Also recently, I found a documentary on the German church-critic Karlheinz Deschner (unfortunately not in English yet). It was titled: “the Hatefilled Eyes of Karlheinz Deschner”. The documentary is some kind of meta-discussion on his body of work which is, alas, not yet available in english, either. He basically wrote for 30 years, alone, on the “Criminal History of Christianity” in 10 Volumes (!) — currently writing the tenth and last one. Hopefull the whole is translated when he is done.

The title “the Hatefilled …” is a quote of one of the Christian interviewees, who also appears in regular public TV sometimes. It reflects how some of the other Christian participants think. They are quite obsessed in trying to find a reason for Deschners engagement, trying to pull Ad Hominem Arguments against him. Deschner on the other hand is a rather gentle (very) old man, speaking softly and supports his work with tons of supportive evidence. He will probably not witness how his work is received and it may appear to him that it happens what the other side wants: that his book just collects dust (one of the christian interviewee says so).

The editor of his works states that when discovering all the lies, the blood and gore, the torture and extortion, how Christian church supported a great many of the big totalitarian systems in europe, someone like Deschner is the voice of the countless victims and being scandalized at this is a natural reaction. I think so, too.  Perhaps this is to be expected, really.

It is impossible in post-war Germany to look past piles of corpses and stay cool about it. The other causes and perpetrators have been identified and brought to justice, yet the Church and the religion are not only around — No, they are chipper and are happily talking about their values and their Christian love as if nothing ever happened. Nobody ever enters an objection. It sounds like their whole religion brought just peace, love and harmony.  Not only that — they behave as if this is obvious.  By asking for evidence, or god forbid, entering an objection, they are outraged.  In the video they even go as far and claim that Christianity was in resistance against the fascistic regimes in Italy and Germany (there is pretty strong evidence to suggest that this is not true).

This is, in my view, the reason Atheists are bullied into a defensive stance, polite,  rejecting the belief but silently agreeing to their benevolent religion made of golden honey and sunshine that always fought for the good and the love. And this seems fairly harmless on the surface, I guess.

But, there is no possible way to be cool about that. There were very interesting comments from the Christian interviewees. One says bascially: humans are evil. They need a god that watches over them and keeps them in check, e.g. Yaweh, etc, etc.

My own action plan is therefore:

• Restore or correct historical facts of religious authorities
• Highlight the fact that so many “Christian” groups fought hard and bitter against humanistic improvements and only when their opponents succeeded and it was widely adopted, Christians would adopt and assimilate this view as if it was their own from the beginning. Poverty, Slavery, Fascism and so forth. Hundred years into the future, the Christians (fanatics) will claim they always wanted equal rights for gays and women.
• Christianity is NOT solely about love and values. The human rights are superior and were established against the church, not with their help or consent.
• Beating them in their own game: it is morally unacceptable that anyone  (God, Spirit, Demon or Human) tortures human beings for an eternity for nefarious reasons (like disbelief). This is not okay. It is frankly absurd, and also rather hideous in concept. Supporting such a cause is evil and morally dubious at best, methinks.

Once this is done and the skewed, brainwashed views are refuted, there is room for the alternative: humans are good. They like each other without any supernatural agent looking over them or keeping them in check. They have developed values out of their inherent compassion. They are good people who learned gradually how to treat each other with respect how to wield arguments over weapons and use (serious) reasoning to settle disputes. Some ideas, political and religious can overwrite their inherently good nature — we know that. This is, to me, the main difference between (some) religious people, especially of the Abrahamitic religions and being nontheist.

If someone wants to be a Christian, or indeed, even if someone wants to be a racist or whatever, in the public sphere, they are protected by free speech. But the so-called values of Christianity or any other religion really, need be challenged, and vigorously so!

I will, if possible, I will try to find sub-titles somewhere. The film is from 1998.

It’s well worth mentioning that Plantinga’s argument is 18 years old or so, and it has failed to convince any naturalist in the mainstream groups of naturalists (Dennett et al). Unusual, considering that it is supposedly such a powerful argument in it’s explanatory content. Nonetheless, having watched this series of videos, it has become clear to me that Plantinga’s EAAN (Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism) as just as flawed as other theological musings such as the slippery old Cosmological Argument.

Critique of Alvin Plantinga’s “Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism” – Link:http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p … C36901BCEE

Before we can even begin to account the myriad flaws and fallacies of the EAAN’s reasoning and supporting arguments, it is already plain to see that the argument is unworkable. Plantinga is a strong advocate of Theistic Evolution and argues that if God created Man “In his own Image”, by means of biological evolution, then our cognitive faculties would be reliably tuned to truth. However if naturalistic (i.e., non-theistic) evolution is true our faculties would be unreliably tuned to “mere survival”. I find EAAN to be incoherent.

Plantinga argues that evolutionary naturalism is unjustifiable because our accumulated mountains of evidence for it (as well as our cognitive processes for testing/assessing this evidence) would not be trustworthy in the absence of God, the source of absolute truth. He then argues that traditional theism is more defensible on the grounds that our minds were designed by God. His argument falls apart because it intrinsically begs the question. If Plantinga conceded that this rather small point of his was indefensible, then the entire argument would fall flat on it’s face. Now, I will try to squeeze in some of my more detailed thoughts on the actual videos.

Part 1

03:15 (3 minutes and 15 seconds)

:

“And then when I use the word ‘naturalism’, what I really mean is … the belief that there’s no such person as God, or anything like God”

Here it would be well worth noting that Plantinga is making an implicit reference to Positive or “Strong” Atheism rather than naturalism. Positive Atheism being, as everyone knows, taking an epistemically positive stance in the form of atheism, with the positive assertion that a God or gods do not exist. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that Plantinga misunderstands both atheism as it is most commonly understood, as well as misrepresenting naturalism. Naturalism could be better defined as empirical-ism, meaning that it only accepts things on the basis of material, tangible evidence, and all evidence is still subject to be changed, or to be shown false. God, the supernatural “realm” in general, and so forth, all fall into the class of ideas and entities that are wholly unknown given naturalism. Vague, untestable, and unfalsifiable, and thus not subject to naturalistic modes of inquiry.

03:24 (3 minutes and 24 seconds)

:

“Naturalism is stronger than atheism. Naturalism entails atheism … but atheism doesn’t entail naturalism; you can be an atheist without rising to the heights of – or sinking to the depths of (whatever you think is appropriate) – naturalism…”

Here he goes again with his broad and unqualified statements about what “naturalism” means. One is tempted to think that this is a deliberate falsification, and not a mistake. It would have been more technically accurate and indeed, honest – if Plantinga had mentioned that “naturalism” in the context of theistic/antitheistic arguments, exists as two differing stances. One is an epistemological position, while the other is an ontological position. Namely: Metaphysical Naturalism, and Methodological Naturalism.

Methodological Naturalism:

“Methodological naturalism (‘MN’) is the commitment of scientific investigation in practice to studying only naturalistic causes and explanations. Boudry et al. observe, though, that there are really two types of MN:

Intrinsic methodological naturalism (IMN) is the a priori philosophical commitment to not even consider supernatural explanations (see the authors’ definition of “supernatural” below). As Boudry et al. state in a forthcoming paper, under IMN ‘science is simply not equipped to deal with the supernatural and therefore has no authority on the issue.’ This is the view expressed by people like Eugenie Scott, Kenneth Miller, and Rob Pennock. It also appears to be the official position of the National Center for Science Education and the semi-official position of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences.

Provisional (or pragmatic) methodological naturalism (PMN),’a provisory and empirically grounded commitment to naturalistic causes and explanations, which in principle is revocable by extraordinary empirical evidence.’ As the authors note:

According to this conception, MN did not drop from thin air, but is just the best methodological guideline that emerged from the history of science (Shanks 2004; Coyne 2009; Edis 2006), in particular the pattern of consistent success of naturalistic explanations. Appeals to the supernatural have consistently proven to be premature, and science has never made headway by pursuing them. The rationale for PMN thus excludes IMN: if supernatural explanations are rejected because they have failed in the past, this entails that, at least in some sense, they might have succeeded. The fact that they didn’t is of high interest and shows that science does have a bearing on the question of the supernatural.”

Source: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com … ernatural/

Metaphysical Naturalism as detailed by Wikipedia:
“Metaphysical naturalism. also called ontological naturalism and philosophical naturalism, is a philosophical worldview and belief system that holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences, i.e., those required to understand our physical environment by mathematical modeling. It is occasionally referred to as philosophical naturalism, or just naturalism. Methodological naturalism however, refers exclusively to the methodology of science, for which metaphysical naturalism provides only one possible ontological foundation.
Metaphysical naturalism holds that all properties related to consciousness and the mind are reducible to, or supervene upon, nature. Broadly, the corresponding theological perspective is religious naturalism or spiritual naturalism. More specifically, it rejects the supernatural concepts and explanations that are part of many religions.”

The latter, (Metaphysical Naturalism), is an ontological position, and deals with reality rather than with descriptions of reality, as does the former. Metaphysical, or Philosophical, or more appropriately Ontological Naturalism, deals with the nature of reality, and can be thought of as an extension to Methodological Naturalism. Essentially, it takes Methodological Naturalism, an essential bedrock axiom of scientific inquiry, and extrapolates it positively, to evoke belief in the non-existence of the supernatural. Or rather, that we live in a mechanistically physical reality governed by natural laws. It can be thought of in the same way that Strong Atheism is an epistemologically burdened claim, pertaining to the non-existence of God. But that’s another topic (again).

And contrary to Plantinga’s oversimplification; the naturalistic stance on the existence of God is far more of a vague one. MethodologicalNaturalism (explicitly) – does not directly deny the existence of one or more gods, like Metaphysical adaptations of naturalism do (implicitly). Methodological Naturalism, a key to scientific discovery; merely withholds judgment on the existence or non-existence of a class of “things” of which god(s) are only a part of. Namely, the group that includes the supernatural, and transcendental entities… Supernaturalism in Science should be out-ruled in principle, anyways. As such then, the Atheist vs. Theist debate in this context, and the relevance of the position of the atheist, is not so much the simple statement that there are no gods (which I believe to be an accurate statement), but rather, it is more of a pragmatic sentiment on the knowability or unkowability of the existence of God, in which case, we may as well reject the notion of gods in principle, until physical proof of it’s (or “their”, if we were to include polytheistic religions); existence.

I needn’t mention Plantinga’s later statement about the beliefs of Hegel, as I do not dispute them. The next sentence is a brief statement about the natural evolution of conscious living beings, and it’s place as part of Metaphysical Naturalism, simplistically defined, that is, as well as it’s technical relevance to the ins and outs of the rest of his argument. He also presents a brief summary of the structure of his argument(s).

04:22 (4 minutes and 22 seconds)

… “Evolution is often thought of as kind of a pillar in the temple of naturalism, if indeed naturalism has a temple. But… I want to argue that they don’t fit together. I want to argue that … one can’t sensibly be both a naturalist, and… accept… evolution (as evolution is ordinarily thought of), and that they conflict with each other. They go against each other. The conjunction of the two – naturalism and evolution – I want to argue … shoots itself in the foot! Or as a more complex, learned sounding way of putting it: is self-referentially incoherent. “

I wondered whilst listening to this when he would get to the point, instead of tautologically repeating the same line four or five times! 

Of course, Plantinga himself has in fact shot himself in the foot as well. As I said, the argument has certainly not convinced me, and it has yet to convince any serious naturalist in the thinking world, or anyone on this forum for that matter. Additionally, it’s good to see Plantinga showing his Platonic Colours again, to some degree.  Plantinga has previously made apparent his Platonic Idealism, meaning that he believes that ideas represent some kind of absolute reality, and we can see examples of this cropping up all over his argument if you look hard enough, as in his Reformed Epistemology.

06:20 (6 minutes and 20 seconds)

“So according to theism; belief in God, we human beings have been created by a wholly good, all powerful, and all knowing being, namely God, who has … created us in his own Image, made us like him… who has aims and intentions – he intends certain things – and can act in such a way to accomplish those aims. That’s part of what it is to be a person …”

I trust you will all see the conflict of definitions here, as Plantinga struggles to keep his terms straight. He starts off by using the generic and unqualified term “theism”, a label which does NOT only apply to the Abrahamic Versions of god(s), but applies moreover, to any ’God’, or gods! And then he proceeds to ”qualify” that statement with what is clearly a description of the far more specific – namely – the Judeo-Christian Monotheistic God, and even goes on to allude to the Judeo-Christian myths and mythologies about the creation of the world and universe, such as God creating man in his own image. He also assumes that this God is personal. And so, it ultimately becomes clear that although he uses the very broad term “theism”, what he is really talking about is the Christian God. It seems very strange to me that a sophisticated philosopher such as Alvin Plantinga could confuse his terms in such a bizarre way. It is not the first time he has done this, and we’re not even through with the 1st vide ( represented by*Part 1* – in huge bold green).

09:09 (9 minutes and 9 seconds)

“In brief here’s how my argument will go …

I’ll argue that … if naturalism and evolution were both true, if that conjunction – that pair of propositions – were both correct … then it would be improbable that our cognitive faculties – memory etc. – are in fact reliable …”

This is a truism! The overwhelming majority of naturalists accept this, and so do I! It is not merely “improbable”. It’s a fact. It is empirically verifiable, and well documented, that all of those cognitive functions are highly unreliable! How reliable were the inductive assumptions of old worldy (lol) religions about their gods and deities? How accurate were the Romans and Greeks’ perceptions on such things, with their dozens of gods?? The god of war, the god of fire, the god of… sewage.  Or the Aztecs who had little objections to cutting peoples’ hearts whilst still alive, and sacrificing their parts to their gods? Not to mention the fact that the people were generally acquiescent to this rather obscure fact.

Here is one, rather random example of how our cognitive faculties can fail us: the McGurk Effect. A mysterious perceptual illusion that takes place because your senses, namely vision and hearing, conflict. This is an example of one of the flaws of our cognitions and precognitions.
It seems almost as though Plantinga is trying to assert that our everyday thinking and cognition about the world and universe is reliable and truthful. “Sadly” depending on your perspective, all of the available evidence seems to favour the opposite conclusion: that it’s unreliable, and based on limited perceptual knowledge. Heck, human beings can only ever understand their surroundings to the extent that they can ask “what am I doing now?” — by which time “now” is long, long gone. 

If Plantinga is attempting to argue that human cognition is somehow perfectly reliable from his viewpoint, and there is no good reason to believe that it is, and good reasons to believe that it isn’t…. then his entire argument will collapse. Rather, the question here is whether or not certain cognitive faculties would be favoured by evolution via natural selection, and which of those faculties can be counted on to produce truthful perceptions of the world.

Next will be the final point I deal with in this video.. but there’s still 5 more….

09:36 (9 minutes and 36 seconds)

“Well once you see that … then once you accept [both] naturalism and evolution, then you now have a defeater for that proposition. For this proposition that your cognitive faculties are reliable…a reason to give that proposition up… a reason not to believe it. And once you have a defeater for that proposition – that your cognitive faculties are reliable, then you also have a defeater for any proposition that you take to be produced by your cognitive faculties…. [ ... ] so then you also have a defeater for naturalism and evolution itself. “

1. If we had to reject all of our belief simply because they might be wrong, then Plantinga’s religious beliefs stand to the same principle as the evolutionary naturalist. Assuming that Plantinga’s reasoning is correct. Unfortunately, it’s not …

2. It is not simply evolution that allows for the possibility of error.

Plantinga seems to be highlighting the fact that has been growing in my mind for quite a while. That all of our faculties, and all knowledge is but axiomatic in it’s nature, no matter how certain we are. Science operates on the possibility of error, as does much else.

Plus, Plantinga also seems to be committing to an implicit fallacy of equivocation, by assuming that all of our cognitive faculties as he puts it, are equal and equally worth mentioning. They are not. It’s pretty evident that some of these functions have been honed to a sharper degree by natural selective pressures, such as vision. In humans, we have full colour vision, and forward-facing eyes, probably one of the most advanced visual systems in the living world. Our olfactory cognition however, is seriously weak compared to other animals such as dogs and cats, as is our hearing, the senses that are usually most acutely tuned in most placental mammals other than primates.

And as for religious beliefs. . .

For an explanation of the cognitions that may lead to religion, I present for your approval, a video made by Dr. Andy. Thomson. According to Thomson, a robust and comprehensive account of religious thinking and beliefs can be arrived at in terms of our species’ biological evolution. God does not exist in our experience; we ascribe an interpretation to our intuitions, but these intuitions are byproducts of brain functioning that can be understood in evolutionary terms. Dr. Thomson: “Religious beliefs are just the extraordinary use of everyday cognitions, everyday adaptations: social cognitions, agency detection, precautionary reasoning. Religious beliefs are a byproduct of cognitive mechanisms designed [by evolution] for other purposes.”

Dr. Andy Thomson: Why We Believe in Gods

I post this as an example of how religion, may in fact have been “designed”, or created as an artifact of evolution, as an adaptation. Thomson provides robust evidence that religious belief is the result of cognitive mechanisms used in unusual ways, and even presents evidence that religious beliefs and/or misassumptions are present even in newborns.  Fascinating indeed …

Part 2

Plantinga now proceeds to quote Thomas Aquinas on the nature of God and it’s “relationships” with human cognitions.

00:14 (0 minutes and 14 seconds)

“Since human beings are said to be in the image of god in virtue of their having a nature that includes an intellect … they’re in the image of God because they’ve got an intellect – they can understand and know – such a nature, one with an intellect, is one most in the image of God in being able most to imitate God. So he thinks of this err … ability to “know” on our part is perhaps the most important aspect of the image of God, in human beings…”

Now I will dissect the flaws in Plantinga’s “Reformed Epistemology”, and discuss the axiomatic nature of knowledge. Plantinga almost appears to argue that our experience of the world is somehow supernatural, and citation is needed there, methinks.

01:21 (1 minute and 21 seconds)

“Most of us would think [ ... ] that at least a function of our cognitive faculties would be to provide us with true beliefs. That’s what they’re for. And we would normally think that when they’re functioning properly, when there’s no dys/mal – function, that for the most part, that’s what they do … Of course it’s true that err… let’s say err… if there are five different witnesses to an auto[mobile] accident, you might get five different stories. But there will be an underlying level of agreement … “

Is it not dangerous to simply assume that your beliefs are reliable from the outset, when you have no reliable means of demonstrating this? Also note how Plantinga simply assumes that his beliefs about the world/universe are true, and then qualifies his statement with the spurious phrase “for the most part”…. It turns out that he cannot claim to know absolute certainty, anymore than methodological naturalists. It seems that Plantinga is no longer talking about his naive notions of objective truths and realities, but is instead simply stating that apparently: Evolutionary Naturalism has a lesser probability of truth than Evolutionary Supernaturalism (in his view).

02:40 (2 minutes and 40 seconds)

“There would be agreement that there are indeed such things as automobiles… that [beings] use them to accomplish their purposes, which in the case of automobiles – normally – involves going somewhere… That automobiles won’t work well on the surface of the moon or the bottom of the ocean, that if you drop one out of a helicopter it will ordinarily fall down, rather than ascend… and so on…”

According to gravity, a car, not like objects such as sheets of paper, or parachutes, will fall through the air, like humans, at around 30-35 ft, per second per second. Once dropped, the car’s speed terminally accelerates to the point of terminal velocity wherein the medium (air) with which the car is traveling through, prevents further acceleration under gravity. Thus, all of Plantinga’s examples of these “truths” of the world and universe are pragmatic facts about reality, rather than philosophical musings.

Whether or not cars can drive on the moon or underwater is a semantical conundrum about how to define “car”. For example, do Lunar-rovers count as “cars”??

The same is true of cars driving underwater, since some of them can. It is also worthy of note, the kind of truth we are discussing here. It is truth about physical objects and entities such as cars, and alike. This kind of truth, as I briefly mentioned in the introduction can be labeled as empirical, and rational.

This is empirical knowledge because it is knowledge that comes to us through the senses, and as I have said in the past, I subscribe to the view that all is mere conjecture if it is not applicable via empiricism. There is still no one single ”truth”, though, (in spite of the method by which we acquire “truths”).

I like how William S. Burroughs puts it in his essay “On Coincidence” in ‘The Adding Machine’: “Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact.”

Aside from the inductive nature of experience (which some Popperians ignore); we have a curious tendency of by-passing perspectivisms, which bundle their own truths in them. Surely, this deferring of perspective has a pragmatic function, but no more than the practical concrete representations of abstract or ideal mathematical shapes.

Every thing experiential is valuative and evaluative and generates differences, such that they may be comparable but not identical. In other words, the most that can be enjoyed is equivalence alone about pertinent facts. Even more, as a consequent, truths are paradigmatic and their constituent elements cannot be separated from the system in which it is contextualized, not unlike a field. Hence, a positivist’s referent is qualitatively not the same as an idealist’s, nor naturalists’ from supernaturalists’, nor a blind person’s from a schizophrenic’s, nor mine from yours, and so forth.

All that can be arrived at is the set of interacting truths, manifested as claims about perception communicatively, to produce yet another amalgam of truths, ad infinitum. This is not a classical dialectic being spoken of here, since there is not teleological point to it (only teleological paths within it.)
Empirical and Rational observation is our most finely tuned faculty, and is at the root of both science, and scientific naturalism. 

03:05 (3 minutes and 5 seconds)

“So our assumption is that when our faculties are functioning properly, though not always, such as when they’re are wokring at the very limit of their ability such as in contemporary physics and cosmology for example, that – for the most part – they will produce truth when they’re functioning properly … “

If it is really the case that our cognitive faculties as Plantinga says, were designed by the creator of the universe, ‘God’, to produce truth, then why do our cognitive faculties all have such a well established founding for error, at least so it would seem? I mentioned the McGurk effect earlier, but there is also the Monkey Business Illusion, visual trickery and many others. Plus: the Homo S Sapiens’ history of scientific error??

03:24 (3 minutes and 24 seconds)

“But isn’t there a problem here for the naturalist? Or at any rate, for the naturalist who thinks that we’ve arrived on the scene after some billions of years of evolution, by way of natural selection, genetic drift, and other blind processes [ ... ] working on sources of variation like random genetic mutation, [ ... ] if that’s the way you think of it then shouldn’t it come as somewhat of a surprise that the cognitive faculties are in fact reliable?”

Isn’t there a problem here for the supernaturalist who falsely asserts that our cognitions are reliable and truthful? Plus, we have still yet to establish what Plantinga means here by “truth”. .. ???
If it is Plantinga’s contention that our cognitive faculties are god-given functions, and were designed by him, to, as I said earlier, produce truth, then why is it so evident, to repeat myself, that our ancestors made such a volume of mistakes, and so on? Our cognitive faculties are rarely if ever fully reliable. And also, Plantinga seems to argue that if both evolution(ism) and natural(ism) were both true, then the probability of reliable cognitive functions coming about are low. Apparently though, it IS low, since humans are only one species in the history of life. And also, the only example of a finely tuned cognition that he has given us so far, is our perceptual observations of cars.

06:15 (6 minutes and 15 seconds)

“If Darwinism is correct, if Evolution is correct, or if the conjunction of evolution and naturalism were correct, then the ultimate purpose of our cognitive faculties would surely be survival … or perhaps survival by way of reproductive age, or to maximize reproductive fitness. So if they have a purpose then that’s what it is. Their purpose ISN’T to provide us with true beliefs, it’s to maximize fitness. …”

Yes. Our cognitive faculties only exist at all because of their predictive power. For example, eyes and the visual system is something that is said to have evolved independently among animals some 40 times throughout Earth’s history, as have many of the other senses, even though the eyes are probably the most pronounced one. And what is more, there are oceangoing invertebrates such as octopus and squid that have eyes on a par with the sharpness of our own. Or nautilus, with it’s sophisticated pinhole camera eye, as Dawkins phrased it so succinctly.

Evolution did NOT give us cognitive faculties to arrive at the most probable truths, nor is evolution a process with purpose or intent. It just plows on. “It” gave us cognitive faculties for survival purposes, as Plantinga has already said. And given the fact that not only can we only expect a certain number of our beliefs to be accurate and subject to revisions at any time, and there are far more ways to be incorrect in one’s beliefs than to be correct, how does Plantinga recognize the false points of his beliefs, if he believes that his cognitive faculties were designed by the all knowing creator of the universe to generate truth(s)? How could such cognitions ever be proven false, if Plantinga’s reasoning is sound?

Nevertheless, I am not alluding to post-modern theories of truths with my claims, but rather, I am simply stating that there are truths to be found using the vagaries of our perceptions, but it will not be the kind of truth that Plantinga would accept with his puerile clinging to certainty and security. All he is doing here is assuming the truth of his beliefs with no form of evidence, and his actual beliefs in question are meanwhile vague and immeasurable by any empirical means. While we can be very sure that cars and tables and chairs and such, exist, and that all of these objects have the properties that we commonly associate with them despite that we can only ever arrive at them through our limited perceptions. But; since are perceptions are highly unreliable, this is a very tentative form of ‘truth’, no matter how much you guys might protest! 

We do not know that our current model of the world and universe and its formation, is really accurate in an absolutist or 100% certainty form. But the reason for that is because knowledge is axiomatic, and this is the way science now works, as a discipline and practice, through the principle of falsifiability, brought about by Karl Popper et al. Methodological Naturalism is simply pragmatic in it’s assumptions. It does not have to be certain in the same way that religious beliefs always have to. It only has to assume that it’s current picture, such as in scientific discovery, is more accurate, and more factual than any previous model.

I will skip the entire 3rd video, since he seems to spend the whole vid making baseless probability calculations, and quote-mining. So here’s the 4th video debunked.

Part 4 (skipped 3rd vid)

05:47 (5 minutes and 47 seconds)

“By virtue of their content as well as their neurophysiological properties; and are also adaptive [to survive]. What then is the probability here of this possibility that their cognitive faculties are reliable? Well here I have to say, not as high as you might think. Beliefs don’t causally effect behaviours just by themselves, it’s beliefs and desires, and other factors that do so together. [ ... ] So, Imagine that Paul is a prehistoric hominid, and the emergencies of survival cause him to display tiger-avoidance behaviour. [ ... ] There would be many behaviours that [may be] appropriate, fleeing for example. Or climbing a steep face – assuming that tigers aren’t that great at rock-climbing … or crawling into a hole too small to admit the tiger [if] it is a large tiger. Or leaping into a handy lake. Now … when I wrote this I was under the impression that tigers, like house cats, don’t like water. [ ... ] But in fact that turns out to be false. “

In this particular example, Alvin Plantinga admits that by not realizing on his part, that tigers can swim, and in fact, thrive in lakes and rivers, because of bizarre reasoning, assuming that tigers behave in a similar fashion to that of cats that are domesticated, and then changed his belief to the correct stance, after having learned more about it, Plantinga has now highlighted the flaws in this argument against naturalism. Naturalistic Evolution did not simply give us false or failing beliefs and desires. It gave us beliefs that most appropriately matched with the observed empirical data as you might call it, for our survival. And this IS important! And this is exactly why our cognitions may have been at least in some sense geared towards “truth” to a revisable degree, is exactly because of these survival advantages that come attached to discovering these “truths”, by virtue of our highly complex cerebral cortexes also “designed” by evolution. Plantinga’s beliefs about tigers not liking water may very well have got him brutally killed, if the situation occurred when he was faced with a tiger.

Plantinga’s tiger-illustration actually hits the nail quite well. He admits that his logically fallacious reasoning lead him to the erroneous conclusion as he later found out, that tigers are like other cats that he was familiar with. And at some time later, someone or other may have demonstrated to him that tiger in fact DO live in waters, such as rivers, and as such, Plantinga’s belief-forming mechanisms were shown to be false, and he had to change them in accordance with the empirically observed facts.

This illustrates the fact that beliefs are malleable and can change as new evidence comes along. And it’s that new evidence that matters, too. That is to elucidate the fact that beliefs are based on evidence, and few things are simply “self-evident”, as proposed by Evidentialist Foundationalism, in philosophy. Beliefs are not things that we merely accept because of the “fact” (LOL) that they were designed by god or gods to produce truths about the world, but we accept our beliefs based on empirically or rationally based justification for those beliefs, relating to the universe that we can observe. This also goes to demonstrate the rather glaringly obvious fact that the naturalistic world and universe is the first axiom of logic in regards to uncovering truths in reality, rather than God-given precepts, as Plantinga believes.

In his tiger illustration, Plantinga lists 3 possibilities of how a pre homo s. sapiens like hominid that he called “Paul”, could end up trying to run away from a tiger. His 1st possibility is that he would for some reason like to be eaten, but when faced with a tiger, giving in to his instincts, presumably runs away hoping for a better prospect, if he isn’t killed. The 2nd example, is that Paul may be led to believe that the tiger is in fact a large and friendly cat, which he wants to stroke … but apparently also believes that the “best” way in which to pet it is to run from it. The 3rd point is one we would all obviously concur with, from both our instincts and our educated standpoint as humans. That Paul believes that the tiger could damage or kill him, and he runs to prevent that from happening.

• 1.) So there is thus a conundrum in expaining how Paul’s false belief could naturally arise by evolution, if both evolution and theism are true. Given the fact that God could have designed the beliefs to ensure that they matched with reality. If Paul wants to be eaten by a Tiger, but then runs hoping for a better prospect, how is it possible for Paul to determine the prospects, in Plantinga’s mind?Whatever the causal reasons are for this avoidance-of-tigers behaviour, Plantinga cannot adequately explain how it could be inferred from observation, OR how it could be acquired as a new belief from experience or cognition, by virtue of our “unreliable”, according to Plantinga, Cognitive Faculties.  This, if true, can only be, under Plantinga’s Reformed Epistemology, a ”properly basic” belief about reality, and thus his argument is ultimately self-refuting to Plantinga’s broader epistemological positions, if this argument is truly taken to its inevitable conclusions.
• 2.) In the second example of Paul with his bizarre desire to cuddle and to pet the tiger, there is the same logical problem as before, but with added connotations. There are plenty of people who do in fact rather like the idea of cuddling up to a tiger, and some have in the past with relatively no injury. So what would stop a prehuman hominid like Paul from realizing this point?
• 3.) Finally is the false assumption that running away from a tiger is somehow a good or productive means of avoiding a tiger, when it is not., given the fact that tigers can run in excess of 35 mph, while the fastest humans humans can only run a 25 mph or so. And the fastest of tigers may average at 50 mph. As such, it would be more productive to use tools and weapons to fight the tiger, and shift your chances of survival a little.Thus, it seems that Plantinga can only use examples that never actually evolved, in order to prove his case. Plantinga in the 5th video then presents a hideous number of bizarre examples that are not really worth addressing. He spends his time endlessly repeating himself. BUT:Part 6 (skipped 5th vid)02:33 (2 minutes and 33 seconds)
  “The traditional theist on the other hand has no reason to doubt that his faculties are reliable, or that it is the purpose of our cognitive system to produce true beliefs. “

This is nothing short of a spectacular article of faith! Again, he is using the generic and unqualified term “theism”, and is not clear on what he means when uses the word “God”. It seems that he means the Judeo-Christian philosophy. But …. his term ‘theist’ applies to anyone who believes in God or gods. How does he know that a Demonic God could not exist and deliberately make our cognitive faculties Unreliable? Who is to make that judgement, and what is it’s significance if it is true? His whole argument would collapse, and so it seems that his entire argument is based on fundamentally flawed use of terms, and falls flat on it’s face on it’s first premise, that our faculties are reliable and truthful. Thus this argument is invalid, and is not a compelling argument against Evolutionary Naturalism. Thanks for reading.

Out-sources:

“Evolutionary argument against naturalism: An argument proposed by Alvin Plantinga (henceforth EAAN), which purports to show that metaphysical naturalism is self-defeating and hence cannot be rationally accepted. In addition, Plantinga argues that theism does not face self-defeat in the same way that naturalism does. In what follows, I shall descrive EAAN and outline some of the main objections to it.
To begin with, let ‘N’ stand for metaphysical naturalism, the claim that there is no God and nothing like God; let ‘E’ stand for the view that human cognitive faculties have evolved by way of the mechanisms that are studied by contemporary evolutionary theory; and let ‘R’ stand for the claim that the beliefs produced by those cognitive faculties are for the most part true.
EAAN has three stages, each of which involves defending a certain premise:

(1) P(R/N&E) is either low or inscrutable (meaning that we cannot determine whether it is low or high). Call this the Probability Thesis.

(2) Anyone who accepts N and E and the Probability Thesis has a defeater for R. This is the Defeater Thesis.

(3) Anyone who has a defeater for R has an undefeated defeater for each of his beliefs.

From these premises, it follows that anyone who accepts N and E and the Probability Thesis has an undefeated defeater for each of his beliefs, including his belief in metaphysical naturalism. But one who is a naturalist must accept E (it is, says Plantinga, the only option for the naturalist when it comes to explaining the diversity of life). Hence, naturalism is self-defeating. Let us see how these three premises are defended.
Plantinga defends the Probability Thesis by inviting us to consider the case of a hypothetical population of creatures on a planet a lot like earth, formed by blind, undirected evolution, and to assume that naturalism is true. What is P(R/N&E) specified, not to us, but to them? Plantinga notes that, when we consider this hypothetical population, there are four possibilities:

P1: There is no causal connection between belief and behavior.

P2: Beliefs are the effects of behavior but are not among the causes of behavior.

P3: Beliefs do causally affect behavior, but not by virtue of their content.

P4: Beliefs do causally affect behavior in virtue of their content.

Plantinga then says that, since these four possibilities are jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive, the probability we want to assess, namely P(R/N&E), is given by the following weighted average:

P(R/N&E)
=
P(R/N&E&P1)P(P1/N&E)
+P(R/N&E&P2)P(P2/N&E)
+P(R/N&E&P3)P(P3/N&E)
+P(R/N&E&P4)P(P4/N&E).

The Probability Thesis is then justified by estimating this weighted average. P(R/N&E&Pi) is estimated as low for i = 1, 2, 3, because in these cases beliefs will be invisible to natural selection and so there will be no selection pressure towards their being mostly true. It seems, initially, as though P(R/N&E&P4) is going to be very high, but Plantinga contests this estimate by presenting examples of beliefs which are false but which, when combined with strange desires, lead to felicitous action. In the latter case, Plantinga concludes that the probability will be at best moderately high, not very much more than a half.
It now remains to estimate the probabilities of the form P(Pi/N&E), for i = 1, 2, 3, 4. Here, Plantinga thinks that, because of the enormous difficulties that naturalists (almost all of whom are at present materialists) face in avoiding P3, P(P3/N&E) is very high. Now, P1, P2, P3, and P4 are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive, and their respective probabilities sum to 1. Thus, each of P1, P2, and P4 must be estimated as having low probability on N&E. Plantinga claims that a reasonable estimate of the probabilities leads to an estimate of P(R/N&E) as being somewhat less than a half.
Plantinga grants, however, that estimating probabilities in this sort of context is a dubious business. So he concedes that it would be proper to take the relevant probabilities to be inscrutable to us, leading to the conclusion that P(R/N&E) is inscrutable to us. In this way, Plantinga arrives at his conclusion that P(R/N&E) is either low or inscrutable.
In his self-profile in this volume, Plantinga has given a new argument for the Probability Thesis, which does not consider different possibilities for the relation between belief and action, and which supports the stronger conclusion that P(R/N&E) is low (rather than the conclusion that it is low or inscrutable).
The Defeater Thesis is defended by appealing to hypothetical cases that, it is claimed, are clearly analogous to the case of the naturalist in EAAN. Since, in these cases, the subject has a defeater for R, the same is true of the naturalist who accepts the Probability Thesis. Two hypothetical cases that have tended to predominate in discussions of EAAN are The Case of the Cartesian Demon and The Case of the Drug XX. The former is described below, and a version of the latter is described in Plantinga’s self-profile in this volume.

The Case of the Cartesian Demon
Suppose a man comes to believe that he is the creation of a demon that, as imagined by Descartes, is immensely knowledgeable. Suppose that he also comes to believe that this demon is not particularly concerned with making his creations cognitively reliable, and on at least some occasions has been quite pleased to make them unreliable, and moreover has made them unreliable in such a way that they continue to think of themselves as paragons of reliability, being unable to detect the cognitive disaster that has befallen them. Thinking about this, the man comes to the conclusion that P(R/D) is low or inscrutable, where R is specified to himself, and D is the proposition that the man has been created by the demon. Then the man has a defeater for R.
Plantinga defends the third premise by arguing that, if the naturalist has a defeater for R, this generates a defeater for the rest of his beliefs as well. The reason is that all of the naturalist’s beliefs are products of his cognitive faculties, which constitute their source. Once the reliability of that source comes into question, so do the beliefs generated by the source. Moreover, the defeater for R that the naturalist acquires cannot itself be defeated, since everything that could be a defeater-defeater is itself subject to defeat. To support this, Plantinga says that to rely on one’s cognitive faculties to form a defeater-defeater of the defeater one has for R would be like trusting a man to tell you he is not a liar when you have already been given excellent reasons to doubt his honesty.
Let us now consider some objections to EAAN. Most of the controversy regarding the argument has focused on the Defeater Thesis. There has been one main worry that critics have had about this claim. The objections to it that we shall describe are manifestations of this worry, which can be expressed as follows: what exactly is the connection between the naturalist’s acceptance of the Probability Thesis on the one hand, and her acquisition of a defeater for R on the other? One of the most natural expressions of this worry is the Perspiration Objection

The Perspiration Objection
The probability that the function of perspiration is to cool the body given (just) N&E is also low. But surely it would be absurd to claim that this gives the naturalist a defeater for this belief. Thus, it is also absurd to claim that the naturalist has a defeater for R in virtue of accepting the Probability Thesis.
There is no defeater in the perspiration case because the naturalist has other evidence for his beliefs about the function of perspiration, beyond just N&E. So could not the naturalist appeal to other evidence for his beliefs about R? This thought leads naturally to the Total Evidence Objection for EAAN.

The Total Evidence Objection
The naturalist has many other beliefs besides N&E. The probability of R relative to N&E conjoined with these other beliefs is quite high. Thus, the naturalist need not have a defeater for R in virtue of accepting the Probability Thesis.
Many philosophers (including Plantinga) hold that, in addition to propositional evidence, beliefs can also be warranted in virtue of non-propositional evidence. This leads to yet another objection, due to Michael Bergmann, which we can call the Non-propositional Evidence Objection.

The Non-propositional Evidence Objection
Even if R has low probability on all the available propositional evidence, the naturalist could still have non-propositional evidence for R which makes it rational to continue to hold on to R. Hence, the naturalist need not have a defeater for R merely in virtue of accepting the Probability Thesis.
These objections comprise just a small sample of the arguments against EAAN that have appeared in the published literature on the argument. Many of these, along with Plantinga’s responses to them, are articulated and discussed in Beilby (2002 [Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument]).”

(“Evolutionary argument against naturalism,” by Omar Mirza. In A Companion to Epistemology, 2nd ed., edited by Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa, and Matthias Steup, 351-354. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.)

As for the technical term “defeater” –

“Following Pollock (1986), we can distinguish between undercutting and rebutting defeaters. Intuitively, where E is evidence for H, an undercutting defeater is evidence which undermines the evidential connection between E and H. Thus, evidence which suggests that you are a pathological liar constitutes an undercutting defeater for your testimony: although your testimony would ordinarily afford excellent reason for me to believe that your name is Fritz, evidence that you are a pathological liar tends to sever the evidential connection between your testimony and that to which you testify. In contrast, a rebutting defeater is evidence which prevents E from justifying belief in H by supporting not-H in a more direct way. Thus, credible testimony from another source that your name is not Fritz but rather Leopold constitutes a rebutting defeater for your original testimony. It is something of an open question how deeply the distinction between ‘undermining’ and ‘rebutting’ defeaters cuts.

Significantly, defeating evidence can itself be defeated by yet further evidence: at a still later point in time, I might acquire evidence E″ which suggests that you are not a pathological liar after all, the evidence to that effect having been an artifice of your sworn enemy. In these circumstances, my initial justification for believing that your name is Fritz afforded by the original evidence E is restored. In principle, there is no limit to the complexity of the relations of defeat that might obtain between the members of a given body of evidence. Such complexity is one source of our fallibility in responding to evidence in the appropriate way. ”

(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evidence)

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-defeasible

Of course, Plantinga did not need to reveal his bizarre ignorance of philosophy, metaphysics, biology, and Palaeoanthropology, by using his equally bizarre tiger examples. There are excellent examples of definitively false beliefs that have lead to better outcomes than ones that are “true”, to whatever standard. Take the placebo effect. Its not just a change of perception, it has measurable effects. Of course, Plantinga is not going to use real-world examples in his lecture, because his own beliefs are not based on anything real, and needs his Christian beliefs to appear at least somewhat more likely to be true at the end of his lecture. As I said, what kind of evil and disingenuous being would create us to have false beliefs? Then again, how could we disprove such a notion…? But if we don’t look at the examples of genuinely beneficial false beliefs that actually exist, and judge their value, we will fail to understand how false beliefs themselves can evolve. Plantinga sets himself up to fail in understanding false beliefs, and does so via a very selective attempt at looking at all the available evidence. Beliefs are part of an evolutionarily unique way of avoiding becoming trapped with mere instinctual mechanisms. Thus we need to examine not only whether or not the conclusions themselves are sound, but whether the method by which we arrive at them is also sound, be they mathematics, logic, deduction, induction, empiricism, abstraction, metaphysics, etc. What we’ve done with our scientific models is to produce a predictive instrument designed to weed out false theories and apprehensions, and it is through this method that it can be seen that Plantinga’s arguments can be seen to be invalid. That is why he want’s to destroy naturalism, even at the methodical level …

AndromedasWake and I attended a conversation between Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers yesterday. Well, we tried. But we were slightly obstructed by the protesters who forcibly entered the theatre and then hippied up the whole damn shooting match.

Protesters? Oh, yes. You may count upon it.

Members of the Education Activist Network spent about half an hour sitting on the stage and talking nonsense. I gather they’re annoyed with Dawkins for his involvement with AC Grayling’s New College for the Humanities, about which they are disgusted, I tell you.

The gist seems to be a) it costs a lot and b) we can’t afford it therefore it is c) an affront to the laws of God and Man. According to the EAN, education is a “human right”, which I don’t think really follows, but even if it is, how do you quantify exactly how MUCH education is a human right? Is it basic levels of numeracy and literacy? Or is it the kind of suave service Grayling aims to provide?

I had to wonder about these protesters, these predominately young, groomed and foppish types as they flounced around the stage. The purpose seemed mainly to have good hair and pose dramatically, rather than effect any meaningful dialogue. I don’t imagine many involved will have donated all their spare money to educational charities, or devoted their spare time to mentoring and private tutoring. They probably like bursting into rooms and then not making sense.

Let’s dismantle the notion that expensive, private education is somehow bad. Assume that I, over a period of years, create an institute to teach guitar. It takes me a lot of time, money and effort, and is done with the aid of many people. In order to recoup my losses and in order to pay for the highest standards of tutelage, the costs are high. Does anyone have the right to complain? Nope. It’s my college and I can charge what I like. No-one has the right to free or cheap guitar tuition; it’s an exchange of money for a service. Even if education is a human right, is an exceptional education a human right? Grayling et al are trying to create extraordinarily high standards of service; costs will, correspondingly, be high.

Let’s make it even simpler. You go to Greggs (a bakery chain in the UK, not sure if it’s worldwide) and a cake is cheap. Got to Les Cakery de Pierre van de Gateaux, in Richtown, and a cake is expensive. But it will be a damn nice cake. Does anyone protest the fact that some cakes are too expensive for people to afford? Hell no. If a bunch of people decide to set up a private institution to offer a service, and the service is an elite one that cannot be sustained without high fees, how is it the right of poor people to demand the abolishment of same? At least it’s an institution devoted to the dissemination of knowledge, even if everyone can’t afford it. What the EAN are actually trying to do is reduce the number of educational establishments, on the grounds that they can’t afford them even though they have no right to expect to be able to afford them.

There was a Q&A at the end, but it seemed that the remaining protesters (many having been removed by police earlier) didn’t want to rush to the microphones, which you might have thought would be their purpose. Mainly they remained in their seats and heckled rather than taking the chance to directly converse with Dawkins on the subject.

Class act, guys.

I have lived through a decade of Ground Zero controversy. From the moment the dust settled, individuals and groups with political agendas descended on the wounded carcass of lower Manhattan, cutting out and dishing up great slabs of suffering to serve at the gluttonous feast of their ambitions.

“All of Ground Zero should be declared hallowed ground”, “The memorial in light should remain until the towers are rebuilt”, “it should be called the Freedom Tower”, “THIS tower design is a better memorial than that one”, “A design contest will show the true spirit of American freedom”, “The stairway to heaven can’t be moved, it would be disrespectful!”, “The beams that form a cross cannot be moved, God placed them there!”

It has gone on and on, year after year.

Politicians and activists stand in the shadow of the ruins, strike noble stances, bow their heads sorrowfully and then declare; “Vote for me! Support me!”

This is what angered me so much about Thunderf00t’s video. It was clearly yet another attempt to ride the emotional tide of Ground Zero.  The great Thunderf00t, long known as a scion of education, reason and logic on YouTube, had spoken out on the issue and had not addressed any of the real facts, had not applied his supposed keen, razor sharp intellect to the falsehoods and bigotry flying about; instead he had created a video that in my opinion, was total, absolute shit.  Like many others before him he had gone the base, common route of indulging himself in fallacy and hate at the expense of reason; at the expense of the people who call that neighborhood… “home”.

I won’t bother to repeat here any of the facts that destroy the many fallacious arguments against the Park 51 Center. But suffice it to say; there has not been a single “factual” argument put forward that has not turned out to be a lie – and in each case it was a lie that could be traced back to some Republican/neo-con right wing source.

I will address one argument that I keep hearing raised time and again.

“Why don’t they just place the Center somewhere else?”

This appeal to emotion, to supposed sensibility and rationality, is one of the most insidious arguments put forward. It totally ignores fact and reality, attempting to portray the opposing side as inconsiderate and unreasonable.

The Downtown Muslim community has existed since before the building of the World Trade Center. Since that time, it has grown. After 9/11, when businesses and families fled Downtown and moved elsewhere, the Muslim Community continued to grow. They are a part of Downtown. They live there, shop there, own businesses there, send their children to local schools. And they already have a mosque right there, a couple of blocks away, that has been there for years. It is now, however, too small for their community, insufficient for their needs in many ways, and needs to be replaced.

So I ask back to those who raise this question;

In a time when economic hardship is the norm, why should they NOT have their Center located where they live and work instead of at another location where the trip would cost them a few hundred dollars a month in transportation expenses not to mention an hour’s time round trip?

Why should they have to raise the additional funds to purchase a building at greater cost when they already have one?

Why should you, who have no connection to the area, with your offended sensibilities, based on your irrational emotional response, dictate how these people live their lives?
And why should the entire neighborhood, Muslim and non-Muslim, be denied the much-needed business and income that will result from the existence of the new community center?

September 11th has passed. On September 12th the politicians, the activists, the bloggers, the news sources put away their fiery rhetoric, set aside their somber expressions, wiped away their crocodile tears and for another ten months Ground Zero will be forgotten.  The tourists will still come in droves to view the site where one of the greatest tragedies in American history took place. But just blocks away, streets that were once teeming with pedestrians now contain only a ghost of that once busy traffic.  Businesses will continue to struggle. Some will survive. Others will not. Life in Downtown Manhattan will continue – Until next year, when some new controversy will be fabricated and the whole circus will begin again.

Someday, the Two Towers will stand again. But we must ask ourselves now;

“What do we want these Towers to mean?”

Do we wish them to be a symbol of the freedom and equality that we have always been told embody the American spirit?

Or do we wish to build an icon to the fear, bigotry and hatred that now dominate the American landscape?

This is TheTruePooka, writing to you from Hell’s Kitchen, NYC. And Remember; if you find these words upsetting; Pet the Cat.

Books, and their content, can challenge our political, religious, and moral sensibilities. Well written literature can change the ethical zeitgeist, inspire a revolution, and even start a new faith – 26 lead soldiers can indeed conquer the world. Because of this, books are often seen by current authorities as divisive and dangerous. If they cannot dispute or counter the ideas contained within, they will resort to destroying the method of propagation in order to prevent the spread of such thoughts. One of the earliest notable book-burning was carried out by the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who ordered all philosophy and history books from states other than Qin to be burned. Soon, dissenting scholars who refused to carry out the orders to destroy these important works were being buried alive. The main effect of this book-burning was the loss of the Hundred Schools of Thought which influenced Chinese life. After the persecution ended only the School of Scholars (Confucianism) and the School of Law retained a prominent position. Lost were the schools that focussed on empiricism, reason, and logic – potentially a great setback for the development of Chinese culture.

In 1478 the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, also known as the Spanish inquisition, was established. The aim of this inquisition was to hold trials for adherents of other faiths (Jews and Muslims) and attempt to convert them to Christianity. If they would not convert or agreed to conversion but were later caught taking part in religious rituals from their original faith, they were put to death. Eventually, the suspicion that Muslims were secretly practicing religious rituals led to the majority of them to be expelled from Spain. During the persecution, several religious books including the Koran were burned en masse. In this case, it was the competition of religious sensibilities which led to the attempted extermination of Muslim ideas. The German playwright Heinrich Heine wrote about the Spanish inquisition in the tragedy Almansor, in the mouth of a persecuted Muslim he puts the words “Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.” As burning books cannot completely eliminate an idea , authorities will eventually have to burn people to completely purge the threatening idea from society – and so it was during the inquisition of Spain. In a bit of black irony, Heine’s works were including amongst the Jewish, socialist, and dissident books burned by the Nazi’s in 1933. His quote from Almansor above is engraved on the ground at the site of the burning.

In the category of censorship in the name of moral outrage, nothing comes close to the bonfires of vanities which were especially common in Italy during the fifteenth century. In the most famous fire – lit by Savonarola in Florence – mirrors, statues, cosmetics, art, chess pieces, and lewd books were all burned to ashes. One book in particular was the Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) written by the Roman poet Ovid. The book contains advice on how to find women, seduce them, and then keep them from being stolen away. Savonarola, the theocratic ruler of Florence, decided that this work was too lascivious to be available to the public and so had Ovid’s book consigned to the flames. The bodies soon followed as acts of homosexuality, previously tolerated, became a crime punishable by execution. Many others were sent to the flames for their own acts of immorality. Savonarola was eventually burned to death himself after being excommunicated by the Pope. Ovid’s Art of Love must be particularly bad because further censorship occurred when US customs seized an English translation in the 1930s, almost two thousands years after it was originally written.

In modern times the 451°C threat appears less menacing. With the advent of mass printing and the spread of ebooks online eliminating ideas is much more difficult. However, book-burnings are still a powerful symbol in which various groups declare certain ideas are off-limits to society.  Today I learned that a Christian group, the Dove World Outreach Center in Florida, is promoting September 11 as International Burn the Koran Day. Led by Fireman Terry Jones, the evangelical church plans to build a pyre of Korans and they hope their example will be copied around the world. Not much offends me, but I find book-burnings to be completely unacceptable no matter what book is being torched. Even more galling is the pastor’s comments that burning the Koran will give Muslims a chance to convert! This church is so bigoted that they see the Koran as a dangerous book that it needs to be destroyed before people have a chance to read it and are willing to use tactics reminiscent of the Spanish inquisition. They are the latest incarnation of a dangerous movement which seeks the destruction of our cultural and intellectual heritage, and as such they must be opposed. So this September 11, rather than burn a Koran I’m going to read one. Rather than attempting to eliminate certain ideas, I’m going to integrate them a little further into our collective society. Anyone interested in joining me?

Star trek provides many clear examples of morality portrayed through the lens of science fiction. The most prominent ethical instruction which permeates many episodes is the ‘Prime Directive’ which constrains the actions of Starfleet personnel. Simply put, the Prime Directive prevents intervention into pre-warp alien societies so as not to interfere with the natural course of their cultural development.  In principle the Prime Directive is an absolute rule to be obeyed even when the inhabitants of a primitive planet are about to be wiped out. In practice, the crew sometimes engage in exceptions to prevent genocides (e.g., Patterns of Force) or stop devastating asteroid impacts (e.g., For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky). Although these violations are not without consequences for both crew and captain, the interventions are usually portrayed as the right action given the circumstances. The real-world political doctrine of non-intervention can be seen as the contemporary equivalent of the Prime Directive. Based on the principles of state sovereignty and self-determination it says that states cannot and should not interfere in the domestic affairs of others. This doctrine is also supposed to be absolute, frowning upon alliances and wars on foreign soil; it instead opts for the containment of problems within local regions. However, just like the Prime Directive, non-interventionism has been violated in recent history by several prominent countries. One clear example is the UN intervention in Kosovo which was carried out under dubious legal authority. The justification given was the prevention of a humanitarian crisis, similar to the reason in Patterns of Force. States will also rush to provide humanitarian aid in countries, like Haiti, which have been hit with natural disasters. Star Trek managed to give us a discussion of non-interventionism, covering both the reasons for it and the horrid situations that result from pursing it to the limit. All this was done in a neutral setting where the idea could be freely discussed away from any real-world political divides which hamper proper dialogue. Star Trek also gave us the moral reasons for breaking the Prime Directive long before humanitarian concerns motivated us on Earth to get involved in the domestic crises of others.

Although science-fiction regularly deals with broad, societal-scale ethics there is also a deep theme of personal morality promoted through the hero or heroine of each series. They are the ones faced with tough decisions and regularly have to balance competing interests when confronted with moral dilemmas. Because they are our heroes they usually make the decision that result in the best outcome in every situation, but sci-fi asks whether merely doing the right thing is enough. If the hero does the right thing but acts for the wrong reasons they will lose our respect and we will begin to question their ethical status.  Delenn, our heroine of Babylon 5, has to face this additional layer of complexity for her moral decisions.  In Comes the Inquisitor she enters a crucible designed to force out the motivations for her actions. Over and over the inquisitor asks who she is. Is she someone filled with pride, puffed up with her own self-importance, and desperate for the glory that will come should she save the universe from destruction? Or is she someone motivated solely by the desire to preserve life and even willing to pay the ultimate price “For one person, in the dark, where no one will ever know, or see”²? According to consequentialist moral theories, what determines the rightness of an act is the outcome alone. No consideration is given to the intentions that the actor was trying to put into practice. Babylon 5 asks whether the outcomes are enough to determine the morally of a given situation and the answers given is a resounding “No!” As is said in the episode, “If you do the right thing for the wrong reasons, the work becomes corrupt, impure, and ultimately self-destructive.”² Consider the war in Iraq, there’s no question that Saddam Hussein was a cruel and corrupt dictator and that removing him was a good thing for the Iraqi people. However, it would be hard to maintain that the political leaders at the time were acting with the intension of helping Iraq rather than for the wrong reasons which included political and strategic gain. These intensions corrupted the entire exercise and, quite rightly, leave a foul taste in many a mouth. This example shows that a person who performs a kind deed for another solely because of a selfish benefit is not truly acting in an altruistic manner. Without the right intentions, the moral actor is not really moral at all. Furthermore, good intentions are more likely to lead to good outcomes, while the cases of bad intentions leading to good outcomes are rare.  Promoting good intentions as morally necessary is one way to improve the consequences of our ethical decision making in the real world.

Speaking of wartime conflict, science-fiction offers a way to discuss the morality of war without getting bogged down in the politics of more local events. We Earthers have a saying: in war, all things are permitted. This statement is explored and taken to its logical conclusion in Battlestar Galactica. In this alternate reality, humanity has built an army of advanced robots and employed them as slaves to perform the menial work necessary to keep a civilisation running. But the Cylons became something greater than their original design and have reached the point where they think and feel so much like their human counterparts it is difficult to tell them apart. The Cylons then turn on their former masters, determined to conquer all humankind. As the show progresses and most of the human military is destroyed, the remaining resistance turns to increasingly brutal acts in order to prevent the Cylons from achieving a complete victory. If the Cylons were merely mindless robots, the actions of the humans would not be morally questionable but because the Cylons share many of the same properties as humans the tactics used by the resistance are open to scrutiny. Even in the context of war, some lines should not be crossed. In the episode Flesh and Bone, a Cylon operative convinces the crew that he has planted a nuclear bomb aboard one of their ships. In this clear case of a ‘ticking bomb’ the interrogation turns to torture in order to learn its location. The bomb scenario is brought up ad nausem in the debates on torture and is usually seen as a trump card. However, Battlestar Galactica highlights a big problem with its use because, as it turns out, there is no bomb and the torture was ultimately pointless. The problem with all ticking bomb scenarios is that, in a real-life situation, the interrogator cannot know that there is a bomb, that the bomber will give up its whereabouts, or that the bomb can actually be stopped. It might be said that the Cylon should not have lied about the existence of the bomb in the first place and so the torture was justified, but this literally makes torture the punishment for lying, a completely unacceptable situation. The second wartime issue conveyed to us by Battlestar Galactica is that of suicide bombing civilian targets in the name of resisting occupation. In the episode rightly called Occupation, members of the human resistance start suicide bombing Cylon and, more controversially, Cylon-friendly human targets. Most people would consider any such act to be morally abominable but set in an alternate universe with humanity on the brink of extinction, Battlestar Galatica manages to make us sympathise with the beleaguered resistance and perhaps even elicits some approval for their actions. Although, by itself, the episode is not enough to change our minds on the tactic of suicide bombing, it is enough to give us pause when we hear of similar instances on this planet and ask ourselves whether we would do the same if under occupation by foreign forces.

We have now seen how science fiction can enlighten us on issues as broad ranging as non-interventionism, intention/consequence approaches to ethics, and the morality of war. By removing the cultural and political barriers that exist in everyday life, science fiction allows for an unprejudiced discussion of moral dilemmas. The fantastic tales provide a narrative that lets us approach ethics in an indirect manner but, as I’ve shown, the results are very much applicable in the terrestrial world. Science fiction is a moral thought experiment performed at the cosmic scale. Ultimately, science fiction gives us an external standard and a common frame of reference to draw upon when faced with our own ethical decisions. If you’ve never considered the problematic aspects of the Prime Directive, never understood why the Vorlons require pure intentions, or never felt pity for a robot in agony then you haven’t grasped the full range of ethical lessons that science fiction has to offer. Without an appreciation of scifi, how can you be moral?

1. Gene Roddenberry (paraphrase).
2. Comes the inquisitor,  J. Michael Straczynski

[Item] or [practice] nullifies or negates the effects, presence, activity or consequences of [entity], [energy], or [phenomenon]. How can you tell? Because absolutely nothing is happening, and so the [item] or [practice] is a legitimate success. This stone keeps away bears. You can tell because you don’t see any bears around here . . . yes, this stone IS for sale. How expensive? Completely.

 This kind of non-logic is still happening today, and not only is it still happening but it’s actively endorsed by government bodies. Welcome to Austria, where a hitherto fatality-laden length of motorway near Salzburg has been fixed. By magic.

Druid Ilmar Tessman has blamed the high accident rate on a local mobile phone mast, which spreads “negative radiation over 120-200 miles.”

The accident rate has been reduced to zero in two years by the use of standing stones and magnets, apparently. Responding to scientific skeptics who say “Whatever can’t be measured does not exist” (Dr Georg Walach, Leoben University), Tessman says “If you ask me to give you a scientific explanation, I can’t. I just know it works, and even critics can’t argue with our success rate.”

Guess what? They can. I find it bogglingly, numbingly depressing that such nonsense is tolerated, let alone invested in as a valid solution. Instead of subjecting such findings to further research – and think about it, if you genuinely were sure that cheap edifices of stone, plastic and magnets could prevent car accidents surely you’d research the hell out of it, given that it represents a new stage of physics – this coincidental nonsense is simply allowed to continue. Drivers on these dangerous roads, whose risk factor has not been reduced in the slightest by these druidical interventions, will drive thinking they’re safe. I’ll tell you for free what reduced the rate of accidents – coincidence. People happened not to die for two years running, which is hardly surprising on a well known accident black spot. The more notorious the area becomes, the more careful drivers will be on it. Makes sense, I feel. But now? Drivers will think that elemental magic protects them from harm, and will quite possibly drive more dangerously as a result.

Grow up, world. If Tessman has truly stumbled on a new arena of scientific endeavour, don’t you think he should write a few papers on the subject?

You can find on the internet, today, people who genuinely think they have psychic or telekinetic powers. Imagine the new depths of Tessman’s delusion now that he’s been told he can fix road traffic fatalities. It’s cruel, when you think about it.

S.H.O.O.T. are basically militant atheists, tasked with hunting down supernatural creatures, especially those of religious significance, that they don’t even believe in….every time you read a comic about someone fighting the supernatural, they’re really doing it on the supernatural’s own terms. If you’re fighting a vampire, you bring stakes and holy water – that kind of thing. I don’t think there’s ever been a team like “S.H.O.O.T.” that basically thinks it’s all bunk, and just goes after any threat with science and bullets, and scientific bullets.

Scientific Bullets?!? AWESOME.

That said this does raise some interesting questions in my mind. Right there in the description of what this new comic is all about is the implication that atheists wouldn’t believe in something supernatural even as they were fillings its non-corporeal arse with scientific lead. This is an argument that often comes up when dealing with proponents of the supernatural, that atheists and skeptics are simply closed minded to the existence of supernatural powers and would thus dismiss any evidence that supported it…apparently even as they engage in a face to face, life to death fight with it!

To me this is a truly ridiculous idea. I for one know exactly what it would take to get me to believe in any supernatural claim. Evidence, good, honest to Darwin, stone cold solid evidence.* Show me high quality, scientific evidence that vampires exist and, no matter how incredulous that idea may be right now, I would accept it. The same goes any other supernatural claim, including those made by the various world religions.

I am not closed to the idea of the supernatural and certainly not to the point that I would reject it even as I bust a cap in its face. But you need to give me something here people if you wish me to take your claims seriously. I would love the supernatural to be real, I really would, but I am not just going to take someone’s word for it. You want me to believe you? Then show me the evidence.

* Though I guess technically if you presented evidence for the supernatural then it would no longer be supernatural but rather simply yet more natural. Hmmmm.

Unfortunately I have now revised my opinion, I think it is now correct to refer to atheist fundamentalism. It might not be strictly accurate, all the above applies, but I do think it is descriptive. I say this in light of a video I have just watched from Coughlan666. I’m not generally a Coughlan fan, his videos are not my cup of tea and I am not subbed to him. In fact I stumbled across his blogtv on one occasion and got booted out by him. So, credentials established, I’m not a Coughlan groupie.

In the video Coughlan reads out a number of messages he has received from atheists since he posted this video attacking Pat Condell, and quite frankly it’s disgusting. I’ll just quote a couple:

“Who the fuck is this junkie piece of shit, fuck off and die”
“You need help, you backstabbing piece of shit c**t”
“I’m from the UK, and one day I’ll find ya, and when I do I’ll slit your throat. Fuck off and die.”

Death threats? Backstabbing? These messages and threats show several things clearly. They show devotion towards youtube users, thunderf00t and Pat in this particular case. that looks very much like religious devotion to various godheads. They show a complete inability to empathise with another point of view. They show total disregard for another persons opinion and they show a complete inability to think rationally. They scream out lack of tolerance. Disagreement is fine, free speech is actively encouraged. But death threats because you don’t agree?

Incidentally, Pat has been on the receiving end of similar treatment since his video saying he was voting for UKIP. Indeed that was the reason Coughlan made his vid in the first place. Here’s Pat on the subject , so this isn’t all one way traffic. It seems that many commenters can’t deal with the fact that you might happen to disagree with them, but disagreement is not the subject here. Devotion to users is.

The devotion is not directed to the points those users raise, not to particular subjects or to particular videos, but rather to the users themselves. And the one thing that seems to unite these commenters is atheism. Atheism might be a lack of a position, but these people are united by that atheism. When/if fundamentalist behaviour emerges from that group I feel it is correct to call it atheist fundamentalism. The atheists making threats against the likes of Coughlan are guilty of the same crimes that they laud Thunderf00t and Pat Condell for fighting against.

There seems to be a notion amongst some that atheism implies rationality. We know that theism is irrational, but some commit a logical fallacy of presuming that the rejection of one irrational belief makes one a rational person. It does not, much as the holding of one irrational belief does not make one irrational.

I’ve never been a fan of the “atheist community”, a collection of individuals founded on a lack of belief. A much better notion would be the critical thinking community and indeed that is how I would refer to the League of Reason. If this episode is to teach us one thing I would argue it should be that the conclusions someone reaches, important though they may be, are only as valid as the process that the person went through in order to arrive at the position. Atheism might be the only rational position to hold, but you can hold the position for irrational reasons and it does not preclude you from being irrational and intolerant on all other issues. Atheism can, then, be irrational.

I must ask how one arrives at the conclusion that a death threat is an appropriate response towards someone who made a video, rude though it may have been, to disagree with a fellow video bloggers content? Which part of that can be considered reasonable behaviour? Do these people think themselves rational and reasonable? What do they hope to achieve, and how do they differ from fundamentalists of any other persuasion?

In my dealings with theists my ultimate goal is usually to free them from the stigma of religion, to free their minds from the controlling influence that is the doctrine of their own brand of faith. I have long been of the opinion that the best way to do this is to teach critical thinking. Rather than demonstrating the absurdity of the positions religion takes, I prefer to help the person come to that conclusion themself by getting them to address their own beliefs in an unbiased way. These events have only strengthened my conviction that this is the correct approach. The messages sent by atheists here shows clearly that atheism is by no means a guarantee of rationality and is evidently not a sign of tolerance. Atheism might be the rational position, but you do not have to be rational to be atheist. Teach rationality, teach critical thinking, teach tolerance.

I once read that the best advert for your own way of life is yourself. Live the way you would wish others to be. The backlash towards Coughlan for his video here has highlighted that a good number of atheists are not even close to critical thinkers, and has strengthened my view that a “conversion” to atheism should never be the goal when discussing religion with theists. A far more appropriate goal would be critical thinking, with atheism an emergent property.

For every person who applies good skeptical thinking and basic scientific understanding in their everyday lives there are at least three people who religiously check their horoscopes on the way to visit their local homeopath. In the recent election for example I discovered that my local MP supported making homeopathy available on the NHS and one of the smaller parties had climate change denialism as part of its manifesto. Something is seriously wrong with that.

So what can we, as hardened and, if I may say so, devilishly attractive skeptics, do about it? How can we help to make the general public more skeptical and more science literate? Well I am sorry to say that I don’t have an answer. I’ve been trying to do my small part by working on a “beginners guide” style book about skepticism but it is not as though that has never been done before. As such my thoughts have recently turned to smaller things, which brings me to the point of this post. I have a question for you.

If you could give one bit of advice, drop one bit of knowledge or just make one suggestion to the general public or someone new to skepticism then what would it be?*

Maybe we can’t influence the world as a whole, but perhaps we can start sowing little seeds of logical and rational thinking. I like to think of this as bulletpoint skepticism. Little catchy easy to remember pieces of information that can change the way people thing. For example simply knowing about something like pareidolia makes it less likely that you will be convinced that you’re really are seeing the virgin Mary in your breakfast cereal.

Anyway it is just an idea that I had, not sure if it is a good one or not or even if I have explained it at all well, but I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with. Plus I haven’t posted anything in ages and felt that I really should put something up. All these newbies are starting to make me look bad.

* Be warned, if you come up with something great I am so stealing it for my book.

A Muslim woman has been fined for wearing a burka in a post office in Novara, Italy, after the mayor passed a law forbidding face-covering garb inside public buildings. Mayor Massimo Giordano could maybe be described as an Islamophobe, but as far as I’m concerned that’s like calling someone a murderophobe or a rapistophobe. It’s entirely rational to dislike or fear Islam, which makes it not a phobia but a very sensible intellectual stance.

Hands up who’s seen, in the UK (I can speak for no other country, being not well-travelled) signs in banks/shops/post offices etc forbidding the wearing of motorcycle helmets? Exactly; lots of ‘em. Seems sensible to me. You don’t want someone shotgunning a hole through the till and making off with the money whilst disguised. Even ignoring the implications that burkas hold regarding the rights of women in Islam, illegalising a clothing that makes identification near-impossible is an act of common sense. If the burka was outlawed in all public spaces I’d have pause for thought; I’d think it was a breach of personal rights if not for the fact that burka wearing is pretty much imposed either by a man or by indoctrination to the religion. 

And how have the Muslim couple in question reacted to this? Well, check this – when the woman (Amel Marmouri) was stopped by police, her husband (Ben Braim) wouldn’t let the burka be removed by male policemen. Presumably the sight of an unclothed face would have led to an instant and massive sexbrawl. 

Kind of proving my point that burkas are often imposed, Braim is quoted as saying “We knew about the law and I know that it’s not against my religion but now Amel will have to stay indoors. I can’t have other men looking at her.” 

Outstanding. He’d rather imprison his wife than allow her outside barefaced. That shows an admirable commitment to your faith, doesn’t it? It’s worth noting that Imam Izzedin Elzir, president of the Islamic Community and Organisations Union in Italy, said ” . . . we are against face veils or coverings in Italy because the law of recognition has to be observed.” So it’s not all bad . . . but does that mean that Muslim women in Italy are allowed out without a burka? Or does it mean they’re law-abidingly confined away from the gaze of other men? I hope, I really hope, that it’s the former.

Ok firstly, as I know not all of you lot live in the UK, maybe I should explain quickly, and no doubt badly, how things work in this country. Very basically the country is divided up into a number of constituencies, each of which has its own local Member of Parliament representing them. In a general election you vote for the local MP you want and the votes are added up to see which party wins each constituency. The number of constituencies won by each party is then added up and the party with the most gets to govern the country. At least that’s how I understand it.

The problem is that the constituencies are not equal in size. As such if you have one constituency of, lets say, 100,000 people and all of them vote Tory (The Conservative Party) then that equals 1 seat in Parliament. However if you have ten other constituencies all with 10,000 people in them and they all vote for the Labour Party then they get 10 seats in Parliament, even though they got exactly the same number of votes. What this means is you get situations, like during our last general election, where numerically more people voted for the runners up than voted for the party that actually won the election. Not ideal.

Because of this you can have the added issue that I am having. I live in an area that has, going back further than I have been alive, always voted Conservative. In fact we have had the same MP for the entire time I have lived in the area and I really don’t see that changing with this election. What this means is that, no matter who I personally vote for, the chances are very, very high that my constituency will be counted as Conservative, and seeing that it is only really the number of constituencies that actually count what does that say about the value of my vote?

And I can tell you I won’t be voting Conservative. Thanks to websites like Skeptical Voter and They Work For You I know that my local Conservative MP, the guy who is probably going to win again this time, voted in favour of entering the Iraq war and supported making homeopathy available on the NHS. So…yeah!

So I am left unsure how to proceed. According to Vote Matcher none of the three major parties, the parties that actually stand a chance of winning anything, stand for the things I believe in, with the Conservative party being at the very bottom of the list. The parties that fit closest which my point of view are the small ones that really stand next to no chance of winning anything. So here are my questions:

Do I vote for one of the Big Three, choosing the least evil of them of course, simply because that way the party I vote for might actually have a chance of winning?

Do I vote for one of the smaller parties that more accurately represent me even though there is little to no chance of them actually winning?

Or do I not bother voting at all given that my constituency will count as a Conservative vote no matter what I do?

Seriously I have no idea what to do. I look forward to reading your thoughts on this matter.

I’d hoped that childishly ripping on Gabriele Amorth, Righteous Exorcist 1st Class Of The Holy Vatican, might be the last slur I cast in the direction of Catholicism. My hope was in vain.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, second highest in the Vatican – sort of a third-hand God – has denied that enforced celibacy is behind child abuse in the Church. His alternative hypothesis is that homosexuality is to blame. Now, I would really like to be surprised at this point. It would mean that I still felt there was some distance left for the Vatican to fall, but considering their leader thinks homosexuality is objectively wrong – among many other equally jaw-dropping transgressions of reason – surprise is nowhere to be found. Merely a weary resignation. I imagine I would feel the same had I a young offspring to whose tireless destruction I returned every evening. You just go with it.

‘ . . . many [psychologists and psychiatrists] have demonstrated, and have told me recently, that there is a link between homosexuality and paedophilia. This is true, this is the problem,’ said Bertone. Wouldn’t it be nice if, just once, a religious authority referred to peer-reviewed research and evidence after hurling such slurs? But let’s not forget that we’re dealing with an organisation grimly dedicated to avoiding responsibility. Blame the gays, because obviously they’re not right in the eyes of the Lord anyway. Or blame Satan. Anything rather than say “Yeah, a lot of our guys are partial to abusing and raping kids. We’re sorry about that and will be instituting rigorous strictures in the future. Also, here’s a shitload of compensation to make reparations. Additionally, we’re dissolving Catholicism because recent studies prove that it just doesn’t work.”

Such fun.

Read this and then tell me how you feel.

Summation: you know how the Catholic church is always getting itself into scrapes? Especially recently? Well, according to their Chief Exorcist Gabriele Amorth (I was dry-mouthed with shock at discovering they actually have official Exorcists, let alone an Exorcism hierarchy sufficient to allow for a Chief Exorcist), any and all inappropriate shiz that Catholics do is directly the work of Satan. This includes not only child abuse but apostasy, which isn’t something I would necessarily regard as Satan’s grinning face. Can I hear anyone say “No true Scotsman”? It’s perfect! If you step out of line – deny Jesus here, rape a boy there – you’re not a Catholic, you’re a shambling ragdoll maliciously puppeted by the Dark King himself. By definition, a Catholic becomes someone who would never do something that a Catholic would not do. 

How . . . crawling do you have to be to avoid accountability in this way? To say that any human activity threatening to stain the reputation of the Church is in fact the work of Satan? It’s horribly akin to bedding a whole army of cheerleaders and then, when Society raises a cautionary eyebrow, claiming that you have an addiction to sex and you will seek white man medicine. Of course, I should acknowledge that Amorth’s view is not accepted wholesale – Father José Antonio Fortea Cucurull believes that Amorth has “gone well beyond the evidence”. But I think it’s bad enough that Catholicism’s Chief Exorcist (a title, might I add, with as much application to reality as “Chief Dream Catcher” or “Chief Negative Energy Dispeller” or, of course, “Astrologer”), a high-ranking official of the church, believes something so chilling. Presumably he believes in homophobia as well, so maybe believing in Satan isn’t such a big deal over there.

Human accountability to actions? Not in Catholicism, baby. As I said, it’s admirable.

But, if life ends at the grave, it makes no difference whether one has lived as a Stalin or as a saint. As the Russian writer Feodor Dostoevsky rightly said: “If if there is immortality, then all things are permitted.” Given the finality of death, it really does not matter how you live.

William Lane Craig, of course, repeats an oft misquoted passage from The Brother Karamazov and for a professional philosopher, as he routinely claims to be, one would think he’d know better; likewise, there’s something about Mr. Craig’s suggestion that ‘professional’ legitimatizes ‘philosopher’ that leads me to believe that he shouldn’t be the former and isn’t the latter. It’s difficult to attribute an author the philosophical views of the characters he creates, but Mr. Craig probably depends less on the person of Dostoevsky than the content of the sentence, the philosophy itself. Ivan Karamazov was certainly concerned with the implications of immortality of the soul, both as a matter of metaphysics and as a matter of belief, as Constance Garnett’s translation suggests: “If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover,” Karamazov continues, “Nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. [...] For every individual [...] who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognised as the inevitable, the most rational, even honourable outcome of his position.” For the sake of drawing the distinction, if Karamozov, in this passage, is concerned with belief in existence of God or the non-existence of God as the cause of moral actions, then we can allay his concerns with empirical certainty: atheism does not cause immorality. But, this concern about the belief in God suggests to me that Karamazov might imagine that there would be no difference between believing in God in a universe in which God happens to exist or believing in that same God as matter of actual fiction; in either universe, whether there is actually a God, belief in God is what actually fosters moral behavior, which I don’t think is Mr. Craig’s contention, nor would it stand to evidence. Rather, I think Mr. Craig and those others who misuse this quote from Dostoevsky are suggesting that, considering those two universes, the universe without a God may contain moral actions, but those moral actions are arbitrary and meaningless and the people in that universe without a God might just as well go around killing each other – it doesn’t really matter. I’ve never entirely understood this argument beyond reading it as a brute assertion; it seems like the meaningless of moral actions in a universe without a God in part stems from the fact that moral laws would then simply be contrived through the power of the few or the many, but also from the fact that any sort of consequence we might experience can be escaped through death into annihilation. I’m not sure why agreed upon rules are meaningless and, more importantly, I’m not sure why Karamazov, and Craig, I would imagine, would suppose that people, left to our own devices without God to give us rules and reward us eternally for following them or breaking the slightest among them, would descend into cannibalism and then what… dogs and cats living together.

I mean: why wouldn’t we descend into socialized medicine? Or greater funding for the arts?

Fundamentally, I think this contest doesn’t comes down God; it comes down to people. To my mind, we can gain some insight from two of the greatest and most important thinkers of the late twentieth century and their frequent discussions on God, mortality, and consequence.

I enjoy this particular moment between Calvin and Hobbes – it captures Hobbes’ cynicism and Calvin nicely illustrates that whether our lives have consequence in the afterlife or whether live is ultimately inconsequential, with the right attitude, both could be a bad thing. Calvin raises an important point and that is the question of attitude because many of the claims which will fundamentally justify the argument behind Mr. Craig’s quoting of Dostoevsky – the theistic depiction of atheism as inept when it comes to moral questions – are ultimately rooted in broad, emotional matters that are not easily answered.

To a certain extent, I think literature engages the question of life with or with eternal consequences by testing narration in worlds without any consequences. The question of whether society could survive if there were no real authorities to punish is very much at the heart of Lord of the Flies by William Golding. We all remember the story from high school, but for the sake of orienting us all: a plane full of children crash on an island and before long, they divide into groups and start waring, and in the chaos, some of the children are killed. For our purposes, Lord of the Flies seems to be suggesting that without consequences, society descends into chaos and savagery; Mr. Craig might be tempted to reference Lord of the Flies but that would rather careless for such a professional philosopher, especially because Lord of the Flies also contains a rather strong indictment of religion. Early in the book, the children begin to imagine that the island is inhabited by a beast and they take to hunting the beast, initially, in addition to gathering meat from the wild pigs that live on the island and then instead. Their hunts become ritualized and the ritual soon takes over and becomes more important than the hunt itself; one tempestuous night, while chanting and stomping around a bonfire, the children, in the heat and lust of the hunt, kill one their own. The idea of ritual then approaches religion when the children begin to present offerings to the beast in an attempt to appease it, the most famous being the head of a pig on a stick which adorns the cover of the book. So, to return to the question, William Golding suggests that without eternal consequences, we would descend into chaos, violence, savagery, and religion.

To some extent, I must admit that both Messers Golding and Craig proceed from places of emotion and attitude, so neither convince me; so, to conclude and simply illustrate the point again, I would like turn to yet another example of literature tackling the question of life in a world without consequence.

In Groundhog Day (1993), Phil Connors is geographically trapped in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania and temporally trapped in February 2, Groundhog Day, reliving the exact same day over and over again. When Phil realizes that he is not subject to the ordinary rules of moral consequence, he takes advantage of the situation, stealing money, seducing women, driving drunk, and even committing suicide. But, without any reference to eternal consequences and seemingly without purpose, Phil turns instead to self-improvement, reading classical literature and French poetry, learning to play piano, helping others, and finding a place for himself in Punxsutawney. So, to return to the question, Groundhog Day suggests that without eternal consequences, we would descend into art, culture, and kindness.

Sometimes when I discuss morality and God with people, I encounter the idea that without theism to civilize us, whether through the actual metaphysical reality of moral absolutes which we can apprehend through proper use of reason or through the force of deeply believed fictions, man would descend into his baser instincts. Sometimes the evidence of this is children who are not yet civilized and utterly evil – this piece of evidence has always struck me as disturbing since most of the children I’ve met in my life have been rather sweet and gentle. And, to be frank, I see no evidence that our baser instincts are all that bad; if we are a social species, our base instincts must involve supporting one another and thinking about the tribe.

One image showed a smiling Christ on the cross next to an advert for a brand of “no nails” glue.

Oh come on, that’s funny. Even my Christian friends would find that funny, inappropriate yes but still funny.

In another, Islamic suicide bombers at the gates of paradise are told: ” Stop, stop, we’ve run out of virgins.”

Yup, that’s funny too. Now I have no doubt that some people would find it offensive but I wonder if they have asked themselves why? Is the cartoon incorrect when it equates martyrdom with the Islamic belief of receiving virgins in paradise? Is it offensive because it mocks suicide bombers or because it implies that there is a limited supply of virgins to go around? Or is it offensive because it forces people to take a look at the things they believe from the point of view of those who do not share those beliefs?

A further cartoon showed two Muslims holding a placard demanding equality with the caption: “Not for women or gays, obviously.”

Again this is funny and should only be offensive to those Muslims who agree that equal rights do not apply to women or gays. If you are a Muslim and you think that equal rights should apply to all, well then clearly the cartoon is not aimed at you so why find it offensive?

In fact the only cartoons that come close to being “sexually abusive and sexually unpleasant” are the ones described at the end of the article.

The images shown to the jury included a drawing of the Pope with a condom on his finger, and a picture of a woman kneeling in front of a Catholic priest captioned with a crude pun. In another image sausages were were (sic) labelled as “The Koran”.

That’s it? Seriously I was expected a bit of hardcore Pope porn at the very least. The picture of the Pope with a condom on his finger is offensive, but only because it reminds us of the truly offensive statements made by the pontiff in relation to condoms and the spread of aids. Pointing this out in a satirically way should not be a crime. As for the other two, really? That is what you class as “sexually abusive and sexually unpleasant cartoons“? Honestly my advice to you would be to stay away from some forms of Manga entirely. I don’t even get the sausages one.

But of course no one in this case is truly offended. This is an example of people taking offence because they think they should take offence, that it is the politically correct thing to do. For example:

The leaflets were discovered by Nicky Lees, the airport chaplain, who told the court she felt “deeply offended and insulted” by their contents.

Really? I think you have to be a completely joyless person not to at least crack a smile at some of these cartoons. I’m willing to bet that Nicky did, well at least until she remember that she was meant to be “deeply offended and insulted” by them.

Outlining the case against Mr Taylor, prosecutor Neville Biddle said that he had gone beyond freedom of expression by leaving the “insulting, threatening and abusive” images in a room used for worship.

Honestly, words fail me here.

He said: “Of course people have a right to speak freely and have a right to insult people. It is one of the most important rights we have and it must be jealously guarded.

“But it is a right not without some prescription. Mr Taylor exceeded that right.”

Addressing the jury he continued: “Your decision will not be easy. You are the conscience of society and you must decide what you are prepared to put up with and what goes beyond reasonable bounds. You are twelve tolerant reasonable British people who know what freedom of speech is all about.”

I really hope that the jurors know exactly what freedom of speech is all about. Freedom of speech gives us the right to say unpopular and even offensive things. People do not have the right to NOT be offended even if they think that they do. No one has been harmed here. No one has to show respect to religious beliefs they do not hold, well unless you’re an atheist I guess. But the funny thing is that, as I said before, there is real offense to be had here.

I am offended by the idea of substitutionary atonement for crimes. I find it completely amoral.

I am offended by those who believe that killing those who do not believe as they do will some how gain them great rewards in the after life.

I am offended by those who think that not having a penis or favouring the same sex is a good reason for discrimination.

I am offended when a guy in a dress and a funny hat puts people’s lives at risk by spreading lies about condoms.

I am offended by the blatant hypocrisy surrounded sex in the Catholic Church and the protection of paedophile priests.

I am offended by sausages that…er no…sorry I still really don’t get that one.

Is it better to have flexible, socially contextual morals that may dip below what many people view as laudable behaviour as a result of free will and personal choice . . . or is it better to have a uniformly high moral standard followed, in part or even in whole, as a result of fearing the perceived consequences of not following it?

Of course, you might say that I’ve used Wordification to bias the issue somewhat – and because I have no higher power to feel accountable to I’m perfectly happy to lie, and say that I didn’t bias the point in the slightest.

The question, I suppose, is how worthy or altruistic can a high moral standard be truly taken to be when it’s prescribed rather than acquired? It becomes little more than Utilitarianism if your moral compass is constantly aware that behaving immorally will result in hell, or a few lost brownie-heaven points from God. You’re not acting morally, you’re just protecting your own skin – which is exactly what I would do, of course.

Clearly the issue is fiercely complex after even a cursory glance. Because so many moral codes adopted by secularists could, likewise, be viewed as contextual to the consequences of breaking these same codes. If there was no judicial system with which to label certain acts as wrong, and mete out appropriate punishment, I highly doubt the society in question would remain in moral stasis. I’m happy to say that I’d likely have done, or tried to do, entirely unwholesome things without the restraining hand of Authority hovering over my balls. Theists may have their fear of God to instil a sense of morality; atheists may have their fear of getting touched up in jail. It’s just as self-serving.

Of course, the spectrum of morality and immorality operates in realms oft untouched by law; the way you think, they way you treat other people, the little things. A moral stance affects all subtle aspects of your life, not just your unwillingness to kill a guy and then stave in his hips with a pensioner. Let’s take the time I stole £20 from someone in a fast food joint. I walked in and saw the note on the ground by the man’s feet. He’d clearly dropped it and was now waiting, an ignorant score lighter, for his burger. I very briefly wondered if I should tell him, but then I decided not to. I stood next to him, my boot on the note so he couldn’t see it, until he left. And then I picked it up. Why?

Because I like money, because I’m selfish, because I don’t have a conscience that feels bad about such things. There was no legal consequence to my action that I had to fear; the only possible consequence was being discovered, and I felt I could talk my out of it if needs be. I acted in a way that many people might consider immoral, because my morality – under the umbrella of legality – is flexible. Clearly, I don’t think I would just start knifing babies in the chin if murder was legalised. I think I would feel bad. I may not grant the notion of objective morality any time at all, but I can grant that there are trends and broadly universal immoral acts, and judicial consequencialism (what an amazing phrase – I hope I didn’t just make it up) is not the single dam holding back a tidal wave of human sludge. There would be shifts, of course, and a rise in violence and theft, but not everyone would realise that they wanted to break laws just because the laws no longer existed.

What if someone religious was in my place, someone with a highly defined and apparently objective sense of morality? Let’s assume they do what we all know the right thing is – pick up the money and give it to the guy. Bravo! Except, why have you done this? Is it because your morality has been painstakingly constructed, over many years, by exposure to myriad different situations and modes of thought? Or is it because you think that not doing it will get you a disapproving stare from whatever deity you call home? And this is only assuming that we’ve found one of the theists who actually follows their own arbitrary objective morals, to the letter, without questions. As we all know from our sojourns through Youtube, religiously inspired morals and codes tend to be as flexible as their secular counterparts. Lying is fine, it seems, if you’re lying for Jesus.

Allow me a brief bit of poetry. Would you rather be in a hotel which locked from the outside or a barn that locked from the inside? Give me the freedom to plumb whatever depraved and lustful depths I see fit, and I’ll do it as a free man. 

I’ll leave you with this. It’s pretty infuriating, of course. Highlights include:

‘Cherie Booth wasn’t saying that religious people are morally superior to others. She was saying that, as a religious man, he should know better.’ Well, that pretty much IS saying that religious people are morally superior, if she is granting them the power to know right from wrong when a non-religious man apparently would – the reasonable inference suggests – NOT be capable of knowing better. No, only the mystical and nebulous power of !Religion! can instil the ability to Know Better.

*Not actually a riddle.

The Omen(1976) was good. The Exorcist (1973). The Prophecy(1995).

Legion(2010), for the record, is certainly not a shameful entry into the genre, but it’s certainly not going to be the standard by any stretch of the imagination. It involves a supposed second “flood,” but this one, carried out by angels. An extermination of the human race. Unlike Noah, there is no family earmarked for repopulating the planet and this second destruction of the earth also coincides with the birth of child. This child, incidentally, makes no sense. Is he the second coming? Why would God destroy the earth moments before the second coming? Seems bizarre.

There are far less cool angel scenes and a lot of the violence is just trite, ordinary zombie-like violence. The whole world is being destroyed and our vision is limited to a few small miles of desert boredom – unsatisfying.

The movie does, however, make one interesting stab at Christian fundamentalism, whether they realize it not. The main good guy in the movie is the Archangel Michael and he has been ordered by God to lead the extermination of mankind and kill the child… whoever the child really is. Michael searches his conscience and refuses the order, instead joining the humans and protecting the child. You would have gotten that from the trailer so don’t be too mad!

Gabriel, the equally bronzed archangel who takes over after Michael’s departure, is less sensitive to sympathy but argues that following orders is what really matters. Obviously, sympathy wins over blind obedience in the end, but certain parallels to the story of Abraham and Isaac and the Nazis, of course, are somewhat transparent. Sometimes I can understand Abraham’s decisions; sometimes I can’t. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t kill Isaac, but would that be because I had placed sympathy over obedience as an act of courage or because generally I was scared shitless.

For my part, I’m glad that somewhere in cinema “God told me to do it” isn’t a good reason.

In summary: the host of a TV show has been sentenced to death for sorcery, because he would occasionally predict the future for his callers. And where was he sentenced? Funland, of course, colloquially known as Saudi Arabia.

And it’s not even as if he was arrested as soon as he started predicting the future. It wasn’t until he went on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia that he was recognised, arrested, put on trial and convicted for doing wrong in the eyes of Allah. Ignoring, of course, the fact that he was dedicated enough to his faith to go on a pilgrimage.

Now, I am a little conflicted by this. The convicted man – Ali Hussain Sibat – said he’d consulted spirits in order to tell people their future. Clearly, that’s a tightly wound package of nads, and I’m all in favour of such a practice being discouraged or forbidden or at the very least fiercely contested and questioned. Sylvia Brown is ample proof that lying like this, whether consciously or through a genuinely deluded belief in your own psychic ability, can damage lives.

But execution for it? There’s a few wee problems. Maybe you’ve already spotted them.

a) Murdering someone for practicing magic or sorcery or witchcraft is just a tad excessive in the year of our lord 2009. Maybe a swift kick in the balls, or in the ladygap, would be more appropriate.

b) It’s sort of hypocritical to murder someone for belief in the supernatural when your entire religion is based around assumption OF the supernatural in the form of a pissed-off deity, who apparently can and has performed miracles. It’s just a little too arbitrary a system of punishment for my liking. But that goes without saying in a country under Sharia law. Anything could happen! It’s an adventure!

If I had iron balls and maybe an armoured car, I’d love to go to Saudi Arabia and stroll around reading Harry Potter. However, I’d also love not to be brutally murdered for association with the supernatural. Funny, isn’t it, that reading the Qur’an – a book which is believed to be the direct word of Allah, infallible, permanent, beautiful, divine, miraculous and predating all modern science by over a millenia – would be laudable, but reading a fictitious fairy tale (spot any similarities?) would get me trounced upside the face.

Islam. What a fun-loving barrel of chodeholers.

Anyway, reason’s greetings and all that. Stay safe.

Balls.

BALLS.

His name is BALLS.

Anyway.

Take a minute to read this recent article. Essentially, the gist is this: A Jewish faith school in the London borough of Brent – which, for any potential murderers, is where I live – got owned in the Torahbox. It was ruled by the Supreme Court that JFS, which selects Orthodox Jews, broke the race relations act by refusing to admit a 12 year old boy – deeming him not properly Jewish, or at least not properly Orthodox Jewish, in the eyes of the Chief Rabbi.

Ignoring for a moment the somewhat irony of Jews discriminating against Jews, this is just . . .wonderful. The fact that JFS has broken the law in this manner could, and hopefully will, have ramifications. Or Ramifications with a capital R, because damn it’s a cool word. As Balls (BALLS) said, “It is also likely that the admissions arrangements of approximately 60 Jewish independent schools are unlawful.” If one Jewish faith school, and then others, can be forced to abandon their policy of religious segregation . . . then other faith schools of different religions can follow. It’s a small but significant chip in the foundations of an outmoded and anachronistic educational system.

Sadly, there are calls for this outmoded and anachronistic educational system to be protected. To quote the Standard, “Lawyers acting for Children’s Secretary Ed Balls are urging the highest court in the land to protect the centuries-old tradition of schools educating children on religious lines.” As far as I can make out, the protection is merited by the fact that the tradition is “centuries-old”. I am hard-pressed to think of a defense more magisterially stupid than the argument from tradition and antiquity. Let’s list a few traditional activities: subjugation of women. Subjugation of people who just aren’t the right colour. Discriminating against, oh, all sorts of people depending on where you were born and what system of culture, society and religion you were raised in. As soon as you start using tradition as a defense, you’re on shaky ground, mijnheer. 

JFS is, of course, contesting the decision arrived at by the Supreme Court (that they’re a crew of bad, invincible, ethnically discriminatory mofos). In a small way, I can see their point. It’s their school, they can admit who they like . . . except that you have to sort of abide by all the various educational laws and decrees to avoid being branded a sack of arseholes. It would be so nice if religious discrimination was removed from education establishments. Balls to the wall. Onwards!