to weed out heretics until only the core of True Believers™ remains.

Posted by: Kel, The Privileged View From Nowhere | September 17, 2010 7:44 AM

I see Pilty ignored my #323...

Posted by: Wowbagger, Man-Hating Man of Pharyngula | September 17, 2010 8:58 AM

Piltdown Scumbag wrote:

Hi KG, been following the papal visit? According to the BBC News website there have been "dozens" of protesters. : )

Well, if they've got kids and live within walking distance of a Catholic church they're probably wise to stay home and make sure the local priest doesn't decide drop in to engage in some child-rape in celebration the momentous occasion of the head ghoul's visit.

Posted by: Janine, The Little Top Of Venom, OM | September 17, 2010 10:29 AM

Couldn't have put it better myself. Liberal Christians just get in the way. ("Yassa Massa Myers, dem fundies sure is BAD folks! Ain't never going to be one o' them, no SUH!")

I am sure you would love to subject liberal catholics to the same treatment that you desire for witches, atheists and homosexuals.

And your use of racial humor is just so fucking cutting edge.

Years from now, I will remember the exchange and still have a clear eyed view of the inhumanity of people like you.

Posted by: David Marjanović | September 17, 2010 11:05 AM

Maybe Pilty is one of those congenitally amoral people who

Why did I put it in so many words. I could just have wallowed in the sad irony of the fact that Pilty does not love his neighbour as himself.

I wonder if he even tries.

Posted by: Kel, The Privileged View From Nowhere | September 17, 2010 6:32 PM

Evolution has nothing to do with it. The question is how a configuration of brain matter can "represent" anything. That is what is meant by the problem of intentionality.

Are you going to take up my challenge and prove me wrong by getting your brain removed? Because with the evidence showing the relationship between brain activity and conscious behaviour (why do you think drugs take effect? Why do you think that people lose memories and mental function when suffering dementia?) and that's not even getting into the problem of interface or the begging the question by taking it away from the physical (the physical seeks to find an explanation within the framework, those who claim dualism don't seek to explain how it works but to say "God did it")

Posted by: Kel, The Privileged View From Nowhere | September 17, 2010 7:43 PM

Or in other words: "Everything is the way it is because it got that way" (J. B. S. Haldane).

(So much for people who claim that science is for "what" and "how" questions, philosophy or even religion is for "why" questions, and never the twain shall meet.)

It's funny how NOMA and the modern proponents of similar lines of inquiry accuse their opponents of having a simplistic or misunderstood view of science.

Posted by: Owlmirror | September 17, 2010 8:49 PM

Suppose some low-life scrote steals my wife's car and dumps it after smashing the windows, defecating on the seats and scratching obscene messages in the paintwork.

In other words, he steals from her something that has actual value; that she needs and uses.

Your analogy utterly fails -- for wafergate, at least.

It very well applies to how Catholics have, in the past, treated all religions (and variants of Christianity) other than their own.

I might even feel that although the demands of justice have been met, the demands of honour require me to administer a jolly good thrashing to the scrote.

Ah. Honour. Is that what you call bloodlust? The church called for massacring people and setting people on fire -- for honour?

A sane society would regard my reactions as perfectly normal and indeed praiseworthy -- only pointy-eared autistic loons seem to have trouble understanding it.

Only red-faced, bulging-eyed, borderline psychotic loons would consider your reactions "normal" or "praiseworthy".

Should a Christian really start by making the least charitable assumption?

Not really, no. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa etc.

Yet you keep doing it, you despicable scrote. You've been doing it for the past two years since Wafergate. You complain about having your "wife's" car stolen, vandalized and defecated on, and then you go and do it anyone and everyone else, and defend it being done to anyone and everyone else by you or your fellow Catholics, and you have the gall to call your malevolence "honour".

"Yassa Massa Myers, dem fundies sure is BAD folks! Ain't never going to be one o' them, no SUH!"

Your racism is noted.

Posted by: Mattir-ritated | September 17, 2010 10:04 PM

I, for one, would be proud to be described as a pointy eared autistic. Seems totally the opposite of loon, though.

Posted by: Owlmirror | September 17, 2010 11:07 PM

Non-Catholic: Your mother Church is a diseased whore who fucks iguanas small human children.
Catholic: How dare you! I love my mother church, she's the most wonderful mother church in the world!
Non-Catholic: *sighs and rolls his eyes* Good grief. Can't you see you're begging the question? You may believe your mother church is the most wonderful mother church in the world and you're perfectly entitled to hold that belief. I, on the other hand, believe note the evidence demonstrating she's a diseased whore who fucks iguanas small human children and am perfectly entitled to call her such.

Tweaked slightly.

Catholic: Whatever. *kicks Non-Catholic in the balls*
Non-Catholic: *writhing in agony* Highly illogical!

"Mother" Church: Are we done here? I have iguanas to fuck, and by iguanas, I mean small human children.

Posted by: God | September 18, 2010 12:13 AM

but is it not the case that Pride and Wrath are in fact Sins, and Deadly ones, to boot?

Come on, You're My apologist. You should be able to figure this one out.

The excuse these types always use is that they think they're allowed to sin on My behalf. So they defend My pride and honour; become wrathful about the sort of things they think I get wrathful about, and so on. Because I'm special.

Of course, this leads to them thinking that it's just fine to be greedy on My account as well; hence, papal palaces and Pradas. And then some of them think it's OK to be lustful on My account; hence, paedophilia.

It all follows from Me being special.

Posted by: Owlmirror | September 18, 2010 11:35 AM

The Christian concept here is to hold the other fucking cheek, to fucking love your enemies instead of dueling over an insult.

The Hoax does not believe in that Christ. He just doesn't. He's a loving-Christ atheist.

He believes in the Christ who came to bring "not peace, but the sword"; the Christ who told his followers to hate their families; the Christ who whipped the money-changers; the Christ who sneered at and condemned the Pharisees; the Christ of Luke 19:27 who will slaughter those who don't accept him.

That Christ had bucketloads of honour.

Posted by: Owlmirror | September 18, 2010 1:02 PM

Holy wrath and general assholery, yes, but honor? As in "oh shit, you failed to respect my feelings properly, so now I'm forced to fight you in a ritualized way near the old castle tomorrow at 6 in the morning (if I can't kill you where you stand)"?

No, more like "oh shit, you failed to respect my feelings properly, so now I'm fully justified in doing whatever violence to your person and/or property that I want."

The ritual of which you speak is the defence of honour between equally-touchy peers. Those who feel religious offence to their "honour" do not regard religious transgressors as peers, but as dehumanized "scrotes" who deserve only punishment, not a fair chance to defend themselves. Hence the Hoax kicking "you" in the crotch rather than challenging "you" to a duel.

insults or humiliations don't figure

YHVH of the Old Testament regards being ignored by those who "owe" him worship as the highest and worst insult and humiliation, followed closely by having competition, and not being taken seriously enough.

Hence the first few of the ten commandments.

Posted by: Forbidden Snowflake | September 19, 2010 5:01 AM

. Suppose Richard Dawkins presents his treasured first edition of the Origin as a gift to one of his young American friends who, in a subsequent fit of jealous bitchiness, rips it up, smears the pages with faeces and posts pictures online.

Even so, I hardly think the destruction of a first-edition Origin by its owner will elicit any kind of reaction except "what a bloody moron this chap is".

None of the analogies work, because the situation in which a cheap, mass-produced item which is distributed nearly indiscriminately is simultaneously claimed to be priceless, special and deserving of reverence is unique and irreplicable in its stupidity.

Posted by: Kel, The Privileged View From Nowhere | September 19, 2010 5:29 AM

Are you going to take up my challenge and explain how a physical system can consciously represent itself as intelligible to itself?

How is it my dog was able to open my desk drawer to remove a ball my brother had hid in it? Unless you're saying that dogs have some magic component to their cognition, surely that constitutes a representation of the world. Just think about it. Even without having any internal reference, we have an agent acting with a representation of at least separate objects and functionality, yet it's just matter interacting with matter. There's nothing magical about representation, but don't take my word for it. Here's Godless philosopher Daniel Dennett to tell you all about it...

Posted by: First Approximation, L'esprit de l'escalier | September 19, 2010 5:38 AM

Jonathan Gray *wink* *wink*,

You will LOVE this speech:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZdNdXDP7HM

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, Quel Dommage | September 19, 2010 7:29 AM

PZ? Is it not time to get rid of this joker?

As soon as PZ realizes Pilty has disgraced us with his presence again, then JG Esq will be shown the banhammer again.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | September 19, 2010 7:52 AM

Pilty is as pompous and idiotic as every. The Esq. in the nym shows his irrationality off with a fine flair. All ego, no substance. Still no physical evidence for your imaginary deity fuckwit. Bye-bye loser, you will be gone shortly and totally forgotten, along with your insipid and irrational prose.

Posted by: Owlmirror | September 19, 2010 11:31 AM

Priggish as ever, I see.

Being called "priggish" by a hypocritical psychotic racist bigot is kind of like being called "intellectual" by a Khmer Rouge, or "counter-revolutionary" by a Stalinist.

Am I supposed to be insulted because I have ethical standards, and you don't?

Posted by: David Marjanović | September 19, 2010 8:10 PM

And your use of racial humor is just so fucking cutting edge.

I was aiming more for retro.

Priggish as ever, I see.

That's... just... funny anymore.

What is (an) abstraction? Surely it is a mental (as in intellectual) act. Is it material? Obviously not, by definition. Therefore intellectual acts are non-material.

o_O

Do you believe I think only matter exists?

Physicalism is not materialism. Matter is a form of energy, not the other way around (you've been sleeping since before 1905, I see). Or to put it in philosophical terms: the world doesn't consist only of objects, it consists of facts – die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist (early 20th century again).

(An) abstraction isn't matter, it is an act, an act done by the brain.

Why on Earth would anyone want to follow Marx?

I was joking; sorry for not making that clearer.

(And the answer's no.)

I happen to agree. Quantity can easily seem to turn into quality, but it doesn't really; you apparently think the difference between a robot and you is quality, I think it's quantity. A lot of quantity, but still only quantity.

You probably wonder where emotions and other qualia come into this.

Not really. Intentionality and rationality pose far bigger challenges to a materialistic conception of mind than qualia.

Please explain. (And, again, don't take "materialism" too literally. The mind isn't the brain, it's an activity of the brain.)

A structured physical system, no matter how complex, can only ever be intelligible, not intelligent.

Evidence, please.

It's a conceptual principle -- you can't derive a thought from an is.

Fine pun, but I can only repeat: evidence, please. Evidence that this "conceptual principle" actually holds in this universe.

You appear to believe that a chalk word on a blackboard (like brain activity a structured physical system) could generate and become aware of its own meaning if only the chalk molecules were arranged in a sufficiently complex matrix.

Not quite, because chalk (plaster – calcium sulfate with inbuilt water) is chemically too simple for that. Brains aren't that uniform.

What, if anything, do you mean by "generate meaning"?

Let's look at what nerves do. Being a scientist, I'm a reductionist, so let's start with a simple case, something that doesn't involve a brain, a reflex. A sense organ triggers an electric current in a nerve cell (in many cases by physically opening the lids of ion channels by pulling or pushing). The changed voltage in that area of the nerve cell opens voltage-gated channels (by electrostatic attraction or repulsion) in the adjacent area of the nerve cell. This way, the electric impulse spreads along the cell. It would go in both directions if it could, but ion channels are inactivated after they're opened, and it takes some time till they can be opened again, so the impulse ends up traveling in one direction only. It reaches the end of the cell, I'll spare us the well-known details of how it triggers all the synapse stuff, and the ion channels at the adjacent end of the next cell open. In the simplest case, the other end of that cell lies in a muscle, and an electric impulse in a muscle triggers contraction by electrostatic attraction. No thinking going on here.

But is there no meaning? Or does the sensory input have the meaning of "trigger the action of a specific muscle right now"?

In the brain, the nerve cells connected to sensory organs and the nerve cells connected to muscles don't touch each other. Most brain cells only contact other brain cells. "The brain is mostly occupied with itself" (as the professor who taught Introduction into Neurology put it). The impulses triggered by sensory input travel through stored memories*; the result (think of AND, OR, NOT etc. gates**) runs through more memories; the result of that runs through imagination, which draws on more memories; and so on and so forth, till finally an impulse ends up in a muscle or thirty.

Is there a meaning in there? Is it qualitatively different from what the hundred million nerve cells around the human gut do, where the pressure caused by arrival of food triggers nerve impulses that cause the ring muscles around where the food is to contract?

What evidence have we got to overcome Ockham's Razor? All else being equal, the most parsimonious hypothesis is that no novel process or substance is involved.

* Memories are... are synapses. Ultra-short-term memory (what you're thinking about right now) is a current that circles through a few neurons, and when you suddenly forget what you wanted to say, that current has been interrupted by another current that has reached one of the neurons involved. Short-term memory is established by phosphorylating proteins that have to do with the emission of neurotransmitters. Long-term memory is established by growing extra synapses between nerve cells that already have a synapse with each other.
** NOT gates are inhibitory synapses, for example.

You have consistently failed to provide any plausible reason why this should be so, resorting instead to vague talk of quantity somehow becoming quality.

That's because I don't need to. The principle of parsimony is on your side; the burden of evidence, therefore, on yours.

Yeah, why didn't I? [link]*

(*Hey, I kid! I kid because I love.)

I don't understand. Who's Sheldon, and what has s/he got to do with your problems with expressing yourself clearly?

"nothing does" was a link. Click on it.

I did. Unfortunately, it was far too technical for a humble layman like myself to understand. I gather the possibility of there being an unknown/undetected cause is somehow ruled out in the current model. However, as I'm sure you would acknowledge, the dominant scientific orthodoxy has undergone radical paradigm-shifts in the past and most likely will do so again. After all, it's just a theorem.

Translation: "I don't understand it, so it could be wrong."

See, that's an argument from personal incredulity. You have two choices:

1) Go to the trouble of learning what it all means, and then show us what's wrong about it. (Collect Nobel prize in physics in passing.)

2) Accept what is at present the most parsimonious hypothesis: that there's most likely no error in the math or the assumptions, and that all those physicists most likely know what they're doing.

I wonder, though, if there isn't a contradiction lurking in there somewhere. If something is acausal, it has no reason to be. In which case, does it make sense to say there can be a reason for it not to be?

See, "reason to be" simply isn't a concept that is applicable to physics. That's counterintuitive to philosophers, and used to be counterintuitive to physicists as well, but that's how it is.

Stuff happens just because it can, at a probability that is determined by how easily it can; nothing can modulate such probabilities to 1 or 0 even for limited spans of time.

Reasons not to be? Virtual particles (those existing on "borrowed" energy) have a half-life that is determined by how much energy was "borrowed". Real particles (those not existing on "borrowed" energy) all have half-lives with which they decay into other real particles, except if they're truly elementary (this means they cannot decay without "borrowing" energy and not paying it back). In short, the law of the conservation of energy is the great big reason not to be. It's disputed if there are others; the big question is whether protons are truly stable or if their half-life is just insanely long (IIRC, the currently lowest possible half-life is 10⁴¹ years).

Well I suppose I could tweak the analogy. Suppose Richard Dawkins presents his treasured first edition of the Origin as a gift to one of his young American friends who, in a subsequent fit of jealous bitchiness, rips it up, smears the pages with faeces and posts pictures online.

This fails because the number of copies of the first edition (of, of course, any book) is limited and usually rather small. Hosts are mass-produced – the wafers are produced en masse, and then they're consecrated en masse. They are fully replaceable.

It can be argued that a few books (The Little Red Book, certain editions of The Bible...) come reasonably close, but that's still not the same as complete, unlimited replaceability.

I can't help feeling that, in your scrutiny of my analogy's minutiae, you're missing the main thrust. Which is simply that a furious Catholic response is perfectly natural in light of Catholic beliefs about the eucharist.

How unsupported, outright ridiculous even, those beliefs are was PZ's whole point.

I further note that you don't adress any part of my "scrutiny". For instance, why don't you expect God to defend himself? Why does He need unworthy people to do His work for Him, in ways that doubtless fall far short of how well He could do it?

PZ says it's because, actually, you know full well it's a frackin' cracker.

A sane society gives the monopoly of violence to the state and forbids people to wage their own private wars. That's what the rule of law is all about. A society which allows vendetta is not a sane society.

I have some sympathy with this view. However there are times when state authority is too weak to protect people from predatory elements in society. And there are times when overweening state authority effectively becomes a predator on the people. In such instances at least, the people have a responsibility for self-defence.

Even then, however, self-defence doesn't equal revenge.

The textbook example is the following scenario. Suppose a store is robbed at gunpoint. The robber walks out with the money. The storeowner waits till the robber is far enough away to not see what's going on, and then he takes his gun from under the counter, runs after the robber and shoots him.

I'm told that there are places in Texas where the storeowner would be considered a hero. Where I come from, he'd be charged with access of self-defence.

Now suppose it's all in Somalia, there is no police or court system, so nobody can be charged with anything. In that case, I'd still consider the storeowner an asshole, and a potentially dangerous one at that. Assuming I had money and/or courage, I'd try to work towards restoring some kind of order so that robbers can be brought to some kind of justice; but I wouldn't be comfortable with shooting robbers outside of immediate self-defence or immediate defence of others.

Gah. Death-watch beetles in the timbers of civilization. [link]

That video was excruciating. "Let's facilitate together"... <facepalm> what a heap of intertwined strawmen. The Christians I know very much believe in right and wrong, and they don't claim otherwise. They just don't believe that exactly the same things are right and wrong as you believe. For instance, they'd have little trouble accusing Kent Hovind of being wrong because he failed to "give unto the emperor what is the emperor's"; while few would use the term "blasphemy", many would get holy wrath. They'd have no trouble laughing at you because you believe in demons, and some would have no trouble claiming you're wrong to believe in hell because that idea contradicts the idea that God is good (and they like that latter idea better).

People who believe that nothing is wrong and that all opinions are equally valid hardly ever call themselves Christians. They tend to use terms like "spiritual but not religious" or "postmodernist" or "New Age" (rhymes with "sewage").

Are you going to take up my challenge and explain how a physical system can consciously represent itself as intelligible to itself?

Let me try... ultimately, it can't. A Turing machine can't simulate itself in real time (let alone faster). What I know about how the brain works wasn't figured out by research on my brain.

Here's Godless philosopher Daniel Dennett to tell you all about it [link]...

I should probably read that sometime.

Jonathan Gray *wink* *wink*,

You will LOVE this speech:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZdNdXDP7HM

I'm less impressed. Dawkins makes an argument from consequences, and he fails to ask the very first question that the TV news triggered in my mind: the Pope has apologized profusely for all the sexual abuse of children – great, so when will the perpetrators have their day in court?

Quo usque tandem, episcope, abutere patientia nostra?

Treating "the" mind as a thing is one of the most unhelpful conceptual biases that has bedevilled the philosophy of mind, one of those linguistic practices that does more to block enquiry than to stimulate it. It's far more helpful to think of mind (without the definite article) in terms of process.

QFT.

You keep repeating this, and variants on it, like a mantra, without ever making any effort to justify it.

It is a mantra.

and a very boring one at that

Let me quote:

Miscreant
Piltdown Man

Crime
Insipidity

Comments
Utterly obtuse toad who just kept coming back with weasely arguments for Catholicism, without ever addressing anyone's arguments with substance.

The problem with silly philosophical puns, Pilty, is that when you make them, they're indistinguishable from your actual arguments.

Well said.

Posted by: The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge | September 20, 2010 12:14 AM

Iain Walker @ 378:

(e.g., a mouth is ontologically prior to a smile, in that a smile cannot exist without a mouth).

You said it all right here. Lewis Carroll intended this as a joke, knowing sane people would laugh at the Cheshire Cat's smile remaining when the rest of the cat was gone.

Unfortunately, "sane people" has nothing to do with Pilty. He can't get his mind around the fact that mind is something brains do, and you can no more have a mind without a brain than you can have a smile without a mouth. The situations are precisely analogous, but neither he nor Descartes are smart enough to realize it.

Posted by: Owlmirror | September 20, 2010 12:35 PM

However there are times when state authority is too weak to protect people from predatory elements in society.

Of course, by "people" you mean "Catholics", and by "predatory elements" you mean "any non-Catholics who happen to be nearby".

And there are times when overweening state authority effectively becomes a predator on the people.

Since you support fascist Catholic dictatorships and the legalization of oppression of non-Catholics, it's pretty obvious that "state authority" only means "non-Catholic state authority" and "the people" only means "Catholics", you bigot.

In such instances at least, the people have a responsibility for self-defence.

Or in other words, Catholics have the right to do any violence they please to the person and/or property of a non-Catholic who dares to offend them by existing.