Wednesday, May 30, 2007

An Elemental Impulse: Religion Is So Powerful That Even Soviet Antireligious Policy Failed..... by Paul Gabel

The featured article in this week’s eSkeptic is on the Soviet attempt to eradicate religion by fiat out of the Russian people. The attempt failed utterly. The historical experiment carries an important lesson for those who study belief systems in general and religion in particular: you cannot legislate beliefs and faith. Today’s atheists who are emboldened by Richard Dawkins’ Lennonesque clarion call to “imagine no religion” should read this article (and the book on which it is based) carefully, and then try to imagine another solution to the problems caused by religious extremists, for as another evolutionary biologist — Edward O. Wilson — cautioned us in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, On Human Nature:

Skeptics continue to nourish the belief that science and learning will banish religion, which they consider to be no more than a tissue of illusions… Today, scientists and other scholars, organized into learned groups such as the American Humanist Society and Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, support little magazines distributed by subscription and organize campaigns to discredit Christian fundamentalism, astrology, and Immanuel Velikovsky. Their crisply logical salvos, endorsed by whole arrogances of Nobel Laureates, pass like steel-jacketed bullets through fog.

There is, indeed, something deeply elemental about the power of belief.

— Michael Shermer

The article is reprinted in its entirety here It would be nice to have all the comments back here, rather than under the article, itself.

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

What Do YOU Fear?


One might criticize me for going a bit afield on this post, but I do think it ties into the debate. However, my purpose has a wider scope, so I would appreciate as many comments on this one as possible. You might even want to post the question on your blogs and get me some additional thoughts on the subject.

The list of possible fears is long and varied, everything from public speaking to spiders and such. However, for the purpose of this survey, I'm looking for the big picture. I will list 10 that I can think of that should set the tone. If these are big for you, let me know. If there are other similar things that are bigger for you, add them.
  1. The US devolving into a dictatorship
  2. The rapture and God's judgment on earth
  3. Hell
  4. Global Warming
  5. Islamic extremism creating global conflict
  6. Nuclear holocaust
  7. Depletion of critical natural resources
  8. The US devolving into a socialist government
  9. Overpopulation
  10. Underpopulation
  11. Too few culturally "Western Civilization" in the population
  12. Pollution
  13. Nuclear power plant catastrophe - or nuclear waste catastrophe
  14. Aliens (from outer space)
  15. Avian flu or similar disease
  16. Scientific advance out of control (e.g. genetic engineering, nanobots, robots with AI)

Monday, May 28, 2007

Mouth's of Babes Department

I regret that I cannot link the source on this quote, but it is reported third hand to me that a book of letters written by kids around ten included this idea: "God why do kill things just so you can make more of them."

Could the question of evil be put any more succinctly. Sure, we humans have divided up killing into all kinds of levels of acceptability and cruelty. But a death is a death. Pain is pain. I've been told by countless women that childbirth is like pulling your bottom lip over your head (that might actually have been Bill Cosby.) So God allows evil, torture, lots of pain, horrific bad things happening to children and cute little animals. But the child above may have whittled the issue down to its essential. What say you?

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

In The Beginning

Like a good lawyer at trial, I would like to give and ask for a few stipulations:
  1. Matter exists.
  2. Energy exists.
  3. Information exists
  4. Rules exist
  5. Each of these exist at this moment as a result of cause and effect that stretches back either to some point, or to infinity.
  6. It is unlikely that we will ever know whether these first causes of each of these exist or if they are infinite.
  7. The human mind is incapable of grasping the idea that any of these came from nothing.
  8. The human mind is incapable of grasping the idea that the causes of these things are infinite.
Up until this point in this series of observations/stipulations, there is no advantage to either the God or no God side of the debate.

I suspect that one reason folks tend towards theism is that it is easier to imagine a spiritual world as infinite, and the finite world as being created by the spiritual. Some who have blogged on the no God side here have suggested that time began with the big bang, and that prior to this there was no time. This fits perfectly with the concept that in the spiritual realm there is no time, and thus infinity is no longer impossible to consider.

Also, state elsewhere but repeated here as appropriate to this post, it is impossible for us to grasp matter or energy as have a first cause without a spiritual dimension to "create" it, but it is even harder to imagine how information or rules were included in a godless explosion of matter and energy.