The Blasphemy Challenge

Old Business

On the issue of the History Channel blaming the Dark Ages on Godlessness, please note the attached History Channel marquee, "600 Years of Degenerate, Godless, Inhuman Behavior"

See my original post on the subject, which includes contact information for The History Channel.

New Business

A blog called "The Blasphemy Challenge", which is specifically devoted to criticizing the Rational Response Squad's Blasphemy Challenge put a recent post of mine, “Theism as a Mental Illness or Child Abuse”, and posted it on their site under the heading, "Atheist Ethicist calls Blasphemy Challenge Unnecessarily Insulting."

I wrote to them informing them that they misinterpreted and misrepresented my article, and explained my position on The Blasphemy Challenge. In response, they made some slight edits to their blog entry and changed the title. The entry can now be found under the title, “Atheist Alonzo Fyfe on the blasphemy challenge.”

Just as an aside, I am curious as to why they could not have written, "Ethicist Alonzo Fyfe on the blasphemy challenge." After all, I have written 1 post on the existence of God and 500+ posts on ethics. So, I do not understand the decision to put more emphasis on my atheism than on my ethics.

Background

The Blasphemy Challenge is an offer from The Rational Response Squad for people - particularly young people - to take a video of themselves stating their lack of belief in God and posting this video on YouTube.

I article that I wrote actually focused on a discussion of some comments made in association with The Blasphemy Challenge. Specifically, I wrote to deny the proposition that theism is a mental illness (because a proper functioning brain will pick up the dominant beliefs of the society it lives in), and to deny the proposition that labeling a child as being a member of a religious culture is “child abuse” (because “child abuse” presupposes a negligent or willful disregard for the welfare of the child that simply does not exist).

I never wrote anything about The Blasphemy Challenge itself. Yet, this site posted a blog entry saying that yet another atheist had condemned The Blasphemy Challenge.

As I mentioned above, I responded to this misuse and misinterpretation of my views by sending a correction. In response to my comment they changed the heading of the blog entry and edited the body slightly. They also included my clarification in the comments, all as part of a good faith attempt to correct their earlier mistake.

These efforts show at least some meager acknowledgements of the basic moral requirements of intellectual integrity. However, I still fail to see why the requirements of intellectual integrity were not strong enough to prevent them from misrepresenting my earlier post to start with.

Anyway, as I thought about this incident, I decided that I should give a specific moral assessment on The Blasphemy Challenge, to reduce the chance that somebody may misinterpret my position in the future.

Specifically, I think that The Blasphemy Challenge, in itself, is a very good idea in principle and I can see no reason not to support it. I do not think that everything the sponsors of the challenge say in association with The Blasphemy Challenge is fair or accurate, but these faults do not give us reason to condemn The Blasphemy Challenge itself.

Overall Assessment

Ultimately, the Blasphemy Challenge is an invitation to people to report a true statement about themselves. In a sense, it is little different than creating a post that says, “I believe that the Sun is the center of the solar system,” or “I believe that the Earth is round.” In this case, the person is stating, “I believe that the Holy Ghost does not exist.” There is nothing about an act that is morally objectionable.

This is not to say that a statement of one’s beliefs cannot invite moral condemnation. If a person were to say, “I believe that all of the Jews should be killed,” this statement would certainly (and justifiably) invite moral condemnation. However, the reason for this condemnation is because there is no evidence or reason to support such a statement. The fact that a person adopts such a belief in the absence of evidence tells us something about what that person desires, and his desires are not those that tend to fulfill the desires of others. Indeed, a desire to kill others is quite clearly the case of a desire that tends to thwart the desires of others.

The lack of a belief in the Holy Ghost, on the other hand, tells us nothing about what a person desires. The kindest and most caring person on the planet can consistently hold that, as a matter of fact, no holy ghost exists, and that the wellbeing of others depends entirely on our real-world actions. We will get no help from a spirit that does not exist.

So, the claim that there is no holy spirit is morally neutral, in itself. An invitation to somebody to do a morally neutral act is, itself, morally neutral. There is no basis here for any type of moral condemnation of The Blasphemy Challenge.

The Insult Argument

One argument offered against The Blasphemy Challenge is that it is an insult to religious belief.

Certainly, the statement, “No holy spirit exists,” implies that those who believe in a holy spirit have made a mistake. In other words, there is some shortcoming in their ability to determine what is true or false. This might be taken as an insult.

However, it would be absurd in the extreme to adopt the position that nobody may ever assert a proposition that might conflict with the beliefs of any listener. We would have to outlaw all spoken and written words expressed where others might encounter them.

More specifically, somebody who demands that we condemn the statement, "I believe no gods exist" because it insults the intelligence of those who believe in God needs to explain why “I believe in God” is not to be condemned for insulting the intelligence of those who believe that no God exists.

If a measure of a moral principle is to be found in applying it consistently to everybody, we can easily see that those who advance the “insult” argument against The Blasphemy Challenge are more familiar and comfortable with injustice over justice.

The Psychological Effect

I have a reason for favoring The Blasphemy Challenge based on the psychological effect that this type of event might have.

In America today, people who do not believe in God are often subjected to pervasive psychological abuse from the first days that they enter school. They are told that those who are not “under God” or who do not “trust God” are inferior to those who do. If they belong to a family who does not believe in God, or if they should come to doubt the existence of God themselves, public (and many private) schools quickly make the child aware of the fact that they are considered among the worst and the lowest of America’s citizens.

I have mentioned before that there is a reason why atheists are considered the ‘most hated’ (actually, the ‘least American’) of all citizens. This is because the Pledge of the Allegiance and the national motto were specifically instituted to teach this lesson to children, and it works. They learn this lesson well.

Those same children, when they enter Junior High School and High School, get to listen to a President declare that only a person who believes that our rights come from God is qualified to be judge. In the last couple of weeks, he has heard a Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, say that only a person who believes in God can lead America. These, too, are messages to young atheists asserting that they are morally and socially inferior to other Americans. When these people are cheered for their statements – when these types of statements give those who make them a political advantage over those who deny them, this reinforces the negative message reaching the young atheists.

There is an editorial being widely circulated across the country right now stating that, “There Are No True Atheists.” The author, Paul Campos, asserts that a person who denies the existence of God must give up ever using the word 'ought'. Any use of the word 'ought' is an acknowledgement of God. Since even atheists make 'ought' statements, they are not true (or, at least, not consistent) atheists. No atheist should be elected president, because no amoral person should be elected President.

The problem here is not just that the atheist learns that he may not hope to become President. It is that the atheists are told not to expect the trust of his neighbors, while his neighbors are told never to trust the athiest. It is the fact that these claims identify the atheist as inherent inferior to Christian neighbors – whether the atheist seeks to become President or not – that does the harm.

In the face of this, I think it is particularly important and useful to do something that will communicate a competing message to young atheists – that atheism is not, in fact, a source of shame.

The blasphemy challenge is similar to “coming out” in the homosexual community – an invitation to homosexuals to stand up and state publicly, “I am a homosexual, a human, with every right to the fair and equal treatment that should be given to all humans who are not a threat to their neighbors.”

Atheists who see others stepping up and announcing their atheism have the opportunity to shed some of the shame that the government and society has surrounded them with through twelve years of public education.

This, by the way, is one of the reasons why I include “atheist” in my blog name and why I openly state my beliefs – in the hopes that this might help a young atheist realize that the assertions that atheists are inherent amoral is hate-mongering propaganda, that tells us more about the poor moral character of those who make such claims than of their victims.

Conclusion

So, I am, in principle, very much in favor of The Blasphemy Challenge. I do wish that it would have been brought into the world in a context that showed more respect for the need for young atheists to see positive role models. It seems to have come with some baggage that I wish would have been left behind. Yet, still, if we sit around and wait for perfection, then nothing would get done. None of my objections are so strong that they would have lead me to the conclusion, “This should not have been done.”

The Lost Tomb of Jesus

An opportunity has come up to display a devotion to higher standards of proof than used by those we tend to criticize.

James Cameron, the director of Titanic, has produced a documentary called, “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” where it is claimed that a burial site has been found that includes Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Jesus’ son.

Perhaps the claim is true. Yet, the issue is not to be decided by a documentary put together by a Hollywood producer. The issue is to be decided by articles in peer-reviewed publications and debates by experts in the field. If they should form a consensus that these claims are correct, an individual with a proper concern for proof over propaganda will have reason to accept those results. Until then, they (we) do not.

An Intellectually Responsible Conclusion

The promotions for the documentary assert that the documentary will provide the viewer with evidence and then the viewer can decide for himself or herself what to believe.

Yet, my contention is that there is no way that a documentary can provide an individual, in 45 minutes, with enough information to make more than a guess as to the conclusion – and that guess will inevitably follow the viewer’s own preconceived notions.

Being convinced by this documentary would be like being convinced of a suspect's guilt while sitting on a grand jury. A grand jury only hears the prosecutor's case - all expertly wrapped to make it look as pretty as possible. No doubt, the message in this documentary will be well packaged to make it look as attractive as possible, to get unthinking people to buy it.

In holding to this standard of knowledge, one is already holding to a higher moral respect for truth than most people who will be discussing this documentary will allow. Most fundamentalists will hold that the claims are false, precisely because their religion claims otherwise. They will assert a certainty that a person with a proper love of truth to know to be unwarranted.

At the same time there will be those who will wish to view this documentary as confounding Christians, who will assert that in 45 minutes they have become sufficiently knowledgeable in the science of archaeology to make a conclusion that PhD scientists in the field do not universally accept.

The difference here is not between those who are certain P is true and those who are certain P is false. It is between both of these groups and the intellectually responsible person who asserts that those who claim to know are intellectually reckless and show an insufficient moral regard for the value of the truth and good evidence. The lover of truth will see members of both camps blinded by a will to believe and an arrogant assumption of infallibility that has a habit of causing a great many more problems in the world than it solves.

The Possibility of Being Wrong

In saying that the documentary will not provide us with sufficient evidence to make an informed decision, I am not saying that Cameron’s conclusions have a 50% chance of being true. Actually, they are far more likely to be false. There is going to be a long list of possible explanations for this data. These odds alone give the Cameron explanation a very low chance of being true.

Consider a case in which you have a friend secretly draw a card out of a deck of cards. You know that the card he is holding is either the king of hearts or it is some other card. Yet, this hardly implies that there is a 50% chance that your friend is holding the king of hearts. Your claim, “You have drawn the king of hearts,” is almost certainly (98% chance) false. Cameron’s claims are almost certainly false.

Yet, those who hold that Cameron’s chances of being wrong are 100%, rather than some smaller number, because their religion will not tolerate him being right, are also mistaken. There is a very real non-zero chance that Cameron’s claims are accurate. The dogmatic Christian who says that Cameron cannot be right because the Bible says so is no lover of truth.

These conclusions speak to a certain amount of justified moral condemnation for James Cameron and his crew. If they are lovers of truth, then they would not be telling their audience, “In 45 minutes, we can give you enough information to make decisions that professional archaeologists do not feel qualified to make.” How wonderful it would be if one of us can get the equivalent of a PhD in archaeology just by watching one documentary. Consider the tons of information that cannot be presented in a forum such as this.

The Right to Freedom of Speech

Now, whenever somebody condemns somebody else for saying something, suggesting that it is something that ought not to be said (in this case, that a 45 minute documentary can give a person sufficient reason to accept or reject a set of propositions on Jesus), that this is censorship and is to be condemned. The assertion would be that I am an enemy of free speech if I assert that Cameron is to be condemned for this particular exercise of speech.

Consistent with this, I would expect some Christians to condemn this documentary, and that others will use eagerly use the opportunity to accuse those fundamentalists of being an enemy of “free speech”

These claims would be mistaken. In order to violate Cameron’s right to free speech, one would have to advocate violence or legal penalties against him. Criticism – even in the form of moral condemnation for making certain claims – is not a violation of free speech, if it is not backed by violence. The right to free speech only makes sense if it includes a right to criticize, and a right to morally condemn, others. These acts are also speech, and those who perform them must also be free.

In fact, this particular use of “the right to free speech” contradicts itself. Those who make this claim are effectively asserting, “No good person would ever make the claim that there are things that no good person would ever claim." The position is incoherent.

Cameron clearly has the right to be free from violence or punishment for producing this documentary. This does not remove his guilt that his documentary contains an invitation to intellectual recklessness and irresponsibility.

Going Against Christian Dogma

In reading a news account of this documentary, one of the statements that I ran across said that, “[S]everal scholars derided the claims made in a new documentary as unfounded and contradictory to basic Christian beliefs.”

Sorry, but a scholar would have no grounds for deriding a claim because it contradicts basic Christian beliefs. That objection would either require the assumption that all Christian beliefs are true, or that it even false Christian beliefs should never be contradicted. Both of these are violations of the fundamental ethics of scholarship.

This leaves only “unfounded” as being a legitimate objection to Cameron’s piece. When this objection comes from scholars, it has merit. However, when this objection comes from the church, it brings with it a touch of irony – that of a church official condemning a belief on the basis that there is not sufficient physical or material evidence to support it.

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The General Tendency of Skeptics

In the article, a biblical scholar Stephen Pfann said, “[S]keptics, in general, would like to see something that pokes holes into the story that so many people hold dear.”

This might actually be true of some ‘skeptics’. However, I would hope that the moral culture of the skeptics would suppress such tendencies. Instead, I hope that skeptics, in general, would be more concerned with whether a proposition is true or false and well supported by the evidence than whether the proposition is convenient or pleasant to entertain.

In fact, Pfann’s claim is an insult in that it attributes a mean spirited – a ‘love of having others suffer’ to skeptics. Apparently, the list of things that are entertaining to the average skeptic is the suffering of a person who has discovered that a cherished belief is probably false. I suspect that Pfann would scoff at the idea that there might be a skeptic who bits his tongue rather than poke holes in the cherished beliefs of an associate or family member, just because he does not want to cause such a person pain.

There are, of course, some skeptics for which this accusation is true. However, what should be true of skeptics “in general” (contrary to Pfann’s hate-filled bigotry) is that the love of truth itself is more important than the love of any given belief, such that the belief can be accepted or rejected based on the evidence. A certain amount of condemnation would be appropriate for any who love a belief more than they love truth.

The Godless, Inhuman Dark Ages

I caught mention of this at Bligbi

The Dark Ages: 600 years of Godless Inhuman Behavior.

This is the tag line that the History Channel is using to promote a new show, as seen in its advertisement. Apparently, somebody got the idea that atheist barbarians were responsible for this period of intellectual stagnation.

I'm thinking that there might be a sequel.

"The Holocaust: A Jewish Crime against Humanity."

If one were to conduct a poll in Europe between 500 and 1100 AD, I wonder what percent of the population would announce that they were 'atheist' or even 'agnostic' or the ambiguous 'no religion'.

I am going to take a guess that the answer will be at or near zero percent.

Yet, for some reason, the History Channel has decided to blame this small and possibly non-existant group with all of the death and suffering, crime and disease of the Dark Ages.

Perhaps the show itself will explain how so few people (at or near zero), who could not even speak their beliefs in public without inviting torture and execution, acquired so much cultural influence that they were responsible for so much bad in the world.

This absurdity of blaming the dark ages on godlessness makes me wonder how this idea got into the minds of those who advertised it. What are the causes that lie behind this effect?

Possible theories may include a conscious conspiracy of hate-mongering and scapegoating. Yet, this seems highly contrived - like assuming that there must be an intelligent designer responsible for the human eye. If we had evidence of a conspiracy - some leaked memo or a string of public statements leading directly to such a conclusion, we would have evidence for an accusation. In the absence of such evidence, we should look at natural explanations.

Promotions are market-tested. There is a lot of money at stake, so it is standard practice to come up with several ideas for a promotion and test them formally and informally. One sensible market test is to call a focus group and ask them, "Which option would make you most likely to watch the show?"

We have surveys that show that atheists are the 'most hated' group in America. That attitude tells us something about the focus group. They are going to respond positively to ant claim that 'the godless' are responsible for anything bad. We do not need to postulate a conspiracy. We only need to postulate a popular attitude of hate, and we already have independent confirmation of that.

Of course, marketers play a role. A campaign such as this requires somebody with an imagination (and with no conscience) to come up with ideas to test before the focus group. Some marketer had to realize that "600 years of godless inhuman behavior" would have a shot at winning the focus group.

Anybody with a shred of intellectual integrity would have asked the question, "What percentage of the population would have called themselves Godless, and did they have positions of significant cultural influence?" They would have them realize that the statement was a historically inaccurate.

Anybody with a shred of moral integrity would have realized that this was not a victimless oversight. Instead, it was quite comparable to advertising a show called, "The Holocaust: A Jewish Crime against Humanity," if it were to pass the focus group test. Instead of, perhaps, using the fact that it won the test to conclude that the culture is moving in a dangerous and wholly immoral and unjust direction.

The next question to ask is: why does it matter? Is this not a trivial transgression of little moral significance in the grand scheme of things?

I think not.

This hatred of atheism is being used as a marketing tool to promote hatred for some very important values. It's hatred against evidence-based thinking. It's hatred against the idea that we live in a universe that cares nothing about human survival, so we must. It's hatred against a number of policies such as stem cell research that can reduce death and suffering.. It's hatred of those who would protest attempting to defend the country from hurricanes and terrorist strikes is to make an offering of homosexuals on some legislative altar to appease God.

It seriously is time to ask how important it is to give our children a better world than we received. It is time to ask how important it is that atheists grow up to have all of the opportunities that intelligent people of good moral character are entitled to, including opportunities to serve in government and to have the respect they deserve from their peers – to be judged by their own actions rather than to be judged as ‘godless, and therefore inhuman’.

The History Channel has a site for accepting comments on specific shows.

You can also participate in its forums.

Mitt Romney: No Atheists in Government

I'm convinced that the nation . . . needs a person of faith to lead the country.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney made this statement to a heckler at once of his speeches who said, because Romney is a Mormon, that he is a pretender and he did not know the lord.

For this, he got a standing ovation.

He uttered almost exactly the same words on MSNBC.

In response, a few atheists and non-atheists who have the capacity to recognize religious bigotry made a few comments. The expected retort, “What would have been the reaction if he had said that we need a man in the White House, or a Caucasian in the White House, or a Christian in the White House?”

We know what the reaction would be.

Now, where would that reaction have come from?

It would have started with the National Organization for Women, the NAACP, or the Anti-Defamation League, respectively. It would have been started by the people who had been insulted by this remark. They would have continued to make noise, until somebody listened.

Atheists cower and say nothing. Because they say nothing, they give the press permission to move on to more important matters, such as the disposition of Anne Nichol Smith’s body or Brittany Spears’ choice of hair style. You know, things that really matter.

For a moment, I would like to invite you to put this event into the mind of a 16-year-old high school student, who has political aspirations, or who is just struggling for acceptance among his peers. He is an atheist. Now, he is in a society where a man can stand up and say, “No atheist is good enough to be President,” and for this he gets a standing ovation.

In some places, this happens in a school where, every day, the other students rise to say a pledge of allegiance to “one nation, under God”.

In some places, this happens in a school where the sign on the classroom wall says, “In God we trust,” and where every student at least knows that their money says this.

This happens in a school where there are students looking for any excuse to put down those among them, and there is no excuse better than the excuse that earns a standing ovation on television, the excuse that students pledge to uphold every day, the excuse advertised by the sign on the classroom wall and on the money.

What is the effect of this emotional abuse?

Head-bowed, eyes down, silent, submission.

Even while the next generation begins another year of being subjected to the same emotional battering in the schools, the last generation does nothing. The last generation is more interested in hiding the shame of their lack of belief, and hoping that nobody notices, than fighting for an environment where their children, nieces, nephews, the children of their friends, the children of those parents they know through internet discussions and bulletin boards, can go to a school free from the abusive and belittling statements that have been written into this nation’s laws and rituals.

I have pondered for the past week what could be done about Romney’s statement. Obviously, writing to him is out of the question. Nor is it reasonable to expect any fair and just treatment from the bulk of the people that will attend his speeches. Attending his appearances with signs of protest would not likely be effective; the bulk of the population will see this as reason to cheer him, rather than condemn him. After all, when they went to school, they too learned to pledge allegiance to bigotry. In promoting this bigotry, they are simply living up to the promise they made as a child.

So, what might actually communicate, to Romney, to the audience, and – most importantly – to the press, how despicable this culture of hatred is.

I would like to offer this:

That, if you have an opportunity to attend an event in which Romney is speaking, that you go with the intent of asking him a question, in public, and where the press can pick up his answer.

For example, bring your teenage child (or a teenage child you know) who is an atheist. Stand up with the child and say, “Governor Romney, you said that we need a person of faith to run the country. I would like you to tell my daughter here, who is an atheist, that no matter how kind she is, no matter how intelligent she becomes, no matter how much it pains her to see people suffer and how much she wants to make the world better, that the mere fact that she does not believe in God means that anybody else in the country who does believe in God is better qualified to be President.”

Or, ask, “If you had a child who was as intelligent as you, as concerned for the future of this country as you, and as committed to making the world a better place as you, who shared all of your features but one, that he did not believe in God, and he was running for President, would you endorse him or his opponent?”

Or, “If something should happen to you, the line of succession for the Presidency is first the Vice President, then Speaker of the House, then President pro tempore of the Senate, then Secretary of State, then Secretary of the Treasury, and so on. Since you hold that the nation must be led by a person of faith, do you consider it wrong to have an atheist in any of those positions that might end up being President?”

Or, “You state that the nation needs a person of faith to lead the country. The founding wrote into the Constitution that there shall be no religious test for public office. Do you think that this was a mistake on their part, and would you favor a Constitutional Amendment that barred atheists and agnostics from running for President?”

Or, “President Bush said, ‘I believe that it points up the fact that we need common-sense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God. And those are the kind of judges I intend to put on the bench.’ This effectively states that atheists, for some reason, lack some essential capacity to serve as judges. Do you agree with this policy and would you continue it?”

Or, “You stated that the nation needs a person of faith to run the country. Are there other positions that you believe atheists are not qualified to hold. For example, can an atheist be a good governor? Senator? Teacher? Parent? What is the limit to what an atheist is qualified to do?”

Or, “If you had a daughter, and her boyfriend – let us say, a black man – asked for permission to marry your daughter – what would you say? What if he was an atheist?”

Or . . . make up your own question.

Remember, the most important point in making such a display is not to convince Romney not to be a bigot. The best one can hope for here is that Romney will do a better job of recognizing the bigotry of his statements than the audience he is trying to impress and be put in the uncomfortable position of trying to give an answer that is not blatantly bigoted without losing a substantial portion of his blatantly bigoted base.

The real purpose of this exercise is to educate the press – to get the press used to the idea of asking and seeking answers to these questions.

In fact, I would recommend asking questions like this of all political candidates, recording them, and posting those answers on YouTube or some similar platform.

Let’s see how many hours of bigotry we can collect between now and November, 2008.

Carolyn Porco: Awe and Wonder

The next in my series of posts on the presentations at Beyond Belief 2006 concerns the presentation by Carolyn Porco, Senior Research Scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Dueling Stories

She was speaking in the part of the seminar that had to do with, “If not God, then what?”

In this, she asserted that science has come up with a story as interesting as any religion – a story that starts with the Big Bang, goes through the formation of galaxies, the formation of stars, the collection of organic molecules in clouds of rock and gas surrounding those stars, those molecules forming life, and, eventually, an “Armageddon” story of destruction when the sun explodes in a supernova.

She accompanied her story with a slide show of astronomical images, from deep-space images of galaxies billions of years old, to the formation of stars, to images of dust around other stars, to the death of stars.

Note: If we have descendents living in this solar system when our sun goes nova, it will not be the end of human civilization. Many of those descendents will move to colonies further away from the sun and designed to survive a nova. After that, our sun will still be a source of exceptional amounts of energy for billions of years as it cools. If there is an eventual end to civilization, it will not come from here. It will more likely come from our engineering our own extinction through ignorance.

Either way, I would assert that this story is far better than any religious story, precisely because we can look at empirical evidence and determine it is true – and our knowledge of this story is getting better over time. Imagine if we were to hold that the science of Ptolemy was unerring, and no future discover could force us to reconsider anything he had written. Imagine how impoverished science would be today.

It would be as impoverished as a system of morals whose practitioners insist can only be drawn from ‘infallible’ books written 1300, 2000, or more years ago, and that no discovery we make today can cause us to reconsider what was, in a more primitive era, considered to be right and wrong.

Awe and Wonder

Carolyn Porco was also asked to speak about awe and wonder in the universe. It is a topic easily illustrated by the images that Porco displayed during her presentation – galaxies, stars being born, stars exploding – all very awesome images.

As I see it, there are three attitudes that people can have relating atheism to awe and wonder.

(1) Awe and wonder do not exist. They are like angels, devils, and God himself, in that they do not exist and nobody has ever experienced such a thing. People have other experiences that they mistake for awe and wonder, but no genuine awe or wonder.

(2) Awe and wonder exist, like trees exist. Atheists and theists may disagree over where trees came from – one arguing for an intelligent designer and the other arguing for evolution. However, neither disputes the existence of trees. They may dispute the nature and origin of awe and wonder, but neither disputes the claim that certain events can be awesome or wonderful.

(3) Awe and wonder are mistakes, like a belief in angels and devils. Even the atheist knows that beliefs in angels and devils exist. Our understanding of the real world would be incomplete if it did not postulate beliefs in such things. However, those beliefs are false. Similarly, under this option, awe and wonder exist, but only for the theist – in the same way that belief in God exists only for the theist. The atheist has to do without (at least if he is a consistent atheist).

For the sake of space, I am going to dismiss option (1). I do not know of anybody who would argue this position. The real dispute is between (2) and (3), where the typical atheists will assert (2), while many theists would assert (3). To those theists, an atheist only experiences awe and wonder when he forgets for a moment that he is an atheist and allows himself to experience God.

Ultimately, any claim that an atheist cannot experience awe without opening himself up to God is as absurd as a claim that he cannot experience pain without opening himself up to God. Or, more generally, that all of his senses – touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste, would all cease to function if he were a consistent atheist.

There is no deep philosophical difference between pain and awe. An individual interacts with the environment, which sends a signal to the brain, which then interprets the event. Part of that processing involves attaching a value to that event or experience, whether it be the awfulness of pain, or the awesomeness of beauty.

Some theists may worry that they would lose their appreciation of certain things if they knew the underlying scientific facts. For example, there is something about knowing how rainbows work that would make rainbows uninteresting.

However, it is questionable that any scientific description of how pain works will make pain any less horrible – that will make the theist indifferent to pain. If somebody were to explain to him the collapsing electric potential across the cell membrane of a neuron that transmits signals along its length, the release of neural transmitters at the end of one neuron, and how those neural transmitters start another wave of cascading electric potential in the next neuron, I sincerely doubt that they would become indifferent to putting their hand in a bed of hot coals.

Science and Dewonderment

There is no reason to believe that knowledge of the scientific facts surrounding the experience of awe will make the object experienced any less awesome.

There is a way in which it is possible for a change of beliefs to have this type of effect. If a child is given an ornament where she is told, “Grandma wanted you to have this when she died,” it may acquire sentimental value. If she were to discover that her mother picked the ornament out of the garbage and made up the story, she may well lose her attachment to the ornament. This is because what she desires is that which connects her to her grandma. Once she finds out that the ornament does not have this property, then the ornament is no longer thought of as something special.

The same can apply to rainbows. A person may believe that a rainbow is a miracle created by God as a way of sending a greeting to the people. She may value the rainbow as a connection between herself and God. Once she finds out that rainbows are not messages from God, then she may cease to think of rainbows as in any way special.

Yet, on this model, we are talking about somebody who has a particular emotional attachment to messages from God. If, instead, we are talking about somebody who has a particular emotional attachment to objects of rare and exotic natural beauty, that person will continue to appreciate the rainbow whether God exists or not.

If a person would actually lose an appreciation for rainbows if she learned that they were not messages from God, she would be mistaken to assume that this must be true of everybody. This is as much of a mistake as assuming, from the fact that one prefers vanilla over strawberry, that everybody prefers vanilla over strawberry. As a matter of fact, people value different things. Some desire experiences that connect them to God, while others like rare and exotic experiences of natural beauty.

Personally, I like rainbows. I have always thought that they were interesting. Because of this, I have always been interested in the science of rainbows. Knowing that rainbows are caused by photons with different energy levels entering raindrops, which splits the light into its component colors, and reflects that light back on the observer, does not distract from the beauty of a rainbow one iota. Any more than my knowledge of how pain works makes pain any less painful.

The Advantage of Science

In fact, this knowledge gives me a bit of an advantage. With this knowledge, I get to experience more rainbows than I otherwise would have. I know that whenever there are rain clouds in one direction, and a bright sun coming from the other direction, in the morning or evening, I have a chance for a rainbow. I can be sitting at my computer while a rain storm goes through, see the beams of a setting sun several minutes later, and predict that I will probably see a rainbow if I were to look to the east. I can be so confident in my prediction that I can tell my wife to come with me, we go out to a bridge near our house where we have an excellent view, and expect to see a rainbow.

She likes rainbows, too.

And rainbows are even more awesome and wonderful when they are shared.

Discussion: Desires, Value, and Meaning

Welcome to my 5th weekend writing on the presentations given at Beyond Belief 2006. This posting covers about an hour of dialogue in Session 3 on the subject of religion and meaning.

In this period, Francisco Ayala, University of California, Irvine said,

People need to find meaning and purpose in life, and they find meaning and purpose in religion. . . . This allows the billions of people in the world to live a life which makes sense. They can put up with the difficulties in life, with the hunger and the sickness and the like, and I certainly do not want to take that away from them.

Richard Dawkins seemed to agree with this to an extent.

I can see and, of course acknowledge that a lot of people do get something from [religion] . . . I do agree with Professor Ayala that no doubt there are many people who need religion and far be it for me to pull the rug from under their feet.

Proposition. No person has ever found meaning in religion. Thus, no life has ever been robbed of meaning by demonstrating that religious propositions are false. Many people believe that they have found meaning and purpose in religion, but, like their belief in God, they are mistaken.

The Basics

Desires are the only reasons-as-ends (goals) that exist.

A desire is a propositional attitude. A person with a desire that 'P' for some proposition 'P' has the attitude that 'P' is to be made or kept true.

Value exists as a relationship between states of affairs and desires. If an agent has a desire that 'P', and 'P' is true in a state of affairs 'S', then that agent has a 'reason-as-ends' to bring about S. That is to say, S has value for that agent.

So, what about these people who find meaning in 'serving God'?

They have a desire that 'P' where 'P' = 'I am serving God'. This means that they have a reason-as-ends to bring about any state of affairs in which the proposition, 'I am serving God' is true. Those states of affairs have value to the agent. Bringing about those states of affairs is what gives that agent meaning or purpose.

However, there is no real-world state of affairs in which the proposition, “I am serving God” is true. Therefore, there is no real-world state of affairs that has value, meaning, or purpose for the agent whose key desire is a desire to serve God.

Consider the state of a parent who cares deeply for the well-being of his child. In fact, his child is suffering and dying. However, he has convinced himself that his child is well. His child being well is so important that he cannot stand the idea of his child being sick and dying. So, he refuses to believe it. He says that his life has meaning and purpose because he is caring for his child, ensuring that his child is healthy, while blocking out the fact that his child is sick and dying. He claims that he could not stand to live in a universe where his child was sick and dying, but that fortunately his child is healthy.

Is there any sense at all to saying that his life has meaning?

Also, I invite you to consider a case where an agent has a desire that ‘P’, where ‘P’ = ‘my only child is healthy and happy.’ Then the child gets blown up in a terrorist bombing. Now, there is no state of affairs in which that person’s desire that ‘P’ can be made true. From that point on, this person’s life is truly empty, with living itself hardly seeming worth the effort. It will remain that way until the person adopts a new desire – a ‘desire that Q’ where ‘Q’ = ‘that there be fewer terrorist bombers,’ for example, that will give the life a new purpose and renewed meaning.

Implications

This has two implications.

The first implication concerns the idea that convincing a person that God does not exist deprives their life of meaning and purpose. This is false. For the person who has a desire that, “I am serving God,” their life is already meaningless. They just do not know it yet.

Their life only has meaning in a state of affairs where, “I am serving God,” is true. This is never true, so their life can never have meaning or purpose. Nobody can take away from a person that which the person never had to start with.

This is not a matter of my forcing my (godless) values on those who value serving God. Those who desire to serve God also state that if there is no God, life would be meaningless. They themselves cannot see value in things that do not involve serving God. They, themselves, describe such a life as meaningless. They simply deny the claim that the description applies to them (though, in fact, it does).

This leads to the second implication. If a person has a desire ‘that I am serving God’ imagines a world without God, he will imagine a world that has no value – that is empty and meaningless. There is no state of affairs in the godless universe in which the proposition, “I am serving God” is true, so there is no object in the godless universe that interests him, has value for him, or fills provides him with meaning and purpose.

The Possibility of a Meaningful Life

However, it would be a mistake for the theist to argue that because he sees no value in such a universe, that nobody can find value in such a universe.

A person with a desire ‘that my children are healthy and happy’ will find the same value in a universe where the proposition ‘my children are healthy and happy’ is true, that the theist would find in a universe where the proposition, ‘I am serving God’ is true.

The meaning that a person with a desire ‘that my children are healthy and happy’ finds in her life is not qualitatively different from the meaning that a person with a desire ‘that I serve God’ would find. Only, the former person actually has a chance for a meaningful life – if she can create a universe where ‘my children are healthy and happy’ is true. The latter person has no chance; since she can never create a state where ‘I am serving God’ is true.

Now, the person with a desire ‘that my children are healthy and happy’ is not guaranteed a meaningful life. Some lives are tragic. They never obtain the things that are important to them.

In some cases, an individual might acquire a desire such as, ‘that I reduce the amount of terrorism in the world and make the people safer,’ only to discover that his actions have increased the amount of terrorism and made others far less safe. This person’s life would be particularly tragic.

Yet, as long as one has a desire that ‘P’, where ‘P’ has a chance of being true in the real world, then that individual has at least a chance for a meaningful life.

Distinctions

Would it be correct to say that only atheists can obtain meaning and purpose in their lives – since they can desire things like, “that my children are healthy and happy,” that can actually be made true?

No.

A person with a desire “that I serve God” can also have a second desire, “that my children are healthy and happy” that can provide true meaning and purpose.

A theist can even have a belief that God exists with no desire to serve God – but a desire to care for the misfortunate. This person can have a fulfilling life. However, this person would not be upset over the prospect that no God exists because his desire to care for the misfortunate can be fulfilled regardless of whether God exists. “God exists” has no value for such a person.

Similarly, an atheist can still have desires for states of affairs that cannot be made real. He can desire to ‘maximize intrinsic value’ – which is as bad as desiring ‘that I serve God’ insofar as intrinsic value is no more real than God.

The atheist can even have a desire ‘that I serve God’ (perhaps learned during his prior life as a Christian). This agent’s belief that no God exists means that he will have to live with the angst of knowing that nothing he can do can fulfill his desire to serve God. He is like a paralyzed person who desires to walk, and who cannot convince himself that he is walking when, in fact, he is not.

A scientist can have a meaningful life because it is possible to make real-world discoveries. An engineer can have a meaningful life because he can build real-world structures. A teacher can have a meaningful life because he can help his students learn. There are a great many ways to have a meaningful life. All you need to do is to want to make or keep some proposition true that has a genuine chance of actually becoming or remaining true. All of these are possible regardless of whether the scientist, engineer, or teacher believes in God.

Though, the teacher cannot have a meaningful life if the things he “teaches” he students are not true. If he ends up making his students dumber by teaching them falsehoods and fictions, than his desire to educate has not been fulfilled. He is like the person who desires to keep his children safe and happy, only to act in ways that (unintentionally) kill those children instead.

Evil

So, what of the person who has evil desires, such as a desire ‘that all the Jews be eliminated’ or ‘that I am an evil overlord’? Can this person find meaning and purpose in his life?

Well, such a person will certainly find fulfillment in eliminating all of the Jews – this much is true by definition. However, there is another question to answer – whether it is a good thing that a person find fulfillment in killing all the Jews. The answer to that question would be clearly not. For the desire to kill all the Jews to have value, it must be a desire that tends to fulfill other desires. A desire to kill all the Jews is not a desire that tends to fulfill other desires. Therefore, such a desire counts as evil. It is a desire that others – that good people = have reason to respond to with condemnation, contempt, and even violence if such a person should act on such a desire.

Indeed, the very essence of evil is a person who finds fulfillment in things that are harmful to others – more, more directly, finds fulfillment in harming others. To deny that people can find fulfillment in such activities is to deny that evil exists. To deny that others have reasons to respond with condemnation, punishment, and even violence is to deny that such people are evil.

This creates a potential problem with the idea of allowing people their religions. What if the religious finds meaning in what he thinks of as serving God, only he thinks that God wants him to do things that are harmful to others. Those options range from terrorist attacks and religious genocide to legislation outlawing important medical treatments and forcing people to live lives that the are contrary to the (harmless) nature of their victims? The unwillingness to pull the rug out from somebody who thinks (incorrectly) that he finds meaning in religion has to depend at least in part on the harms that person is inflicting.

Conclusion

This part of the conference was devoted to the subject of, “If not God, then what?”

The context of this discussion can be captured by, “If not a desire to serve God, then what?”

To give a person’s life meaning, give that person a desire that ‘P’ where ‘P’ is capable of being true in the real world.

To give a person virtue, give that person a desire that ‘P’ where the desire tends to fulfill other desires.

Sam Harris Essay Contest

In a recent guest editorial called “Beyond the Believers” in Free Inquiry magazine, Sam Harris established something of an essay contest for those who wanted to come up with short answers to many claims made in defense of faith at the Beyond Belief seminar.

He identified four related sets of propositions, each of which he assumed to be false, and asked readers to provide a short (200 word maximum) retorts to each of these sets of claims with a small prize given to each winner – without actually defining what a “winner” is.

Obviously, it is a violation of my very nature to keep any of my writing short. Fortunately, I am covering the Beyond Belief series that Harris spoke about in my weekend posts, and that will give me the opportunity to provide more elaborate answers. In fact, tomorrow’s posting will cover the first of Harris’ sets of propositions. So, I’ll use this opportunity to see what I can accomplish in the “short essay” category.

1. Even though I’m an atheist, my friends are atheists, and we all get along fine without pretending to know that one of our books was written by the Creator of the universe, other people really do need religion. It is, therefore, wrong to criticize their faith.

Before I get to my response, I want to add some context from the Beyond Belief seminar to this context. The actual discussion (or, I think, the discussion that Harris was referring to, in the middle of Session 3) concerned “pulling the rug out from under” people who could not handle the struggles of everyday life without their religion.

My response:

“Other people” need religion like an alcoholic needs a drink.

It may be extremely difficult for an alcoholic to get through the day sober, but this does not imply that it would be bad for him to try.

If we are talking about somebody who 'needs' religion in this sense, we are talking about a psychological dependence. Specifically, we are talking about a psychological dependence in a faerie tail - like 'needing' to believe in Santa Clause.

It is also important to note that this is a learned dependence. There seem to be a lot of people who do not need such a thing and the factors that determine whether one acquires them appear to be environmental. This means that we can’t stop with just asking, “Do people have this need?” We must ask, “Should we be causing people to acquire this need?” What good does it do to make people psychologically dependent on a faerie tail?

I am more than happy to allow a person his harmless addictions. However, when an addiction causes people to harm others, we have reason to prevent people from acquiring such an addiction – to say they should not be caused to have this need.

2. People are not really motivated by religion. Religion is used as a rationale for other aims—political, economic, and social. Consequently, the specific content of religious doctrines is beside the point.

Do people do not pray? They do not attend church? Do they not make references to religious text? Do they not make these references in the belief that they will alter the behavior of others? Do they not quite reasonably think that those attempts are sometimes successful? What of those who refuse blood transfusions, or who sit in the chapel and pray while their child is in surgery?

We need a theory that best explains and predicts these intentional actions. The claim that religious beliefs have nothing to do with these actions is one of those extraordinary claims that will require extraordinary proof.

If we are forced to admit that religious beliefs are a part of the best explanation of some actions, then it is strange to exclude them when explaining political, economic, and social action.

Even if we take the initial assertion as true – that religion is being used as a rationale for political, economic, or social aims – and those political, economic, and social actions involve maiming and killing others, or writing laws that cost others life, limb, liberty, and fulfillment, we scarcely have an argument for holding religious beliefs to be irrelevant.

3. It is useless to argue against the veracity of religious doctrines, because religious people are not actually making claims about reality. Their claims are metaphorical or otherwise without real content. Hence, there is no conflict between religion and science.

To my understanding, metaphors have content. "A is like B" is true if and only if A is like B in the way specified. That content might not be very precise, but it is there.

Furthermore, those metaphors are being used to influence behavior. They are being used to draw lessons about how to act – lessons that do have content.

Some people hold that the lesson is to engage in behavior that is, in fact, harmful to others. That the agent denies that there is harm, or insists that the harm serves a greater good (where that greater good is as mythical as leprechauns), those conclusions have content.

And they have consequences.

To the degree that we have reason to avoid the worst of those consequences, we have reason to be concerned about their causes. It does not matter whether those causes are called ‘metaphors’ or ‘beliefs.’ The harm that they cause give us reason for concern.

4. Religion will always be with us. The idea that we might rid ourselves of it to any significant degree is quixotic, bordering on delusional. Dawkins and other strident opponents of religious faith are just wasting their time.

False beliefs will always be with is. The idea that we might rid ourselves of false beliefs to any significant degree is quixotic, bordering on delusional. Advocates of education are just wasting their time.

Or, if one prefers a moral response

Child abuse will always be with us. The idea that we can rid ourselves of child abuse is quixotic, bordering on delusional. Opponents of child abuse are wasting their time.

Those who are familiar with the rules of logic will recognize these as examples of a disproof by counter-example. They demonstrate that even if the premises are true, the inference to the conclusion is invalid. It simply states a false dichotomy to assert that we must either be totally successful or we are wasting our time. Progress is measured in degrees, not in absolutes.

If we add a taste of economic analysis we can see that the initial efforts can be aimed at harvesting the low-hanging fruit - the options with the best potential for positive gains. We can save the less efficient options for when we have more resources.

Addendum

I want to make it clear that though the contest put the question in terms of a battle between faith and science, none of my answers follow that distinction. Those answers remain true to the principle that the only reasons for action that exist are desires, and that if a belief does no harm (thwarts no desires), we have no genuine reasons for action to be concerned about them. Any reasons for action we make up that are not tied to desires are just that – made up, and of no relevance in the real world.

Consequently, I am concerned only with (1) harmful addictions; (2) political, economic, and social actions involve maiming and killing others, or writing laws that cost others life, limb, liberty, and fulfillment; (3) avoiding the worst consequences; and (4) the best potential for positive gains.

When it comes to reasons for action, the question is not one of faith or no faith, but one of harm or no harm.

Running for Public Office

Sometimes, I have some thoughts of running for Congressman.

If I did run, it could not be as a Democrat or a Republican. I have dealt with partisan politics, and find political parties to be mostly private clubs who sell their services to the highest bidder. They do not adopt positions as a matter of personal conviction. Rather, they are mascots - like the AFLAC duck and the GEIKO gecko whose job is to sell a product for those who hire them.

These claims are exaggerated, but they are still too close to the truth for comfort.

So, I would have to run as an independent. This would require collecting 800 signatures in my district in about 50 days using only workers who are registered to vote in this congressional district.

Naturally, the established parties do enjoy making competition as illegal as they can make it without risking outright rebellion. This is just another measure of their true moral virtue and dedication to the principles of democracy.

Could I win such a race?

An unknown third-party atheist candidate.

In most parts of the country, I would say, "Certainly not." In Boulder County, Colorado, I would say, "Probably not."

However, I think I could embarrass both major parties into making some changes, and get some ideas out in the public that should be out in the public.

Like the ides that there can be an atheist ethicist.

“The Atheist Candidate?”

Actually, I would not run as an atheist.

When people ask a candidate about his religion, I think that they are truly interested in his values. They want some reliable indication that the candidate is a "good person". They false believe that religion is a reliable indicator, but that does change the fact that they use it that way.

My 'religion' in this sense is not 'atheism'. Atheism implies nothing about values (other than that values do not come from God and have not been unerringly written into scripture.)

My 'religion' in this sense is desire utilitarianism. This describes what I hold to be true about value. So, this is what I would put in the 'religion' box on my candidate profile.

When they try to relate my beliefs to Marxism and Nazi ideologies, I will simply answer that the relationship between my beliefs and those others is exactly like the relationship between Al-Queida and Catholicism.

The fact that some evil people are religious does not imply that all religious people are evil. Pretending that they are is bigotry.

Representation

Another philosophy that I believe in is that a representative's job is to represent the people of his district - ALL of the people - and not just represent himself.

He is to be like a movie star's agent. He represents his client for the sake of his client, but the client has final say.

There is a tendency to think that representatives should not listen to opinion poles. I think they should. The movie star's agent has no right to say to his client, "I thought you would be excellent in this role, so I committed you to a contract." No, the client gets to decide whether to accept or reject the contract. The representative executes the client's will.

I will have limits. One set of limits is defined in the bill of rights. I would vote against searches and seizures without a warrant, arrest without charges, conviction without a trial, cruel and unusual punishment. I will uphold and defend the Constitution to the best of my ability. Within those limits, I would represent the people of my district to the best of my ability.

However, this does not mean that I would lie. If my clients instruct me to vote against gay marriage, then I may vote against gay marriage. However, I will not pretend to be opposed to gay marriage myself. I will, instead, inform them that I think their instructions are unfair and prejudicial, and that they deny people a fulfilling life (the only life they will ever have) for no good reason. As an agent, I have an obligation to give my client my honest advice and my honest recommendations. However, if that client decides to ignore my advice and recommendations, then, as I said, I work for my client, not for myself.

Removing God from the Public Square

If anybody decides to make a fuss about my candidacy, one issue that they would almost certainly use is the claim that I would want to remove God from the public square.

“Actually, that’s not true. I am against “under God” in the Pledge and “One Nation Under God” as the national motto because they attempt to establish religious segregation in this country – to assert that those who trust in God are first-class citizens and those who do not are second-class citizens. Any public policy that names me as a second-class citizen is bigoted on its face and immoral in its content.

“If you want to bring God into the public square, you can do so in the same way that George Washington and the founding fathers did. When it came to an oath of office, they wrote an oath that does not mention God.

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

“There was no mention of God. Yet, a citizen was free to add a trailing phrase such as, ‘So help me God’ if it pleased him to do so. I can find no objection to treat the Pledge of Allegiance the same way, to make it a pledge that all citizens can take, and to leave it open to any citizen to bring God into the public square by voluntarily adding, ‘So help me God’ at the end.”

“Those who say that atheists are attempting to remove God from the public square, that their goal is to prohibit religious speech, are liars. They are marketers of hate who use lies to sell their product to a gullible population. Sometimes I wonder if they believe in God themselves, or if they fake religious devotion to curry favor with the public. After all, the religion they claim to love has clear prohibitions against bearing false witness, yet they live their lives on the profits generated by bearing false witness as a way of marketing hate.”

Other Issues

Religious issues will likely attract the most attention and the most press, but it would not be my reason for running.

Why would I want to be a congressman?

Because I think that I am particularly well suited to help make sure that the best laws get passed. I realize that I cannot be an expert in all fields, but I know what an expert looks like and I can determine who to trust.

Because we need real-world solutions to real-world problems. The best scientific theories are those theories that best explain and predict real-world events. Explaining and predicting real-world events is how we make the world a better place than it would have otherwise been. If we can explain and predict how bird flu operates, we can best protect ourselves from its effects. If we can explain and predict the effects of different social structures, we can best promote those social structures whose effects are to improve the life, health, and well-being of those who live within those structures.

When it comes to voting on a law, I would not be taking my orders from a party whip who has already sold my vote to the highest bidder in terms of party support. The people of my district will get a true representative who will be able to best serve their interests consistent with the moral limits on law that were written into the Constitution.

I think that this would be a wonderful honor to make that type of contribution to the wellbeing of others.

That would be my philosophy, if I were ever to run for public office.

Space Policy 2007

It’s strange that, if I were to prioritize the different issues that I write about in order of importance, that I do not spend much time on the issues that would be at the top of that list. These are (1) the continued existence of the human species (and its descendent species), and (2) preventing catastrophic harm on a global scale. Clearly, many of the issues we have to deal with pale in significance.

In this context, let me share some headlines with you from the last few days.

“U.N. urged to take action on asteroid threat” A 460-foot long asteroid called Apophis (appropriately named, for Stargate SG1 fans) has a 1in 45,000 chance of hitting the earth on April 13, 2036. Several scientists want the UN to take responsibility for determining how to respond to this and similar threats.

“Scientists to NASA: Study Earth” I wrote about this issue a few weeks ago in a post, “Evidence-Based Thinking about Earth’s Future” – about the fact that the Bush budget is seriously depleting NASA’s capacity to collect data on what people are doing to Earth. The less data we have, the more our policy decisions will be blinded by ignorance.

“Moon ventures could bring in good money: Experts explore commercial spinoffs from lunar exploration.” . This is a look at ways in which private companies can make private profits associated with NASA’s plan to return to the moon by 2020.

“NASA Studies Manned Asteroid Mission” . This is a plan to use the hardware that NASA is designing to return to the moon to send people to examine an asteroid as its orbit brings it near Earth.

Now, I am going to engage in some rather unrestrained dreaming. I realize that I have absolutely no power to make the changes that I describe below. However, that does not imply that these are not worthy of consideration.

Earth Monitoring

Of all of the tasks that NASA performs, those that actually produce dividends for the people of Earth should be its greatest priority. This means protecting the Earth from asteroids and other sources of harm, and in providing us with data that we need to make sound policy decisions. There is simply no reason to put a lunar base on the to-do list until those space activities that promise to pay dividends to the people of Earth have been taken care of.

So, let’s say that we eliminate this $104 billion lunar base plan, and put $500 million per year ($7 billion from now to 2020) into earth-monitoring satellites. This leaves $97 billion for other projects.

Asteroids

Those other projects include studying the asteroids.

In space, the best measure of distance is not in miles, but in what is called “delta-v” or “change in velocity”. This tells us how much energy is required to get from one place to another. Because of the moon’s gravity, it’s “delta-v” is actually quite high – it takes a lot of energy to get off of the surface. Asteroids have little or no gravity. We can go to and from many earth-crossing asteroids with less delta-v then going to and from the moon. Meaning, in an astronomical sense, those asteroids are “closer” than the moon.

As of February 6th, we knew of 600 asteroids that are “closer” than the moon in terms of delta-v requirements.

Plus, NASA has reason to study asteroids in a way that pays dividends for the people on Earth. Protecting the people of Earth from a collision is certainly an activity that pays dividends to the people of Earth. Asteroids also have resources that can be used in space – resources that can be harvested without cutting deeper scars into the living earth.

Priming the Pump

We have got a planet full of people wanting to get into space. In June, 2004, SpaceShipOne made the first privately funded space flight and, in October of that year, earned its builders the $10 million X-Prize for making two trips into space in a two-week period.

Since then, Richard Branson of British Airways is investing in a set of larger ships capable of taking paying passengers into space. Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace launched a test module for a private space station. He is now teaming up with Lockheed Martin to make Lockheed’s Atlas 5 rocket capable of taking humans into orbit. With the aid of a pair of development contracts, SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler are developing their own rockets capable of carrying people to the Space Station.

We do not need the government to be running these programs. It seems that there are a lot of private individuals willing to do the same thing. They could certainly use some financial help. However, we would be better off having NASA buy services from these companies than building and launching its own projects.

Think of this as a way of turning $90 billion in taxpayer money into a $200 to $300 billion space program. If NASA offered this money as prices for the successful accomplishment of certain feats in space development, these companies would find it that much easier to come up with the rest of the money.

So, now, we have our earth-monitoring satellites, and we have doubled or tripled the size of America’s space program – without adding a single dime to the government’s budget.

Asteroid Development

Ultimately, President Bush’s declared purpose of his space initiative is to bring the rest of the solar system into Earth’s economic sphere. (Or, more accurately, into the economic sphere of the United States.) However, he is mistaken in believing that the moon offers the best economic resource. The best economic resources come from the asteroids.

One payoff that will come from asteroid development is, specifically, by avoiding the tremendous costs of an asteroid impact. The moon is not going to hit the Earth in any foreseeable future – we face no risk of catastrophic costs from that direction. We need to worry about asteroids, which means studying asteroids.

Also, because of the low delta-v requirements, asteroids are more useful. Some asteroids are thought to be extinct comets – chunks of ice covered with a think insulating layer of dirt and rocks. These could give us the water we are looking for to use in space.

By the way, the Japanese got some very interesting pictures of one of these asteroids. They can be found with the New Scientist article, “Hayabusa probe prepares to punch an asteroid” As you can see, this asteroid is not a solid rock. It is a collection of gravel flying in close formation – shattered by impacts then falling back in on itself.

If there is good money to be made on moon ventures, then private companies should be permitted to collect it. One of the possible uses mentioned for lunar resources is to provide a base for spacecraft going to other parts of the solar system. If, indeed, this is an advantage, we can expect companies to take advantage of this as they seek to collect the prizes that come from harvesting data and resources from near-earth asteroids.

Additional Considerations

There are a couple of additional points that deserve consideration.

(1) Asteroids are not the only threat that we face from space. One might get the wrong impression that once we know the orbits of the asteroids, and have taken pains to remove any threats, that the danger is over. There is another threat – long period comets. These are comets that show up every 20,000 years or so as their orbits carry them far from the sun. They come into the inner solar system at exceptionally high speeds, meaning that they pack a lot of energy, before heading back into deep space again. If one of these bodies is heading our way, we will not likely have years to respond to the threat. We may only have a couple of months.

(2) One thing that we can be sure of is a big-budget NASA project is going to put a lot of money into the pockets of organizations that hire the best lobbyists and make the biggest campaign contributions to the right candidates. On the other hand, a prize system will give the money to the people with the best engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs – people who can dream up ways to add to the revenue from a space mission on the private market. If we are to remain competitive on the global marketplace, we need scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs more than we need politicians, lawyers, and lobbyists.

Conclusion

Let’s return to Earth for a moment and look at the real-world, practical possibilities. We pretty much need this $500 million per year in earth-monitoring satellites. If anybody says that we do not have enough money to pay for them, that person should be told that the lack of information and “sailing blind” is likely to cost us a lot more than $500 million per year.

As for asteroids and comets, it is time to take that threat seriously – a lot more seriously than building a moon base. Really, I would hate to put all of this effort into making the world a better place than it would have otherwise been, only to have it obliterated because of a lack of foresight. That’s almost as stupid as living in a city that sits below sea level without taking pains to make sure that the dikes could withstand a hurricane.

Theism as Mental Illness or Child Abuse

For the last couple of weeks there has been a debate on the efficacy and the ethics of “The Blasphemy Challenge” – a self-proclaimed publicity stunt from the Rational Response Squad whereby young people are encouraged to publicly declare their lack of believe in God (commit blasphemy) and post their statement on YouTube and are rewarded with a free DVD of “The God Who Wasn’t There.”

One of the main points of contention is whether the claims that surround The Blasphemy Challenge are insulting towards theists and, if so, whether this is likely to promote a false impression of atheism and generate a harsh backlash against atheists.

On Insult

I wish to begin with a statement about insult. There is nothing morally objectionable about insult (in common cases) where the claim made is true and the behavior worthy of condemnation. If there is evidence that a person believes that P, claims that not-P, makes this claim for the purpose of manipulating another person, and the manipulation is to the disadvantage of the victim (or others) and to the advantage of the speaker, it is fair to call that person a liar.

We can hardly think it is reasonable to defend oneself from such a charge simply by noting that the charge is insulting. It is as laughable as imagining a person on trial for rape claiming in his defense, “The prosecution is engaged in insulting and derogatory behavior in calling me a rapist. Anybody who submits another person to these types of insults should be ashamed of themselves and should immediately stop that behavior!”

Not if the accusations are true.

When insults are impermissible it is not because they are insults. It is because the insult was unfairly or unjustly launched at the victim. In other words, the inappropriate insult (in common cases) is either negligently unjustified or false.

So, we need to look at the claims made in conjunction with the blasphemy challenge and see if they can be criticized on these grounds.

Theism as a Mental Illness

A part of this discussion has focused on “Sapient’s” claim that theism is a mental illness, and that he would take his mother to a mental hospital to overcome her delusional beliefs if she was a Christian and mental hospitals treated theism.

James Lazarus says that this is inappropriately insulting.

In fact, Lazarus is right on this. It is an unjust characterization.

Sam Harris has made similar comments. Harris has said that if a person were to go to the breakfast table and claim that saying a few Latin words would turn his cereal into the literal body of Elvis, that we would call this person insane.

Indeed we would.

However, there is an important part of the context missing from both of these analogies.

Christians live in a community where the vast majority of the people reinforce these beliefs. This culture of common beliefs defines the difference between the man uttering Latin words over his cereal in the morning and the Priest conducting mass.

I have mentioned in the past that humans are not fully rational and, more importantly, we cannot be fully rational. We do not have the time to hold all of our beliefs up to rational scrutiny. Therefore, we (rationally) adopt rules of thumb – heuristics that allow us to get our beliefs mostly right even though they can lead to mistakes.

One of these heuristics is to listen to those around us. If the vast majority of the people around us (or, at least, those we come into contact with) assert ‘P’, then it is rational to adopt ‘P’. Notice that ‘P’ is not grounded on any type of evidence that directly infers the truth of ‘P’. ‘P’ has not been proved or even proved likely in an argument that has ‘P’ as the conclusion. Rather, agents adopt ‘P’ without any foundation, simply because so many people around him have adopted ‘P’.

Logicians recognize this as the bandwagon fallacy or argumentum ad populum. It is not, strictly speaking, rational and can easily lead to people adopting false beliefs.

It may not be a logically ideal way of acquiring beliefs, but it is practical. Given that we do not have time to hold all of our beliefs up to rational scrutiny, it is useful to simply grab some of the most common beliefs that others have accepted and hope that they know what they are talking about. It is not unreasonable to hold that those beliefs are generally good enough to live with . . . generally. In addition, this method helps people to get along and to communicate, like picking up a common language.

Building a Ship of Beliefs

In an earlier post, “Joan Roughgarden: Evolution and The Bible,” I borrowed an analogy I heard often in graduate school that compared a person’s set of beliefs to a ship at sea. That ship is in constant need of repair, refit, and, in some cases, redesign, but the owner cannot cast the ship aside and start over. He has to do repairs piecemeal, by attaching new systems of beliefs to those that already exist.

If we carry that analogy further, we can imagine a child as adrift at sea, surrounded by driftwood. From this, the child starts to build a raft. Then, his parents help him to build a framework for future beliefs. All future experiences and pieces of information can only be understood in terms of how it fits onto this framework. If it does not fit comfortably, then it will be warped and twisted and distorted until it does fit.

The child uses what he is given and puts it together as he has been taught. Even here, there is little opportunity for the agent to actually subject his beliefs to rational analysis. He scarcely knows the rules of rational analysis.

There are a lot of Christian beliefs floating around for a child to pick up. On the other hand, there are very few “speaking Latin to morning cereal will turn it literally into the body of Elvis” beliefs to pick up. There is good reason to count the latter beliefs – if one should adopt them – as signs of mental illness. However, adopting the former beliefs in the context of a society filled with Christian beliefs is simply proof that the mind is functioning normally.

The claim that such a person is mentally ill is an unjustified and unjust insult. It is not fair, and it betrays a certain amount of mean-spiritedness on the part of any who would make such a claim.

I am all in favor of being mean to people who deserve it. Indeed, desire utilitarianism demands condemnation and, in the worst cases, punishment as a way of promoting good desires and inhibiting bad desire. In many cases, I write that people are not mean enough. For example, by far we do not denigrate and condemn enough those who work to manufacture false beliefs - beliefs that can kill and maim millions. The problem is not that it is wrong to insult people. The problem is with insulting people who do not deserve it.

Faulty Structures

This analysis can also be applied to Richard Dawkins’ claim that labeling children Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or the ideology of his or her parents is “child abuse”.

In order for something to count as “child abuse”, the person who performs the action must betray either an intention to harm or a callous disregard for the possibility of harm to the welfare of the child. Even negligence (a form of child abuse) is understood in this way – as the absencce of a level of concern for a child’s welfare that would have motivated caution in a concerned individual.

I sincerely doubt that those who label a child “Christian” or “Muslim” have this type of disregard for the well-being of the child. In fact, quite the opposite is usually the case. The individual is very much concerned for the welfare of the child. He or she has simply made a mistake.

Women who took thalidomide while pregnant did significant harm to their children. Yet, this was not sufficient to charge them with "child abuse". This is because the behavior was motivated by a mistake, not by an absence of concern (or a desire to harm) the child. Calling thalidimide users "child abusers" for actions taken before the harmfulness of thalidimide was known is grossly inappropriate.

Of course, there are cases where a parent subjects a child to some exotic ritual that does harm to the child where we would call it abuse. We do say that the parent ought to have known better. However, this is the case where a concerned parent would have reasonably been expected to adopt a different set of beliefs. Here, too, there is a relevant moral difference between the parent who adopts a harmful belief that the bulk of society knows to be harmful, and one in which a parent adopts a belief that the bulk of society fails to see the harm. There is no "child abuse" in the second case.

And why use the term "child abuse?" The main motivation that I can think of for using a term like this is to make the targets of this term the subjects of the same hatred that is (justifiably) directed towards those who truly abuse children. This term is used to manufacture hate. Hate is fine, when the targets of hate deserve it. Yet, in this case, the goal is to manufacture hate where it is not deserved.

Morally concerned people will take more care in the use of these types of terms.

A Belief Framework

Claiming that the Christian framework, given to a child, does not qualify as “child abuse” does not imply that it is not harmful. The accidental poisoning of a child is not child abuse, but it is still harmful.

This framework has the problem in that it often instructs the child to take actions against dangers that are not real. At the same time, it often disarms the child against dangers that are real. More importantly, this framework encourages the child to put together a structure of beliefs that make the child a threat to the well-being of others; imposing legal sanctions that prohibit people from realizing certain goods while forcing upon them states that are not good. These false beliefs often get in the way of positive real-world change to the point that innocent people are maimed, killed, and otherwise harmed.

It is not fair to apply the terms “mental illness” or “child abuser” to such people. The former is an unjustly derogatory statement. The latter is an attempt to solicit hatred in the heart of the listener against people for whom hatred is not justified.

Using these terms loosely puts atheists in a bad light, not because it is wrong to insult people and they might get angry. It is wrong because the claims are simply false, and making them demonstrates that the speaker is more concerned with being angry and promoting hate than with being accurate and promoting truth.

There are real harms being inflicted that we should know about, but the moral condemnation and solicitation of hate should be saved for those who actually deserve it.

Barring Creationists

I have another question from the studio audience.

Ed writes to ask, "Would it be ethical to dismiss or reject applicants to a graduate program in the biological sciences if it is found out that they are creationists?"

The Definition of Creationist

The first problem that I am going to run into with this question concerns what it means to be a ‘creationist’. Typically, in this context, it refers to somebody who intentionally stranded DNA in a particular way to get the various forms of life. In another sense, all God created was reality and the fundamental laws of physics that make up that reality.

It would not be too much of a stretch of the term to say that God created the universe and gave it the set of laws that he did because he knew that those rules working on the matter he created would result in the evolution of a human race.

So, there are even some definitions of ‘creationism’ that are compatible with evolution. These are simply versions that hold that God created a universe in which evolution can concur.

As such, there is no particular reason to refuse somebody employment or an appointment to graduate school based on the fact that he is a creationist. What matters is whether he is able to display a proper understanding of the rules of science and an ability to pass that knowledge o to others. Merely being a creationist is not a disqualification.

Presumption of Innocence

As a general rule, I advocate the principle of presuming a person innocent unless proven guilty. Being a creationist is not “proof” that the individual is guilty of anything. It does not prove his inability to contribute to biological research, or his ability to become a good teacher of biological fact.

The reason for the presumption of innocence is that we should all have an aversion to doing harm to others – an aversion that requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the harm is necessary. To deny a person entry into his chosen profession is to do harm. It is up to the individual to make sure that the harm is inflicted for good reason. Thus, we have the presumption of innocence.

“Being a creationist” is not a proof of any type of wrongdoing. As such, it cannot override the presumption of innocence. One needs something more substantive in terms of evidence that the individual does not actually understand the material and is merely seeking some type of authority to “teach” claims that are not true and widely rejected within the profession.

Mistakes of Fact

However, the situation changes the instant the individual does something – commits some overt act – that experts in the field have reason to condemn.

We would certainly have reason to fire a math teacher who is caught teaching his students that 2 + 2 = 5. We would also be quick to dismiss the history teacher who told her students that the Holocaust never took place - that it was all a part of a cleaver plot by some Jewish cabal interested in world domination. And no university has reason to keep a teacher who fills his astronomy lectures with claims about how the planets influence our lives.

Certainly, there are going to be disputes within a discipline as to what the facts are. Yet, even these disputes have an affect on who gets hired and who gets fired – who passes and who gets held back. Students and teachers are required to defend their work and the selection committee has a right to refuse admittance to anybody who does not demonstrate a sufficient grasp of the subject under consideration.

If I were a part of such a selection committee, I would look for the best teacher available - that would be my job. This means that I want to hire a teacher (or accept a graduate student) who can display and who will teach an understanding of the facts.

Asking the Right Questions

The type of people Ed is worried about are those who memorize answers they do not agree with, but which biologists seem to accept as “the right answers”, in order to give all of the visible signs of understanding the material. They give those in the selection process no clear reason to reject them.

On this matter, I think it is quite reasonable for interviewers to make sure that they ask the right and relevant questions. In the realm of biology, an acceptable candidate for graduate school or a teaching post should know how to answer creationist assertions – be able to explain why they are not science or, at least, why they are not good science. He should be able to explain what science is and why it takes that particular structure. If a selection company is not asking these types of questions, they should not be surprised to discover that they have selected people who do not know the answers.

Of course, even here it would be possible for such a person to slip through the system. Here, we may add the condition that the organization has a right to periodically review the work of any student or teacher. The instant the student turns in a paper or any other document defending ideas held to be absurd among professionals in the field, those professors have reason to give a student a grade that represents his lack of knowledge, or to be rid of the teacher and replace her with somebody who actually understands the subject she is teaching. At that point it would be necessary to wait until the individual committed some infraction as a teacher or a student.

Other Objectives

There are those who want the credentials who do not have the slightest intention of entering into the field. Once they get the credentials, they then enter the public world to express their opinions in a way that others in the field cannot directly challenge them. They do not hold any traditional job as teacher or student within the industry.

The real question is whether an organization can permissibly deny giving them these credentials in order to minimize the harm that these types of people inflict on others.

Ultimately, again, I would argue that they do not unless and until they find some overt act that suggests that the teacher is teaching falsehoods or the student does not actually understand the material.

Without the overt act there is no proof of wrongdoing.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I hold that the answer is no, institutions cannot permissibly exclude others simply because those others have a different religion. There must be an overt act of teaching falsehoods that is strong enough to substantiate the accusation of wrongdoing. Those who cannot (or will not) teach the truth about the biological sciences have shown themselves contemptible.

Richard Dawkins: Missing Religion

The Beyond Belief 2006 seminar that I have been writing about on the weekends did not have a set schedule. Rather, speakers were invited up to speak sometimes out of turn in order to generate what the organizers called a conversation on the issues. After Joan Roughgarden gave her presentation about describing evolution in biblical terms, Richard Dawkins was invited up to give a response.

Dawkins actually responded first to something that Steven Weinberg said at the end of Session 2. Just before the conference broke for (a very late) lunch. Weinberg was given an opportunity to introduce the next topic, which was supposed to be, “If not religion, then what?”

Prophets and their Books

In this short introduction, he expressed an important concern. Humans seem to have a strange attraction to prophets and their books. If we get rid of Jesus (or, actually, Paul) and The Bible, or Mohammed and The Koran, what enters the vacuum?

Marx and Das Kapital

Hitler and Mein Kampf

Mao and The Little Red Book

Some people would add:

Darwin and The Origin of Species: yet, this classification comes from those who are so locked in a mindset of “a prophet and his book” that he cannot imagine somebody living without a prophet and a book. They assume, falsely, that everybody must have a prophet and a book to live by and the ask, “If not The Bible, then what?

Another pairing that I could add to the list is:

Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged.

Now, some people may be offended by my putting this book in the same company as those above. Yet, the worshippers of any of these ideologies would find the company shameful, I imagine. Yet, they all do have a lot in common. I once was a libertarian who spent a lot of time among Randian Objectivists, and the distortions of reason and fact that they can subject themselves to would shame a Christian, in spite of the fact that they hold reason in high esteem.

Some may claim that I have done the same thing, blinding myself to facts and reason in defending desire utilitarianism. I will not deny the possibility. Furthermore, I hold that I am the least qualified to judge whether such a charge is true or false. I hope that it is false. I also hope that, if the charge is true, that others can see through those mistakes so that they do no harm.

In the mean time, let’s get back to the main point. If not religion, then what? One of these other non-religious prophets and their books? That sounds like a bad idea.

Is there a a reasonable alternative to prophets and their books?

The Mischievous Old Aunt

Weinberg ended up comparing religion to an old aunt. “She lies and causes mischief,” Weinberg says, “But she was beautiful once and we loved her.” In her old age, she has become quite a bother, and it is time for her to pass on, but we will still miss her, according to Weinberg.

Richard Dawkins stepped up to the microphone and said,

I wondered whether Steven Weinberg . . . was feeling the need to bend over backwards and be a little bit nice about religion. Scrape the barrel to find something nice to say about religion. So, we came up with this picture of the elderly aunt. We will all miss her when she goes. I won’t miss her at all. Not one scrap. Not one smidgen. I am utterly fed up with the respect that all of us, including the secular among us, have been bestowing upon religion.

What Is There to Miss?

Ultimately, if we are talking about missing religion, we are talking about missing false beliefs.

False beliefs are, as Weinberg says, ‘mischievous’ (to say the least). We seek to fulfill our desires. However, we act to fulfill our desires given our beliefs. False or incomplete beliefs stand in the way of us fulfilling our desires. The person who believes that a glass contains water and drinks it to quench her thirst tells us of the ‘mischievousness’ of false beliefs.

Some of these false beliefs provide an escape from a reality that can be difficult to handle, such as the possibility of death. Weinberg spoke of consoling a parent over the loss of a child with the false belief that the child is not really dead, but instead has moved on to another place where the child will know nothing but joy and the protection of an almighty and perfectly benevolent God. These false beliefs are the difference between pleasure and pain for a lot of people.

Yet, they are still false beliefs, and false beliefs are the barrier that gets in the way of our preventing harms to start with. A quite simple fact of the matter is that there will be far fewer children dying if we had a better handle on how to explain and predict the real world. We could then explain and predict those parts that tend to kill children, and make them far less common or far easier to avoid. Just as false beliefs can get in the way of our quenching our thirst, they can get in the way of our saving our children.

Comfort and Joy and the Meaning of Life

There are also those who would miss the comfort and joy that they claim to find in religion, and the meaning that their life has when they devote their life to God.

On this measure, I have had dreams in which some deep desire of mine has been fulfilled – or, at least, the dream has given me a belief that they were fulfilled, giving me great joy. I wake up, and find myself in the same house facing the same job so that I can pay the same bills. I wish that it had not been a dream – that the events had been real. In fact, that’s what it means to say that the dream fulfilled my desires. They caused me to have false beliefs that the state I was one where its propositions were those that I desired (wished) to be true.

Yet, it was still a dream.

What if I could stay in that dream state forever, falsely believing that the propositions I accepted in the dream were true in the real world? I would know great comfort and joy. I would think that my life had meaning and purpose. In fact, I would be a blob of protoplasm wasting away in a dream state until I finally died. Even if I was given an opportunity to remain in that dream state, with all of the comfort and joy it provides, I would prefer the real world, with its difficulties and disappointments. At least, in the real world, when I help somebody, there is somebody who actually benefits.

No person has ever found meaning and purpose in his life serving a God, because the time he spends serving God is like the time that I spend in a dream. It may generate great feelings, but those feelings have no anchor in the real world.

The one difference between permanently sleeping and living a dream life and religion is that the person living the dream life is harmless. He lays in his bed while his body rots, accomplishing nothing real but experiencing great joy and the pretense that he has done great things. He does not do any good, but he does not do any harm either.

Unfortunately, many of those who find meaning and purpose in religion find that meaning and purpose in doing things that are harmful to others. Notwithstanding the maiming and killing of others in the name of God, they seek legislation that deprives others of fulfilling lives and relationships, stand in the way of medical research, block scientific advance, erect barriers to freedom that do real-world harm but which serve no real-world purpose, and denigrate and belittle those who do no harm and tend to provide great benefit to the community in the name of defending the faith.

Besides, people also thought that they found meaning and purpose for their lives in the Nazi Party, the Communist Party, and the KKK as well. Sometimes we just have to ask, “How many people have to suffer and die for your life to have meaning?”

Conclusion

If not religion, then what?

Well, let’s put an end of the era of prophets and their books. Those who quote some author as if he were an infallible prophet can already trust that he does not know what he is talking about. Nobody is that good.

And even though false beliefs can bring comfort and joy, they also bring great misery and sorrow. Better abilities to explain and predict the real world are the best tools that we have to avoid the situations where we would need to be comforted, including the deaths of children, and our own deaths.

There is a real world out there. Anything worth doing, is worth doing for real.

Joan Roughgarden: Evolution and The Bible

This is my fourth weekend commenting on the presentations given at Beyond Belief 2006. This weekend, I start with the third session of the conference, with presentations by Joan Roughgarden (professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford) and Richard Dawkins (Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University).

Roughgarden continues a theme from the first two sessions by addressing the question, “How do we get theists to embrace science?” Her suggestion is that some effort be made to go to where the critics are coming from and find ways to put biological theory in biblical terms. Specifically, she has sought to express evolutionary theory in biblical terms.

She addresses two main elements of Darwinian theory, that “There is variation generated by random mutation and then there is the process of natural selection . . . that operates on the variation and produces changes in the . . . population.”

To explain Darwinian theory in biblical terms takes two references from the bible.

The first is a story from Genesis in which Jacob makes a deal with Labon where Jacob can keep the speckled and brown sheep and the others will go to Labon. God sought to compensate Jacob for injustices inflicted upon him by having the speckled and brown rams to “leap upon” the ewes so that most of the stock became speckled and brown.

The second story she uses has to do with a story where Jesus compares his teaching to seeds falling off of a cart, landing on shallow soil and good soil. Those seeds that land on shallow soil do not grow and those that land on good soil produces fruit. Roughgarden says, “So I even use the phrase in the book that mutation is a mustard seed of DNA tossed into bodies at random, and then you see in what bodies those mustard seeds prosper, and in those bodies then fruit is produced a hundred fold.”

Her lesson then is that, “In this way, one can directly find passages within the bible that can lead to an inherently friendly narrative about what evolution is.”

Richard Dawkins will come up next and ask, “Why bother?” However, I wish to argue that there are reasons to bother (and, please note, I write under the theory that says that the only reasons that exist are desires and that moral reasons are good desires), though not reasons for everybody to bother.

The reasons to bother can be explained using another analogy that I heard repeatedly during college that draw an analogy between a person’s beliefs and a ship at sea. If somebody wants to make repairs to a ship while it is floating at sea, one cannot simply dismantle the entire ship and then put it back together again. Instead, the only option is to rebuild the ship one section at a time, attaching each new or rebuilt section to parts of the original ship that still exist. Over time, in this way, one can construct a completely new ship. However, each change still must be anchored to what already exists.

Roughgarden’s project provides a way to change some parts of the “ship of beliefs” of particularly strongly religious theists that do not require that those theists completely abandon a whole set of beliefs and construct an entirely different world view from scratch. It allows that change can only occur by attaching a set of new beliefs to a set of beliefs that remain. Those remaining beliefs can be challenged later, but then those further challenges can be built onto the first changes.

To be fair, Roughgarden does not speak about changing whole sets of beliefs. In fact, Roughgarden is clearly a very religious person who simply wants her fellow theists to be comfortable accepting evolutionary theory. For her, these expressions of evolutionary theory in biblical terms are the end of the road. Yet, they need not be.

This analogy of rebuilding a ship one plank at a time can also be applied to rebuilding a culture. In fact, cultures seldom, if ever, undergo wholesale transformations from one system of beliefs and institutions to another. Even social revolutions can find an anchor in the traditions and beliefs of the system that is overthrown. If one wants to change a culture, it makes sense to put one’s effort into changing it one plank at a time.

We can apply this model to the problem of the Islamic Jihadists. Anybody who proposes a solution that involves completely overthrowing Islam and replacing it with an entirely different belief system is being irrational. Cultures do not change that way. Instead, a more rational strategy is to find some planks of Islam that one can change – replacing it with a set of beliefs that do not lend themselves so strongly to people killing and maiming others in the name of God.

This is substantially what happened to Christianity in the last four hundred years. One step at a time, Christians removed some old planks of their religion and replaced it with newer planks that were friendlier to science and reason. At the start, they took their planks that said that the Earth was at the center of the solar system, cut them away, and replaced them with planks that said that the Sun was the center of the solar system.

They have removed planks that prohibited the collection of interest with planks that not only ignore those biblical prohibitions but which holds entrepreneurship to be a high virtue. As a result, they replaced economic stagnation with economic growth.

Planks that obligate a person to kill those who profess beliefs in other Gods and that hold that God gives his blessing and a right to rule to kings have been tossed and replaced with planks that demand religious tolerance and the right of the people to select their leaders.

The slavery plank has been replaced with an individual liberty plank.

Christian culture has replaced the plank in which heresy was punished by death with a plank that demands freedom of speech.

These types of changes have created a version of Christianity today that would not likely be recognizable to the Christian of 1000 years ago.

Granted, not all Christians have been open to change. There are many who are protesting these repairs and improvements, and some who advocate taking out certain upgrades and putting the ship of Christian culture back the way it was. Yet, change has happened, it has happened one plank at a time, and it will continue to happen one plank at a time.

It has happened substantially because of the efforts of those people who have said, “Let’s upgrade and repair – not the whole ship of cultural beliefs, but this set over here that is in the greatest need of upgrade.”

Though it is possible to praise those who go through this effort, and to recognize the value of their contribution in bringing about change, I do have to confess that I have no interest in taking up the job of changing Christian culture. When I write, the vision of the reader that I have in my head is that of one who does not believe in God (thus, I spend absolutely no time arguing for or against the existence of God). I have no interest in joining the task of reforming Christian culture.

I can explain this lack of interest in terms of what got me into this business to start with. As an atheist high school student, I wanted to leave the world a better place than it would have otherwise been, and I needed to know what ‘better’ was. This sparked my interest in moral philosophy. One could say that I became more interested in the design and architecture of ships than in their actual construction and repair.

Yet, one of the virtues of desire utilitarian theory is that it makes sense of a system that allows different people to choose different roles in society. Classical act utilitarianism, for example, has only two moral categories – the obligatory (that which maximizes utility) and the prohibited (that which does not maximize utility). Desire utilitarianism has room for three moral categories; (1) the obligatory (that which a person with good desires would do), (2) the prohibited (that which a person with good desires would not do, and (3) the permissible (that which a person with good desires might or might not choose to do).

A society has a need for architects and, with this, a need for people whose desires will draw them into the profession of architecture. It also has a need for people who do refit and repair, and reason for some people to have desires that attract them to this profession. The desires that draw people into architecture or construction are not for everybody, so they fit in the category of ‘permissible’.

I can argue for the value of having some people engaged in the task of bringing about a refit and repair of parts of the traditional Christian ship of beliefs. As a moral architect, I can identify the parts that are in the greatest needs of repair – because what we have is a threat to life and limb at best, and a threat to the seaworthiness of our society at worst. Yet, I confess that I lack the skills (and the interest) to convince Christians to make the repairs that most need making.

At the same time, I argue that the atheist ship is also in need of refit and repair in some areas. There are some refits that I argue for simply because what I see annoys me (e.g., the idea that ‘atheism’ is ‘the lack of a belief in God’ as opposed to – what I would refit it into – ‘the belief that the proposition ‘at least one god exists’ is almost certainly false’). Others, I hold, are as dangerous and absurd as the worst parts of Christian beliefs (that there is no such thing as moral truths and that one can make meaningful references to ‘reasons for action’ that are ‘subjective’ in the sense that one does not have to go to any effort to prove that those ‘reasons for action’ actually exist).

In all cases, it is unreasonable to expect any type of change that does not result in anchoring new beliefs to a framework of beliefs that remain (at least for the moment) fixed. This is simply one of those facts that a rational person will keep in mind as he argues for social change.

Friendly Atheist: Doctors and Morality

The Friendly Atheist invoked my name recently in a post on “Doctors and Morality”. In that post, he discussed a report from the Associated Press, “Study: Moral Beliefs May Sway Docs’ Care” that reported that many doctors will not refer patients to others who might provide treatment that the doctor finds objectionable.

A disturbing number of doctors do not feel obligated to tell patients about medical options they oppose morally, such as abortion and teen birth control, and believe they have no duty to refer people elsewhere for such treatments, researchers say.

He then made the polite suggestion that, “Perhaps the Atheist Ethicist can add more to this discussion.”

I would like to give it a shot.

If I were a Doctor

In the article that the Friendly Atheist refers to, the authors of the survey being reported on seem shocked to discover that people who believe that something is immoral act like they are people who believe that thing to be immoral. In fact, this is all they discovered. Expecting to discover that people who believe that something is wrong act like people who believe it is obligatory is like expecting to discover that circles have corners.

If I were a doctor, I would not help my patients obtain treatment that I found to be morally objectionable. Furthermore, I would find any request that I do so to not only be morally objectionable in its own right, but incoherent.

'Morally objectionable' means 'ought not to be done.' So, if I find some act to be morally objectionable, that means that I find it to be something that ought not to be done. If you tell me that I have an obligation to do something, then you are telling me that it ought to be done. If you insist that I ought to do something that I hold is something that I ought not to do, while saying that it is perfectly acceptable for me to hold that the act ought not to be done, then you are simply not making any sense. An act can either be obligatory, permissible, or prohibited. An act cannot, at the same time, be morally obligatory and prohibited.

In the context of desire utilitarianism, I can speak more specifically. A 'wrong act' is an act that a person with good desires would not perform. That is to say, if I hold that an act is morally objectionable, then I hold that it is an act that a person with good desires would not perform. The only way that I can perform such an act is if I failed to have good desires. In other words, I would have to be a bad person. To say that I have an obligation to do something that only a bad person would do is to say that I have an obligation to be a bad person.

That, too, is incoherent.

So, you’re still not making any sense.

Beliefs

One possible attempt to avoid this incoherence is to say that the act that I am being told that I am obligated to perform is one that I merely believe is morally objectionable. Yet, when I wrote the above section, I wrote as if the act was in fact morally objectionable. If we can throw out the idea that something can, in fact, be morally objectionable, then the claim that one is obligated to do that which one merely believes should not be done can make sense.

Well, actually, it can’t make sense.

A belief is a propositional attitude such that if a person believes that ‘P’ (for any proposition ‘P’), then that person has the attitude that ‘P’ is true. A person who believes that abortion is wrong is a person who has the mental attitude and is disposed to act as somebody who holds that the proposition, “Abortion is wrong,” is true.

Note: I know full well that there are theories that hold that moral statements have no truth value. I have no space in this posting to refute those theories. However, I hold that those views are mistaken. One of the reasons is that if moral statements have no truth value then it would make no sense to say that somebody has moral beliefs. Beliefs are propositional attitudes, and propositions have truth values.

In light of this, if I have a belief that X is wrong, then this means that I have the attitude that ‘X is wrong’ is true. If somebody is telling me that I ought to do X, then he is telling me to adopt the attitude, ‘X is not wrong’. Indeed, he is telling me that X is obligatory. Something cannot be both obligatory and wrong.

Note: Actually, something can be both obligatory and wrong in the special case of moral dilemma. However, moral dilemmas represent a special case and we do not need to clutter this discussion with such considerations.

If the speaker is telling me both at the same time that it is permissible for me to adopt the attitude ‘X is wrong’ and obligatory that I adopt the attitude ‘X is not wrong’, then this person is telling me that I should become insane – or at least acquire some mild mental disorder – since it would require some defect in thought to hold, at the same time, ‘X is wrong’ and ‘X is obligatory’.

Telling me that I must act like a person who believes that ‘X is wrong’ is true is the same as telling me that I must not believe that ‘X is wrong’ is true. I cannot act like a person who believes that X is obligatory unless I believe that X is obligatory.

Acting

Of course, there is an exception to this. Actors often act as if a proposition is true even when they know that a proposition is false. They act as if they are hobbits trying to destroy a magical ring even though they do not believe that they are hobbits and there is no magical ring.

So, is this claim that I am to treat ‘X is obligatory’ as true a claim that I am obligated to act like a person who believes that X is obligatory, even while I believe that X is wrong?

The problem with this solution is that acting does not free a person of moral culpability. Assume that you caught me robbing banks. When caught, I answer the charges by saying that, while I believe that bank robbery was wrong, I was only acting like somebody who believed at least in the moral permissibility of robbing banks. Clearly, my claim to be acting does not let me off of the moral hook.

Note; there is a clear difference between the type of acting I am talking about, which creates actual instances of a wrongful act, and acting that involves simulated instances of a wrongful act. I am not talking about the latter form of acting, only the former.

You are still asking me to adopt an incoherent set of beliefs if you are requiring me to act like somebody who believes ‘X is obligatory’ while saying that I am, at the same time, permitted to believe, “X is wrong.”

Mistakes

Here is another way of interpreting your claim that I am obligated to help my patients obtain medical treatment that I hold to be immoral:

When you tell me this, you are saying, “Your belief that these treatments are immoral is mistaken. As a matter of fact, these treatments are obligatory. As such, I am going to require that you at least act like a person who believes that helping a patient acquire these forms of treatment is obligatory.”

In desire utilitarianism, a right act is the act that a person with good desires would perform. In judging an agent’s action, it does not matter what that agent believes or desires. All that matters is whether his act is the act of a person with good desires. So, it makes sense to assert that my obligations as a doctor are to act like a person who believes that these forms of treatment are not wrong.

However, this counts as forcing one’s morality on others. In this case, those who hold that these forms of treatment are morally permissible are forcing doctors who believe that they are impermissible to act as if they are permissible.

For political and social reasons, it may be useful not to put too much pressure on the doctor with the mistaken beliefs about the wrongness of these treatments. We may allow a slight concession. “You do not have to perform the treatment yourself, but you must make sure that the patient gets the treatment.” Still, even requiring this of me is to require that I act as a person who holds that the treatment is permissible.

By analogy, consider telling a person, “We do not require that you kill the Jew yourself. We only require that you help to make sure that the Jew gets killed,” or “We do not require that you apprehend the escaped slave. We only require that you help the slave catcher to apprehend the escaped slave.”

We can see here that this type of command is one in which the agent is being told to act as if he is somebody who believes that the execution of Jews or the institution of slavery are permissible. One is still forcing their morality on those who hold that these acts and institutions are immoral.

Forcing Morality on Others

Is it permissible to force one’s morality upon others?

I assure you, if you come after me with a knife saying that you are obligated to kill me, I am not going to stand here and passively respect your moral beliefs. I am very much going to enforce my moral beliefs on you (by prohibiting you from killing me) by whatever means are at my disposal.

And if you think it is morally permissible to rape my niece, I will once again take whatever steps available to me to force my contrary moral views on you.

The same is true if you attempt to destroy my home or take my money.

As a matter of fact, forcing our morality upon others is a daily occurrence.

There is a problem with forcing one’s morality upon others. If you believe that something is obligatory, and I believe that it is wrong, one of us must be mistaken. However, there is no prima facie way of determining who it is. Of course, you will believe that I am mistaken, and I will believe that you are mistaken. However, the question remains, “Who is mistaken in fact?”

The possibility of error suggests that there is room for a principle that states that we each be given some permission to act on our own beliefs. If what is at stake is not large, then we may be better off to allow you to act on what you believe, while I act on what I believe, as long as the harm done to others is minor.

Yet, as the harms done to others by those who are mistaken become greater and more obvious, there is less room for allowing those who would do harm the freedom to do so. When it comes to those whose moral opinion permits the killing or maiming of hundreds or thousands, we have greater reason to demand that those people not act like people who hold such an opinion.

Given that people who believe that X is wrong will behave like people who believe that X is wrong, if we are going to force them to behave differently, then we are forcing our morality on them. There is a strong impulse to deny this fact, but it remains a fact nonetheless.

There are good reasons for being concerned with forcing one’s morality upon others. There are good arguments for freedom that state that people should be allowed to do as they please, and the burden of proof is always on those who would destroy freedom. People who force their morality upon others often make mistakes, and those mistakes often have dreadful consequences. There is reason to be nervous about doing this and to limit such actions to those where the need to force morality on others is clearly established.

However, we cannot ignore the fact that this leaves us with an important question to answer that we cannot avoid answering. “What moral beliefs should we force upon others?” We cannot avoid the question by hiding from it.

Sophistry: Engineering False Beliefs

I would like to add another moral crime to our list of common moral crimes.

Along side examples of immorality such as ‘murder’, ‘rape’, ‘theft’, ‘lying’, ‘breaking promises’, ‘negligence’, ‘bigotry’, and the like, I would like to add ‘engineering false beliefs’ or ‘sophistry’ to the list.

I wrote about this last weekend in the post “Discussion: Public Relations”. There, I wrote about an example in which Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA, 48th District)was questioning a panel of climate scientists, attempting to engineer false beliefs about the relationship between human activity and global warming. Rohrabacher asked about the “mini ice age” in Europe that ended in the mid 1800s, and suggested that the scientists were starting their measurements at an artificially low temperature. Rohrabacher insisted that the Europe-only temperature records before 1850 were relevant to the issue of global warming.

Examples

What I mean by adding engineering a false belief to be a moral crime, I mean for experts testifying before Congress or even under oath in a court of law to give an answer like,

"Congressman Rohrabacher, I am here to tell the truth about global warming. I live by a moral code that says that engineering a false belief is the same as lying. I trust that the purpose of your question is not to engineer a false belief, so let me say how that can be avoided.

"Europe experienced a mini ice-age ending around 1850. But Europe is not the world. Inferring that our data on global temperature change is wrong because Europe had a mini ice age is like inferring that data on the average human height is wrong because almost all basketball players are over six feet. Frankly, it is an insult to suggest that the thousands of scientists who worked on this project are either too stupid to see the relevance of European temperatures or somehow conspiring to cover up the truth."

Another of Rohrabacher’s attempts to engineer a false belief involved asking the question, "What percentage of the total greenhouse gas emissions are caused by humans."

Again, I would like to propose that the answer take the form of,

"I would be doing a disservice to this committee if I were to tell you a partial truth that would engineer a false belief about climate change. I would be engineering a false belief if I did not warn you that you cannot draw meaningful conclusions about climate change by comparing human contribution to changes in greenhouse gas concentration to changes in global temperature. Humans are responsible for virtually all of the changes in greenhouse gas concentration.

"I can answer you question, Congressman, but I must trust to your honesty and interest in getting to the truth of this matter that you view it as a moral outrage, as I do, for people to try to cloud the issue by making a false inference from this to the human contribution to the change in global temperatures. Pretending that the answer to your question is relevant to the climate change debate is dishonest, and I swore on coming here that I will not be attempt or to help others attempt to engineer false beliefs about this issue."

Sophists

I need a term to refer to those who engineer false beliefs that can be given the same bite - the same call for contempt - that terms like, 'murderer', 'rapist', 'thief', 'liar", and "cheat' all carry. Towards that end, I thought it might be useful to resurrect the term 'sophist' in something one of its ancient Greek meanings - as somebody who values manipulating others through rhetoric and sophistry. I am, however, not wed to this option and would welcome alternatives

Clearly, we would all tend to be much better off in a society without sophists, just as we will tend to be better off in a society without murderers, rapists, liars, and thieves. In other words, we have many and strong reasons for action for turning our moral sites onto those who engage in this practice.

Clearly, there are times when each of us might profit from a bit of sophistry. Clearly, there are times in which each of us might profit from a lie, a theft, or even a murder. However, these infrequent examples of personal profit are seriously outweighed by the risks of harm we suffer from being made the victims of others. From this, each of us have many and strong reasons to establish a culture with as few sophists as possible, which we can create by turning our tools of condemnation against those who practice this art.

We can see more evidence that we have 'reasons for action' to add an aversion to engineering false beliefs (sophistry) to our list of vices, simply look at the levels of destruction that some sophists are willing to inflict on others.

Sophists are responsible for the costs, in terms of money, life, and limb, from the Iraq war on the ledger. The White House use of discredited evidence to claim that Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy nuclear material was an act of sophistry. When Joe Wilson exposed this, the attempt to discredit him was a second act of sophistry. Sophists, in this case, killed 3,000 Americans, maimed 20,000 more, tore hundreds of thousands of them away from their families and put them at risk, and cost the country nearly $500 billion that could have been put to other use – not to mention the costs they inflicted on the people of Iraq.

We have the death and suffering of smoking attributed to a smoking industry that spread the sophistry that smoking was not dangerous – a campaign designed and executed by sophists.

We have a level of destruction that will make World War II look like a barroom brawl coming from the sophists of global warming, with the executives of Exxon-Mobile and other companies using sophistry to collect billions of dollars in profits by engineering false beliefs that will cost its victims trillions of dollars in damage.

If you have or are concerned about the future of any child, that child faces far more of a threat from the acts of the sophist than from any other group.

Sophistry and Lying

If we are to look at the ethics of sophistry in detail, we will discover that it has much in common with lying.

We need to make room for the innocent mistake. Not every false statement is a lie. Not every bad inference involves engineering a false belief. However, the possibility of innocent error does not prevent us from recognizing the evil of lying and the value of condemning the liar. The possibility of innocently bringing about false belief should not distract us from recognizing the evil of sophistry and the value of condemning the sophist. The possibility of innocent mistake does not change the fact of deliberate deception. It does not change the fact that sophists are killing and destroying the future of innocent people in huge numbers.

Also, we need to allow that sophistry, like lying, is sometimes permissible. For example, just as it is permissible to lie to the Nazi soldier about the presence of Jews in the Attic, it is permissible to engineer a false belief that there are no Jews in the attic. And just as a little white lie can be an act of kindness, there may be some kindness in engineering a harmless false belief.

However, when I talk about the condemnation of sophistry, I am not talking about lies to protect the innocent or to give somebody a benefit at no costs to others. I am talking about people who destroy hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives for personal gain.

Finally, sophistry happens to be a crime of language – of speech. I have argued in the past that the only legitimate response to words are words and private actions. There will certainly be disputes over which speech acts are sophistry and which are not. Maintaining the peace requires a prohibition on answering speech with violence.

However, the right to freedom of speech does not prohibit people from collecting damages when they have been lied to. Nor does it prevent us from making conspiracy a crime when it can be proved that those involved were starting to act with the intent of doing harm. Con men are criminals even when their con consists merely of deceiving others into investing in a company that does not exist, or funding a mission that there is no intention to launch. There is no reason not to subject sophists to the same risks as liars when their sophistry deprives others of life, health, or property.

First Steps

What I would like to recommend in the way of turning sophistry into a more highly recognized evil is simply for people to call more attention to it in others. However, I think it would be even more important for people to publicly express their own unwillingness to engage in sophistry. “If I said ‘X’, I would be guilty of helping to engineer a false belief because I know that people have a habit of inferring ‘Y’ from ‘X’, and ‘Y’ is a false belief.”

It would do a lot to turn public sentiment against sophists for those who accept this recommendation to refuse to use sophistry in their own lives and to make noises about the fact that this is a part of their code. In doing so, the people should start to learn who cares about truth, and who does not.

And I would really like to see people take active steps to hold sophist legislators like Rohrabacher as morally accountable for their poor moral character as they would hold to a degree proportional to the harm to others they are willing to engineer, when compared to those who make sexual advances to congressional pages and the like.

Gun Control II: Constitutional Rights

Two days ago in a post called “Gun Control”, I wrote about some considerations on the question of gun control.

I cut one consideration out of that earlier post because it was large enough and important enough to be given a separate and more thorough examination.

Note the language that the founding fathers used in writing the Second Amendment.

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The founding fathers believed, and founded the Constitution on a belief, that rights existed independent of government. Governments have no power to create or destroy rights, according to this theory. They only have the power to secure or to infringe or violate rights.

So, according to the Second Amendment, there exists a natural right to keep and bear arms. This right is not “invented.” It is not some arbitrary rule picked out of a hat. It is a principle borne from reason that is true even in a state of nature where no government exists. If a government decides to prevent people from keeping or bearing arms, then the right to keep and bear arms does not cease to exist. It is still there. Instead, this right is being violated by government action.

This is the philosophy upon which the Constitution is built.

We see this theory that rights exist independent of government action and governments might respect or violate those rights in a number of places in the Constitution.

Congress shall make no law . . . abridging . . . the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . .

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial . . .

. . . the right of trial by jury shall be preserved. . .

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Of course, this theory finds its strongest statement in the Declaration of Independence. There, the founding fathers wrote that certain rights such as those to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable, that the purpose of government is to secure these rights, and that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.

Clearly, they did not feel that the existence of their rights as Englishmen were dependent on whether the government in England granted them rights. If they held to such a philosophy, the would have had no grounds for objecting to anything the English government might impose.

Implications

If there exists a right to keep and bear arms that exists independent of government, and governments may not violate those rights, then we can determine the limits of government by determining the scope of these rights. If there is no right to keep and bear an atomic weapon, then no government can infringe upon a citizen’s right to keep and bear an atomic weapon. Thus, no law limiting the private ownership of atomic weapons would be in violation of a right to keep and bear arms.

There are some who argue that no rights exist. If this is true, then no government law could ever infringe upon a right of the people peacefully to assemble, or violate a right to be secure in one’s persons, houses, papers, and effects, or violate a citizen’s right to a trial by jury.

This could not be argued that governments may do whatever they please. There may be other ways in which a government’s actions may be wrong other than through the violation of rights. However, it does follow axiomatically that if no rights exist, then no government action can violate a person’s rights.

Do Rights Exist?

This discussion leads us to the question, “Do rights exist?”

Rights do not exist in the form of intrinsic values. Intrinsic values do not exist. If rights are intrinsic values, then rights do not exist.

However, the proposition, “If rights are intrinsic values, then they do not exist” does not imply, “Rights do not exist.” We are still free to examine whether rights exist as something other than intrinsic values.

Typically, utilitarianism and rights theories are seen as mutually exclusive, competing views of right and wrong. Typical act utilitarianism holds that an action is to be judged right or wrong because of its consequences. Rights theory holds that actions are intrinsically right or wrong independent of their consequences. Act utilitarianism gets into trouble when people argue, for example, that it would be permissible to torture somebody to death if enough people got pleasure from watching the torture. Rights theory gets into trouble when it suggests that a right may not be violated even if the violation would prevent every creature on the planet from enduring perpetual, excruciating pain.

I hold that desire utilitarianism gives us a concept of rights that does not depend on intrinsic values, is consistent with the view that an action is right or wrong independent of the act’s consequences, but still leaves room for considering extreme consequences.

The desire utilitarian concept of a ‘right’ says, “People have a right to X” means “A general population-wide aversion to depriving people of X will tend to fulfill other desires.” That is to say, “People have a right to live” means, “A population-wide aversion to taking another person’s life will tend to fulfill other desires.”

Note: I am not talking about whether an act of taking a life will fulfill or thwart desires. I am talking about whether an aversion to taking life will tend to fulfill or thwart (other) desires.

If a person has an aversion to taking the life of another, then that person will be reluctant to act to take the life of another even when that act would fulfill other desires. The stronger the aversion to taking a life, the less likely it is that a person will take a life even when taking a life will fulfill other desires.

A person with an aversion to pain will avoid pain even then the pain would fulfill other desires. A person with a love for his children’s well being will secure his children’s well being even when doing so will thwart other desires.

However, if we pile enough other desires up against this aversion, then they will eventually outweigh that aversion. This person will (reluctantly) kill. So, if we put the taking of an innocent life up against the detonation of an atomic weapon in a distant city, the person with an aversion to killing will find that aversion overridden with concern for the millions of people who would otherwise die. Thus, rights have weight against other considerations.

The Right to Keep and Bear Arms

On this analysis, a “right to keep and bear arms” exists to the degree that “a population-wide aversion to depriving others of their weapons” will tend to fulfill other desires.

Think of how a population-wide aversion to killing, rape, theft, torture, and other evils will tend to fulfill other desires. Then, we need to ask ourselves whether a population-wide aversion to depriving others of their weapons fits into that category.

Now, a general population-wide aversion to depriving others of their freedom clearly fits as a desire that would tend to fulfill other desires. Yet, this desire can clearly be overridden, as it is with laws against murder, rape, theft, and torture (in civilized countries). This population-wide aversion to depriving others of freedom implies an aversion to depriving people of their weapons. However, this, like others, can be overridden by such things as a population-wide aversion to being murdered, or having one’s family, children, friends, or neighbors murdered, or having them suffer the effects of somebody close to them being murdered.

Summary

To the degree that there is no value to an aversion to depriving people of their weapons, to that degree there is no right to keep and bear arms. To the degree that there is no right to keep and bear arms, to that degree no government law can infringe upon such a right.

This, then, is the way a desire utilitarian would weigh an important set of considerations relevant to the issue of gun control.

Paula Zahn and Atheist Discrimination, Take 2

I waited to write this evening’s blog until I saw what happened on the Paula Zahn show on the issue of discrimination against atheists.

As a result, in the time I have, I am going to give a set of disconnected thoughts on the topic, rather than an argument with a single point.

(1) I would like to congratulate those who sent in the “gigabytes” of email that made this, in the words of the host, the most controversial issue brought up. I would like those who participated in this to recognize that you have made a difference – and encourage you to keep it up.

This type of response should have followed President Bush’s statement that only those who believe that our rights come from God are qualified to be judge. I suspect that if this type of noise had been generated then (and Bush repeated that claim during the Presidential debates) that it might have made a difference in the election.

(2) I want to note that those who protested the original episode almost certainly include a few theists who recognize bigotry when they see it and who also took a stand. I find it highly unlikely that, in all the email they received, there was not at least one that said, “I am a Christian, but I was appalled at the statements that your panelists made.” Also, it is likely that many of the people at CNN responsible for rehearing the case were Christian, and yet they did give the case a new and more balanced hearing.

The important point being that a person is to be judged by the position he or she takes on an issue, not on his or her religiosity that matters.

(3) There will always be things to complain about, and things which can be done better. If you are somebody who will always complain about something and that nobody else can ever please, do not be surprised to discover that they give up in frustration after a while.

(4) I do think that there is a need for soundbyte answers to some of the most common questions asked about atheism, and I would like to offer a few.

(a) Inferring morality from a disposition to pray is as bigoted as inferring criminality from the color of one’s skin.

(b) There are many moral people who do not pray, and many praying people who are not moral.

(c) We are a Christian nation in the same sense that we are a white nation, and it no more justifies bigotry against non-Christians than it justifies bigotry against non-Whites.

(d) [In answer to the question, “Where do you get your morality?”] From the fact that this is the only life I will ever have and it’s insane to try to live that life in a hive of murderers, rapists, and thieves.

(e) [In answer to the question of why there is so much bigotry against Atheists.] The Pledge of Allegiance and the national motto teach bigotry against Atheists. They were passed during the McCarthy era to teach children that atheists are not true Americans, and they work.

Anyway, anybody who thinks that they may be confronted with these types of questions should take the effort to have memorized and well practiced a set of short ‘clichés’ to use against standard statements.

(5) I am going to repeat something that I wrote when this story first broke because I think it needs to be repeated.

These victories are worthless and ephemeral, disappearing like smoke, unless they are tied to a substantive objective that can be seen and measured. The substantive objective that I recommend is the removal of “under God” from the pledge and “In God We Trust” as the national motto, because these do, in fact, teach Americans (and the most vulnerable of all Americans – the children) to think of those not under God and who do not trust in God as anti-American.

As long as this attitude towards atheists persist, children will shun atheism as a way of avoiding the stigma of being anti-American, voters will refuse to accept atheist candidates for public office, and demagogues will continue to be able to attack science by associating it with atheism. Furthermore, atheists are not the only ones who suffer from this. Religious conservatives will continue to be able to fight anything they do not like, from homosexual rights to abortion to stem cell research – simply by associating it in the public mind with the hated term ‘atheist’.

It is a common marketing ploy. If you want to get people to have an adverse reaction to A, you associated it in the public mind with B, which they already hate. So, religious conservatives know they can gain a great deal of political leverage by talking about the homosexual/atheist agenda, speaking about the evils of atheist materialist science, and complaining about godless liberals. All of this is fostered, at least in part, by the lessons that are taught daily in our schools, that atheists are anti-American.

They are not only harming us with their bigotry, but they are using their effectiveness at generating hatred against us to harm others – and even to harm themselves, since a scientific understanding of the universe is the best tool we have available for avoiding the worst that the universe can throw against the human race.

It is, I would argue, of crucial importance to start to get educators to understand that when they go along with this ritualistic Pledge of Allegiance, that they are teaching their students to psychologically segregate Americans into a “white” group who is “under God” and a “colored” group who are not “under God.”

And that this is simply unjust bigotry given the status of a national ritual.

Start here, and we start to take a major step in making the world a better place than it would have otherwise been, and leave our children a better world than was left to us.

Gun Control

I have a question from the studio audience.

Here's a studio audience question for you: Gun control. I don't know enough to have a reliable opinion on the subject, so if it's worth a blog posting, I'd love to hear how you approach the topic.

Thomas

The Constitutional Question

Debates on gun control have to take into consideration the Second Amendment to the Constitution

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed

Now, on the Constitutional question, there are a number of things that deserve mention.

Interpretation

Imagine a parent telling a child, “In order to keep you safe and healthy, you have to be home by 10:00 PM.” The child then comes home at 1:00 AM. When the parent begins to scold the child for breaking curfew, the child answers, “You said that the 10:00 curfew was to keep me safe and healthy. Your rule says that I can stay out as long as I want, as long as I do not do anything that is unsafe or unhealthy.”

That child would be grounded for the rest of his natural life (and then some).

The founding fathers said that the right to bear arms is justified because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. A lot of people want to interpret this as saying that it is permissible to take away the right to bear arms whenever it does not violate the requirements of a well-regulated militia. This, as I understand it, is the same as the child saying that it is okay to stay out as long as he wants as long as he is not doing anything (that the child judges to be) unhealthy or unsafe.

The parents’ rule states, “Be home by 10:00”. The Bill of Rights states, “the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” That’s the rule.

Agreement

I have noticed an amazing coincidence. For some strange reason, a huge portion of those who believe that gun control is a good idea also believe that the Constitution permits gun control. At the same time, a huge portion of those who believe that gun control is a bad idea also believe that the Constitution prohibits gun control.

There are extremely few people who believe that the Constitution prohibits gun control, even though gun control is a good idea; or who believe that the Constitution permits gun control even though gun control is a bad idea.

This suggests that there are an awful lot of people out there who are first deciding their view on gun control, and then endorsing whatever interpretation of the Constitution fits their conclusion.

Technically, this is the same type of thinking as deciding first whether one wants it to be the case that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and helped in the 9/11 attacks, then looking at the evidence to support that conclusion. It is the same as deciding first whether it is economically useful to believe that human activity contributes to global warming then looking at the evidence and accepting only what supports that conclusion. It is the same as deciding that the Bible is literally true then accepting or rejecting scientific findings based on whether they are consistent with biblical claims.

And it happens on both sides of the debate. Neither can condemn the other.

The question of what the Constitution says, and one’s view of what it should say, are two different questions which can reasonably be expected to generate two different answers.

Good and Bad Law

Not everything that the Constitution says is worthy of our respect.

All we have to do to prove this is to remember that the Constitution once protected slavery, and counted African Americans as slaves worth three-fifths of a person for the sake of representation in Congress.

When writing the Bill of Rights, the founding fathers offered their opinion as to whether gun control was a good idea. They said that it was not. Elsewhere in the Constitution they offered their opinion on equal rights for blacks, and decided that this was not a good idea. In some things, the founding fathers were correct. In some things, they made a mistake. One of the questions that we have reason to ask is whether they made a mistake regarding gun control.

In this regard, we need to consider such things as the fact that the founding fathers probably never dreamed of a “musket” that can fire 100 rounds per second or a cannon that can lob a single cannon ball to the other side of the world and destroy a whole city. Even if they were right with respect to what counts as a good idea in an age of muskets, this does not imply that the same policy will work in an age of machine guns and missiles.

Considerations

Presumption of Liberty Argument

One argument that is relevant to the issue of gun control is the issue of a presumption of liberty. It is never the duty of those who argue in defense of freedom to explain why it is useful. If I wanted to walk to the store for some milk and bread, it is not my job to justify this action. Instead, it is the duty of those who argue that I should not be permitted to do so to make their case.

This argument is the same as the argument for the principle that an accused person is to be presumed innocent unless proven guilty. A love of freedom and an aversion to do harm suggest that we make an assumption in favor of innocence, and that we place the burden of proof on those who would have us do harm to prove that harm is deserved. Similarly, we should presume liberty, and put the burden of proof on those who argue that liberty must be infringed.

So, nobody needs to say a word in defense of the right to keep and bear arms. It is up to those who argue against such a right who must make their case.

The Personal Security Argument

One of the ways that they can make that case is by demonstrating (beyond reasonable doubt) that we will be more secure in a society that has gun control. If gun control means that one has a smaller chance of being maimed or killed, or of suffering the fate of somebody one loves being maimed or killed, then the aversion to being maimed or killed and concern for others are both “reasons for action” for gun control.

However, because the advocates of gun control need to overcome a burden of proof, it is not enough to argue that “it seems kinda make sense that gun control will protect innocent lives.” Those who advocate gun control do need actual proof.

I will admit at the start that I have not examined this specific issue in enough detail to know whether that proof is available. I cannot say one way or the other whether the case for gun control has been made.

The Defense from Tyranny Argument

One argument against gun control notes that the biggest threat to the liberty and security of the people has been their own governments. The Declaration of Independence states that we have certain rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.” The best defender of liberty has never been governments (who are the natural enemies of liberty) but the people themselves. Of course, for the people to protect their liberty from their own governments, they must have the means to do so.

The current Bush Administration, and events in Europe, create reason to question this argument. The Bush Administration has shown itself to be on a virtual rampage against the Bill of Rights and other principles of freedom that have protected us for 200 years. They have argued that the President has the right to engage in searches and seizures without a warrant, to arrest an individual without an indictment from a grand jury, to hold him without trial, to deprive people of life, liberty, and property without due process, to engage in cruel and unusual punishment, to throw out the doctrine of checks and balances by giving the Executive Branch the power to make law (through the use of signing statements) and to bypass judicial review.

Yet, those who have argued that gun control must be prohibited because it is necessary to protect the people from an abusive government are among the biggest defenders of this administration. In fact, if we look at history, this is no surprise. Throughout history, tyrants have been greeted with cheers. Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler were not only autocratic dictators, they were also exceptionally popular.

A well armed population may be a poor defense against tyranny, particularly when those with the arms are those who are most likely to use them in defense of an administration that advocates tyranny.

The case of Europe and Japan also provide counter-arguments against the “preservation of liberty” option. Both regions have extensive gun control, and both regions seem to be under no threat of a tyrannical leader coming to power and depriving them of their freedoms. In fact, that threat seems far more real in the United States under the Bush Administration in a country without gun control, than in Europe and Japan.

So, again, the argument that a “right to bear arms” is necessary to the defense of liberty from tyranny appears to be weak. The evidence seems to suggest that if the people love liberty than they do not need to keep and arms to defend it from their own government, and if they do not love liberty, then having a right to keep and bear arms will do little good.

Conclusion

In this blog entry, I have given some considerations to be applied to the issue of gun control. That is, after all, what Thomas asked for – to hear how I would approach the topic.

These are the types of issues that I would address. However, I do not have the time to become a sufficiently qualified expert in this field to say that I know what the right answer is. Instead, on this issue, I would like to trust to the judgment of a qualified expert.

Personally, the approach that I would take would be the same approach that I took regarding the Iraq War strategy. I stated repeatedly that I do not have sufficient evidence to pass judgment, and that I would trust to experts to make that decision. When I read that the Join Chiefs of Staff and the Iraq Study Group both recommended withdraw, then I put my vote on the side of withdraw - and argued that Bush is an arrogant fool for putting his own judgment against the judgment of experts.

If there were a body who looked at the issue of gun control that I could trust to be experts and to be specifically concerned with doing the right thing, who studied the issue in detail, I would trust to their judgment.

Discussion: Public Relations

This is the sixth post on the presentations made at Beyond Belief 2006.

After Neil Tyson’s presentation, the moderator, Roger Bingham, had the first five presenters (Steven Weinberg, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, and Neil deGrasse Tyson), at the head table and opened the room to discussion.

The first question came from Mazarin Banaji, Department of Psychology at Harvard. She asked,

Is there something about the scientific agenda that sort of handicaps us in a particular way. In other words, if the Warren Buffett, Bill Gates foundation were to give you the $30 billion that is now only half of their endowment, what would you want to do with it to bring about change in the manner to which you see it appropriate.

After a couple of panelists gave responses, Patricia Churchland (Chair, Philosophy Department, University of California at San Diego) rose from the audience and said,

[Mazarin’s] suggestion is not that you get the scientists to do this PR campaign but that you hire a PR firm and you say, ‘Look, what we want to do is make available to the public the type of story that Neil told, and do it in a way that is persuasive – you guys are the ones who are supposed to be in the business of persuading people, get the sound bites right, get the timing right, hit the right television shows . . . let’s go. . . . Give the job to people who know how to do it. Give it to professionals.

Indeed, this makes sense. If you want a medical breakthrough, you give the job to a skilled medical researcher. If you want to sell a product, you give the job to professional marketers and public relations experts.

However, Banaji asked if there was anything that is handicapping scientists in doing this, and I think the answer is, “Yes.”

That handicap is actually quite easy to express.

No public relations campaign will ever pass muster to be included in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and no peer-reviewed scientific paper will ever pass muster as a public relations campaign.

The public relations experts come to this science board and they present their campaign. Let us say that they have decided to advance the slogan, “Science saves lives.” They then present a storyboard for a 30-second commercial that looks at a few instances where science has saved lives. Let us say that they involve a child whose life was saved by some medical procedure, the scientific prediction of a hurricane’s path, and the engineering that went into a building capable of withstanding an earthquake.

Scientists, insofar as they are scientists, will immediately start to object to the campaign. First, no scientist will ever accept the idea of supporting a conclusion based on a single incident. One child’s life was saved by a medical advance. How do you know? You at least need a control group before you can make a claim like that, and enough individuals in each group to justify any generalization. You don’t look at a specific incidence and draw a general conclusion. That’s bad science. The head of the science PR committee is soon pounding his fist on the table shouting in anger, “We are supposed to be promoting science, and you stand there and give us a paradigm example of bad science!”

Public relations campaigns are, inherently, bad science. It is simply not possible to show enough evidence to scientifically support a conclusion in a sound bite.

Let me give you an example of how public relations works.

Recently, I was watching Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” with a friend. In that movie, Gore has a graph of changes in CO2 concentrations over the past 650,000 years, showing its relationship to temperature over that time and identifying the seven most recent ice ages.

Then, he showed the change to the current levels of CO2 concentrations.

One person that I was with then gasped, “It’s doubled!”

In fact, CO2 concentrations have not doubled – it has gone from a global average of about 280 parts per million (ppm) to 360 ppm, an increase of less than 30 percent. However, Gore decided to use a graph that would give an individual the impression that the increase in CO2 levels have doubled. This happened because the bottom of Gore’s graph did not start at 0 ppm, it started at 200 ppm. There was an 80 ppm difference between the bottom of the graph and the historic global average, and another 80 ppm between the global average and the current concentrations, giving the appearance that CO2 levels had doubled.

Perhaps this was an accident. However, it is quite likely that this chart was presented in this way precisely because it would then have an enhanced psychological effect on the viewer – because it will cause this sudden burst of anxiety that would cause somebody not accustomed to dealing with graphs (and ways of deceiving people through graphs) to gasp and immediately adopt a false belief about CO2 concentrations. “It’s doubled” is a false belief.

Another example of public relations versus science can be found in the testimony of four climate change scientists to the House Science and Technology Committee on February 8, 2007. In this testimony, Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA, 48th District) asked the scientists, “What percentage of greenhouse gasses are created by nature, compared to what percent by human kind?”

This precipitated a tense exchange between Rohrabacher and one of the witnesses, IPCC scientist Susan Solomon, who insisted on answering with the fact that humans are responsible for 90 percent of the change in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

Of course, if you want to answer the question of who is responsible for the change in global temperatures, we want to know what is responsible for the change in CO2 levels.

Yet, Rohrabacher insisted on getting an answer to the original question. Why?

A reasonable theory is that Rohrabacher was attempting to engineer a false belief that humans are responsible for only a small change in global warming. Many people, when they hear that humans are responsible for, say, 25% of greenhouse gas concentrations would immediately adopt the false belief that we are responsible for 25% of the global warming. By engineering this false belief, one would be able to cause people to act in ways that harmed themselves, but provided a significant benefit to companies and individuals who contribute heavily to the Republican Party. Of course, that profit would enable those individuals to contribute even more to his political party, while those afflicted with this false belief would become even more impoverished by it.

Part of the evidence for this theory is that, earlier, Rohrabacher attempted to equate the temperature of Europe during the little ice age to the temperature of the whole planet that global warming scientists measure – as if a cold Europe implies a cold planet. This is another example of engineering a false belief. Any criminal investigator will agree that establishing a pattern of behavior is relevant to demonstrating guilt.

I would argue that attempting to engineer a false belief is the moral equivalent of lying. In fact, I would argue that lying is wrong because attempting to engineer a false belief is wrong, and lying is an attempt to engineer a false belief. If it were not wrong to engineer false beliefs, then lying would be permissible.

Yet, public relations firms seem to be professionals mostly in the art of engineering false beliefs. To hire an engineering firm is to hire a professional engineer of false (but useful, to the person with money) beliefs.

Of course, just as it is possible to engineer false beliefs, it is also possible to engineer true beliefs. However, even here, there is a conflict between science and public relations. Even the engineer of true beliefs has to engineer that belief in 30 seconds or less. There is no sound scientific argument that can be given in 30 seconds or less. Whatever ‘argument’ the public relations firm can fit into a 30 second commercial is one that no scientist would accept as one that ought to convince somebody to accept the conclusion.

Science depends on proving a proposition, not on engineering acceptance of it.

There is a reason why the leading public educator on the subject of global warming is not a scientist, but a politician. It is because scientists simply are not in the business of engineering beliefs.

Patricia Churchland gave the correct answer regarding what should be done to promote science. One needs to collect a lot of money and hand it to a public relations firm that will come up with the sound bits and commercials that will sway the public mind.

The problem, however, is coming up with sound bites and commercials that a scientist of good moral character could endorse, and that will still be effective in persuading a public that is substantially ignorant of the field one is discussing.

So, how would I answer this question?

I think that the answer has a moral component. Rather than join the ranks of those who are in the business of engineering false beliefs, or manipulating faulty reasoning, what we need to do is to make it a moral embarrassment to attempt to engineer false beliefs. Gore’s graph should be seen as an embarrassment, because it engineers a false belief about changes in CO2 concentration. Rohrabacher’s antics in attempting to engineer a false belief should be viewed as morally on par with soliciting sex from an underage congressional page. It certainly threatens the welfare of far more people, many of them far younger than the pages that serve on Capital Hill.

This is not a matter of engineering beliefs. This is a matter of engineering desires – of promoting desires that tend to fulfill other desires. In this case, it involves engineering an aversion to engineering false beliefs sufficiently strong to require Gore to use a more honest graph, and to keep a man like Rohrabacher out of Congress.

I think that I can make an argument that hiring a public relations firm for that purpose – for the purpose of engineering good desires – would be a perfectly legitimate activity, and one that is far overdue in fact.

Since I do not have enough money to hire a PR firm, I will do what I can in this blog, and encourage you to do the same.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Intelligent Design

This is the fifth in a series of posts that I am writing about the presentations given at Beyond Belief 2006.

The fifth presenter at that conference (and the first presenter in Session 2) was Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The lesson that I would like to draw from Tyson’s speech is that we need to teach intelligent design. It would be nice to have students learn about intelligent design in school. However, this is not likely to happen. There are too many people arguing for keeping intelligent design out of our schools. However, in teaching intelligent design, they really should teach the truth about intelligent design. That is what schools are supposed to do, right? This means teaching the problems with intelligent design. Because our school system requires this forced ignorance of the problems with intelligent design, our population remains vulnerable to those who continue to take advantage of the public ignorance (or who fall victims to that ignorance).

This ignorance inflicts a heavy cost on our society.

Tyson began his presentation by focusing on the fact that some of the brightest people today and in the past have accepted some form of intelligent design. If some of the best and brightest in the history of science can be taken in by such a theory, then perhaps it is somewhat over demanding to expect a lay person to do any better.

I want to put on the table the fact that that you have school systems wanting to put intelligent design in the classroom, but you also have the most brilliant people who have ever walked this earth doing the same thing.

Tyson’s claim that many of the best and brightest scientists continue to believe in God starts with the same surveys that atheists often cite that show that the vast majority of top scientists do not believe in or doubt the existence of God. A survey that shows that 93 percent of the nation’s top scientists are atheist or agnostic also shows that 7 percent are theists. (Note: Tyson asserted that 15% were theists, but this is not the number reported in the polls.)

This shows that it is possible to be fully educated in the marvels of science and even be an active participant in scientific progress and still hold a belief in God.

From this, Tyson concluded that it is simply false to think that all you need to do is to educate a person in science and you can eliminate his believe in God.

He also went through history to show that many of the greatest scientists in history accepted some form of intelligent design.

Ptolomy, writing at the boundary between what is known and unknown, wrote,

I know that I am mortal by nature and ephemeral. But when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch the earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus myself and drink my fill of ambrosia.

Newton’s theory of gravity handled the attraction between two bodies, but could not account for the long-term stability of the system. At this point – the boundary between what is known and unknown, Newton wrote:

The six primary planets are revolved about the sun in circles concentric with the sun and with motions directed towards the same parts and along the same plane, but is it not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the council and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.

Christian Huygens nowhere writes about God until he gets to the boundary between what is known and unknown.

I suppose nobody would deny but that there is somewhat more of contrivance, somewhat more of miracle, in the production and growth of plants and animals than in lifeless heaps of inanimate bodies, for the finger of God and the wisdom of divine providence is in them much more clearly manifested than in the other.

Importantly, these people did not invoke God for the purpose of trying to smuggle religion into science class. They were not trying to advance some hidden agenda. They said these things – the best and the brightest in science – because they believed these things.

This sounds like a defense of intelligent design. One could go on from this to argue that if the best and the brightest minds in science, past and present, hold that there is room for divine influence in nature, then it may be argued that there is no good reason to leave it out of the science classroom.

However, Tyson offers a different conclusion. He argues that the acceptance of intelligent design, even among scientists, even among the best and brightest minds in science, is a problem. The problem is that where scientists (and others) evoke intelligent design, they quit studying, and they quit learning. They draw a line in the sand and refuse to venture past it.

Here, Tyson referred back to Newton.

Or, more precisely, to an 18th century scientists Pierre-Simon Laplace who took the full power of calculus and applied to the motions of the planets and showed that the planetary orbits are stable over time. To do this, he perfected a type of mathematical modeling called perturbation theory. In doing this, he answered a question that Newton did not answer, and where Newton evoked intelligent design.

I deliberate said that Newton ‘did not answer’ this question, not that Newton ‘could not answer’ this question, because Tyson later argues that Newton could have answered this question.

The lesson, then, is not that we need intelligent design in the classroom. The lesson, according to Tyson, is:

Even if you are as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God, and then your discovery stops. It just stops. Your kinda no good any more for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who does not have God on the brain, and who says, ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ They come in and solve it.

But look at the time delay. This was a hundred year time delay.

And the math that is in perturbation theory is like crumbs for Newton. He could have come up with that. The guy invented calculus just on a dare practically. When somebody asked him, ‘Ike, how come planets orbit in ellipses and not in some other shape?’ and he couldn’t answer that, he goes home for two months, comes back, out comes integral differential calculus because he needed that to answer that question. So, this is the kind of mind we are dealing with Newton. He could have gone there, but he didn’t.

He didn’t. His religiosity stopped him.

So, we have religiosity to blame for the fact that an important advance in science was discovered a century after it could have been discovered. Intelligent design, at least according to Tyson’s argument, delays advances in science because it tells people to quit looking.

To be honest, Tyson's assertion here is scientifically weak. A lot more needs to be done if one is going to demonstrate that the proposition, "intelligent design causes delays in scientific advancement" is true. There is little evidence here to back up such a claim. It is, at best, intuitively plausible, and we all know how dangerous intuitive plausibility is.

However, in spite of that problem, Tyson's conclusion still has merit - that there are reasons to teach intelligent design. He says that it should be taught because it is a real phenomena in the history of science and of how the brain works at the boundary of knowledge. He also suggests that this is a problem in that it stops scientific advances. People should be taught that intelligent design makes even the most brilliant mind, “. . . kinda no good any more for advancing that frontier.”

However, all of this means teaching the problems with intelligent design. Whenever people tend to speak about teaching intelligent design, they talk about presenting it as a viable option to scientific theory. Yet, if we were to teach intelligent design honestly, the lesson would actually be one of explaining why intelligent design fails to stand as a viable alternative to any scientific theory.

One legitimate response to those who insist on including lessons on intelligent design would be to say, "Sure. I think it is a great idea. Students really should know about all of the philosophical, historical, and cultural problems with intelligent design so that they would know why so many thinking people reject it." Because, in fact, if we were to teach intelligent design in school, and teach it honestly, most of the intelligent minds in that school would learn why intelligent people tend to reject it.

In fact, if I were running a private school, I would have those students learn about intelligent design. When they graduated, they would know the problems with intelligent design and be able to explain those prolems to others. I have the philosophy that a good education is one that makes a student better able to contribute to the well-being of society, and that understanding the problems with intelligent design helps to improve society by making it less vulnerable to those mistakes. So, yes, a graduate should be able to contribute meaningfully to the social discussion on intelligent design.

Since the schools are not going to teach intelligent design (or will not teach the subject honestly) then there is a need to fill in the gaps on our children’s education. We must take the time to teach children about intelligent design theory, so that they can speak intelligently about it to other students, and so that they will be less vulnerable to the myths of intelligent design.

So, I must ask, because I do not know, where is there a good book on intelligent design for children? If nobody can find one, then maybe this is a project worth taking up.

Bigotry and the Ethics of Belief

In the discussion of the anti-atheist bigotry exhibited on Paula Zahn Now, Austin Cline, in the post “Karen Hunter Defends Anti-Atheist Bigotry and Comments”, looked at some claims that Karen Hunter later made in defense of her statements on that broadcast. presented an argument in response to a claim that Karen Hunter, one of the participants in Zahn’s show, made in defending what she said on the show.

I am interested in one argument that Cline made in that analysis, and in comments made to my post yesterday, “Ms. Hunter, I Will Not Shut Up.”

Those statements suggest that belief is like skin color in that they are not (in any morally relevant way) a matter of choice that would put them in the realm of moral judgment. The argument is that prejudice against people who hold a particular belief is no different than prejudice against somebody of a particular race.

I disagree.

In fact, it is quite possible and legitimate to hold individuals morally accountable for what they believe. At least in theory, it is possible that an atheist is guilty of moral wrongdoing.

Response to Hunter

I want to quickly address Ms. Hunter’s comments so that I can set them aside. She argued that it is permissible to denigrate atheists in a way that it is not permissible to denigrate blacks because being black is not a matter of choice. Atheism, on the other hand, is a matter of choice.

I responded that if being black were a matter of choice – if one could take a pill that changed one’s race – it would still be morally wrong to denigrate those blacks who choose not to take the pill and remain black.

I also argued that the argument assumes that the behavior we are talking about is one of denigrating a group of people. If the behavior was not denigrating, then choice would not be relevant. Choice is only relevant when somebody is denigrating the choices that another person has made.

The Problem of the Ethics of Belief

Cline offered another defense of the atheist position, that beliefs are not a matter of choice (in a way that makes moral judgment legitimate).

First, not believing in any gods is no more a "choice" than not believing that there are elephants in my kitchen — beliefs aren't acts of will, but simply conclusions we accept based on what we know and already believe.

However, if we accept this argument, we have to ask what to do about the person who believes that atheists lack the capacity to be moral because they do not believe in God, that blacks are fit only to serve as talking farm animals, that infidels and witches should be burned at the stake, that Ms. Smith is a witch, or that flying a plane into a sky scraper is doing the will of a benevolent God and will buy a ticket to heaven for oneself and all of one’s friends and family.

In fact, the entire discussion of Ms. Hunter’s claims on Paula Zahn Now was, in effect, an attack on her beliefs. It would seem that if the belief that no God exists is not a matter of choice and therefore not subject to moral criticism, then Hunter’s beliefs are not a matter of choice and therefore not subject to moral criticism.

Free Will

Part of the problem is going to center around the question of what it means to choose a belief. That, in turn, is going to take us to the question of free will and the nature of choice.

In moral philosophy, there is a dispute over what it means to say that a person 'should have done otherwise.'

One theory of ‘choice’ requires that a person must be capable of acting in a way overrides all causal factors. Those who believe that this type of choice is required come in two basic stripes. One stripe (libertarians – not to be confused with the political philosophy of the same name) holds that humans have this magical power to ignore the laws of nature and that moral judgment is based entirely on how we use that power. The other stripe (determinists) hold that we do not have this magical power to ignore the laws of nature, that moral judgment is based entirely on how we use this power, and that as a result moral judgments are nonsense.

The other theory of ‘choice’ (compatibilism) says that the type of choice that is subject to moral judgment fits within the causal laws of nature – that it refers to a subset of those causes. As such, we have no magical power to ignore the laws of nature, but moral judgments still make sense since they refer to choices made within the laws of nature.

I accept this second theory of ‘choice’. Moral judgments themselves are events that have causes and effects, that their effect is primarily to change the desires that people develop, and that those desires in turn effect the actions people perform. We are justified in making moral judgments whenever any action evidences desires that we have reason to promote or inhibit.

Applying Compatibilist Choice to Belief

Applying the compatibilist concept of choice to the question of belief, we come up with the moral question, “Can a belief provide evidence of a desire that we have reason to promote through praise or to inhibit through condemnation?”

The answer to this question is often, “Yes.”

It is not possible to make a moral judgment of a person when his belief is grounded on good evidence and sound reasoning. In this case, the existence of good evidence and sound reasoning justifies the belief. At worst, we can praise the person for his respect for the rules of good evidence and sound reasoning.

However, when a person makes a mistake, we then have reason to ask, “Of all of the mistakes that she could have possibly made, why is it that she made that mistake and not some other?”

We know that desires can influence what a person believes. Sometimes, the best explanation we have for why a person adopted a particular belief is because she wanted to believe it. A mother can refuse to accept the fact that her child is dead because she simply does not want to believe that her child is dead. A President can believe that the leader of another country is harboring weapons of mass destruction purely because he wants to believe that the leader of another country is harboring weapons of mass destruction.

Whenever this is the case, then a person’s beliefs give us a window on his or her desires. That window on a person’s desires tells us if that person is exhibiting desires that we have reason to promote through moral praise, or reason to inhibit through moral condemnation.

In other words, whenever the fact that a person has a particular belief can be traced back to what the person desires, then beliefs are an "act of will" in the morally relevant sense - as much an act of will as any (other) intentional action.

The Ability to Believe

These points tie into the claim that people sometimes make that, "I could not believe in God even if I wanted to."

Those who believe this, I assert, believe it only because they want it to be true. In fact, if a person wants to believe in God badly enough, he will believe in God. He would ignore the evidence that suggested conclusions he did not like, while accepting evidence that supported the conclusions he wanted to accept. We see it happen all the time. The person who claims, "I would be different. I would not follow these patterns of behavior" is somebody who wants to attribute to himself superhuman powers.

In short, he believes this because he wants to believe it. Not because there is any evidence for it in real world observations.

The Schlussel Example

Karen Hunter’s accomplice in the exhibition of anti-atheist bigotry on Paula Zahn Now was Debbie Schlussel. Schlussel also made comments in response to a flood of email that she received as a result of her hate speech. Austin Cline covers these as well in, “Debbie Schlussel Defends Anti-Atheist Bigotry and Comments”

Schlussel uses the examples of Adam Gadahn and John Walker Lindh as atheists who converted to Islam and became supporters of Al-Queida to argue that atheists are dangerous. Using these two as examples, she substantially equates “hate-filled atheists” with “future Muslim extremists (redundant)”.

If a person were to identify two Christians who converted to Islam and joined Al-Queida, and used it to condemned all of Christianity, it is reasonable to expect that Schlussel would instantly see the problem with that argument. In fact, she would find the problem with that argument so obvious that she would instantly subject anybody who made that argument to the worst form of condemnation. She would, in short, have no problem recognizing that a person who uses such an argument is worthy of harsh moral condemnation.

Yet, she uses the argument herself, and blinds herself to the moral condemnation that such a person deserves.

Why is it that she can see the problem in the one case, but cannot see it in the other?

We are talking about events in the real world, so they must have an explanation. There must be an answer to the question, “Why?”

I suggest that we can find the answer by looking at Schlussel’s desires – at what she wants to believe. Whenever an argument leads to a conclusion that Schlussel does not like, she has no problem identifying flaws in the argument that she can use to attack those who make such an argument. However, when an argument leads to a conclusion that she likes, she has no interest in questioning the argument behind that conclusion. She accepts the argument without question.

So, Schlussel wants to believe that atheists are proto Muslim terrorists. She wants to see them as people deserving of condemnation and denigration. If she did not want this, then she would have reason to look at the arguments more carefully and see the problems with them.

This “desire to see others as worthy of condemnation and harm regardless of the facts” is a desire that tends to thwart other desires, so it is a desire that morally concerned individuals have reason to condemn.

In other words, an examination of Schlussel’s beliefs shows us that she has desires that good people have reason to make an object of contempt and condemnation. She has desires that tend to thwart other desires; that is to say, she has desires that others have reason to inhibit through condemnation.

She is a bad person.

Let the condemnation fly.

However, one cannot condemn Schlussel for her beliefs without accepting the more general principle that people can be condemned for their beliefs. This, in turn, is inconsistent with the claim that beliefs are not objects that can be used in assigning moral condemnation. We can either hold that beliefs are outside of the realm of moral judgment, or we can condemn Hunter and Schlussel for their beliefs. We cannot do both.

Ms Hunter: I Will Not Shut Up

It appears as if the atheist community is getting uniformly angry. This reaction has been in a response to a segment of Paula Zahn Now on CNN. In this segment, Zahn started out with a report on an atheist family in Missouri who got run out of town for being an atheist. However, the moral outrage has been directed at Zahn and her guests, two of whom vented the same hatred that the atheist family in the report had experienced.

Austin Cline at About: Agnosticism/Atheism has covered this issue in a pair of posts Paula Zahn Now: Karen Hunter, Debbie Schlussel, Stephen A. Smith on Atheism and Atheists React to Anti-Atheist Bigotry on Paula Zahn Now.

Through Cline’s site you can find links to others showing the episode or linking to the transcript.

In looking at the reaction to this incident, which Cline also documents, I have to say:

It’s about time!

In the past, an incident such as this would only draw a small response from a small segment of the atheist community. A few atheists would respond to this outrage, and a few others to that outrage. The result is that it is seldom the case that people have protested loud enough or long enough to actually be heard. Typically, those against whom the protest has been directed has been able to ignore the pesky little noise that atheists make.

In order for alienation from a community to result in change, those affected need a symbol. Instead of picking small, scattered battles, they need to find one incident that symbolizes everything that is wrong in the millions of little examples that show up every day. Then, the community can focus its energy on that symbol and make enough news that they can no longer be ignored, and their message finally gets heard.

It can be a working woman who is just too tired at the end of the day to stand up and move to the back of the bus.

It can be a work of fiction such as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" that portrays all of the suffering and injustice in an institution that needs to be abolished.

It can be a tea party in Boston.

If we look at the Boston Tea Party, we see that the government of England was using it as its own symbol. It had removed the other taxes that the American colonies had been protesting, but left a tax on tea as a symbol of the crown’s right to tax the colonies. Americans did not dump in the tea because they were angry about a tax on tea. They attacked the tax as a statement against the crown’s symbol of taxation without representation. The Americans were able to focus its energy on this one tax, and in doing so speak with a loud and uniform voice.

If one can stand a military analogy (and I can seldom do so – except, it is apt in this case), the use of a symbol follows the principle of concentrating one’s forces to hit a crucial weak spot in the enemy line. Concentrating one’s effort on a crucial weakness and focusing energy on it, as a symbol of everything else that deserves fighting against, can hopefully generate a breakthrough that eventually brings down the entire defensive line.

I do not know what the atheist catalyst will be in this country. However, it will have the look and feel of this Paula Zahn incident. It will generate a wide and spontaneous protest from all corners of the atheist community, all focused on one event.

In looking at this incident, let's at least get the facts straight. I doubt that Paula Zahn set up an attack on atheists – at least not consciously. (A funny thing about prejudice is how it affects people subconsciously, and how it is possible to find bigotry in people who consciously would condemn it.)

Also, to say that Zahn should have had an atheist – or at least a competent defender of atheists – in her panel is not entirely consistent with the format for the show. The show involves bringing in panelists who will speak on all of the issues that will be discussed – from Senator Joseph Biden’s comment on Senator Barack Obama, to the weight of candidates, to the Super Bowl, to atheist discrimination. I believe that she was as surprised as anybody to discover that she did not have an articulate defender of the atheists in her panel.

We can see this if we look at the comments that Zahn herself made during the broadcast. Right away, when she saw what was going on, she asked, “Are any of you going to defend them here tonight?” She asserted the right to free speech, love thy neighbor, and challenged the claim that atheists were imposing their beliefs on other people.

However, she did not lead the discussion, nor did she do more than impose a few scattered comments and questions.

It is also important to note that the segment was broadcast under the banner, “Why do atheists inspire such hatred?” This question is as bigoted as asking, “What did blacks do to inspire the Europeans/Americans to enslave them?” or “Why did the Jews inspire the holocaust?” This is an inexcusable account of blaming the victim. It literally begs the panel to answer the question by pointing out what the atheists are doing that make them deserving of this type of treatment.

The situation on this episode is pretty much the same as one would expect if somebody had assembled three white men in 1920 and asked them to describe the plight of the blacks. Those comments would inevitably be racist, and yet nobody in the panel and most of the audience would be unable to recognize them as such.

For all of these reasons, Paula Zahn’s interview symbolizes what atheists have to put up with in America today, and it symbolizes what people of good moral character should find intolerable.

However, there is still one important thing missing from this symbol. It does not have (or it has not yet been identified with) a clearly defined objective.

Eliminating taxation without representation, abolishing slavery, and ending segregation were all clearly defined objectives – something that clearly defines what those who are involved in the protest are fighting for, and what those on the other side are fighting against.

The broadcast does define an objective. In the news portion that preceded the discussion, correspondent Gelia Gallagher interviewed Ryan Anderson with the religious journal “First Things”. He said, “Part of the public persona and the public image of atheism is what's presented by people suing to remove ‘In God We Trust’" from the coins or God phrase in the pledge of allegiance. And when that militant atheism becomes kind of like the public image of atheism, I think that gives rise to a lot of discontent with atheism.”

Hunter herself started her protest with, “I think this is such a ridiculous story. Are we not going to take ‘In God We Trust’ off of our dollars? Are we going to not say ‘one nation under God?’ When does it end? We took prayer out of schools. What more do they want?”

The correct answer is to say, “We are not.”

Zahn mentioned the survey that suggested that atheists are the least popular group in the country. She told her panelists, “What I find so interesting is when you look at the statistics, that they were the most hated of all the minorities.”

The one person defending atheists to this point disputed the statistics – which makes him ill qualified to be our defender in this forum. He does not even know what the facts are. Though, Zahn’s characterization is not entirely accurate either.

The poll actually rated atheists as lowest, not in terms of most hated, but in terms of sharing the poll taker’s vision of American society. That is to say, atheists, more than any other group, are considered outside of and even anti-American.

Where did they get this idea? Where would anybody ever hear somebody say that being an atheist is the same as being anti-American?

They get it from a Pledge of Allegiance that literally equates being “under God” with sharing American values and with refusing to be “under God” with having no allegiance to the United States or to the principles of liberty and justice for all.

They get it from a national motto that those who trust in God are “we” who are truly American, and by implication that those who do not trust in God are “they”.

Every day in schools across the country teachers get up in front of the class and not only tell their students that atheists are not loyal Americans and do not pledge themselves to liberty and justice for all, but they require that their students repeat these accusations every day. They get the message every time they look at a coin and read that “we” trust in God. So, who when asked who does not share their values as Americans, the only sensible answer is to say that it is “they” who do not trust in God who do not share their values as Americans.

Interestingly, Austin Cline presents us with a post titled, “Karen Hunter Defends Anti-Atheist Bigotry and Comments”. In it, he quotes Hunter as saying,

You choose to be an atheist. I didn't choose to be black. I have never seen a sign that read: Christians Only.

The claim that one chooses to be an atheist only makes sense if one admits that the treatment that atheists receive is denigrating and derogatory. This statement says, “It is okay to denigrate you because you choose to be who you are, but it is not okay to denigrate me because I did not choose to be who I am.” However, it is permissible to denigrate people whose first name begins with J because a person’s first name is a matter of choice?

And what would the moral case be if race became a matter of choice? What if a black person could take a pill and become white? Who would accept the argument that it is permissible to treat any black person who does not take the pill in a denigrating and derogatory matter because race, now, is a matter of choice?

Choice is irrelevant.

However, more importantly, I have, in fact, seen signs that read, “Christians Only.”

Putting “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance is no different than hanging a sign that says, “Those who are Under God Only”. A national motto of “In God We Trust” says, “Those who Trust In God Only.”

There is no moral difference between psychologically dividing this nation between those who are “Under God” or who trust in God and those who do not, and physically dividing a restaurant or a bus into a “white” section and a “colored” section. Every school child knows that students who sit out the Pledge of Allegiance are sitting in the psychological equivalent of the “colored” section of the classroom and of American culture.

There are those who protest the idea of making this an objective because it will make the “white” (“Under God”) people angry.

Of course they will be angry. They are being accused of injustice. They are being told to give up a position of power and authority over others – that they can no longer denigrate and belittle others. Of course they are going to be angry. That is how they maintain their power – by attacking (snarling, growling, and biting) at those who they sense as stepping out of bounds and challenging their position.

Imagine the Civil Rights leaders of the 1950s saying, “We know that the whites are never going to grant us equality, and demanding it only makes them mad. So, we should shut up about equality and accept whatever they seem happy to give to us.”

Those who defend the Pledge and the national motto defend religious segregation on the basis of religion. Those who refuse to oppose them refuse to oppose religious segregation. Those who fight for their removal fight against religious segregation.

When those who defend the Pledge and the Motto say that the opponents of religious segregation are anti-Christian, ask them whether they think that the protests against racial segregation were anti-White.

In the Paula Zahn piece on atheism, Hunter asserted that atheists “need to shut up.” Certainly, her life would be much easier and much more comfortable if atheists would quietly walk to the back of the cultural bus where they belong.

Sorry, but, no. I will not move to the back of the cultural bus.

And I will not shut up.

Propaganda and Second Opinions - Global Warming

This is a story of two sets of parents.

Both sets of parents give their children a pill every morning. They get paid to do so – for whatever reason one might imagine. All that matters is that the parents profit by giving their children these pills and, until recently, there has been no evidence that the pills do any harm.

However, that changes. A report comes out linking the substance in the pill to a number of health hazards – including, in rare cases, death.

After reading this report, both sets of parents head down to a local research facility.

Parent Set A goes to the research institute and says, “I want a second opinion. I will pay you $10,000 to look into the matter and tell me whether there is anything to this research, or whether it is one of those scare stories I hear about from somebody with too vivid an imagination and a need to have a cause to fight for – no matter how ridiculous.”

Parent Set B goes to a research institute and says, “I want a second opinion. I will pay you $10,000 for a report that says that I can ignore what it says in the paper, that their research is flawed, and that they are nothing but a bunch of activists who need a cause to fight for, even if they have to invent one.”

The question is: How would we rank the moral character of these two sets of parents?

With the recent release of the most recent report of the International Panel on Climate Change, the American Enterprise Institute sent letters to a number of scientists offering to pay each of them $10,000 if they will write a report critical of the IPCC findings.

American Enterprise Institute has spent the last several years selling a service to companies who profited from activities that produced greenhouse gasses. The service it has provided is to cloud the public mind on the issue of global warming, to paralyze the body politic into inaction through rhetoric and deceit so that its clients can continue to harvest profits through methods harmful to the rest of the planet. Specifically, they have been buying reports on behalf of their sponsors that say that those sponsors can ignore findings that a particular additive that they are putting into our atmosphere is causing harm.

What seriously bothers me about this situation is that people do not hold organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute morally accountable for their actions.

We can read the story above about what Parent Set B does in order to ‘justify’ the fact that it is continuing to take money for feeding this additive to their children and see how utterly evil such a person is. Such a story would be front-page news, be broadcast from one end of the country to the other, the topic of conversations in almost every office building and dinner party, and written about in hundreds of blogs. These parents would be totally vilified and deservedly so.

We can read a story about the American Enterprise Institute and the companies that hire it doing the same thing on a global scale, harming not only their own children but threatening our own children and children half way around the world that none of us even know, and the story hardly makes a blip on the media and social radar.

Executives at the American Enterprise Institute and the companies that contribute to it are given a moral free pass for the most reprehensible of attitudes towards the safety and well-being of others.

I want to make it clear that this argument does not depend in any way on the merits of climate change science. Look at the initial story again – the story of the parents feeding additives to their children. Please note that I said nothing about whether the original report was sound or unsound. We do not need to know whether the original report was sound or unsound to make a moral judgment in this case. All we need to know is that Parent Set B did not care enough about the harm they could be doing to ask for a fair and impartial analysis of the evidence.

Those who work for the AEI, and those who sponsored their activities, did not care enough about the potential harm that could be done through global warming to ask for an unbiased assessment. Instead, they valued personal profit over public welfare, and were willing to see untold harms inflicted on others for the sake of money in the bank.

For years, one of the major supporters of AEI has been Exxon-Mobile. Recently, Exxon-Mobile has announced that it is no longer supporting groups such as this. Yet, this does not change the fact that they contributed to these campaigns for years, that they profited in doing so, and that so far they have shown no signs of giving back any of their malevolently acquired profits for the sake of reversing the damage they have already caused. Exxon-Mobile will pocket nearly $40 billion in profits this year alone.

Yet, the moral stain here is not only on the hands of the leaders of Exxon-Mobile and the American Enterprise Institute, but on people who give them a free moral pass when those same people would condemn and even imprison Parent Set B in the example above. Hypocrisy itself is a moral crime. There is no way we can count it as fair or just to have Parent Set B suffer the consequences of their actions while the executives of Exxon-Mobile and the American Enterprise Institute continue to stand in full sight of the public having done far worse.

The victims of their actions actually include the children, nieces, nephews, and the children of the friends of most of the employees at AEI and the companies that financed their campaigns. I wonder what it feels like to work for a company or an institute that proves that proves by actions such as this that it cares so little about the welfare of one’s children, nieces, nephews, and the like?

[Note: There is, of course, the principle that the only legitimate response to words are counter-words and private acts such as boycotts and letters of condemnation, and the only legitimate response to a political campaign in an open society is a counter-campaign advocating laws that will remedy the situation. Vigilante justice has a habit of turning peaceful societies into places like Baghdad, and is not to be tolerated.]

The McCain Resolution

It’s time to start work on electing a new President, so I am going to be spending some time in the next couple of years looking at what Presidential candidates say and do. These pieces of information will be useful in determining what type of President each person would become.

The Battle of the Resolutions

In this regard, Senator John McCain has been making news recently as the Senate takes up a so-called “vote of no confidence” regarding President Bush’s “Surge” strategy for Iraq. The vote comes in the Warner-Levin Resolution (pdf), a non-binding resolution that says that the Senate “disagrees with the "plan" to augment our forces by 21,500.”

In its place, McCain has offered his own resolution (pdf) that

Congress should ensure that General David Petraeus, the Commander of Multinational Forces-Iraq, and all United States personnel under his command, have the resources they consider necessary to carry out their mission on behalf of the United States in Iraq.

What I find particularly interesting, and what provides an important insight into McCain’s character (and the type of President he will be) is what he has said against the Warner-Levin resolution. As reported in a New York Times article, “War at Home: McCain’s Resolution,” McCain is defending his position by saying things like,

In other words, this is a vote of no confidence in both the mission and the troops who are going over there. . . . a vote of, quote, “disapproval,” which is fundamentally a vote of no confidence in the troops and their mission.

This idea that disapproving a commander’s plan is the equivalent of insulting the troops is absurd.

Captain Bush

Let us assume that there is a war on. Captain Bush of Company B goes to his superiors with a plan to capture an enemy stronghold. The commanders look over Captain Bush’s plan. They also look over his service record as leader of Company B. Those five years have been a disaster. Captain Bush has shown a persistent tendency to misread intelligence and draw false conclusions, make overly optimistic projections of combat results, charge into battle poorly equipped, grossly underestimate the enemy, fail utterly to anticipate their reactions to his maneuvers, and chalk up appalling casualty rates in the process.

The commanding officers are about to refuse Captain Bush’s plan, when General McCain comes along and says that rejecting the plan sends the wrong signal to the troops in his company. He claims that it is equivalent to a vote of no confidence in the soldiers of Company B.

This is nonsense.

McCain’s philosophy is that supporting the troops means accepting whatever plan comes down the pipe because rejecting it is an insult to the troops – a vote of no-confidence in what the soldiers can accomplish.

In fact, anybody with a decent sense of responsibility for the troops holds that “support the troops” means giving them all of the advantages one can muster and not wasting their lives when less wasteful options are available. It means making sure that they are not being asked to make the ultimate sacrifice unless that sacrifice is necessary, and that one will take the effort to make sure that the sacrifice is not necessary.

One does not support for the troops by saying, "Hey, let's show our troops how good we think they are by sending them on poorly planned missions with insufficient supplies against an unknown enemy with total confidence in their ability to win in spite of the fact that we have stacked the deck so heavily against them.”

In fact, if there were a Captain Bush in the military, any decent commander would “support the troops” by assigning this incompetent officer to some desk job that limits the amount of damage that will result from his incompetence, if they did not simply dismiss him.

The military shows its support for its troops by rejecting stupid plans that do not give the soldiers all of the possible advantages and even rejecting leaders (and their plans) if they prove sufficiently incompetent.

It may be necessary, when the situation demands it, to go along with a commander once that commander gives his orders. However, it is never necessary to pretend that one agrees with the commander’s decisions.

One of the things that this suggests about McCain is that, if he were President, he would share one of Bush’s worst qualities – the inability to distinguish dissent from treason. We can expect him to be a President who will spend four years stifling debate and silencing critics by asserting that any who disagrees with him insults the soldiers.

Six years of this kind of thinking are enough, and we have two more years to put up with under the best of circumstances.

The “No Plan” Criticism

There is a second element of this political battle that deserves some comment as well.

McCain criticized Democrats, who are seeking to pass a non-binding resolution of no confidence in Bush’s “Surge” plan for Iraq, for not coming up with a plan of their own. I believe that I have an idea of what McCain is up to with this.

This is another interesting piece of political rhetoric.

Let us say that you put 10 people in a room. Each of them has their own plan for how to accomplish some task. Each of them thinks that theirs is the best plan. You then introduce a non-binding resolution – a vote on whether the 10 people assembled accept or reject Person 1’s plan. Under these conditions, you will get a vote of 9 to 1 in favor of a resolution rejecting Person 1’s plan.

However, let us say that you introduce a slightly different resolution – a resolution that says, “Reject Person 1’s plan approve of Person 2’s plan.” Now, you are going to get a vote of 9 to 1 against a resolution that rejects Person 1’s plan and accepts Person 2’s plan.

McCain is in a win-win situation here. He can win by asserting that the Democrats have no alternative plan to offer, thus making the Democrats look bad. Or, if the Democrats come up with a plan, it will almost certainly be a plan that many people will criticize, at which point he can join the criticism of the Democrat’s plan.

Please note that these political dynamics exist without ever specifying the content of the plan. It does not matter what Person 1’s plan is, or Person 2’s plan, or any of them. The content of the plans is irrelevant. All that matters is a political dynamic where you have 10 people who love their own plan more than anybody else’s.

McCain is good at playing political games. So are the Democrats. Both of them are trying to exploit this dynamic – the Democrats by criticizing Bush without offering an alternative, and McCain by insisting on an alternative because no resolution could pass if it were made too specific.

I would hope, with the lives of troops hanging in the balance, the Senate would pay more attention to content and less on political maneuvering.

As it turns out, we will get nothing. The Republicans in the Senate blocked any Senate debate on Iraq today. The Senate now has to move on to the important business of passing a budget by February 15th, or the government comes to a halt. Maybe later, we can have an honest discussion of the best way out of this situation.

Or, maybe not.

Cervical Cancer Vaccine by Executive Fiat

Action items In some context of your own choosing, take some action today to promote the passage of a law in your state or country that will mandate that all girls get vaccinated for Human Papillomavirus (HPV). However, make sure that the actions taken respect the principle of a proper separation of powers that is necessary to protect the people from a tyrannical executive branch.

The Case of Texas

Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, has signed an executive order mandating that all girls in Texas get a vaccine for Human Papillomavirus (HPV), a major cause of cervical cancer.

I have one serious problem with this executive order – this is with a member of the Executive Branch of government taking legislative authority away from the legislature. As I have argued repeatedly with regard to President Bush’s signing statements, there is good reason for a system of checks and balances – too much power in too few hands is a recipe for disaster. This means leaving it to the legislature to make law.

I have no objection to the legislation itself, and I would certainly encourage any state to pass this legislation. The claim that this vaccine promotes promiscuity is an absurdity. The argument used against vaccinating children is as foolish as an argument prohibiting motorcycle drivers from wearing helmets, or prohibiting seat belts or air bags or child safety seats in automobiles, on the grounds that the possibility of getting maimed or killed in a wreck will cause people to drive more carefully.

Principles of Parental Obligation Revisited

In an earlier post titled, “Consent and Dignity: The Case of Ashley” I argued for a principle that governs one person making decisions for another that the agent should choose what the individual he is choosing for would have chosen for herself if she was rational. In fact, a rational person would choose to get this vaccine. Even a rational person who also decided to protect herself from sexually transmitted disease through abstinence has a reason to be concerned about a possible sexual assault, an unfaithful spouse, a spouse who was not so careful when younger, or a spouse who was a victim of a sexual assault.

In addition, I argued that this principle of doing what the individual one is choosing for would have chosen for herself has to consider the fact of the other person’s incompetence. If I knew that I was prone to make irrational decisions when gambling, it would be rational of me to take precautions against the high consequences of those mistakes. I could resolve to go gambling only with a certain amount of money and no access to any more money. Children are prone to make irrational decisions. Parents, whose obligation is to choose for children what those children would choose for themselves, have an obligation to protect children from their own irrational and immature choices.

Some people protest, “We have a right to decide how to raise our children!” Not when there is good evidence that one is raising one’s child in a way that puts the child’s life and health at risk. We can ask such a person, “What would you say of the parent who thinks that his child needs daily sexual stimulation to grow up healthy. Does, he have the right to raise his child as he sees fit?” The principle behind the answer to this question is that there is reason not to allow parents to “choose” to risk causing their child clear and scientifically demonstrable harm.

For these reasons I would certainly urge any legislature to support this law. Giving a child this vaccine is something that every good parent will do. However, this is an issue for the legislative branch, not the executive branch.

An Aside on Religious Beliefs and Harm

I have read comments from many parents who say, “I know that my child will never have extra-marital sex, so I know that they will never need this vaccine.” These parents are idiots. A parent can no more know this than one can know that their child will never use drugs, smoke, or drink. Nor can any parent ever know that their child will not be the victim of a sexual assault or find a partner who was not so careful.

As an aside, it is also worthy of mention that this is yet another case where people confounded by religious beliefs adopt attitudes that put the health and even the lives of others at risk – that put the lives and health of their own children at risk. I have not complained about religious beliefs when it leads people to doing things that help others or help protect people from harm. Yet, this is another item to add to the list where religious beliefs cause those who have them to put others at risk, or at least to refuse to remove them from harm’s way.

It is a habit of those who criticize religion to point to incidents in the past – crusades, inquisitions, slavery, and the like, as reason to condemn religion. This is actually a very poor argument. Unless the person one is talking to actually endorses the crusades, inquisitions, and slavery of the past it is unreasonable and unjust to accuse him of supporting those moral crimes.

However, it is perfectly legitimate to complain that a person’s religious beliefs, if they imply opposition to this legislation, would contribute to the deaths of thousands of tens of thousands of today’s children if they were to become widespread. This is a good reason to oppose any attempt to make those beliefs widespread. Yet, even here it the argument applies only those whose religious beliefs lead to opposition against giving children this vaccine.

Moral Principles of Government Power

In the case of Texas, such a bill faced heavy opposition. There was a very good chance that the legislature would not come up with the right answer in this issue. However, we have a lot of very good reasons to reject the principle that the Executive Branch may override the Legislative Branch whenever the Executive thinks the Legislature is mistaken. The legislature has the right to be wrong.

I can fully understand the temptation on the part of the governor to take action. If I were governor, I would approach this issue by imagining myself sitting in the hospital room of a young woman with cervical cancer. I would imagine myself being forced to tell her, “You are in this situation because your parents were fools. Even though I could have forced them to make a wiser choice . . . even though you would not have been in this situation if I had done so . . . I choose to allow your parents to remain fools and to put your health, even your life at risk. I cannot deny some responsibility for this.”

Yet, every would-be tyrant ever lived would love to have a principle of government that said, “The Executive Branch may assume legislative authority whenever it thinks that the legislature is wrong.”

It is all too tempting to adopt an attitude that says, “The Executive Branch is limited in its power whenever it, like the Bush Administration, is prone to do things that I do not like; and far less limited in its power when it does something I like.” However, this is not a viable principle to adopt. No doubt, the Executive Branch is not going to appeal to me to determine how much power it has. If it is given these overly broad powers, then it will use them whenever the Executive pleases to do so, not when it pleases me.

Adopting a narrower principle requires that I allow that there will be cases when the Executive Branch oversteps its boundaries even when they are doing something that I very much would like to see done, over the protests of a legislature who are opposed.

It is far more important, capable of saving society from far greater harms (as the Bush Administration’s abuse of this principle has proved), that the Executive Branch not be allowed to take for itself the power to pass legislation.

Education and Action

This is not to say that nothing should be done to protect those children from foolish parents. Instead, it argues for a strong campaign to educate the people to create a legislature that will pass this legislation. This campaign does not need to convince everybody, just enough people to actually get the bill passed.

This type of education campaign will actually be good for a society because it should lead to a better educated population. The Governor’s attempt to bypass the legislature not only forces this decision on a population whose representatives do not approve it, it also keeps the population in the dark as to the merits of this legislation. It is one thing to force an individual to perform some action. It is another to educate that person about the reasons why he should perform that action.

Those citizens who do not take steps to educate the population about the moral requirement to get the Legislature to approve this legislation, those are the citizens who should imagine themselves sitting at the bed of some future young woman telling her, “I could have saved you from this, but I did nothing.”

Michael Shermer: The Art of Political Compromise

The fourth presenter at the Beyond Belief 2006 Seminar (which I am commenting on in my weekend posts for the next few weeks) was Michael Shermer, founding editor and skeptic in chief of Skeptic Magazine.

Shermer spoke on the issue of alliances.

The main point of Shermer’s presentation was to argue that if one wants to accomplish anything, one needs to form alliances with others. A willingness to form alliances with others means compromise.

I think I can best illustrate Shermer’s case by looking at an extreme example. If you wish to accomplish something, but you refuse to work with anybody who does not totally agree with you on every issue, then you will have an organization of one person. There is no person on the planet in perfect agreement with you on everything.

If you were trying to form a political party in a “winner take all” political system like the United States, you need to form a big enough alliance to get a majority of the votes. This means a lot of compromising. Those people who insist that their party take positions that a majority of the people cannot support effectively insist on forming a party that cannot win elections.

In short, those who are pursuing political solutions in such a system should see their task as uniting the best 51% against the worst 49% - because the attempt to unite the best 49% against the worst 51% is not likely to do much good.

Shermer made this analogy to political parties explicit in his presentation. He identified himself as a libertarian, and noted that there were people in the Libertarian Party who insisted on pure idealistic purity on the part of other members. The result was that the Libertarian Party never made it out of the low single digits in terms of popularity (except in a few isolated regions of the country).

All of the earlier speakers talked about the differences between scientist methodology and religionist methodology. Steven Weingerg and Sam Harris, for example, spoke of the importance of authority in religion, where there are books and leaders who are assumed to have all of the truth and nothing encountered outside of religion is permitted to contradict this truth. While science, on the other hand, holds everything open to question and ready to be dropped as soon as sufficient evidence can be mustered for dropping it.

Shermer, without ever making this explicit, spoke of a way of thinking that is different from both of these – the way of politics. He begins with a fundamental truth of practical reason – in order to pick out the most efficient course of action a person first has to identify a goal. Once we know the end, then we can start looking at means to reaching that end. Against Harris, Shermer argued that Harris’ method is great if one’s goal is to simply get into peoples’ face about religion, but not useful if one wants to talk them out of religion and get them to embrace science.

There are two main differences between political thinking and scientific or religious thinking.

First, political thinking considers the effects of a proposition, not its meaning. If a scientist wants to argue in defense of P and against not-P, he presents empirical, testable evidence and shows it to be consistent with P and inconsistent with not-P. If a theist wishes to argue in defense of P then he finds a religious authority and asserts that this authority asserted P. If a politician wishes to get somebody to adopt P, then the politician appeals to emotion, rhetoric, and other mind games – whatever works to get people to accept P even if it is very poor evidence that P.

Second, political thinking is a realm of compromise. Neither science nor religion allows compromise.

In religion, the idea of compromise is out of the question. Religious truths are claimed to be universal and absolute. A religion need not hold that non-believers must be destroyed on Earth and will be condemned to hell in the afterlife. However, God’s tolerance of those who make a few mistakes on matters of religious dogma does not prevent that dogma from being ‘true’ in a religious context.

In the case of science, if one scientist answers that a particular scientific quantity is P and another argues that it is Q, the scientists will not get together and say, “The answer must be ((P + Q)/2).” No, the scientists will fight until either P is established as true, or Q is, or some third option R comes out on top. R might end up being equal to ((P + Q)/2), but R is not the right answer in virtue of the fact that it is ((P + Q)/2).

Politics, on the other hand, requires compromise. It is essential to the nature of politics that politicians be ready to give up their ‘truth’ in order to support a ‘fiction’. If one person wants a minimum wage of $9.00 and another thinks it should stay at $5.00, then the politician will see if they can gather enough votes to pass a minimum wage hike to $7.00. Politicians make deals in ways that neither scientists or theists are willing to allow.

Shermer is asking the audience to take a politician’s view of the disagreement between religion and science.

The main problem with talking people out of religion, according to Shermer, is that people’s social lives are seeped in religion.

If you give a person a choice between, say, Darwin and the theory of evolution in particular, or science in general, and his religion . . . . What you really asking them to do is give up their family, their friends, their social circle, their community, their social life, virtually every aspect of their life. . . . They won’t even get past the first paragraph of your book which, because they are not interested in giving all of that stuff up.

Shermer’s answer is to tell people that they do not need to give up anything. If God is eternal, it does not matter whether he created the world and populated it in in 6,000 years or billions of years.

If you believe God is the creator of all things and he is omnipotent and omniscient, then what difference does it make how he did it? Spoken word, lightning bolt out of the finger, natural selection, gravity.

There seems to me to be an obvious answer to Shermer’s argument. It matters how God did it, because the Bible/Koran/Torah/Whatever says that it matters. It matters because there are people out there whose family, friends, social circle, community, and every aspect of their life is not tied simply to the proposition, “God exists.” It is tied to the idea that everything in their bible is literally true. It is tied to such things as opposing homosexual marriage, blocking stem cell research, criminalizing abortion, requiring schools to teach children that all true patriots pledge allegiance to God, or – in other parts of the world – become suicide bombers, execute those who dare to teach anything other than their interpretation of holy text, and view science as the enemy of God.

In a sense, this blog follows Shermer’s strategy. I do not argue about the existence or non-existence of a God, because I do not believe that this question in itself is important. The proposition, “God exists” (because God is a made-up entity and, as such, can have whatever qualities the speaker decides to assign to Him) is compatible with anything else.

I have said before, the proposition “God exists” is quite compatible with the idea that God created the universe and filled it with moral value and that desire utilitarianism describes this moral system that God created. On this model, there is no substantive difference between the Christian slogan, “What would Jesus do?” and the desire-utilitarian slogan, “Do that act that a person with good desires (desires that tend to fulfill other desires) would perform.” I see no reason to be particularly worried about such a person.

If somebody wants to add, “God will condemn to hell those who do not act as a person with good desires (desires that tend to fulfill other desires) would act,” and reward with heaven those who do act in this way, that person is not a threat to me or anybody I care about. As such, I do not focus any attention on such people. I focus, instead, on those whose religious beliefs cause them to adopt attitudes that make them a threat to others.

This follows the spirit of Shermer’s strategy because I have asked the question of what my goals are, and I have excluded the requirement that others agree with me on things that are not essential to that goal. In this case, it is to make the world a better place than it would have otherwise been in a universe where desires are the only reasons for action that actually exist. Others do not even need to agree with me that desires are the only reasons for action that exist to act as a person with good desires would act.

However, I do not pretend that asking most Christians to accept even this compromise would not require asking them to give up their family, friends, social circle, and virtually every aspect of their life. They have built that life in a community that thinks Jesus would condemn homosexuality, block stem cell research, criminalize abortion, and demand that all true patriots pledge allegiance to God. Their Jesus is not a desire-utilitarian. As such, their Jesus is somebody who would do a great deal of harm in the name of God, and doing what Jesus would do also means doing a great deal of harm in the name of God.

Shermer is not wrong. It is the case that, to accomplish anything, one cannot refuse to form alliances with those who one disagrees with on certain issues. It is wise to ask, “Is this issue relevant to my goals?” If not, then there is no reason not to form an alliance with those who do not have the same views on irrelevant issues. It is true that a prudent individual keeps this fact in mind. However, there are limits. There are certainly views out there that a person with a concern to make the world a better place has reason to oppose, and to oppose directly.

Sam Harris: The Tone of Political Discourse

This is the third in a series of posts that I am doing, going through the presentations made at Beyond Belief 2006.

Sam Harris, the author of A Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith was the third speaker at the conference. He claimed that science is fundamentally at odds with religion because both make claims about was, what is, and what will be. However, according to Harris, religious claims are based on bad evidence, and religion allows people to be en masse what only an insane person could believe as an individual. These crazy beliefs, he claims, are driving us into an abyss where we could lose everything.

As is typically the case when Harris talks, the conversation afterwards does not focus on whether his claims are true or false, but whether it is prudent or imprudent for him to say them the way he does. Immediately after his presentation, Lawrence Krauss (the second presenter who I wrote about last week), objected that it is better to praise rationality than to condemn irrationality.

It is interesting, and well worth the exercise, to listen to Harris speak and, at the end of each sentence, ask, “Is that true?”

There are some things that Harris says I have found untrue. First, I do not condemn irrationality in all instances. I hold that rationality takes too much time and, if we were to demand perfect rationality in all things, we would all end up dead. Prudence demands that we sometimes use quick rules that do not always yield the right answer, but which yields answers more quickly, in cases where a quick probably right answer is much better than a slow but certainly right answer.

Also, I have written in the past, I object to an assumption that is implicit in Harris’ writing that, if Person 1 believes X and Y, and Person 2 believes X and not-Y, that Person 1 is morally culpable for the fact that Person 2 believes not-Y (on the basis that he agrees with Person 2 on X). That is to say, religious moderates are blameworthy because of the excesses of religious extremists. I hold that such accusations are fundamentally unfair.

Be that as it may, I listen to much of what Harris says, and I can say after each sentence, “That is true.” It may not be diplomatically phrased, but that does not change its truth value. Even if true, apparently, these are truths that are not to be spoken because speaking them has bad consequences.

These points relate to a couple of items I read in the past few days.

Austin Cline at "About: Agnosticism/Atheism" wrote in a posting "Atheism in Trouble? No, Christianity Has Already Lost" responded this week to an editorial in Christianity Today that spoke about “The New Intolerance” of Harris and Dawkins.

Vjack at "Atheist Revolution" recently posted an article in which he asked, “The New Atheism: A Boon to the Religious Right?”

I want to make a quick digression here. In the Christianity Today editorial, the authors pull a rhetorical trick by those who cannot stand being criticized by applying the term ‘intolerance’ to what is in fact ‘criticism’. I discuss the difference in an earlier posting, “Speaking vs. Acting”.)

On the issue of tone, I want to make two points.

(1) Atheists do not get to pick their tone. Their tone is going to be picked for them by the media, who determine which speakers it will broadcast and which they will not.

(2) There is no way to bring about change and end an injustice without making those who are defending injustice uncomfortable in that position, and those who have traditionally been most comfortable in that position are simply going to get angry.

The Media

In “Atheist Evangelism and Political Strategy,” I argued that the media is going to select the voice for various factions in conflict in society, and they are going to do so in whatever way brings the highest ratings. They are in the job of making money, and making money means bringing eyeballs to the advertisements that their sponsors have paid for.

It is simply bad business to create a show that makes atheists feel good and alienates evangelicals, when it is far more profitable to create a show that makes evangelicals feel good and alienates atheists. Since atheists are already the most hated group in the country, showing atheists as people deserving of hate is clearly one way of showing viewers what they want to see, and showing them what they want to see is the best way to make sure that they come back to see more.

A case in point can be found in a recent segment of Paua Zahn Now (which Austin Cline discusses on his site) in which two atheist-bashers and an incompetent defender were invited onto a panel to discuss anti-atheist discrimination.

Ultimately, this is about like inviting two Nazis and a Stalinist into a room to discuss whether the Jews are being treated unjustly. We do not have to watch the show to know what they are going to say.

(Note: Some may interpret this as a statement equating Catholics with Nazis. This, of course, is a distortion which, if used, will only demonstrate a willingness on the part of the speaker to hide his bigotry under a smoke screen of rhetoric. The above paragraph is meant to demonstrate the unfairness of an episode in which two attackers and an inept defender discuss the persecution of an unrepresented group by using an extreme example that makes this unfairness most obvious.)

I suspect that Zahn did not intentionally or knowingly create an unfair show. Instead, what probably happened is that, like any successful television personality, she always keeps the question of ratings in the back of her mind. Without even any conscious thought, a show consisting of two atheist bashers and an inept defender probably just felt like a good idea. She could not explain why it felt like a good idea, but it just seemed the right thing to do.

It seemed the right thing to do because, where ratings are a concern, there is good reason to provide atheist-bashers with a few minutes of guiltless atheist bashing. This will please a large segment of the population and help to ensure that they will come back later for some more of those good feelings.

The point of this is that anybody who is concerned about poor representations of atheists in front of the camera needs to find a way to stand up and do something to attract the camera towards something that he thinks is a better representation. He must keep in mind that the camera will always gravitate towards whatever makes the audience feel good, and we live in a culture where the audience feels good when they are shown images of atheists they can hate.

One final caveat: This quest to attract the camera must not involve violence. Though cameras have an annoying tendency to always turn towards violence, it still only focuses on those who deserve to be condemned.

Making Others Uncomfortable

The second point that I want to comment on is that there will not be any change without making the perpetrators of injustice actually feel uncomfortable in their position. If you make them feel uncomfortable, some of them are going to hate you for it. They will get angry. They will attack. If one is too timid to make the defenders of injustice angry or too fearful of their attack, then one should not be in the job of fighting injustice.

Unless a person is made uncomfortable in his current position, he has no reason to change it.

When blacks passively walked to the back of the bus, whites - even white moderates - had no reason to complain or to change the status quo. After all, they got the best seats. Why change?

The same is true when blacks passively walked to the 'colored' section of restaurants and used the 'colored' rest rooms, where the best seats were reserved for whites. When white politicians blocked access to the polls by black voters with literacy tests and poll taxes that blacks could not pass or pay (because of discrimination in schools and in employment), blacks who decided not to fight the system and stay home gave the whites the political power they wanted. Why would any white person in this type of system want to see it changed?

It was when blacks refused to move to the back of the bus, sat in the white section of the restaurant, and insisted on removing the barriers that kept them from voting, that things started to change.

However, they also got a lot of people upset – the white people who were accustomed to always having the best seats on the busses and in restaurants, the best schools, the best jobs, and all of the political power.

Was there any way to effect this change without making those who sat comfortably in a position of power from getting upset? I think it is unlikely. I think it is quite odd to hear people make arguments that, if they were made in the slave era of the 1860s, would sound something like, “If we make the white master as comfortable as possible and fulfill his every want and need, this is the best way we can ever hope for to get him to set us free.”

Why would he want to do that?

Dividing a school classroom into a group that stands and pledges allegiance and a group that sits and shows no allegiance is no different than dividing a restaurant between a 'white' and a 'colored' section.

There is no difference between a President who says, "We need common sense judges who realize that our rights come from God, and that is the type of judge I intend to appoint," and a Southern politician who says, “We need white, literate voters and those are the only type that I will allow to vote.”

All of this has the effect of making the theists among us comfortable with the fact that there is a huge segment of the population that they do not need to compete against when it comes to political power – a group of people who have no hope of getting elected – because they have created a set of institutions that surround children from the first day they enter school with the message, “WE trust in God and pledge allegiance to the United States; THEY do not trust in God and have no allegiance to the United States.”

These are not things that atheists can put an end to by voluntarily sitting in the 'colored' section of the classroom during the Pledge of Allegiance, while the ‘white’ kids stand and profess their loyalty to America. And it does no good to paint oneself white and stand with the white kids (so that they do not treat you like a 'colored' person). This does nothing to end the discrimination; it only legitimizes it.

What it takes is making it obvious that those who perpetuate this type of culture are guilty of a gross immorality. It requires making them feel ashamed of themselves, which is going to make some of them very angry.

Conclusion

I am not denying that there are more effective and least effective ways of making change. However, there is no effective way of making change that does not require making those who are guilty of treating others unjustly feel uncomfortable in that position, and that means making some of them very angry. Change will occur when there are enough people willing to stand up to this anger and shout, “You are wrong! I have a right to be here, and I am not going away!”

Atheists pride themselves on the fact that they live in the real world. Well, these are parts of the real world that the atheist lives in. The media will not be the atheists’ friend as long as atheists are the most hated group, and viewers are going to give more favorable ratings to atheist-bashing shows such as Fox News. This does not mean that there is no room for a few fringe atheist-friendly shows, just as there were black bars and restaurants in the early 1900s. They’re just going to have a very small section of the market.

And atheists are not going to solve anything by talking among themselves, complaining to each other about the treatment they get. They will have to do something to get those who would never come to an atheist blog (such as this) to take notice.

As I have said before, this is not an atheist blog. I have no interest in converting people to atheism, and give no space to discussing arguments for or against the existence of God. My interest is in converting others into people who will benefit their neighbors and do no harm to them. Where religious beliefs turn others into people who do harm, I am more than ready to condemn those beliefs. Where religious beliefs are harmless or turn others into people who benefit their neighbors, I see no reason to complain.

Anti-atheist bigotry, moving the atheist into the ‘colored’ section of the classroom, the town hall, and denying them a seat in government entirely, is just one area where certain religious beliefs cause people to harm others.

Global Warming and Externalities Tax

I mentioned yesterday that I was considering a change in focus for this blog.

One change I hope to make is to focus less on talk, and more on action. Many of my weekday blogs will contain a requested action and reasons for that action.

For example, this week I would like to recommend arguing for an externalities tax rather than caps to control greenhouse gasses.

Action:

(1) Write to your federal Representative or Senator - or, if you live outside of the United State, contact the appropriate government leader, and explain that you would prefer that the government impose some sort of externalities tax on industries that contribute to global warming, rather than ceilings or caps on emissions.

(2) Make the same recommendation to any person or group you have contact with to promote popular support for a tax over a cap.

Background

The Senate is considering several pieces of legislation, all intending to put mandatory caps on greenhouse gasses. An externalities tax (and, I will argue, an “unjust profits tax”) on companies that contribute to global warming makes far more sense.

Reasons for Action

The Economic Case

Desires are the only reasons for action that exist. Good desires are desires that tend to fulfill other desires. Good desires are the only desires we have reasons for actions to promote. (I will not repeat this in every post, but it is the fundamental principle of desire utilitarianism on which I base the posts in this blog.)

Basically, it is rational to add one more of something whenever the benefits of adding one more exceed the costs. For example, it is rational for a society to build one more car to the degree that the social benefits of one more car exceed the costs. However, with each car built, the benefits decrease and the (opportunity) costs increase. So, it is not rational to build an infinite number of cars. Yet, neither is it rational to build none.

Applying this to global warming, it is rational to produce a unit of green house gas in the atmosphere when the benefits of the activity that produce that increase exceed the costs of producing that unit of greenhouse gas. The level at which costs exceed benefits is the level at which we should freeze greenhouse gas concentrations.

Of course, this theory faces a lot of practical problems. We do not know precisely what the costs and benefits are. We know even less what the costs and benefits will be in the future, since this depends on technology that does not exist yet.

Yet, these facts are exactly the facts that argue for a tax over a carbon emissions cap. The things we do not know means that we can only guess at the level where additional greenhouse gasses will do more harm than good. Congress might pick a number that is too low, costing us the benefits of the activity we are forced to give up. Congress might pick a number that is too high, failing to prevent suffering that could otherwise be prevented.

More importantly, changes in technology may argue for changes in the number. If Congress has set the number, then any change that responds to new technology would require a huge political debate. Changes may take a great deal of time, during which our society will be operating under legislation that does more harm than good.

A tax, particularly one that is tied to output, will provide the organization with an incentive to invest in GHG-reducing technologies whenever the benefit from the technology (in terms of cost savings) exceeds the cost of the technology. Entrepreneurs are allowed to investigate whatever options they can dream up. If there is no way to reduce emissions efficiently, then we learn to live with the results. We will still be better off than we would be cutting emissions where the costs of the cut exceed the benefits.

Ideally, the value of the tax will be tied to the costs of the damage done by greenhouse gas emissions. Its purpose will be to raise money for research and for compensating people for the harm suffered.

This is not a perfect solution. Then again, doing nothing is not a perfect solution. Caps are not perfect solution. We will not discover a perfect solution. The best we can hope for is to discover the least imperfect solution. Because an externalities tax puts innovation and entrepreneurial skills to work solving the global warming problem, it is the least imperfect solution.

The Moral Case

Those Who Do Harm, Pay

There is a moral dimension to this in that if one person performs an act that harms another, it is the person who does the harming who should pay for the costs, not the person harmed.

Putting the burden on the person harmed is a type of wealth redistribution scheme. In this case, it redistributes the wealth from the poor (who cannot afford to avoid the costs) to the rich (who gain the income from selling a product that causes harm to others).

This should not be a tax on customers, but a tax on those industries that create products that contribute to global warming. One reason is political - such a tax will be easier to sell. Another reason is efficiency - there are certain economies to be had by having the tax computed by a smaller number of entities. Those industries will have a choice to absorb the costs and take a reduction in profits, or to pass those costs onto customers and thereby modify customer behavior.

A Wrongful Profits Tax

Imagine a case in which a hit-and-run driver gets caught after hitting a person at a street corner and leaving the scene of the crime. After being caught, he releases a statement saying that the reason that he left the scene is because it was convenient and profitable for him to believe that the pedestrian he hit was not harmed. This story came to light when the driver was caught trying to conceal evidence that linked him to the crime. Furthermore, the hit-and-run driver had government officials, including the mayor, working with him to bury the truth about the accident, in the hopes that the information would not come to light.

This is not a paradigm of moral virtue.

This situation describes the case that the Bush Administration and several companies, not the least of which being Exxon-Mobile – find themselves in.

Corporate Responsibility

Exxon–Mobile and other companies engaged in a calculated campaign that effectively invested millions of dollars to convince people to act in ways that would ultimately end up causing trillions of dollars of damage to themselves and others, for the sake of putting billions of dollars into the pockets of these investors.

The moral crime is that a number of companies conspired to hide scientific fact behind a smoke screen of demagoguery and deception. They hired companies and established or funded 'think tanks' made up of liars-for-hire who mastered a set of tools fine tuned by empirical research to be effective means of deception. Yet, they faced a situation in which immediate action could significantly have reduced the amount of damage that global warming could do. By getting people to put off doing anything to solve the problem, these companies sought to make money, while doing trillions of dollars worth of damage to future generations.

Ultimately, when all is said and done, the executives of these companies will have committed a crime as destructive, in terms of both the destruction of real property and loss of life, as Hitler’s War or Stalin’s Purges, all for the sake of money in the bank.

Yet, there will be no war crimes, no Nuremburg trials. The villains in this case, unless they grow a conscience and voluntarily offer retribution for their moral crimes, will die wealthy.

The Bush Administration as Accomplice

This week, the House of Representatives committee held hearings on the degree to which the Bush Administration joined in this collusion, pressuring scientists to hide the facts on the trillions of dollars and countless lives to be lost, while their campaign contributors continued to haul in profits.

Today, the International Committee on Climate Change released its 2007 report. One of the phases of this report is for government officials to “buy off” on the scientific findings. In short, politicians have been given the power to determine scientific law – or, at least, to determine what will be said about scientific law. Again, the Bush Administration has gone to work defending those clients who spend millions of dollars to do trillions of dollars worth of damage to others so that they can become billions of dollars richer. In short, they are still demanding that the scientific reports do not contradict political and economic expedience for their customers.

It is ironic that, on the same day the Bush Administration was performing this service for its client, Exxon-Mobile posted a record $40 billion in profits.

I have written against any windfall profits tax in the past. I have compared a windfall profits tax to a major’s decision during a time of famine to punish anybody in the town who dares to hunt or gather food for the village. At a time of desperate need, a society wants to reward such people, not punish them.

However, in the name of justice, the Federal Government has good reason to level a tax against companies such as Exxon-Mobile, taking back some of their billions of dollars in profits and using that money to avoid the trillions of dollars in damage that these companies were more than happy to allow others to suffer.

This is not a windfall profits tax. These companies are not being taxed for making honest profits. This is an unjust profits tax – a tax on profits gained through a campaign of deception engineered to cause people to sacrifice their own interests and the interests of their children. This tax would not target profits. It would target deceivers – in the hopes that future generations will have a better grasp of the moral contemptibility of profiting through deception that does harm to others.

Conclusion

Typically, I am opposed to sending letters to Senators and Representatives. Typically, they do no good. To get a Senator or Congressman to change his stand on any issue, one has to make it profitable (in terms of votes) for them to take that position. This means convincing voters to support the Senator who holds that position and withholding support of any who do not.

The part of the action statement that talks about contacting one’s representative is just a way of letting them know that there are other, better options. The more important point is to drum up support for such options by promoting them in the presence of others.

Another important step to take is to make sure that companies cannot profit from campaigns of deception that do trillions of dollars worth of damage to customers. We will have a better society to the degree that corporate executives such as this do not exist.