E2.0: Ronald de Sousa: A Passion for Science

This is the 24th in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

In the previous presentation, Greg Epstein argued for a culture of humanism, and ended his presentation with a song. In this presentation, Ronald d’Sousa speaks about developing a passion for science, and ends in a poem.

In listening to de Sousa’s presentation, I noticed that he blurred a distinction that I think it is important to unblur. There has been a dispute among atheist bloggers about the legitimacy of ‘framing’. In the context of this debate, ‘framing’ means paying attention to how certain facts may be perceived by the public, and presenting those facts in ways that will make them more acceptable.

In the political world, this type of practice is known as ‘spin.’ Politicians do this in order to give their policies an appearance that might not be totally accurate, but will make it easier to get past the people. Thus, a bill that allows companies to poison their neighbors by removing mandatory restrictions on air pollution and replacing them with voluntary restrictions can be known as the ‘clean air act’. A bill that effectively repeals the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th Amendments to the Constitution can be called ‘The Patriot Act’.

For the most part, framing is lying, and nothing that a person who values the truth can endorse. In fact, a great deal of the difficulties we have in creating sound policies in this country is due to the fact that we, as a culture, have little or no respect for truth. Lying (or ‘framing’ has become mainstream, to the degree that many people have lost the ability to tell the difference between fact and fiction.

In making this presentation, de Sousa uses the term ‘framing’ and speaks about framing as a good thing. However, what he ends up talking about is different, and the difference is important.

Framing has to do with the manipulation of belief. De Sousa does not actually talk about manipulating our beliefs (coating them in ways that make them easier to swallow). He actually talks about manipulating our desires. He talks about the passion for science – creating a love for knowledge, and a wonder and awe in the aspects of nature.

To illustrate his point, he suggests a parable. In this story, a man finds a stone that looks like a human face. It is not a perfect likeness – there are distortions and flaws in the image. However, he still takes it home and marvels about how millions of years of erosion from wind and water has created such a stone. Then a friend comes over, sees the rock, and identifies it as a reject from a local sculpture. Its features (with its flaws and distortion) were not the product of natural phenomena, but the flawed efforts of a designer. Suddenly, the stone loses its value. It becomes just another worthless rock.

This, according to de Sousa, is how atheists and humanists should paint the world. They should be generating a passion of awe and wonder for a universe that, through billions of years, can bring a collection of molecules together to form us. We can expect that such a process will have a few flaws and distortions. In contrast, to think of the universe, with its flaws and distortions, as the output of a designer means that it is not so awesome and marvelous. It means that the universe is rather ordinary – as awesome as laptop that sometimes locks up and loses one’s documents, or a car that does not always start.

As a desire utilitarian, I can fully endorse this project, while condemning the practice of ‘framing’ mentioned earlier. We have many and strong reasons to promote a love of truth – even unpleasant truth – because those truths are not going to go away simply because we do not like them.

I have agreed that, given our limited resources, it is often better to understand an approximation of a truth than to get every detail right. In most of our everyday experience, Newtonian physics gives us answers that are close enough to the truth for all practical purposes. The complexities of Einstein’s equations do not give us answers that are useful, even if they are more accurate.

However, recognizing these types of limitations is not what people typically talk about when they talk about framing. All we need to do for our statements to be true is simply to admit to some measure of uncertainty. The person using Newtonian calculations who says that the car should reach 60 miles per hour in 4.4 seconds simply needs to be understood as saying, “The car should reach close-enough-to-60 miles per hour in close-enough-to-4.4 seconds.’ Understood in this way, the statement is true, and no ‘framing’ is involved.

All of this is consistent with a love for truth.

Indeed, it is important here to note that I am speaking of a love for truth – a passion that says that a true statement is not only more useful than a false statement, but where an agent values truth for its own sake independent of its usefulness, and condemn even harmless fiction. A difference between a love of truth and the practical utility of truth is that, when an agent encounters a useful fiction, the lover of truth will hate it for being fiction, where the person who sees truth as being merely practical will reject it for being impractical.

The same is true of a person who has a love of knowledge.

I recall incidents in graduate school, when I was totally engrossed in reading a good book, suddenly thinking, “I’ve got to put this away. I’ve good schoolwork I need to do for tomorrow.” An instant later I realized that the book I was reading was my schoolwork. I enjoyed graduate school, and would clearly have done the same job even outside of school.

That’s easy enough to prove. After all, that’s what I’m doing in this blog – all of the things that I did in graduate school, without a single shred of college credit.

Each morning I log onto the Astronomy Picture of the Day to learn what surprise they have in store for me. They always have a short paragraph describing the science behind whatever image they are showing – explaining how the colors of a nebulae are due to its reflecting light from a nearby star or glowing with the energy of a nearby star. In all of these cases, the scientific facts about the hydrogen atoms, the distance in light years, the size of the cloud, all add to how amazing the picture is.

And every valentine’s day, I send my wife a rose.

This is not ‘framing’ science the way the term is typically understood. This is not misrepresenting scientific findings – promoting false beliefs and misunderstandings – in order to win a political or social contest that cares nothing about facts. This has to do with promoting passions, in the hope that people will come to find value in science even where it is not useful – value in science and truth and knowledge for its own sake.

D’Souza did not only speak about science. He spoke about living life as an atheist. There is the fact that no divine intervention will save us. When we pull together and accomplish some end – whether it is landing on the moon or ending small pox or building a nation that is substantially free of violence – these are things that we can be proud of. These are things that add value to a life, and can make a life worth living.

Reflections on Rejected Moral Theories

Hello, readers.

How’s life?

Personally, I’ve been doing a little soul searching, trying to see how my life so far measures up with what I wanted my life to be. Of course, I found no soul. But that does not affect the measure of my life so far.

This blog . . . as long-time readers already know . . . represents my attempt to make good on an oath that I gave to myself when I was 16 years old to leave the world a better place than it would have otherwise been if I had not lived. Of course, I needed to know what ‘better’ was if I was going to actually fulfill this goal. I took the attitude, when I was 16 years old, that I honestly did not know. I was hearing different people making different claims, all of them perfectly certain that they were right and everybody who disagreed with them was wrong, and I absolutely did not know which to pick.

When I thought of the certainty that others expressed I thought that this was the greatest hypocrisy. “How could you be so certain of being right – certain to the degree that you are willing to impose huge costs on others – when there are people out there who are as smart as you are saying that you are wrong?”

In fact, it did not take me long to realize that one way to make the world a better place than it would have otherwise been would be to do something against this arrogance.

I learned that one of the things that people do to get themselves into this mindset was to trust their feelings. They did not look at the arguments – at the reasons for adopting one view over another. Instead, they would hold a proposition in their mind and judge how it caused them to feel. If they liked the feel of an idea, then they asserted that it was true, and so absolutely true that it justified whatever harms might be inflicted on others as a result of promoting that belief.

I never trusted my feelings. I always thought that feelings were the prejudices and bigotries that I was raised with, and were never to be given any weight unless I could put a solid foundation of reason underneath them.

It was easy to see why a person should not trust their feelings. Every atrocity committed in human history was committed by people who made themselves comfortable with their crimes. I have no doubt that the vast majority of the slave owners in the American south felt perfectly comfortable with the idea of owning slaves. The inquisitors and crusaders of Europe were of a mindset that they had trouble not sleeping if they were to spare the life of an infidel or a Muslim. The every-day crimes that I see around me, from the person who abuses a child to those who view homosexuality as the biggest threat America faces, are all perfectly comfortable with the ‘feel’ of their thoughts and actions.

I see this as reason to distrust feelings, not because these things that others accept ‘feel’ wrong to me. I distrust feelings because I am surrounded by people whose feelings differ, who cannot all be right. The evidence makes it abundantly clear that feelings are not to be trusted.

So, as I sat there in my American History class thinking about making the world a better place, I knew that I could not trust my feelings to tell me what that was. I knew that I could not just grab on to some sort of cause that I liked and start working on promoting it – because I would likely be making a mistake. I decided that I needed to learn a lot more than I already knew before I could make sure that I was actually making the world better.

And still I was surrounded by people who, out of arrogance, presumed that they only need measure how they felt about things to determine that they were fighting on the right side, and that it was safe to ignore everybody who felt that they were wrong.

So the fighting continued.

It seemed that one thing that a person could do in order to make the world a better place was just to deflate some of the arrogance out there – to invite people to ask themselves, “Am I right? Am I so certain that I am right that I am willing to inflict harm on others in the name of my own moral perfection?”

Anyway, while so many people were arrogantly presuming their own moral perfection, I went off to college to study value theory – to try to find out what the reality of ‘better’ actually is.

I learned a lot of 12 years of college. I gave the issues that haunted me a lot of thought to finding out what ‘better’ was, and I ruled out a lot of theories.

I ruled out divine command systems at the start because God does not exist. And even if God did exist, how could we answer the question that what God commanded us to do was better than what God prohibited us from doing?

I ruled out libertarian theories because ‘man qua man’ does not exist, and the theory makes an entirely invalid leap from ‘is’ to ‘ought’.

I ruled out natural rights based theories because advocates of these theories could not tell me what a right is, or how I can find one in nature.

I ruled out non-natural theories because, if value cannot be reduced to something natural (something in the universe that ‘is’) then it makes more sense to say that value does not exist then it does to postulate non-natural entities.

I ruled out act-utilitarian theories because the only way a human can always perform that act that maximizes utility is if a human has only one desire – the desire to maximize utility.

I ruled out rule-utilitarian theories because they collapse into act-utilitarian theories.

I ruled out happiness theories because whenever happiness and truth when different routes, value followed truth, not happiness.

I ruled out subjectivist theories because, if everything is a matter of opinion – if A is just as valid as not-A – then there is no reason to adopt A or not-A and adopting either would be a mistake.

I ruled out emotivist theories because moral statements behave in all instances like propositions.

I ruled out theories that ground morality on genetics because the advocate of genetic morality cannot answer the question, “Is X moral because it is loved by our genes, or is X loved by our genes because it is moral?” If the former, then the most atrocious acts can be moral. And if it is the later, then morality is something outside of our genes.

I ruled out intuitionism because it made more sense to view our intuitions in terms of the prejudices and bigotries we were raised with than some type of supernatural connection to some mysterious moral truth.

Yet, in spite of these flaws, each of these theories have people who latch onto it as tightly as any religion, and who refuse to entertain any objection.

When people latch on to a flawed idea with the tenacity of a religion, and think that their attitudes are so well grounded that it is perfectly legitimate to use that system to advocate harming others in some way, we have (or potentially have) a very serious problem.

So, perhaps, one way to make the world a better place than it would have otherwise been would be to simply point out to people the errors in following any of these flawed systems. I do not really need to advance a separate system that I thought was true. It would be enough to simply clear away some of the brush – the garbage ideas that litter the moral landscape – to make some room for ideas that made sense.

Morality and Being Human

“Human” is not a morally relevant category. By this I mean that nothing of moral consequence necessarily hinges on whether or not a person is or is not human.

Recently, I have seen it mentioned in a few places that the fact that an entity is ‘human’ has profound moral consequences. For example, in Lee Silver’s presentation at Beyond Belief 2, he quoted a source that said that science had proved that abortion was wrong because science had proved that a human life starts at conception.

Richard, in a comment to yesterday’s blog, asked me to clarify whether my claim, the moral quality of an action does not depend on the agent’s reasons for performing it by asking, Do you mean a *human* action, or any action?

Plus there is a line in the Star Trek movie, “The Undiscovered Country,” where Chekov says, “Everybody is entitled to basic human rights,” and a Klingon responds, “Human rights. The very name is racist.”

In fact, the fact that ‘human’ is not a moral category can be most easily demonstrated by appeal to science fiction, where humans encounter a wide variety of non-human life forms, all of which have moral worth. The statement in Star Trek IV was, in fact, racist. There is no such thing as human rights. There are only rights.

So, in my answer to Richard’s question, I do not mean *human* action in the sense that the fact that an action was performed by a human has special moral significance. The actions that I am speaking about are intentional actions – actions motivated by beliefs and, more importantly, (malleable) desires, regardless of the species of the agent that performed them.

Wherever desires are malleable we have reason to lend our support to a project of promoting desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others, and inhibiting desires that tend to thwart the desires of others. It does not matter whether we find those desires in a human, a Vulcan, a pet (the phrase ‘bad dog’ is, in fact, a moral statement), or a god.

Value consists in relationships between states of affairs and desires. Moral value consists in relationships between malleable desires and other desires. It has to do with desires that people generally have reason to promote (because they tend to fulfill other desires) and desires that people generally have reason to inhibit (because they tend to thwart other desires). The genetic composition of the agent is not a part of the formula. Does the agent have desires (reasons for action)? Does the agent have the capacity to figure out that certain malleable desires in others will tend to either promote or inhibit the fulfillment of his own desires). If so, we have all we need for moralit – without once mentioning the biological family of the agent.

If a being has no desires, then it has no reasons for action. It has no reason to promote certain desires in others or to inhibit other desires. It has no reason to do anything. That which has no desires cannot be harmed in any morally relevant way by the actions of another. Abortion does not harm the interests of a fetus that does not yet have desires.

In the vast majority of cases, it does not thwart the desires of those who are opposed to abortion either. Those who are opposed to abortion have this position because they think that something of intrinsic merit is being destroyed. Yet, this belief that something of intrinsic merit is being destroyed is false. The desire on the part of those who oppose abortion to preserve something of intrinsic merit cannot be fulfilled. Even if abortion were made illegal, a desire to protect a state of intrinsic merit can never be fulfilled, because no ‘state of intrinsic merit’ exists. Only a false belief in a state of intrinsic merit exists. False beliefs are poor justification for real-world laws.

It may thwart the desires of other people who have an aversion to abortion. However, The issue also goes the other way. The fact that an individual is a ‘human’ does not automatically grant it moral rights. In order to have rights, an individual has to have interests. In order to have interests, an individual has to have desires – has to have the capacity to wish that something were the case, before those interests can be violated, and the individual can be wronged.

So, the concept of ‘human’ is both too broad and too narrow to encompass the realm of moral concerns. It is too narrow in that non-human things with desires also have interests, and desires to fulfill or thwart other interests will necessarily imply desires that fulfill or thwart the interests of non-human entities. It is too broad in that there are humans without desires, and thus humans without interests, and thus humans that cannot be wronged.

Teaching Intelligent Design

Today, I want to defend the proposition that we should be teaching intelligent design in science classes.

Recent events (and not-so-recent events) have shown us that there is a serious deficiency in our education system. There are a lot of people in this country who think that intelligent design counts as a scientific theory. The numbers of people who believe this tells us that our education system has let us down. It has failed in its mission to help students to understand what a scientific theory is. Armed with that knowledge, they should find it much easier to see through the smoke and mirrors and legislative bullying of those who advocate creationism in its various forms.

It is a travesty of our educational system that so many young students can go through science classes in this country and graduate with such a poor understanding of what science is. The mere fact that we have such an ignorant population should be a cause of embarrassment in its own right. When America shows up at the bottom (or near the bottom) of countries when it comes to an understanding of scientific facts, our politicians should hang their head in shame for their failure, and the people themselves should take this as a reason to resolve to elect better politicians in the future.

Even worse than the pure shame of this national ignorance is the cost. Americans are spending huge quantities of money trying to get myth and superstition taught as science, and huge quantities of money fighting it. These conflicts are tying up the courts and diverting huge amounts of labor-hours into a worthless struggle that could be devoted to more productive concerns. In other words, we are losing money. What is the public education system for but to give Americans knowledge that will help our economy thrive and prosper? What is the public education system for, then, if not to teach people the ignorance and the waste associated with advancing the doctrine that intelligent design is science.

When I say that intelligent design should be taught in science classes, I am not saying that it should be alluded to. I am saying that science teachers should dedicate at least a class period to looking at intelligent design as a paradigm case of ‘not science’. When the lecture is done, the students should be tested on these facts. Those who fail – those who cannot explain why intelligent design fails to be a scientific theory. One of the measures by which we judge the quality of education in a school should be in terms of the percentage of students who can explain why intelligent design is not science, with schools (and students) counted down appropriately to the degree that neither can meet these simple requirements.

This way, when a student gets to college, the college biology teachers do not need to waste their time teaching students things that the students should have learned in high school. Students should enter their first college science classes knowing that the way that a theory gets contested is by putting it up against another theory, drawing implications from each theory as to what would happen under different circumstances, creating a set of predictions that can then be tested by observation. Whereas intelligent design theory cannot provide an instance where it makes a more reliable and accurate prediction than evolution.

Advocates of intelligent design do sometimes claim to have experiments that disprove evolution. For example, they claim that we should be able to put some creature in a given environment, come back in a few thousand years, and see if a new species springs up. However, since evolutionary theory does not predict that the results of such an experiment will be a new species, it is simply not the case that this experiment would be a test as to whether evolutionary theory can withstand empirical verification. A proper experiment must look at outcomes that a scientific theory actually exists.

Of course, this too is symptomatic of the overwhelming ignorance of science in this country. It is not surprising to note that those people who are so uneducated on the nature of science that they classify intelligent design as science are also too ignorant to construct a proper scientific experiment.

It does not matter that there are a few people who call themselves scientists who go along with this nonsense. In every field there will always be a bottom ten percent. The trick – and the purpose of science education – is to try to keep the levels of ignorance exhibited by the thesis that intelligent design is science. It is a bizarre form of education to allow students to point to a student in the corner that got the wrong answer on a test and claim that the ignorance of a few justifies the ignorance of the many.

In fact, one of the absurd implications of this type of policy – one of the absurd implications of saying that, “If one person in a field holds a position than everybody in the field is justified in holding that position,” is to generate a system of education where every form of insanity and ignorance can result in a passing grade. The field of science education should recognize that there are standards for determining that an answer is good or bad other than, “Pete likes it,” and it is by those standards that we judge whether an answer demonstrates competence in that field.

“Pete likes it” is not a demonstration of competence.

This, too, becomes an element of what we should be teaching in science. I have no objection to presenting Ben Stein’s movie Expelled in a science class. Because, then, a teacher can use that to further point out how the case for intelligent design has nothing to do with science.

“Okay, class, please notice that in this entire film on teaching intelligent design in a science class that the authors did not use one argument that would count as a scientific argument. In fact, what you see in this movie is a propaganda that is intended to rouse the rabble. By the form and structure of the type of claims that are made in this movie, we see that it was made by people who want to make mob action – the twenty-first century version of torches and pitchforks – a part of the scientific process. Nowhere today, in the peer reviewed literature, is an author’s ability to assemble a mob considered valid evidence in support of a scientific claim.”

Hopefully, if this plan were adopted, we could quickly come to a time in this country, through proper education, we can lift much of the ignorance that has people living under the delusion that intelligent design is a scientific theory. Democratic governments, where power resides in the people, requires that the people be educated to the degree that they can make intelligent decisions and cast intelligent votes. It is the goal of the education system to give the people the education they need to fulfill this role. Science is going to play a significant role in that future – from medicine to agriculture to energy production to climate change. It would seem that crucial to that enterprise that, at the very least, future generations be taught how to recognize the difference between science and not-science.

The Unsupported Fundamental 'Ought'

Today’s posting takes off from my responses to a couple of that people have recently left to a couple of recent postings. They concern the fundamentals of the desire-utilitarian theory I use as a foundation for all of my writings.

When I speak or write about desire utilitarianism, a lot of readers make an assumption about what I am talking about that simply is not true. They assume that desire utilitarianism means, “Do that act that will fulfill the most desires.”

That is not desire utilitarianism as I defend it. That is a closely related theory that I call desire-fulfilling act utilitarianism. It is an act utilitarian theory in that it is focused on evaluating actions, and does so according to their consequences.

Desire utilitarianism is not an act-utilitarian theory. It does not primarily evaluate actions. It primarily evaluates desires. It evaluates actions only in a secondary or a derived sense. A ‘right act’ is that act that a person with good desires would perform. But we cannot know what a right act is until after we know what good desires are.

It is common, ever since Hume presented his ‘is/ought’ argument. Hume is typically understood to have said that we cannot derive ‘ought’ statements from ‘is’ statements. This meant that all moral arguments (all arguments that ended in an ‘ought’ conclusion) had to contain at least one fundamental ‘ought’ statement that could not be reduced to anything in the ‘is’ universe. These fundamental ‘ought’ entities are basic. They cannot be proved or disproved. We can really do little more than assert their existence.

I deny the existence of such entities. I deny Hume’s entire is/ought distinction. The universe is made up of only one kind of relationship – and that is ‘is’ relationships. ‘Ought’ relationships either must be reduced to a subset of ‘is’ relationships or ‘ought’ statements refer to something that does not exist. Either option is fine with me as it turns out. If a reader does not want to reduce ‘ought’ to an ‘is’ statement, we can eliminate ‘ought’ entirely, and I can still capture all of the parts of ‘ought’ in the ‘is’ universe of relationships between states of affairs and desires.

We can compare moral theories the same way that we compare scientific theories. One of the ways we can do so is by asking whether the theory requires any strange entities, or whether it can explain and predict a wide range of relevant moral facts.

In saying this, I am not speaking of moral facts of the form ‘abortion is permissible’ and ‘homosexuality is a sin’. I am speaking about the following types of moral facts:

(1) ‘Ought’ implies ‘can’ and ‘cannot’ implies ‘it is not the case that one ought.

(2) Actions fall into three moral categories; obligation, permission, and prohibition.

(3) The moral quality of an action does not depend on the reasons that the agent had for performing it.

(4) ‘Negligence’ is a type of moral wrongdoing.

(5) Moral judgment requires that the agent, in some sense or another, have some type of ‘free will’ in that an agent does not deserve praise or condemnation unless there is some possibility that the agent could have done otherwise.

(6) Intrinsic value properties (or true fundamental ‘ought’ properties) do not exist. Any moral argument that appeals to a fundamental ‘ought’ as a reason for action has is grounding morality on a fiction.

Desire utilitarianism handles moral facts like this without the difficulty that other theories have.

In my earlier post, I compared desire utilitarianism to Ayn Rand style Objectivism and to happiness theory. Ayn Rand Objectivism theory fails because it postulates entities that are as fictitious as God – an entity called ‘man qua man’ from which all value can be derived. First, there is no such thing as ‘man qua man’ other than the completely arbitrary decision to use the term ‘man’ to refer to beings with certain qualities. No normative statements follow from this. The fact that we have a term that refers to a set of qualities does not imply any type of normative or prescriptive force. If we were to use the term ‘reddles’ to refer to red marbles, this does not imply anything about any moral obligation to realize ‘reddles qua reddles’.

A theory that postulates desires, states of affairs in the real world, and relationships between them where a desire that P motivates an agent to realize any state of affairs in which P is true, has a distinct advantage over a theory that postulates strange entities such as ‘god’ or ‘am qua man’.

I reject happiness theory precisely because it fails to explain and predict real-world phenomena. Specifically, it fails to explain and predict why it is the case that when happiness is separated from truth, people tend to prefer truth over happiness. Happiness theory implies that under conditions C, where the agent must choose between happiness and truth, many (most) agents choose happiness.

Desire utilitarianism, as I argued, does not allow us to separate value from truth. A state of affairs has value only to the degree to which propositions that are the object of agent’s desires are true in that state of affairs. If those propositions are not true, then the state of affairs loses its value.

So, desire utilitarianism explains and predicts real-world events better than happiness theory. Desire utilitarianism, unlike Ayn Rand Objectivism, does not postulate strange entities such as ‘man qua man’. There is nothing in it that is not ordinary – ordinary desires, ordinary states of affairs, and ordinary relationships where a proposition that is an object of a desire is true within a state of affairs.

These are ordinary ways of criticizing theories. The fact that I am writing about ethics does not justify, nor does it require, a different kind of thinking when it comes to comparing one theory to another to determine which is best. A theory can be rejected for postulating entities that are as mysterious (or more mysterious) then they thing they are being used to explain. And a theory can be rejected because it makes explanations and predictions that simply fail to correspond to observation.

The idea that morality requires an unsupported foundational ‘ought’ that is distinct and separate from ‘is’ is so widely accepted that few people think to question it. The instant that somebody starts writing about a moral theory, the mind starts searching for the author’s unsupported foundational ‘ought’. Typically, the searcher then declares that “Your unsupported foundational ‘ought’ is just as unsupported and just as foundational as everybody else’s unsupported foundational ‘ought’”.

In fact, this objection has weight. All unsupported foundational ‘oughts’ are equally suspect. Actually, all unsupported foundational ‘oughts’ are alike in being nonsense.

We scarcely hear anybody say that there is no such thing as an unsupported foundational ‘ought’. Yet, why not?

The idea of an unsupported foundational ‘ought’ is, really, just a religious concept – a ‘god of the gaps’ for secular ethics (or for religious ethics, for those who say that the unsupported foundational ‘ought’ comes from God). It is distinct and separate from the world of ‘is’, yet can somehow interact with it. We can say nothing about its structure or composition. We know nothing more than that it exists (at least, this is what the advocates of an unsupported foundational ‘ought’ claims to know) and that it is the source of all value in the universe.

It doesn’t exist.

Desire utilitarianism does not have unsupported foundational ‘oughts’. It has desires (propositional attitudes written into the brain – attitudes that a particular proposition is to be made or kept true – that are encoded into the mental computer), states of affairs, and relationships whereby the propositions that are the objects of those desires are true or false in any given state of affairs.

That’s it.

There is not an unsupported foundational is-independent ‘ought’ to be seen.

Or heard.

Or felt.

Dealing with Disagreement

Once again we see evidence of two different cultures pursuing two different options with respect to how to handle conflicting view.

Culture 1, when it encounters somebody presenting an alternative idea, says, “Go ahead. Present your case. We will then explain why you are wrong.”

Culture 2, when it encounters somebody presenting an alternative idea, says, “We must silence this competing view before others hear of it.”

Part of the reason that Culture 2 has adopted this particular methodology is precisely because there is nothing that they can offer in the sense of a reason to reject the alternative idea. Culture 2 defends their positions by appeal to face. At best, they completely lack evidence for their view and, more often than not, the available evidence completely contradicts their view (as where the scientific data shows that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old).

Where people cannot offer reason in defense of their position, they can only offer force. So, their culture says to bring force (at least economic force) against any who would provide an outlet for this contrary view.

Earlier, I discussed this dynamic in the context of two movies; “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “The Golden Compass”. In the case of The Chronicles of Narnia, the members of Culture 1 said, “Present your view, and then we will present our criticism.” In the case of “The Golden Compass”, the members of Culture 2 said, “We must have a boycott. We must cause so much economic harm to any who would threaten to present an idea contrary to our own so as to make sure that nobody again will threaten to do such a thing. We must not allow these alternatives views to appear in public.”

Now, it is showing up in the case of billboard wars.

I do not recall ever hearing a demand that a theist billboard be removed. (An exception to this is where signs are put up at taxpayer expense, in which case the issue is not that of silencing a competing view, but that of being forced to pay for some church’s advertising.)

Yet, atheists either cannot get a billboard put up or, once up, it is immediately removed under the weight of protests from the members of Culture 2 – from the members of the culture that demands the silencing, rather than the considered rejection of, a contrary view.

One story along these lines concerns an attempt from the Freedom From Religion Foundation to pay for billboards that say, “Beware of Dogma”. CBS Outdoor Advertising in Grand Rapids simply refuses to accept their business, and offers as their reason the fact that Culture 2 will launch a vocal protest for the purpose of getting the signs removed. This, of course, is in keeping with Culture 2’s values of prohibiting the presentation of any view contrary to their own.

In the second story, as described in Hateful Response to ‘Imagine No Religion’, the Freedom From Religion Foundation put up a “Beware of Dogma” billboard in Chambersberg, PA. Shortly thereafter, the company from which FFRF had leased the sign, Kegerreis Outdoor Advertising, put up its own sign that said, “In God We Trust: The previous sign posted at this location does not reflect the values or morals of our company"!

At the same time, another group, “In God We Trust” answered the FFRF sign by putting up billboards of its own that say, “Why Do Atheists Hate America”.

Apparently, the second sign is in keeping with the morals of Kegerreis Outdoor Advertising. Apparently, their morals do not contain a provision against malicious hate-mongering.

At this point I need to clarify an issue. In an earlier posting called “Connecticut Valley Atheists: Imagine” , I protested against the use of a sign in Connecticut which the phrase, “Imagine No Religion” was used on a picture of the World Trade Center. In that case I protested that the sign was designed to manufacture hatred against theists by making the maliciously false claim that any and all religion is equally responsible for the 9/11 attacks. I said that maliciously false claims such as this are bigoted hate-mongering and, thus, not the type of sign that a person with good desires could endorse.

The FFRF sign, however, does not make the malicious attempt to link all religion to 9/11. The backdrop for its message is neutral – it shows the letters in an image that has the appearance of a stain-glass window. As such, it does not contain any maliciously false interpretations and, as such, it is not subject to the same criticism that I gave to the Connecticut sign last December.

However, the “Why Do Atheists Hate America” sign contains exactly the elements that I condemned the Connecticut sign for. Once again we have an example of malicious hate-mongering.

The organization that paid for the “Atheists Hate America” sign, ingodwetrustusa.org, tried to defend their actions by claiming that the sign really says, “Why do atheists act as if they hate America.” However, first, that is not what the sign says. If somebody were to ask, “Why is the sky blue?” this question is the same as saying, “The sky is blue. Why?” Similarly, if a person were to ask, “Why do atheists hate America,” this is the same as saying, “Atheists hate America. Why?” The organization is making a maliciously false claim about all atheists that atheists hate America, qualifying their statement as hate-mongering.

However, even if they were to put a sign up that says, “Why do atheists act like they hate America,” they are still making a maliciously false statement that every atheist acts like they hate America. They are making a bigoted assertion about all members of a group by attributing to all of them a trait that only some of them share. It is not the case that all atheists are responsible for the “Imagine No Religion” sign – only a subset of them are. However, ingodwetrustusa.org, in its lust to promote unreasoned and unfounded hatred of others, has decided not to worry about such minor issues as fairness and justice.

They also tried to defend their claims by saying that the FFRF sign made the same sort of statement. They asserted that "Imagine No Religion" has to imply, "Imagine No Christians." It does so in the same way that the American Cancer Society wants us to imagine a world without cancer victims. It does so in exactly the same way that Christians want us to imagine a world without Muslims, and Muslims want us to imagine a world without Christians. It is an end that is to be accomplished, not by force of arms, but simply by convincing people to give up false beliefs.

Of course, since these people are agents of hatred and bigotry, they much prefer to give a hate-mongering, bigoted interpretation of what was said.

In other words, it is still the case that malicious hate-mongering bigotry apparently does reflect the values and the morals of Kegerreis Outdoor Advertising – because they are not showing any signs of protesting this campaign.

In fact, we should take Kegerreis Outdoor Advertising and ingodwetrust.org at their word. Hate-mongering bigotry is, in fact, in keeping with the morals of both of these organizations. These are the values. When we are told how religion gives these people special access to moral truth and a special incentive to be moral, we can see this at work in their enthusiastic embrace of type of unjust, unfounded, hate-mongering bigotry depicted in these signs.

In fact, this is in keeping with the values of these organizations that, instead of allowing different people to express their views and explain what is wrong with them, they adopt a policy of silencing competing views and threatening those who express them.

That's the difference we see between Culture 1 and Culture 2

E2.0: Greg Epstein: Humanism - The Heart of Atheism

This is the 23rd in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

The next speaker at the conference was Greg Epstein, Humanist Chaplain of Harvard University. Epstein used his time before the conference to support humanism and to claim that atheists needed to build a movement that was broader

Humanism a progressive life stance . . . that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and our responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment aspiring to the greater good of humanity.

He started his presentation with a claim that science can build hospitals (by this, I think he means that science can provide the intellectual foundation that serves as the foundation of the practice of medicine), but that science will not visit you in the hospital. That is to say, science does not have any heart. Humanism, according to Epstein, is the ‘heart’ of atheism.

I agree with Epstein on this matter. Atheism (taken to mean the belief that the proposition ‘god exists’ is certainly or almost certainly false) implies no moral conclusion. It says nothing about what we ought or ought not to do.

Theism also implies no moral conclusion. You can take the proposition, ‘god exists’ and tie it to any moral claim imaginable. Perhaps God created homosexuality as a way to keep the population from growing too quickly and wants us to celebrate this option as one tool for keeping population growth in check. Only, the ‘religionists’ listened to the wrong people and have spent the last several thousand years teaching the wrong lesson.

Like I said, neither atheism nor theism gets us anywhere in terms of moral conclusions. It’s the stuff that we add to atheism or theism that yields these types of results. It’s the stuff we add to atheism or theism that the ethicist (such as myself) has reason to be concerned with.

Life is difficult, Epstein says, and atheism tells us nothing about how to deal with this difficulty. Humanism goes beyond atheism to provide ways of dealing with life – with the happiness and sorrows of living, in the real world.

In order to do this, according to Epstein

We need a movement that is a little more diverse. We need a movement that is a little more inclusive. And we need a movement that is a little more actively inspiring.

On the issue of diversity, Epstein has a simple way to illustrate his point. He simply invites the audience to look around the room at the various attendees where the descriptions ‘white’ and ‘male’ apply to almost every speaker. (Note: I must confess that I have always had difficulty categorizing people as ‘white’ or ‘nonwhite’ except where it is extremely obvious, and I prefer it that way. There are several speakers that I would not know how to classify in terms of diversity. So, in a sense, I am somewhat at a handicap when it comes to noting the degree to which Epstein may be correct or incorrect.)

Epstein also points out that the conference does not display a lot of cultural diversity. In this area, Epstein describes himself as a ‘humanistic Jew’ (a Jewish atheist) as a term that links culture with humanism. Richard Dawkins has described himself as a ‘cultural Christian’, which describes a cultural or ethic tie that goes outside of simply atheism. Recognizing these types of ties is not tribalism, but does recognize that different people have different cultural ties – ties in terms of heritage, race, and age.

For another example of cultural atheism Epstein brought up Nobel Prize winning economists Amartya Sen, a “proud Indian humanist”, who is very strongly connected to his Indian heritage.

He is very much through and through a humanist, but a humanist who sees life through the lens of . . . somebody who was born in India and feels very much connected to his Indian cultural roots.

Epstein also speaks of Confucian humanism; “thousands of years of poetry, of music, of art, of philosophy.” He speaks of novelist Salman Rushdie’s “Muslim humanism” – a person who is aware of his relationship to a group that, among other things, preserved the writings of the ancient Greek philosophers while the Europeans were going through the dark ages and losing their knowledge.

Epstein distinguishes his call for diversity – particularly diversity in the sense of allowing for a diverse set of cultural humanisms – from being inclusive. The people that Epstein wants to include in this wider group includes people who believe in some supernatural entities. He speaks about being accepting of and working with some theists.

In saying this, he stressed that he was not advocating an attitude that Epstein attributed to Dennett in terms of being ‘faith in faith heads’. The term refers to atheists who are happy that some people are theists – who see theism as a good thing and who are happy that some people have faith. Against this, Epstein speaks more in terms of ‘polite disagreement’. He points out that there is as much disagreement within a particular religion as there are between religions, yet people within a religion are still able to form some sort of a family. People with different religions should be able to do the same thing.

I think we can find the type of model of what Epstein is talking about in science. Scientists in a discipline can find themselves in disagreement over some fact within that field of study. Some can believe that the Tyrannosaurus Rex was primarily a scavenger, while others believe it was a hunter. Yet, these people still belong to the same family. Members in neither group are willing to claim that the other is right or even that it is a ‘good thing’ that some people have this alternative view of the T-Rex. They state that their opponents are wrong. Yet, they still share membership in the same group.

So, humanists can become members in a wider circle of people who are interested in dealing with the joys and sorrows of human existence – celebrating or dealing with marriages, births, deaths, friendships, relationships, sickness, natural disasters, relationships, dreams, and the like – who do not agree with us entirely on matters of God’s existence.

Of course, I want to add (though Epstein did not mention this fact) that there are others that we have little reason to welcome into such a family – people whose religion drives them to take actions that actually cause (or fail to prevent) the harms mentioned above either directly (through violence) or indirectly (blocking the scientific advances that can cure disease and prevent disasters).

A final ‘improvement’ that Epstein would like to introduce into atheism is expressed in his question, “What can we do in the future to sing and to build.” He reported that atheists do two things very well – spoken and debated. He wants to add to this some of the cultural elements that we find in religious groups; architecture (the building of cathedrals) and singing. These, of course, are merely examples of what is actually request for a more inspiring humanist culture.

On this issue, I think that humanists do quite well. We simply do not recognize it. The reason we do not recognize it is because we do not attach a humanist label to our creations. Much of the art and dance that we create these days have nothing to do with religion. Yet, they are still inspiring. I went to see Stomp the other day. It was an extremely impressive performance (as I knew it would be). It does not promote humanism. It does not wear any conspicuous humanist tags. Yet, it is, in a very real sense, a celebration of what humans can accomplish here, in the real world.

It has exactly the type of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ that Epstein spoke of in the first two parts of his presentation. We are able to draw a circle around the group that values such a performance that includes more than just humanists. We may disagree with their interpretation of their events, but we can still agree to its value.

There seems, then, to be some tension between Epstein’s three criteria for a better humanism. He wants it to be more diverse and more inclusive. Yet, in the area of ‘inspiration’ – in its architecture, art, and music – he seems to be calling for something that is a little less inclusive. He seems to be speaking about cultural elements that have a humanist focus, to the exclusion of other interpretations. Because, if he speaks about a more diverse and inclusive form of art, we already have that.

This might be a good idea to have a distinctly (and exclusively) humanist art. The idea is worth some thought. Yet, it would benefit us to know exactly what it is we are thinking (and talking) about in discussing this subject.

E2.0: Lee Silver: Religion Without God

This is the 22nd in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

Lee Silver, Professor of Molecular Biology and Public Policy at Princeton University, addressed the Beyond Belief 2 conference largely to speak about a religion that has no God – at least not a God in the traditional sense of a person sitting on a throne passing judgment on others.

An idea that we get from listening to some atheists is that there are only two options – belief in a personal God and a devotion to reason and science. Of course, any atheist who thinks about this for more than a moment will realize that this is not the case. These just happen to be the two options that he has focused the greatest amount of his attention on. Yet, at times, he does slip, and he reacts to news around the world as if anybody who is not a Christian, Muslim, or Jew is fully committed to the tools of reason and science.

For example, I commonly hear atheists celebrating the relative atheism in Europe, as if Europe has discovered the light and is years or decades ahead of America in that regard. Yet, it is just as plausible to argue that Europe, instead of discovering the light, has discovered an alternative form of darkness. It is because of this that, in spite of their abandonment of the Christian religion and aversion to Muslim religion, they fail to actually take off as a society.

The religion that Silver spoke about is the religion of naturalism – the idea that whatever is natural is good.

One of the forms that this nature worship takes in Europe can be found in their devotion to homeopathic medicine. Homeopathy, according to Silver, relies on the idea that sickness in the body is caused by ‘negative spirits’ and that the road to health is to replace these forces with ‘positive spirits’. The doctrine does not mention a God. An individual can be an ‘atheist’ in the traditional sense and still accept homoeopathy. Yet, these people still base their decisions on false beliefs about entities that do not exist and values that are not real. Whenever people do this, they risk making poor decisions that do more real-world harm than real-world good.

This irrational nature worship has manifested itself in Europe in the form of a strong public opposition to the use of genetically modified foods. Just as religion in America has lead to opposition to stem cell research (a form of scientific advance that promises to significantly reduce death and suffering), Europeans are strongly opposed to the use of genetically modified crops.

The creation of genetically modified foods is another technology that promises to reduce death and suffering by providing us with more efficient ways to feed a growing world population. To shun the technology of genetically modified foods is as irrational as to shun the technology of stem cell research. It does not matter that the prohibition does not come from scripture. It still comes from a belief in things that do not exist – a worship of things that have no divine spirit.

I suspect that many readers can understand the position better when we start to talk about genetically modified children. The idea that a parent may be able to genetically modify a child – selecting traits – often leads to a strong preference for ‘natural’ children. These are children whose DNA is determined, not by the parents, but by the unguided laws of nature. Readers may sense a strong preference for the latter and an aversion to the former that motivates them to seriously consider laws against such actions.

Unfortunately, those laws would also prevent a parent from noting that a newly fertilized egg has cystic fibrosis and purposely choosing to have that strand of DNA altered so as to remove the disease.

Defending these types of positions requires claiming that there are some ‘reasons for action that exist’ that call for preferring ‘natural’ over ‘unnatural’ states of affairs. It seems to require that what is ‘natural’ has some sort of intrinsic value and it is something that people should like in spite of its relationship to desires is false. Preserving the environment for its own sake – as an endeavor that realizes something of intrinsic worth – is as much a waste as pursuing an end because it pleases God. There is no God to please, so any claim that an act is justified because its result pleases God is false. There is no intrinsic value in nature so to say that an act is justified because it preserves that which has intrinsic value in nature is false.

Silver does not speak about the value of nature in terms of ‘intrinsic value’. He speaks of it in terms of worshipping a goddess mother Earth. However, in terms of practical effects, there is no difference. Both views still have agents bypassing important scientific breakthroughs and scientific research on a subject that promises to be extremely useful for the sake of realizing ‘sacred’ values that do not exist. Both views involve appeals to reasons for action that do not exist.

Desire utilitarianism says that, insofar as we are interested in our moral obligations to the environment (or anything else for that matter), the only type of value that exists is in the form of relationships between states of affairs and good desires (desires that tend to fulfill other desires). This means that the only value that a state of affairs in nature has is in terms of its relationship to good desires.

We can make an argument that a desire for that which is natural is a good desire, and an insufficiently strong aversion to ‘playing God’ is a bad desire, in virtue of the desire-thwarting possibilities. That is to say, if these technologies get out of control, the consequences could be disastrous (and tremendously desire-thwarting). In order to avoid potential disasters we have good reason to promote an aversion to these types of activities. It is often called ‘playing God’, but it is in fact playing with technologies that have the potential to produce disastrous consequences.

In these cases, we still have to ask about the nature of these disastrous effects. Are they real desire-thwarting effects? Or do they consist in the widespread destruction of ‘intrinsic values’ that do not exist anyway? If the latter, we can ignore them, the concerns raised are not real.

We may have a certain natural affinity for certain types of environmental states. In just the same way that we do not want the air to be too warm or too cold, we do not want to be bothered by obnoxious smells, and we do not want to be bothered by obnoxious noises all the time, we may have evolved a natural desire to find value in certain environments. These may well be environments that are like those that our ancestors found to be easy to live in. In this case, there may be a natural desire to preserve certain environments, and these desires give us a reason for action.

However, this does not give the natural environment any type of sacred value. It has value in the same way that a comfortable room or a quiet place to sleep has value. It has the same value of a good tasting steak or a good looking picture.

As it turns out, I can give an argument for promoting a certain type of value in nature – an argument for a certain type of environmentalism. It rests on the fact that nature, tens of millions of years, has given us an environment in which humans could survive, even where humans were too stupid to take much responsibility for their own survival. So, to the degree that we have an interest in surviving as a species, to that degree we have reason to preserve an environment that even our primitive ancestors could have lived in. We have reason to argue for using caution when we make changes – particularly when we make global changes such as destroying the ozone layer or filling the atmosphere with extra carbon dioxide and methane.

This does not argue for a blind worship of nature, any more than an IT department’s decision to proceed cautiously with a server upgrade argues for a blind worship of the existing computer network. It is simply a call for practical restraint – let’s make sure that we are not going to do anything significantly harmful before we do it.

In many cases, the ‘reasons for action’ that people give for standing in the way of actions that are called ‘playing God’ are reference to ‘reasons for action’ that simply do not exist. Nature has no intrinsic merit. The only value to be found in any state of affairs – including any state of affairs in nature – is determined by that state’s capacity to fulfill good desires. These include desires for food, clothing, and shelter as well as health. If the value of a state of affairs in nature cannot be expressed in these terms, then the values that people are speaking about are as imaginary as those of any religion.

Sectarian Harrassment and Support

I encountered a depressing story this morning of two families in Delaware who challenged the Indian River School District’s practice of promoting Christianity in its public schools (Prayer Suit Settled Little for Families). The Indian River School District’s staff members would lead explicitly Christian prayers at school functions, leading to a pro-Christian anti-Semitic attitude that resulted in the harassment of Jewish children. Parents of two of the children filed a lawsuit. After 3 years of harassment, one of them has decided that this type of activism just isn’t worth it, regrets having done it, and would never do the same thing again.

It was similar to a story reported on Atheist Revolution in “Complaining about God in School Can Have Dire Consequences”

The most depressing part of this story is the recognition that there is no support structure for people like this. We are all well aware that those who challenge theocratic practices such as this can pay a heavy cost. Yet, as far as I know, there are no agencies or institutions set up to collect contributions that will then go to helping support people in this type of position.

That support could take several forms.

(1) Providing the individuals with people that they can talk to and provide moral support

(2) Providing assistance that would help to avoid the harassment such as an alternative cell phone

(3) Helping the victims avoid public exposure by providing people who could do yard work or go on errands for the family.

(4) Providing the family with a greater sense of security by providing them with somebody who can accompany them when they go out in public.

(5) Providing moving expenses and people who can help move if the harassment drives the family to making that type of choice.

(6) Organizing a public information campaign that condemns any community that condones this type of harassment, and condemns civic and religious leaders who do not take a stand against it.

These people are actually doing the community a service. They are helping to protect and promote important values. There is some obligation to regard them the same way that we would regard a soldier who has gone off to war. They deserve our honor and respect. We show them this honor and respect by showing that we are willing to endure part of the burden that they have accepted.

What makes these practitioners of harassment particularly despicable is their willingness to target children. What these people want is to use the public school system as a tool for promoting their own church – their own religion – by using it as an opportunity to preach to (brainwash) an audience that is not only captive but vulnerable.

When people protest, these practitioners victimize children another way. For all practical purposes, they hold the children of any who would protest hostage, and proclaim as loudly as possible, “One false move out of you and we will make sure that your children suffer.”

It is a very effective technique.

It is the embodiment of evil, but it is also effective.

That’s one of the messages that needs to be made clear in this type of situation, and the message that I have in mind in the sixth item on the list above. It involves using the incident to point out that the local community has evolved a culture that condones the exploitation and abuse of children in order to obtain their religious objectives. They exploit access to children in the public school system for their own objectives, and then they promote not only the abuse of children who do not conform to their program, but the abuse of the children of any who would protest this exploitation.

This is the moral culture that the community has adopted, but it is not a culture that any community has a right to be proud of. It is a culture that shows that the moral leaders in that community – the preachers and political leaders – are themselves morally bankrupt. Yet, they insist on exploiting the school system to pass this lesson in immorality (exploitation and abuse) on to the next generation.

I want to stress that I think the habit of debating these issues in terms of ‘separation of church and state’ should be put aside. This is, of course, the proper role for the lawyers to take when arguing the case in court. However, it is not the role that people should adopt in debating the issue in public. The public debate should not only explain that there is a separation of church and state, but also that there should be a separation of church and state in the sense that where it is violated we tend to find a culture of exploitation, intimidation, and abuse.

In these types of cases, the two often go hand in hand.

In too many places across the country, they are successful. In too many places around the country today we do have children learning the moral lessons of exploitation, intimidation, and abuse from the moral leaders in that community – through the public school system. This is the lesson that those schools are teaching. It is a lesson that they will continue to teach unless and until somebody stands up to put an end to it.

Yet, we have so far left those who would dare to stand up against this culture of exploitation, intimidation, and abuse to fend for themselves. The ACLU may provide legal support, but where does the family go for moral support? Where do they go when they become the actual targets of the very culture of exploitation, intimidation, and abuse that they have decided to challenge?

So, this posting is a challenge to those who are involved in fighting the culture of exploitation, intimidation, and abuse to find ways of supporting its soldiers in the field – the people who are on the front lines and in the court room. It is a bit unfair, I think, to expect them to go into battle alone, with us in the background, collecting the benefits of their actions, but not willing to share the burden.

Atheist Proselytizing

I have seen a few posts about the atheist blogosphere concerning atheist proselytizing. “What should our goals be?” people are asking.

It’s a question that I asked in creating this blog. It is a question that I ask when I decide what to write each day. “What are my goals? What post could I create today that would best further those goals?”

My answer: Atheist proselytizing should focus on those things that make the world a better place than it would have otherwise been.

For example, a couple of days ago I wrote a post about the Copenhagen Consensus, which argued that the most cost-effective way to make the world a better place is to fight the spread of AIDS. (Or, at least it was 4 years ago; we will see what the 2008 conference says). One of the ways to prevent the spread of AIDS is by promoting the use of condoms. Simple, cost effective, having massive positive benefits – and also a number of positive side effects. It also prevents unwanted pregnancies, reduces population growth, and prevents the spread of other sexually transmitted diseases.

However, the Catholic Church and other religious organizations are against this. They campaign against it. They do so based on myth and superstition.

This, then, is one of a multitude of examples in which superstition kills people and destroys lives. It is one of a multitude of instances in which it is possible to say, “Because people grasp onto these absurd ideas, we have more death and suffering in the world than there would otherwise be. To avoid death and suffering, we have reason to promote an aversion to the adoption of these absurd beliefs.”

As the head of a group of atheist proselytizers, I would create a subgroup within the organization dedicated specifically to the prevention of AIDS. It would be a group that collected money for the purpose of buying condoms and shipping them to countries where the HIV/AIDS epidemic is at its worst. Atheist proselytizers would go from village to village giving out scientifically vetted information on AIDS, promoting the use of condoms, and spreading the word that the agents of myth and superstition who argue against this practice are also the agents of death and suffering.

That’s the form that I think atheist proselytizing should take.

I would also form a group dedicated to opposing creationism. It would oppose not only the teaching of creationism as science in American classrooms, it would oppose creationism itself. It would not attempt to make the case that evolution is compatible with religion. It would not make the case in terms of separation of church and state. It would make the case that science saves lives, and anti-science puts lives at risk.

The most popular posting that I have written to date – still drawing 10% to 15% of the traffic to this blog 7 months after I first posted it, is “Ben Stein’s ‘Expelled’”. It is a critique of the movie grounded entirely on the principle of harm done. We can save lives to the degree that we can explain and predict the universe around us. The best method for doing this is science – which continually produces amazing predictions that no religious prophets could ever be able to match. “Intelligent design” is anti-science that simply does not produce the types of predictions that are required of a scientific theory. It’s failure to produce predictions translates directly into a failure to preserve and protect lives.

One of the harmful effects of the Intelligent Design dogma is that it will seduce children away from studying or even understanding science (that is to say, studying or even understanding how to save and preserve lives in a universe of natural laws) and into worthless and ineffective superstitions.

I would also set up a group for opposing ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance and a national motto of ‘In God We Trust’. Both of these movements aim to teach children that it is better to be ‘under God’ or to be somebody who trusts in God than it is to be an atheist. It denigrates atheism as a matter of national policy, even though atheists are by far disproportionately responsible for the scientific discoveries in this country and save more lives and prevent more destruction than religion. With these actions, the government is telling children not to become the types of people who produce more good for their fellow humans in outcomes such as medical breakthroughs, protection from natural disasters, food production, and energy production and efficiency, than any other group in the country.

That is how I would proselytize atheism.

In saying this, we must note that atheists are not immune from unreasoned dogma. Religion is not the only place where one can go to find doctrines that promote death and human suffering.

Europe, though being more ‘atheist’ than America, also suffers from the influence of atheist dogmas that are as anti-science as any religion. The list of popular philosophies in Europe include post-modernism and cultural relativism, both of which condemn the idea that we can have actual knowledge of the real world. These dogmas have been as effective at holding the European culture back scientifically and economically as creationism has been in America. Focusing on religious dogmas and their harmful effects is just a part of the problem.

In fact, the philosophies of post-modernism and cultural relativism point to an important case of atheist scapegoating. Many ‘new atheists’ have accused religious moderates of shielding religious extremists by preventing criticism against the harshest forms of their religion. However, they did not mention the fact that these non-religious philosophies are an even greater obstacle to criticizing fundamentalist religions. It’s from these philosophies, not from religious moderates, that we get the idea that no culture may criticize another. Religious moderates, in contrast, still held to the possibility of moral and objective truths.

We see how atheists can be attracted to pleasant-sounding but useful fictions with as much zealousness as a religious devotee in Objectivism, in the thesis that ‘atheist’ means ‘the absence of a belief in God’, and in the happiness cult. All three of these dogmas have clear problems, yet people latch onto them with little regard for the rational arguments against them.

Objectivism even has its own mythical entities – this thing called ‘man qua man’ that is a rational animal that tells us that reason is the defining characteristic of man. It makes unwarranted leaps from ‘is’ premises (man is a rational animal) to ‘ought’ conclusions (man ought to always promote reason above all else). It confuses the distinction between ‘means’ and ‘ends’ (e.g., life is the near-universal means to the fulfillment of other desires; therefore, it is the universal end). Yet, it attracts a group of atheist followers like any other cult.

The ‘meaning of atheism’ issue is a small affair, yet it illustrates how an atheist can latch onto an idea that just a moment’s reflection will expose to be false – merely because the idea serves a political purpose. The claim is that ‘atheism’ means ‘the lack of a belief in God’ – and because of this we can dismiss the claim that atheism is a religion and atheists actually believe something. However, it does this by introducing a definition of ‘atheism’ that has nothing at all to do with how competent English speakers use the term. ‘Atheism’, as the word is used by competent English speakers, means, “A person who believes that the proposition ‘God exists’ is certainly or almost certainly false. It involves an actual belief that is in need of support. Atheists need to accept this fact and deal with it appropriately.

Indeed, there are some strange implications in talking about ‘atheist proselytizing’ in a context in which an atheist is somebody who has no belief in God. It says that atheist proselytizing can be successful by killing a person (since a dead person has no belief in a God) or by inflicting sufficient head trauma that a person can no longer hold a proposition ‘God exists’. Whereas ‘atheist proselytizing’ in a context where an atheist believes that the proposition ‘God exists’ is almost certainly or certainly false requires a bit more work.

The Cult of Happiness holds that happiness is the sole value. This is proved false by the fact that when happiness is divorced from truth, then happiness loses its luster. Induce happiness by taking the brain of a person in a state of happiness and put it in a jar where it relives its last state of happiness over and over again, or put a person in an experience machine that feeds the agent false beliefs that induce happiness, or find an way of stimulating the brain with an electrode in a way that produces happiness, and then inquire as to the value of this state.

Desire fulfillment, on the other hand, cannot be divorced from truth. Desires are propositional attitudes (attitudes that particular propositions are to be made or kept true). A desire is fulfilled if and only if a state of affairs exists in which the proposition that is the object of a desire is true. Desire fulfillment theory accounts for the essential connection between value and truth. Happiness theory ignores it. Yet, the cult of happiness still dominates atheist conversations about value.

So, let us not think that in ‘atheist proselytizing’ begins and ends with promoting the belief that the proposition ‘God exists’ is very nearly or certainly false. The proposition ‘God exists’ is only one of a number of propositions that people can hold without good reason, and many of them have nothing to do with religion.

Progress Report on Persective on the Pledge

I have been putting my efforts recently in completing a short book version of Perspective on the Pledge. I have a draft version of the whole book ready, at Perspective on the Pledge.

If anybody wants to read a copy and send me back a list of corrections, I would appreciate it.

The book now contains a new argument against, "In God We Trust", which I have cut and pasted below.

But there is another important component of a motto that this version would not capture, and it is a component that sorely needs to be mentioned. Mottos are not merely descriptive. They are prescriptive. They do not tell you want the members of the group are. They tell you what the members of the group should be.

The Marine motto, ‘Semper Fidelis’ (or its spoken counterpart ‘Semper Fi’) is not just a description of what marines are. It is a statement of what a marine should be – what all should strive to be. Any marine that does not live up to the motto – any marine that is not faithful to his comrades in arms – is looked upon as a disgrace, as something unworthy of the name ‘Marine’.

The same is true of the Boy Scout motto, ‘Be Prepared’. Nobody thinks that all Boy Scouts actually are prepared at all times. This is an ideal to be strived for, even if it is never obtained. Boy scouts who are not prepared fall short of this ideal. They are the types of scouts that, according to this motto, should feel shame at their shortcomings, and that they should strive to correct in the future.

So, when the United States adopts as its motto, ‘In God We Trust’ they are fully aware of the fact that not all of us trust in God. However, the government is telling its people that it is the official government position that an American who does not trust in God is like a Marine who is not faithful, or a boy scout who is not prepared. He is somebody who falls short of the ideal, something that is actually unworthy of being in the group that uses the motto the name ‘American’. In the case of ‘In God We Trust’ we are being told that those who do not trust God are not worthy of being Americans – and that this is the government’s official position.

This, of course, is something that the government has no right to say.

This is not only false. It is malicious hate-mongering. Adopting this national motto does nothing less than adopt the position that the first and most important quality that an American has is that of a bigot eager to ignore and to violate the principles of justice and equality before the law. The government has absolutely no right, and absolutely no just cause, to adopt the official position that a person who does not trust in God simply fails to live up to the standards of being a good Amerycan.

Then, the proponents of such a law say that it has passed into the realm of ‘ceremonial deism’ which has lost its religious meaning. As I illustrate in the story, this is proved false by the vocal reaction that people have to removing this phrase. That motivation is a lie – another falsehood as blatant as claiming that 2. + 2 = 5.

Furthermore, I would dare any person who states that the Pledge or motto has lost its meaning due to use to stand before a Marine and state that because this motto is so widely used and referred to in Marine culture, that ‘Semper Fidelis’ to a Marine is now nothing more than ceremonia, void of any normative strength at all.

George Carlin on the Absence of Rights

George Carlin has a new comedy routine. It has recently appeared on HBO and is quite popular among the atheist blogsphere because of Carlin's explicit atheism. In this particular program, Carlin also took a swipe at the existence of rights.

Carlin is no philosopher, and to examine his work is not the same as examining a philosophical argument in defense of a position. Unfortunately, the pop philosophy of somebody like Carlin will reach more people and have more of an impact than anything having to do with a reasoned defense of a proposition.

If a comedien is going to defend a particular proposition, it would be better if they would defend a proposition that is true, and ridicule those who hold it to be false. When a commedien defends a proposition that is false, and ridicules those who believe it is true, it is counter-productive.

We know this. When Carlin says that no God exists, and ridicules those who believe in a God, we consider this to be a good thing.

I doubt that a commedien can convince somebody of a new proposition, but it probably does have the effect of reinforcing a proposition that a person already holds. It gives that attitude positive reinforcement, and positive reinforcement of a belief, though it is not a 'reason' for holding a belief, still has an effect.

So, while Carlin is reinforcing the attitude that no rights exist in an activity that does nothing in the sense of providing reasons, it may be worthwhile to offer some reasons on the other side of the scale.

Carlin's first question is, "Where do they come from?" He dismisses the God option (rights come from God) easily enough. "The God excuse - the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument."

When I speak about rights, I certainly do not speak about anything that comes from God.

I hold that all forms of value exist as relationships between states of affairs and desires. Moral values concern relationships between malleable desires and other desires, and focus on questions of what malleable desires we have reason to promote or to inhibit. "Rights" fit into this account as states of affairs that we have reason to promote a desire for or an aversion to.

To say that there is a right to freedom of the press, on this account, is to say that it would be a good idea for us to promote an overall aversion to responding to words or other ways of conveying ideas with violence. We may, of course, respond with criticism and even condemnation, but not with violence.

Similarly, the right to a trial by jury on this account states that we have reason to promote an aversion to certain types of kangaroo justice - that we have reason to be averse to doing harm to a person unless that person has been proved to be deserving of harm in an arena where he has been allowed to defend himself and confront the evidence against him, and where the evidence is heard by a body that has no personal stake in the outcome (the 'jury').

These rights, I would argue, certainly do exist. These 'states of affairs to which there are many and strong reasons to argue for a desire or aversion' exist. They do not come from God. They are simply descriptive facts about how particular desires relate to each other.

The types of rights that Carlin says we made up are the rights that are found in documents - such as the Constitution of the United States. He notes that different governments around the world enumerate different rights. The fact that different cultures enumerate different rights is supposed to be evidence that they are simply made up.

Yet, if the account of rights that I use is true, their enumeration in any document is irrelevant. The question, concerning the existence of any right, is whether or not it is true (or false) that people generally have reason to promote any particular desire. A right to life exists regardless of whether it is enumerated in a Constitution, so long as people generally have reason to promote an overall aversion to killing.

In fact, this is how rights are spoken of in the various documents that Carlin referred to. The right to freedom of speech in the First Amendment, for example, is not something that did not exist until the First Amendment was ratified. Rather, it existed before the First Amendment was passed. The Amendment is nothing more than a limitation on the government from abridging a right that already exists.

Similarly, the 4th Amendment did not invent a right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. It is a prohibition on the government from violating a right that already exists.

Different people in different countries do not have different numbers of different rights. Instead, there are different theories describing states to which people generally should have desires or aversions, and there are different enumerations of those things to which people should have desires or aversions.

Another argument that Carlin uses to argue that rights exist is to say that rights cannot be taken away. He uses the fact that Japanese Americans were interred during World War II.

In 1942 there were 110,000 Japanese American citizens in good standing; law abiding people who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. . . . They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their piers, no right to due process of any kind.

In fact, they did have a right to a lawyer and a right to a trial. These rights were violated. In fact, the very claim that the actions taken against them were wrong is the claim that their rights were violated.

If, indeed, a person has no right to a lawyer and no right to due process, then it would be false to claim that those who denied them a lawyer or due process did anything wrong. We would have no reason to apologize to the Japanese Americans about the way we treated them if it were true that they had no rights. It is precisely because they had rights that the U.S. Government ignored that we classify the act as 'wrong', 'immoral', or 'unjust'.

Nobody who seriously defends the concept of a right claims that a right is something that cannot be violated. In fact, they would claim that it is nonsense to speak of a right as a thing that cannot be violated. The violation of a right is not proof that the right does not exist. Instead, it is the fact that a violation of a right is a moral wrong - a contemptible act - is evidence that a right exists even when it is being violated.

So, Carlin's argument here is a straw man. The absurdity he is arguing against is more 'made up' than the rights that he claims to be talking about.

Coppenhagen Consensus

What is the best way to solve the world’s problems?

In a presentation given at TED called, “Our priorities for saving the world,” Bjorn Lomberg, a Danish political scientist, made a number of very interesting points and drew a number of interesting conclusions on this subject.

First, he said, if you want to know the best option to take among a number of competing options, you do not ask a physician or a climatologist or any sort of scientist. Scientists are great at providing information within their field, but are not particularly adept at handling information outside of their field. As such, they are not the most highly trained experts in comparing – say – the value of fighting AIDS in Africa vs. the value of preventing climate change.

Instead, the best people to ask when one wants to know, “How do I get the best bang for my buck – the best output per unit of input?” are economists.

This makes sense.

Second, he said, these economists are not going to investigate problems, they are going to investigate solutions. The real question that we need to answer is not, “What is going to do the most harm in the next few years,” but “Of all the actions available to us, which has the potential to prevent the greatest harm (or to provide the greatest benefit).”

This also makes sense.

So, Lomberg called a group of the world’s leading economists to a conference called The Copenhagen Consensus to discuss a number of proposed solutions and to pick those that had the greatest potential – those most worthy of our attention.

The original conference was in 2004, so some of its recommendations are outdated. In addition, the 2004 panel had only eight economists involved. A new conference is being planned for May, 2008 where 55 economists will be involved - including 4 Nobel Prize winners. I have always been a fan of trusting the experts. I think that the chance that a person sitting at his laptop and writing a blog can do a good job of determining the world’s priorities is pretty low. The best thing that a person sitting at his laptop writing a blog can do is point readers to experts who are using reliable peer-reviewed methods to get things done.

Yet, this doesn’t mean that somebody who has studied social and political philosophy might not have some input into the moral value of some of these projects – independent of their economic value.

For example, the panel decided that the best option to pursue was to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS.

The panel assigned the highest priority to new measures to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. Spending assigned to this purpose would yield extraordinarily high benefits, averting nearly 30m new infections by 2010. Costs are substantial, estimated at $27 billion. Even so, these costs are small in relation to what stands to be gained. Moreover, the scale and urgency of the problem—especially in Africa, where AIDS threatens the collapse of entire societies—are extreme.

This was back in 2004.

Unfortunately, this analysis seems to have overlooked a significant cost to any program that aims to reduce the incidence of a sexually transmitted disease – and that is the cost of overcoming primitive superstitious beliefs about sex, particularly those that are held by the world’s major religions.

For example, one of the most cost-effective ways of combating HIV/AIDS according to the study is through increased use of condoms. However, we have religious groups that are violently opposed to pursuing this policy because it violates a superstitious belief that sex without a condom has sacred value. Getting a program adopted which promotes this option will require some cost in battling this primitive superstition.

An accurate assessment of the costs of any program must include the costs of getting it adopted. Assume that we had two options before us – a $10 billion dollar option that will produce an estimated $500 billion in benefits, and a $10 billion dollar option that will produce an estimated $400 billion in benefits. The first option produces $50 in return for each dollar invested. The second produces only $40. If we had only $10 billion to spend, we should spend it on the first option.

However, let us now add the fact that the first option will then spark religious protests. Religious pundits will denounce the program and start their own campaign to defeat it. Countering these religious claims will require an education campaign that will cost another $10 billion. Now, the first option produces only $25 in return for each dollar invested, and the second option (which has no religious opposition) still produces $40.

To be fair, opposition does not need to come from religion. It could come from political ideologies as well. For example, one of the other methods of reducing the incidents of HIV/AIDS is to promote a reduction in the number of sexual partners. Promoting ‘family values’ where the adult partners are faithful to each other and condemning those who ‘sleep around’ are ways of encouraging people to select lifestyles involving fewer sexual partners. However, many people who do not draw their sexual values from any religious principles hold that we should not negatively judge those who seek multiple sexual partners.

To a degree that a malleable desire tends to fulfill other desires, we have reason to promote it. And to the degree that a malleable desire tends to thwart other desires, we have reason to use social forces to inhibit the formation of that desire. People who have an aversion to ‘cheating’ in their partners have a desire that will tend to keep their partners safe from sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS. People who have no aversion to having sex with people other than their primary partner have a set of desires that creates desire-thwarting risk. Those who create risks for others are not good people. Those who risk the lives of others are worse.

The idea that sexual attitudes are morally neutral – that having fewer sexual partners is not a virtue and that having more sexual partners is not a vice – is as dangerous and false as the idea that sex without a condom is sacred and sex without a condom violates some natural moral law.

This is an illustration of the claim I have made earlier that religion is not the root of all evil – false beliefs are. And whereas religion is filled with false beliefs, there are false beliefs as well that fall outside of the realm of religion that can do just as much harm.

There is a distinction between arguing that a certain form of behavior is morally bad and arguing that it should be made illegal. The instrument of the state is a heavy and awkward instrument to wield and has a number of unavoidable side effects. In some instances, using the law to enforce moral principles may be like wearing boxing gloves when doing brain surgery. Whereas no act should be made criminal unless those who engage in it are also guilty of doing something immoral, not every immoral act should be made criminal.

In addition, particularly when it comes to sex, we must pay close attention to the issue of malleable desires. Each of us has a family tree – parents, grandparents, great grandparents – that goes back hundreds of millions of years and through hundreds of millions of generations to the point where sex became required for procreation. None of us can say very much about every individual in that family tree. Yet, there is one thing we can say – none of them died a virgin. Evolution almost certainly worked to fix a desire for sex as a basic fundamental human desire. Even where sexual desire is malleable, the ways and degrees to which sexual desires may be molded may be quite rigid.

The best way to get at answers to these types of questions is through more scientific research into the nature of sexual desire, the effects of certain types of social activities on molding sexual desire, and the costs as well as the side-effects of those social activities. This is not an area where armchair psychologists can be expected to provide sound conclusions as well as rigid scientific research.

It is also not an area where it is at all reasonable to believe that substantially ignorant tribesmen living 2000 years ago without the benefit of any form of science at all ‘got it right’ as it were. This is definitely an area where my previous analogy comparing the use of scripture as a guide to ultimate moral truth, to the use of the works of Hippocrates as the guide to ultimate medical truth, applies.

The most important point of similarity between these two examples are that those who use the Bible as the ultimate source of moral truth, like those who would use Hippocrates as the ultimate source of medical truth, would reach conclusions that will do a great deal of harm to a great many people. They would be the bringers of death and suffering on an massive scale. They are people who those who wish to solve the world’s problems and prevent death and suffering have good reason to condemn in very harsh terms.

E2.0: Scott Atran: The Causes of Terrorism

This is the 21st in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

Scott Atran begins with a very provocative comment.

My interest here is to give you a reality check about what terrorism is about. So far I’ve heard mostly ignorance and nonsense. You guys have no idea what terrorism is about.

I would like to begin by saying that my interest here is not to determine what terrorism is about. My interest is in true beliefs and good desires. Yet, it is the case that if religion is the cause of things that tend to thwart desires, and we have reason to promote an aversion to things insofar as the aversion will tend to prevent the thwarting of desires, then we have reason to promote an aversion to religion.

On this matter, Atran says:

I think that religion is basically a neutral vessel. It has done everything you can imagine, and its contrary. And there is nothing intrinsic about religion, for the good or the bad.

This sounds like something I have said. I have argued that the proposition ‘God exists’ is morally neutral. It does not tell you anything about what to do or what not to do. Those implications come from the things that people add to religion. The things that people add to religion are the things that evolved creatures invented and put there for whatever purposes they have for doing so. If religion did not exist to hold the things we put there, nothing prevents these evolved creatures from putting those same elements in something else, a philosophy that does not have a God, such as communism or the type of corporate feudalism that sprang from Objectivism. Post modernism and subjectivism promise to give free reign to our darker nature with philosophies that are as antithetical to science and reason as any religion.

I often read of many atheists celebrating the atheism of Europe. They do not even ask what form this atheism takes, or how wide spread the different sects of atheism may be. One of the dominant atheist philosophies in Europe is post-modernism, a philosophy that denies science and that says that all moral codes (including the most radical and extreme religious codes) are equal.

We condemn the ‘religious moderate’ for giving sanction to fundamentalist religion. We should condemn the atheist post-modernist as well. However, like all good politicians, when fellow atheists make a contribution to evil we ignore their contribution, and focus only on the flaws that we can find in the other party.

The rest of the presentation looks at terrorism itself and explains its causes and its scope. This is one presentation that is well worth listening to. Atran draws his information from a serious scientific study of terrorists, collecting data from literally tens of thousands of would-be terrorists and their supporters. His is not the idle speculating of the arm-chair philosopher or blog writer. His claims are supported by empirical evidence.

According to Atran, that evidence supports the following conclusion:

We have this idea of a terrorist organization that goes out and looks for recruits. It hires people who look like they might be worthy prospects for engaging in a suicide attack. They are hired, trained, sent out as operatives to pull some job. The next thing we know there are trains or busses or buildings blown up and bodies all over the place.

That’s not the model that Atran gives us.

Atran tells us of a group of people from 18 to 30 who have formed a social unit – a group of ‘friends’ who hang out together the way that young adult males everywhere tend to do. He says that the biggest predictor that one is going to become a member of one of these groups is not mosque membership or religious training or the work of Madrassas in Pakistan, but whether one is a ‘soccer buddy’ to another would-be terrorist. So, a group of young adults get together, they become soccer buddies, then one of the soccer buddies decides that they want to do something violent, and he brings the rest of the group along.

This self-made terrorist cell, then, goes looking for Al-Queida (usually on the internet, according to Atran).

What is their motivation?

Atran describes two sources of motivation. One of them is Al-Jazeera news network.

Commenting about the neighborhood where the Madrid bombers came from, Atran said,

There are two cafes here. One . . . that belongs to the Madrid club. One that belongs to the Barsa club. Al-Jazeera is on all the time, and the kids sit there and the brothers sit there and they comment on the News. I don’t know how many of you have watched Al-Jazeera. You get 15 minutes of Iraq with people running through the streets with their kid’s brains falling out. You get 10 minutes of Palestine which isn’t as bad but its pretty gruesome. And you get 1 minute for the rest of the world. . . . [P]eople watch this and, let me tell you, you would want to join the Jihad. They say, ‘How can they do that? How can people let these people kill children like this?’ We’ve got to do something.

Anyway, the motivation behind these terrorist attacks is moral outrage – it is Americans killing Iraqi children and Israeli killing Palestinian children and a desire to strike back. The most significant source of this moral outrage is the American activity in Iraq – reported on Al-Jazeera, as mentioned above.

Atran adds that religious education is a negative indicator of terrorism. The people who form these terrorist cliques are people whose understanding of Islam is fairly basic. Consequently, one of the points that Atran makes is that you do not fight terrorism by studying the Koran and going after religious fundamentalism – the teachings of the Mosque or the Madrassa. You fight terrorism by not killing Muslim children, but instead involving and including those children in social groups that teach positive values independent of whether or not those children continue to visit a Mosque or study the Koran.

Another statistic that Atran said was relevant to fighting terrorism had to do with the fact that in America, the Muslim population has ‘bought into the American dream’ and their economic standing matches that of the general population. Per capita, Muslims are underrepresented in the prison population in this country. In Europe, on the other hand, Muslims make up an impoverished minority. As such, they make up 60% or more of the prison population in European nations. If Europe could learn to incorporate Muslims into the general population, than, according to Atran’s arguments, Europe would have less to worry about with respect to Muslim terrorism.

This is just a small portion of the interesting findings that come from Atran’s presentation. As I said, it is one of the presentations that a reader is well advised to take a look at. His information is extremely useful in understanding current world events and world policy, and contains a set of ideas that are very much worth spreading.