Abstract

Review of Reviews

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 19 January 2007
Monday, 22 January 2007

Bad Science

Richard Dawkins is hated. He is hated by the scientifically illiterate as an arrogant and know-all scientist, and he is hated by the believers in God as a confounder of their dishonest cant and specious “truth”. Writing a best seller called The God Delusion gave the wilfully nescient and their shepherds a chance to have a go at him. One might have thought that most people of average intelligence brought up in a religious tradition from birth would have been able to scribble a capable few paragraphs showing Dawkins the error of his ways, and that the editors of exclusive magazines could draw on the services of theologians or even the strange body of people who profess to be scientists while espousing supernatural beliefs, but the editor of Harpers Magazine chose a novelist to reply, in what purported to be a review of Dawkins’ book. A novelist is someone who makes up stories.

Doubtless, a novelist can be expected to have a certain skill with words, but can hardly be expected to match theologians or scientists in their own fields of specialism. So it seems an odd choice, unless it was that Marilynne Robinson was at a loose end, short of a few bob, and begged for the chance to get in print in Harpers once again. Even so, she could hardly be the equal of a divine when it comes to trying to refute Dawkins. Nor is she, but she got a lot of support from dubious people who aim to sell religion in place of science by way of the “Intelligent Designer” scam that has replaced creationism as the pseudo-science of preference for believers in God. Perhaps that was the reason she got the chance.

Often, it is hard to get just what she is being critical about except that she does not much like science or scientists like Dawkins, but is fond of the religion that Dawkins criticizes. One has to assume from her tone, and inability to address any of the substantive issues raised in the book, that she is a Christian believer herself. If not, she is of the Mary Midgley school of Christian apologists, those in public denial of their Christian beliefs, because they realize they undermine any arguments they might have as being simply the prejudice that it is. Robinson’s review is little more than a feeble piece of Christian apologetic, in which she uses many of the characteristic ploys apologists for Christianity habitually use, none of them honest. Thus she finds it easier to try to assassinate Dawkins character, either his scientific reputation or his principles—in her august opinion—or people that he cites. Can we all join in? Meanwhile, she cannot marshall a word in favour of God, or in refutation of the God delusion of the title.

Robinson seems to think science is a collection of personally held views, and Dawkins has his own particular ones. So, Dawkins popularizes “a version of evolutionary theory” in which “evolution is driven by ‘replicators’—genes”. She emphasises it by speaking of “science (by which he really means his version of Darwinism)”. Just how many versions of Darwinism does this “deeply minor” (her pejorative) yarn spinner have in her repertoire. She refers to him as tendentious, as if the religious apologists of the world are not a bit. Religion is necessarily tendentious, but science is forced to be balanced, if only because it is a joint enterprise, and not a matter of singular opinion as Robinson implies. At least she admits that “the institutions of religion, like the institutions of journalism and government, have done a great deal to trivialize or disgrace themselves lately”, and it would be hard to disagree with that. But that is one of the points Dawkins is making.

Parts of her review, which does not touch on the contents of the book in any meaningful way, but simply concentrates on her dislike of Dawkins expressing them, have been greatfully pounced on by the nutters of the Discovery Institute, more accurately the Obscurity Institute, or the Creationism Institution. They have used their propaganda machine to get blogs with the same content in several places. The passage they like is:

Bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion.

The instance she produces is the science of eugenics, which she treats as being self-evidently evil. She says:

Neither Nazis nor Germans had any monopoly on these theories, which were influential throughout the Western world, and second, that the research on human subjects carried out by those holding such assumptions was good enough science to appear in medical texts for fully half a century.

Quite so, and why not? Do Christians have some antenna that signals “evil, evil”, when something like eugenics arises? Robinson knows eugenics as evil because it was associated with Nazi theories of racial superiority. In fact, it is the science of human genetics, a part of the study of genetics, and which goes on with increasing endeavour, even though most people have ceased to call it eugenics because of its historic connotations.

“Eugenic” simply means concerning good birth, so it began as the study of factors that lead to differences in people through reproduction. The word was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin. It contributed to genetics and led to the development of human psychology, the science that showed that religion is a fraud. Galton thought eugenics would show the way to improving the human race, but it was the Nazis who combined it with their hatred of the Jews, whom they called “unter menschen”, to give them an excuse for genocide. Americans killed a million Vietnamese because they were sub-human “gooks” only a couple of decades ago, and today are doing the same in Iraq to Arabs, all of whom apparently are potentially dangerous “tourists”, in American eyes.

Scientists are to blame for eugenics, and all the work done on it, and who else could be if the study was being approached scientifically, as much of it was. It seems they ought to have known better! So, they are responsible for the Nazi genocide, we must assume from this line of reasoning. Robinson’s hindsight knowledge that work should never have been done on it is just the sort of prejudice that Dawkins tries carefully to eschew—to pretend that people of a previous age should have had the knowledge that we do, and then to condemn them for acting in ways, that they could not necessarily have done. But, if we are to accept Robinson’s absurd backward extrapolation of present attitudes, we need to know too why Galton, a man brought up in a strictly middle class Christian (indeed Quaker) family, could propose the hypothesis that Robinson thinks led to the mass murder of Jews under the Nazis, and why Hitler, a man brought up as a devout Catholic, by a devoutly Catholic mother, could put the scheme into action.

Our present knowledge about these things has come from science. Scientific work done on genetics shows that science works. When someone puts forward an hypothesis, it is in the public domain for others to test whether it stands up or not. In the event, science has shown that eugenics was human genetics, but as conceived by Galton and others was dangerously simplified. Bad genes cannot easily be eliminated by selective breeding or murder without causing damage to the species, because the effects of good and bad genes cannot always be separated. Nature is more complicated than the eugenicists had imagined. Science proved the “believers” in eugenics wrong. The alternative was to leave them believing their demonstrably erroneous beliefs. That is what Robinson thinks we should do when the belief is religious belief, despite the evidence Dawkins puts together to show how destructive religion is.

Religion and Fraud

In the cases of scientific fraud she cites, like the Piltdown hoax, the same is true in that it was science that revealed the fraud. If this is to be compared with religion, then how can any religion expose a religious fraud? The whole point is that religion is a fraud. No religious claim can be disproved, because they always concern unobservable, imaginary things like angels, demons, God and life after death, and even when they do not, Christians find any excuse and that suffices. Religious people cannot expose the fraud in their own beliefs, because they are merely beliefs, with no foundations beneath them or evidence behind them. Science exposes the weakness of believing what is not provable, but by encouraging people to believe what is not provable, the pious liar encourages belief in all sorts of dangerous delusions like quack medicines, quack therapies, quack histories, and quack nutrition, for example. Journal editors get a lot of advertising income from all of this quackery, perhaps the reason someone as unqualified as Robinson was picked to review Dawkins’ book by the editor of Harpers.

Robinson writes:

If by “science” is meant authentic science, then “religion” must mean authentic religion, granting the difficulties in arriving at these definitions.

The difficulties are profound in the case of religion. What is an authentic religion? None of them are authentic in the sense meant here of being tested and shown to be true. There can be and is authentic science, and there is pseudo-science that is not authentic, either in not meeting the scientific criterion of testability, or, in having been tested and shown to be false, but in each case still believed by its adherents. Religion is not testable in any way, but that too is believed. It depends on belief—blind faith. Such belief is fancy, just as pseudo-science is. There ought not to be any need to explain to ignorant people like Robinson, that science is distinguishable from pseudo-science by its own methods, but there is no way of distinguishing a pseudo religion by the methods of religion. The methods of science show they are all frauds. Religion is not just “commingled with… doubt, hypocrisy, and charlatanism”, those are what it is.

Robinson speaks of “the best of” religion, and “the worst of it”, but what are the criteria that distinguish them? She must have them but declines to explain what they are, simply suggesting she has a “greater admiration” for religion in the highest sense of the word than for “science in the highest sense of the word”. In typical apologetic style, she uses the fact that science has not fully comprehended the world against itself, citing three debatable instances—“science… does not claim to understand gravity, light, or time”. Never mind that science has a better understanding of all three than religion was able to get in the whole of the previous life of humanity, it is “sufficient to persuade me that conclusions about the ultimate nature of things are, to say the least, premature, and that to suggest otherwise is unscientific”. In that she is utterly right, and as she notes, it is not something that scientists, despite their lacking the brilliant comprehension of a Harpers’ wordsmith, have missed. Perhaps she would explain why religion, even though it is based on God’s own personal revelations, never tells us anything useful. All it has ever done is add a mystical force to the law to keep people psychologically in awe of it, with benefits particularly to those who decree the laws—the rulers.

Apologetic Ploys

As should have been expected, Robinson is quite out of her depth in writing this review. She neither understands evolutionary biology, nor does she understand the physics of nonequilibrium. There is no reason we should think she should, as someone who makes up tales, but here she goes further. She aims to refute aspects of Dawkins’ quite tentative argument. He is tentative in this because he is not writing for experts. No doubt she and her editor rely on the ignorance or credulity of Harper’s readers, but really it is the apologetic trick of the straw man. To do it, apologists often begin by using a type of ad hominem argument. The elevate themselves by denigrating their opponent—giving the false impression that they understand but their opponent is a dolt:

The odd thing about Dawkins’s work, considering his job description, is that it does not itself seem the product of a mind informed by the physics of the last century or so.

The physical and the material are artifacts of the scale at which reality is perceived.

The first is manifestly ad hominem. Dawkins is too foolish to undertand these things, so gets it all wrong. The second implies it because “the poor idiot does not appreciate such subtleties”. Robinson has missed her vocation. She should have been a quantum physicist, but decided to do something hard like writing yarns instead. Dawkins is explaining that we are constantly exchanging our material selves, our atoms and molecules, so that not much of our material being is the same as old folk as it was when we were young. We seem to be the same person—and of course all the experiences and memories that coonstitute our personality are ours—but our basic physical make up is constantly changing. A wave in the ocean seems to be an entity, moving across the surface, but the molecules at the surface are not moving at all, except up and down. This, for Madame Einstein, is evidence of the existence of the immaterial soul! The illusion of a soul is actually from our consciousness apparently residing somewhere inside our heads because that is where our eyes are. In short, our conscious self seems to be inside our body, not integrated with it. That is the illusion of the soul.

Robinson thinks there is no merit in thinking rigorously because all thought presents problems. That really is the charter for mountebanks that the shepherds love to hear. Dawkins tries to explain that any entity able to be a creator of the universe must have been more complex than His creation, so believers ought to explain how any such complexity itself came to be, or they have not explained anything. Science has produced a theory whereby complexity can grow over countless ages of time. It is the theory of evolution, and is the only way we know complexity, and therefore God, could have come into being. So, even if some god created the immediate world we live in, he, she or it must have evolved. Otherwise God simply exists, or He is one of an infinite regression of creators of the creator back in metatime and metaspace infinitely, or to some time when the first God actually evolved. Robinson’s “answer” is:

Theists need find no anomaly in a divine “complexity” over against the “simplicity” that is presumed to characterize the universe at its origin.

Of course, they do not. They will believe anything that suits them, and that is all they are doing. How does it differ from believing in Mother Goose or Santa Claus. Both come from nowhere except in our imagination to give us presents, simple material gifts or our world and existence. There is no conceptual difference. There is nothing superior about it, as apologists imply, and seem to think. It is childish thinking, and does not answer the question. Maybe there is no answer, but, in that case, just inventing an answer is still no answer! Believers might get comfort out of their belief, but the belief is imaginary.

Mary Wakefield, in a review in The Telegraph, points out that people believe impossible things, “against the odds not as a result of them, because they find access, through faith, to a way of life and a source of love that they can’t find anywhere else”. She is addressing the question of belief, and her answer is psychological comfort. God, then, is the short way of saying “psychological comfort”, but unlike “psychological comfort”, it is psychologically comforting to think it is God. It does not alter the fact, though, that God is an illusion or delusion, depending on how fanatical you are about magnifying a psychological comfort into an entity independent of oneself. In other words, belief is a psychological comfort blanket for the mentally neonatal of all ages. Science is attempting to find answers. Religion is simply offering childish excuses.

Exegesis and Racism

Robinson next decides she is an exegete of Jewish law. Few Jewish exegetes will deny that the law was given to Jews and was meant for Jews, and not for gentiles. It was certainly Paul’s view. Even so, she finds a reason why the law applied to gentiles, thus presumably justifying Christians applying the parts of it they like to the whole human race, whether they want them or not. In quoting Leviticus 19:33-34, that is what Robinson implies even though it is absurd, and is no less absurd because a billion Christians think it.

When a stranger soujourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself.

Leviticus 19:33-34

Typically apologetic, Robinson omits the whole of the central sentence which makes it clear that the stranger is being treated as an honorary Jew for the period of his stay, and she alters the verb “sojourn” to “reside”. A sojourn is a temporary residence, not a permanent one, and certainly can hardly include colonists or a military occupation by foreigners. Indeed, the Jews have a royalty law that forbids anyone other than a Jew from ruling them (Dt 17:15). Dawkins pointed out the truth of the matter, that the law was a Jewish law, and could certainly have been no more thought to apply to Roman soldiers occupying and brutalizing the Jewish population than the Americans thought it right to be oppressed by the British, or the French Maquis thought it proper to be law abiding to Nazis when Hitler occupied France.

There is more special pleading on the same grounds but no more true for her and a billion Christians misreading the parable of the good Samaritan. Even accepting the Christian reading, the Samaritan is good because he did good works to the Jew. If he had put paid to the battered man by delivering the coup de grace, he would not have been considered good. If he had assisted a Roman, the Jews would have considered him wicked. The Romans, like the “Coalition” in Iraq, were oppressing the local population. They were not being good Samaritans, so why should the parable have been apt at all from the lips of Jesus. The parable was included in its present form in the gospel written by Luke, and Luke was writing for Romans. In its original form, it was not a puff for Samaritans, but a condemnation of the two who went before, a priest and a Levite—the priesthood. They were collaborating with the Romans.

Continuing in what she wishes to suggest is a concern of Dawkins with Jewishness, she criticises him for suggesting that the racism of Hitler in respect of the Jews was not particularly outside the spirit of the time, because the same spirit has infected the modern era. The spirit of the time is xenophobic intolerance, varieties of racism, and anti-Semitism was a part of it, whatever respect Robinson has for the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. When Russians, Poles and Germans were pesecuting Jews, the Americans were still persecuting Blacks even though they had fought a civil war to stop it. Robinson is soon speaking proudly about this war against racists and the 14th Amendment. Yet, as she is forced to recognize, that battle against racial prejudice is only abating now, 150 years later, because of positive discrimation over the last few decades. The appalling response to hurricane Katrina in New Orleans shows that the US neocon administration has scarcely progressed despite it. Indeed, the decision of the boastfully Christian US to invade Iraq leading to the direct murder of thousands of innocent civilians, cynically written of as “collateral damage”, and the initiation of a civil war causing the deaths of thousands more is just the same racist angel of death hovering over the present age. 2000 years ago, the Jews were the Iraqis, and now the Romans are the Americans. “Who will be Jesus Christ?” we can ask. Robinson’s pathetic apologetic misses all the important issues. That is typical of the “genre” (her prejorative again!).

Prancing to the Gods

Robinson cited favourably the 14th Amendment which nominally gave everyone in the US the same rights of citizenship, against the racial prejudice of T H Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, whom she finds altogether easier to attack and so spends some time doing it. Deliberately (surely) misreading Dawkins, she attacks Huxley as a racist plainly hoping to taint Dawkins and Darwinism with an implication of racism, while Dawkins rightly hesitates to judge people of the past on modern standards. One wonders whether Robinson has read some of the speeches of Abraham Lincoln mentioned by Dawkins, notably those he made in rural, racially prejudiced regions, when the great man did not sound as liberal over race as he proved to be. Even he had to win votes form backwoodsmen less enlightened than himself. Anyway, she has to admit:

The United States never suffered a more grievous moral setback than when it allowed thinking like Huxley’s to make a dead letter of the 14th Amendment.

It demolishes her lofty and unresonable attitude to Huxley. If Huxley’s racism is “a proof of the power of atavism”, Robinson ought to look to see the atavism around still. It is unquestionably among the ranks of the Christian fundamentalists, the right wing authoritarians who act like latter day cannibals dancing round the stewpot… and vote Republican. And she accuses Dawkins of not being familiar with “modern authoritarianism”. Robinson shows every indication of being cosetted in her own little world of uncritical smugness, in which it is anathema that people should think for themselves, and especially free themselves of the stultifying myths that US creationist and neocon rulers foist on to them. She tries to make out that Dawkins, Darwinism and science are intolerant, though the opposite is true. Dawkins is right that science is a liberating force, and religion is an enslaving force, and the history for which Robinson professes a fondness proves it to be so. Believers ought to read a little of the unbowdlerized history of their belief. The truth is that she is an ignorant hack offered a stage to prance grotesquely for her fans in the gods!

Alfred North Whitehead

Another magazine, The American Spectator, has a review by somebody called Richard Kirk. Kirk in name, kirk in nature, presumably, a case of nominative determinism. Kirk is a great admirer of Alfred North Whitehead, the British mathematician who retired and became an American philosopher. Kirk likes Whitehead because he is willing to think the best of Christianity in its historical influences. Whitehead was, of course, an Anglican Christian, the son of an Anglican clergymen, and he could not, unlike his better known student, Bertrand Russell, give up supernatural belief. So, Whitehead finds good in Christianity unlike “the scattershot pettiness that pervades Richard Dawkins’ book” which is Kirk’s way of reading the fact that Dawkins can find little good in it.

The credit that Whitehead gives Christianity is that anything modern started in the dim and dour misery of the Dark Ages, the one thousand years that Christianity was unchallenged in Europe. In this ten centuries, the best Christianity could produce was S Thomas Aquinas and his Schoolman philosophy, a tortuous convoluted compendium of all the ways that the world depended on the supernatural. Learning was dead, and Christianity had all the responsibility for its murder because it began itself in the splendour of classical civilization, but destroyed it all as being demonic in less than two hundred years. A thousand years later, it all had to be relearned.

The confidence that modern science displays in its intellectual project rests upon an unconscious faith in the universe’s detailed rationality that was derived from medieval theology.

So says Kirk. We are, then, expected to believe, along with the believers in everything supernatural, that a deeply irrational faith led to rational thought. It is obvious that, if it is true, the faith cannot have had anything to do with it. The two are at odds. The only credit Christianity can take is that it never killed off everyone in Europe, although it got close to it at times, its sheer filth being a breeding ground for plagues, and its own terrifying beliefs in the soul and its demonic possession leading to countless cruel deaths by burning, torture and starvation in dank, rat infested dungeons. Whitehead had little to say about such things. For him, Aquinas was sublime, and the founder of modern science, but Whitehead was just as deluded by his beliefs as any other Christian. It took the heresy of Nominalism to break the Scholastic stranglehold on thought, and from it came science. Christians like Kirk can only lie. They cannot tell it as it was, because how it was was too horrible to contemplate. And they cannot bear to let someone like Dawkins tell the truth.

The Whitehead approach of ignoring anything wrong in Christian history, and giving it credit it does not deserve, Kirk calls “subtle analysis”, and he warns that none of it will be found in Dawkins’ book. Indeed not, Dawkins is more honest than that. Instead, Kirk tells us, are pages of attacks on “easy targets”, and he obviously does not like it, presumably because they are all among his best friends and ideas—Pat Robertson, Pastor Ted Haggard, Ann Coulter, fundamentalism, Pastor “God Hates Fags” Phelps, Dr James Dobson, Carl Jung and G W Bush—his own selection.

Credo or Curiosity?

Christian apologists like Kirk have trouble with thinking, one of their beliefs being that everyone, like them, has a credo to live by right or wrong. Dawkins has a bio-creed, it seems. It is:

Life emerged on earth due to random interactions of material elements; life evolved from its primitive forms to its current complexity because of natural selection; no god is needed to make sense of these (or any other) phenomena.

No doubt it is one way of putting what Dawkins is trying to explain, and inasmuch as it is true, it is not something that a creationist God botherer of the modern fundamentalist persuasion can be expected to like. Kirk does not. He complains that Dawkins spends less than 100 pages out of around 400 on God’s existence, not bad going, you might imagine, since God has not given any of us, believers or otherwise, the least indication that He does exist. Rather like Robinson’s, this review ceaselessly complains about what Dawkins says, but does not say why it is wrong.

Typically delusional, Kirk complains that this is not a serious philosophical book, as if any book that discusses God must be seriously philosophical. It is much more psychology than philosophy, because a belief in something for which there is not a scintilla of compelling evidence is pathological not intellectual. More serious is this blatant lie:

What one won’t find in The God Delusion is serious curiosity about the essential nature of the universe.

We have people whose concern with the universe is that it is a metaphorical vale of woe, delaying their advent into a much more desirable, if less material world, suggesting that a scientist has no curiosity about it. At best, for a Christian, the world is a clever artefact made by the supreme being to impress us, or scare us, and since He made it with His supernatural skills, it follows that it is no concern of ours how it was put together. We are supposed merely to be grateful. It is, of course, the way of thinking that dominated Europe for the Dark Age millennium, and it is returning.

The scientist is curious about the world itself, ignoring any half-baked theories that it was made by some mystical giant bigger than anything but half the weight of nothing. The scientist is curious about the world itself, and actually discovers about it. It turns out that it is quite comprehendable, even though a supreme intelligence could have made it utterly incomprehendable! What the believers do not like about it is that there is no sign or necessity in it of the God Hypothesis, as Laplace called it. One thing is certain about what we have discovered so far about the universe. if God made it, He did so, intending to remain hidden. It is easier to hypothesize that there is no God. That is in line with the maxim of William of Ockham, one of the Scholastics that Kirk’s hero Whitehead so admired. Entities ought not to be multiplied without need. Ergo, when there is no need of the entity, God, there is no God.

Kirk flashes his creationist credentials, referring to evolution as the “theoretical conceit that random interactions could have produced the phenomenon of life on earth”. In ignorant or lying vein, he adds:

Never mind the fact that scientists endowed with that mysterious chemical characteristic known as consciousness can’t, with purposeful intent, replicate that vital accident.

Believers like this line of attack on science, and it is really flattering of the astonishing progress science has made in only a few hundred years, that the believers think it ought to be able to do what God Himself had the whole of eternity to do, or so they tell us. Even so, now it is substantially untrue. Scientists have created life in the test tube, albeit not from scratch. They have taken a simply life form, a virus, broken it up into its constituent proteins, and then reconstituted it from the bits. Plainly the virus broken into bits was dead, but when the bits were reassembled, it lived again. the scientists had therefore created life. Naturally, Kirk and the divine anti-science police will deny that it is making life, but that is what they always do to preserve their absurd fancies—they move the goalposts. Separated proteins are not alive, but they can be combined together to form a living active virus. Life has been made from inanimate proteins.

Does it matter where life arose? Apparently it does to corybantic Kirk, the ferocious defender of God. He mentions that Francis Crick, the discoverer, with James Watson, of the DNA double helix, thought it possible that life came to earth from space, a notion called panspermia. Kirk, typically ignorant thinks it means that bug-eyed monsters, “space aliens” brought “life-seeds to earth”. Er, not quite. The so-called life-seeds themselves were the aliens! Nor is another try sound:

Never mind the embarrassing fossil-record confession by the late Harvard biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, that “most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth” and that in any local area, “a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed’”.

The creationist wants his flock to think it is embarrassing, but there is nothing embarrassing about it, and Gould and Eldridge explained why in their theory of punctuated equilibrium, an idea that Falconer had had soon after Darwin, but which had been overlooked in the enthusiasm for Darwinism. Moreover, the alert reader will notice that Kirk has overlooked the adjective “most”. It is another of the characteristics of believers that they never notice when facts are qualified. They do not have the mentality to cope with such subtleties, Whitehead or no Whitehead. Let Dawkins make some non-committal statement like, “If the world is created, then God is the creator”, and the Christian will be online saying he has admitted that God is the creator. It really is not surprising that they cannot understand science. They cannot understand reason.

Pascal

Kirk complains that Dawkins has the temerity to pick on Pascal’s wager as a false and feeble argument, even though he does so because it is one that Kirk’s Christian buddies use incessantly to people unable to discern its frailties, not least of which is the way it insults the intelligence of any Almighty that exists. Not that Christians have got where they have by assuming that God is intelligent. Dawkins should have given some of the more rational notions poor infirm Pascal had. Pascal was a mathematician, and in his younger life, he was quite brilliant, but later in life, after a scare, he retreated into Christian meditation, and wasted the last ten years of his short life. So, he is claimed by science and by Christianity. Kirk cites:

The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short, it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God that imagination loses itself in that thought.

Blaise Pascal

Pascal is uttering sensible scientific philosophy until the last sentence, and that we must assume is what Kirk likes, but is, as usual, utterly divorced from the rest. It is a non-sequitur. As Kirk is obliged to admit in a churlish way, there is no reason to think the awe Pascal felt was anything to do with religion. Many people feel it without religion, inluding the top scientists. Why should it have anything to do with God? The universe is amazing itself. What is the point of inventing something purely imaginary to be notionally more amazing than the universe? It is ridiculous and serves only to feed the delusion that individual people somehow are on God’s level. It is a psychological self-deception to make yourself as important as everything else in the world, when plainly you are not.

Another favourite of profoundly inconsistent mental paupers like Kirk is to use the discoveries of science as if they were written in illuminated words in the Holy Book. We saw it with Robinson, and Kirk uses the same trick, citing the hypothesis of multiple universes as if Dawkins had no idea of it, and lacked the humility to understand it. If there are multiple universes, God did not reveal it through Holy Words, angels, mystical trances or any other form of religious claptrap. It is a hypothesis, and if it is demonstrated in some way, it will become part of science. Christianity can claim no credit for it, pace Whitehead and his admirer, Kirk.

Kirk’s own explanation of God is that “philosophical explanations have to end somewhere”. It seems to be another mountebank principle. “The philosophical explanation ends with God. We decree it. So belt up!” Even if this dictum about philosophical explanation is true, no one knows where it begins or ends, and so the assumption of God is just bad philosophy. Kirk gives us yet another of the apologetic ploys they use incessantly, even though they have been exposed and arguments based on them refuted repeatedly—false dichotomy. This one is the false dichotomy between “a meaningless cosmos or with a being who provides a reason for things”. There are other possibilities besides these two, especially with the emotive descriptions attached to them—a form of special pleading, another apologetic ploy thrown in for good measure. Meaning is something that only human beings can judge, so any cosmos free of human beings necessarily is meaningless, unless some other type of being has the same ability we have of judging meaning. It is one of the reasons Christians invent god. But there is a possibility no Christian will ever consider—the cosmos is God. If it has no other merit than showing Kirk’s dichotomy is false, it suffices here, but maybe Christians would do well to think seriosuly about it, for it would solve a lot of problems for them. It is only dogma that prevents them from thinking about it.

Clarity or Confusion?

Kirk ends up returning to his hero Whitehead, but his quotation ends with this:

If we confine ourselves to certain types of facts, abstracted from the complete circumstances in which they occur, the materialistic assumption expresses these facts to perfection. But when we pass beyond the abstraction, either by more subtle employment of our senses, or by the request for meanings and for coherence of thoughts, the scheme breaks down at once.

We get an interpretation from Kirk which naturally suits himself, but which this quotation hardly justifies. No doubt Whitehead explains himself better at length, but here is just confusion. What does he mean by facts abstracted from their circumstances? How can such “facts” mean anything? What are the more subtle uses of our sense? And why should seeking meaning and coherence in thinking make any scheme break down. Seeking meaning and coherence are the very things that science does, but religion does not do. Religion invents stories that purport to explain things, but do not. That is its trouble, and the thing that Dawkins warns against. 72 black eyed houris welcoming the bits of the suicide bomber to heaven might be an explanation to some, but it is a way of making people kill themselves in fact.

The final jibes by this confused man are first:

Our universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time.

Dr Edward Tryon

In the psychological projection that is normal for these people, he says this is Dawkins’ view, yet a few paragraphs back he was quoting multiple universes at Dawkins, and it is precisly the belief that Christians have. God gets bored, decides to make a world, and “In the beginning…”

Then:

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

Apparently another citation from Whitehead, the first two sentences could make another of the mountebank statememnts that these reviewers and, perhaps, modern fundamentalists generally seem fond of. Is Whitehead, in his final years a philosopher, really advocating woolley thinking, unclear thinking? It seems absurd, and contradicts his admiration for the Scholastics mentioned above, supposedly as the foundation of modern rationality. Admittedly, one can never expect Christians to be coherent. If he is advocating woolliness of thought, it is again a demonstration of how wicked Christianity is, of how it blinds and fools even the best among us. Where does Whitehead say that this is desirable? His implication is that it is not, and the confusion is that the attempt at clear thinking does the opposite of its intention. Quite why is not explained, but we do know that believing in fairy tales can be extremely dangerous personally, and in society as a whole.

But he is more likely to be advocating clarity of thought to overcome sentimentality of feeling, perplexities of fact and superstition. Then the last sentence offers a psychological explanation of foolish beliefs, like those of the Christians. Without clear thinking all that remains are gossamers, and those empty threads, pretty though they look in the sunlight, are what the Christian opts for.

Annex 1—Ontological Argument

Dawkins mocks Anselm’s Ontological Argument for God:

1. God is the being than which nothing greater can be conceived
2. If God did not exist, something greater could be conceived
3. Therefore God exists.

The conclusion is necessary because otherwise the logic is contradictory. Christians remain much impressed by this apparently logical argument. Even so, Thomas Aquinas rejected it, and so do eminent philosophers like Hume and Kant, but Christians keep returning to it. Of course, while logic is powerful, it is not faultless. It has its own paradoxes, of which this seems to be an example. A clearer one is the Cretan who tells you, “Cretans lie”. So, do Cretans lie or not? You are faced with a contradiction, and the same is true here. Instinctively, to the scientist at any rate, it is wrong. So, explore it by removing charged words from the syllogism like “God” and “greatest” so as not to be too emotive and risk begging the question, and cast it in a more general form:

1. Think of the most incredible thing you can
2. An incredible thing that existed would be much more incredible than the one being just imagined
3. Therefore, the incredible thing exists.

It is impossible to think of the most incredible thing unless it exists because actual existence makes anything more incredible than the same thing just imagined. It could be most horrible, most beautiful, and so on. The same form of syllogism as Anselm’s proves that the most incredible thing anyone can imagine exists. Maybe, for Christians, God is the most incredible thing they can imagine, then this is just a rewording of Anselm’s proof, showing that it is not unfair to examine it this way. But many Christians would not want to think of God as being incredible, because despite the proof, they do not want to think they believe something incredible. Then God is not incredible, and cannot be the most incredible thing they can imagine. There must be things more incredible than God. Some people think it incredible that a good God could permit Satan to exist, and so Satan might be the most incredible thing they can imagine. It makes Satan into the God of those others who think God is the most incredible thing they can imagine. Maybe this is why Christians are so fond of killing each other.

But what is so incredible about the most incredible thing, given that its existence is so easy to prove by simple logic? When the existence of something is proved, it is more incredible that it does not exist. The logic must be faulty because it leads to opposite conclusions. Yet the logic is the same as it was for Anselm. It suggests that Anselm’s proof is faulty, as we suspected.

In Aristotelian logic, objects are in categories based on their essences or attributes. An object can have an attribute that another does not have. But is Being an attribute? Can an object have as its essence non-existence? The world would then be full of objects which do not exist because that is one of their attributes. Plainly the attribute of non-existence is a contradiction. What does not exist cannot have any attributes, even non-existence. Any object must exist to be categorized at all, so, if it does not exist, it cannot be categorized and can have no attributes at all. Objects, categories and essences apply to things in the world and therefore existing. Certainly, one can imagine what does not exist, but an imagined object is not a material object in the world. A god can be imagined as a perfect being, but, contrary to Anselm, what is imagined need not be.

Hume and Kant agreed the fault was that existence is not a property. Existence is established by experience, not by definition. Nothing exists outside our imagination simply because we can imagine it. It remains imaginary whatever properties it is imagined to have, including existence. Envisaging that it exists, still leaves it imaginary, and no more real than the original imaginary one, which was certainly imagined to be real too. We imagine things as being real. To imagine a glass of wine, we imagine a real glass of wine—we do not double the imaginative task by imagining it as an imaginary one. Even if we did, it would still be imaginary. Imagining it specifically real, does not make it more real than the original. Imaginary entities do not have levels of existence. So, the contradiction is contrived, and does not need actual existence to resolve it. To conclude that God exists is simply to affirm the original thought refined by the added notion of existence. It is still an idea, and remains an idea until experience in reality demonstrates it exists in it. The argument has no bearing on whether God can possibly exist or not. God can exist in logic—that is, treatable as a logical entity—but that does not bring God into existence in reality. Until God is identified in reality, God only exists in our imaginations. God might really exist, but this is no proof he does.

The problem is that neither Christians nor Christian philosophers can distinguish the real from the imaginary, and so Williams, following Plantinga, argues that the “being must exist if its existence is possible because ‘necessary existence is a great-making property’”. But whatever conditions and properties or how restrictive they are that are added to the being, it remains imaginary. Add the condition that an entity is not optimal unless it can make the Ontological Argument true, and it remains imaginary, and the argument remains flawed. All are misled by their delusion of God. They think the idea of God is real. They give God properties but are only adding imaginary properties to an imaginary God. The problem is they cannot distinguish the two.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History