waka waka waka

A couple of weeks ago I posted an essay in response to a post of Bill Vallicella’s on whether life might have an objective meaning. In his piece Bill argued that any attempt to offer a purely subjective interpretation must lead to an infinite regress, and therefore must be false. I responded, drawing on work by Daniel Dennett, that the regress argument might not block a suitable naturalistic account. This led to a long discussion in the comments thread, with over a hundred entries. Toward the end, philosopher Peter Lupu offered some extensive criticisms of my position, which I would like to begin to address here.

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Dr. William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, is back in harness after a month-long layoff from blogging. I’m glad he’s back on the job: he is as interesting and provocative as always. I’d like to weigh in on this post in particular, in which he argues that meaning, in particular the meaning of life, must either have an objective basis, or founder in an infinite regress.

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From my friend Wayne Krantz comes a link to a story that will appear in tomorrow’s New York Times: apparently some of Barack Obama’s younger and more enthusiastic supporters, having noticed that his middle name — Hussein — has been a heavy cross to bear, have decided to make it their own middle name as well.

This comes as Mr. Obama continues to be vexed by rumors that he is a closeted Muslim. He appears, quite reasonably, to regard these allegations as slanderous calumny (which they almost certainly are), and has done all he can to distance himself from that troublesome religion — including going so far as to have a pair of bescarfed Muslimahs removed from the stage during a recent campaign appearance. For him actually to be a Muslim, of course, would be political suicide: it would be hard to imagine anything more viscerally repugnant to the average US voter, short of being a rational secularist with no religion at all. (That said, there is in fact one Muslim member of Congress: Representative Keith Ellison, a Farrakhan supporter who represents the anomalously tolerant district of Minneapolis — but the politically astute Mr. Obama has so far had the good sense to fend him off with a boathook whenever he approaches.)

One girl’s father was appalled, his heart blackened by fear that his daughter might actually be converting to Islam. But he needn’t have worried: it’s all in good fun, of course. Whee!!

Read the story here.

From reader JK comes a link to an article about a growing tension in the Persian Gulf. No, it isn’t between the Sunnis and the Shi’a, or between US diplomats and the Iraqi parliament, but between Islamic fundamentalists and those in the region who, having attracted enormous foreign investment, and having used it to build some of the most dynamic and opulent financial centers in the world, are also beginning to develop a taste for another Western export: freedom.

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With a hat tip to our friend Jess, here is a link to a post at the science blog Gene Expression that reports a result which, if true, is hardly a surprise.

A couple of days ago I linked to Steven Pinker’s discussion of the recent report by the President’s Council on Bioethics, and mentioned that one of the contributors, surprisingly given the overall makeup of the Council, was the irreligious and materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett. In his essay, he is in fine, feisty form.

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For those of you who don’t know, our friend Kevin Kim has a new website, created for the purpose of chronicling his upcoming transcontinental walk — a trek whose purpose is to explore the many parallel currents of religion in America, and if possible to help build bridges between them. The walk itself won’t get going for a few weeks yet, but you can’t keep a good blogger down, and Kevin has been posting as regularly as ever. Kevin himself is one of the more unusual religious figures I know: a trained theologian and an elder of the Presbyterian church, he’s also a non-theist.

Today he offers an interesting rumination on the Vatican’s position on Christianity for extraterrestrials; it’s well worth a look.

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No matter what your reaction — snarling in defiance, as are the conservative voices of the West, groveling in awe, as are the liberal governments of Europe, or exulting, with growing confidence, as in the mosques and madrassas — radical Islam is rising. Those who see it, rightly, as a potentially lethal threat to all that Western civilization stands for, argue for a variety of responses: restriction of immigration, economic boycotts, intolerance of non-assimilation, expulsion of seditious agitators, ethnic profiling, intellectual debate, military intervention, and the republishing of cartoons. One hears somewhat less, however, about another sort of response, one that might be the most effective of all: the education and empowerment of Muslim women.

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Although I am not a theist myself, and sympathize broadly with the current crop of prominent atheist authors, we obviously cannot ignore the central role that religion has always played in the organization and cohesion of human groups. I think, along with Sam Harris and others, that it ought to be possible for human societies to arrange their affairs so as to have the communal and cultural benefits that religions offer while moving beyond the supernatural fantasies that are traditionally at their core. The Unitarians are an example of movement in this direction, and the interesting fact that our friend Kevin Kim can function as a Presbyterian elder despite being a nontheist is reason for optimism as well.

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With a hat tip to Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna, we offer yet another frightening example of the withering of essential Western liberties under the steady pressure of Islamism. The latest gesture of craven appeasement comes from Austria, where a politician has been indicted for expressing an unfavorable opinion of Mohammed’s having married a six-year-old girl.

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As long as we’re on the subject of spineless capitulation to religious extremism, here’s a relevant post over at Gates Of Vienna.

By now you have probably heard the tragic story of young Madeline Neumann, a home-schooled girl who died of easily remediable diabetic ketoacidosis because her parents thought it better to pray for her recovery than to seek medical treatment. Her mother, who says that said that she and her family “believe in the Bible and that healing comes from God”, is making the best of a bad situation:

“We are remaining strong for our children,” Leilani Neumann said. “Only our faith in God is giving us strength at this time.”

This is criminally insane. Read the story here.

Debating philosophical or religious questions in the blogosphere can be awfully unproductive; it shows you why some of the same questions that vexed the ancients are still confounding us today. People with different fundamental assumptions live in inner worlds that are quite irreconcilable: words mean different things to different speakers, and often serve only to highlight these differences while doing nothing to bridge them. For a splendid example of all this, have a look at this protracted comment thread over at the Maverick Philosopher, which starts out as a post about recent atheistic critiques of religion.

Today’s Times carried a front-page story about Muslim families who, wishing to maintain control over their children so as to prevent their exposure to decadent Western notions, have taken to withdrawing them from the educational system. In most instances it is, unsurprisingly, the daughters who are kept apart.

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In a recent post, Kevin Kim offers a rebuttal to Sam Harris’s argument that religious moderates are in fact an impediment to progress toward a more rational world.

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From our friend Jess Kaplan comes a link to a critique, by the British philosopher John Gray, of the “New Atheism”. It is an engaging piece, but it makes a lot of familiar and rather weak arguments, and some that are quite strange indeed. I suggest that you go and read it — it is worth the effort — and then read this rebuttal by A.C. Grayling.

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From a friend of a friend in the mysterious East comes a pair of links to some videos featuring a Bahraini Shi’ite by the name of Dhiyaa al-Musawi. In the first clip he is being interviewed, in Arabic, and he is saying some extraordinary things.

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An item in today’s Washington Post informs us that our only hope to avoid total annihilation is to reduce our carbon emissions to zero. Now.

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In a recent post, Bill Vallicella chides Christopher Hitchens for a humorous jab at religion that he and Richard Dawkins often make. The offending remark, in its general form, is that since we are already all atheists as regards Poseidon, or Osiris, or Thor, all that is needed to finish the job is to go “one god further”. It always gets a laugh, but not from Dr. Vallicella.

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Well, I certainly stirred up some controversy with that recent post about the Dutch and their apparent willingness to ban a forthcoming film in order not to anger any Muslims. A great many topics came up, and I think some readers may now look at me as some sort of Eastward-facing version of Lester Maddox. I want to clarify a few things.

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Following on yesterday’s inflammatory post, today we have a heartening item from the New York Times. Apparently some of Iraq’s young folks are finding Islamic fundamentalism a bit confining.

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The struggle of civilizations, or perhaps more aptly the struggle of modern civilization against medieval barbarism, has taken a depressing turn in the Netherlands. Unlike their neighbors the Danes, who have staunchly defended their liberties despite storms of outrage from thin-skinned Muslims mortally offended by a few cartoons, the Dutch are planning a somewhat different response to Islamic fury over a forthcoming film: supine, craven appeasement.

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A BBC article informs us that the Turkish government, in an effort to ease the constant tension between medieval Islam and modern-day secularism, has commisioned a team of theologians to revise and update the Hadith, the body of lore and tradition based, allegedly, upon the sayings and deeds of Mohammed.

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I’ve been watching a spate of videos, over the past week or so, featuring various members of the group often referred to as the “New Atheists”: Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. The last two links I’ve posted here were debates between one or another of these fellows with some religiously-minded opponent, but most recently I ran across a conversation amongst all four of them at once. This video ought to be an instant hit with all the atheists out there: these fellows have achieved rock-star status amongst the heathens, and getting them all together like this constitutes sort of a Supergroup of the Damned. (Too bad the name “Blind Faith” is already taken.)

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I yesterday’s post I linked to a video of a debate between Conservative Rabbi David Wolpe and atheist author Sam Harris, and said that it looked to be of a very different quality than the wincingly lopsided encounter between Christopher Hitchens and Shmuley Boteach. Well, now I’ve had a chance to watch the whole thing, and indeed it was on quite another level. David Wolpe is highly intelligent, educated, articulate, and charming — in short, everything that Boteach manifestly is not — and his conversation with Harris was as civil as it was engrossing. I recommend it to you all, and may comment on it myself shortly. You can find it here.

I’ve now had a chance to watch the Hitchens-Boteach debate, and it wasn’t pretty. I don’t know who thought these two might be evenly matched, but it was a sad spectacle. I was reminded of H.L. Mencken’s description of the doomed William Jennings Bryan’s spasms of desperation at the Scopes trial (the comparison is apt, as Boteach also spent much of his time railing, incoherently and with astounding ignorance, against evolution):

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With many thanks to our friend Maven, here is the full video of the debate I was unable to attend, back on January 30th, between Christopher Hitchens and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on the question Does God Really Exist?

I haven’t had time to watch it myself yet, but I thought I’d pass it along without further comment. Let’s have a look.

In today’s London Times we read the following:

The acting director of a Baghdad psychiatric hospital has been arrested on suspicion of supplying al-Qaeda in Iraq with the mentally impaired women that it used to blow up two crowded animal markets in the city on February 1, killing about 100 people.

Iraqi security forces and US soldiers arrested the man at al-Rashad hospital in east Baghdad on Sunday. They then spent three hours searching his office and removing records. Sources told The Times that the two women bombers had been treated at the hospital in the past.

“They [the security forces] arrested the acting director, accusing him of working with al-Qaeda and recruiting mentally ill women and using them in suicide bombing operations,” a hospital official said.

Ibrahim Muhammad Agel, director of the hospital, was killed in the Mansour district of Baghdad on December 11 by gunmen on motorbikes. Colleagues suspect that he was shot for refusing to cooperate with al-Qaeda. Even before Sunday’s arrest, US officials believed that al-Qaeda was scouring Iraq’s hospitals for mentally impaired patients whom it could dupe into acting as suicide bombers. They said that al-Qaeda had used the mentally impaired as unwitting bombers before. “We have fairly good reason to believe this is not the first time they have recruited mentally handicapped individuals,” said one senior officer, though he did not think there had been more than half a dozen cases.

That the responsible parties can imagine such acts to be morally justified, as I am sure they do, and can believe themselves to be righteous servants of God, should give us plenty to think about.

There’s been quite a ruction lately about comments made by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that called for Britain to adopt Islamic Sharia law as part of its legal system. This sort of supine acquiescence is the road to cultural suicide, it seems to me, and he has been roundly castigated by all, as he ought.

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Well, I’m a tad chopfallen tonight. My friend Duncan Werner had mentioned to me yesterday that there was going to be a debate this evening, at the 92nd Street Y, between Christopher Hitchens and one Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on the question Does God Really Exist? I thought this would be a good scrap, so I went online to buy a ticket, but found that they were sold out. Not giving up, I went up to the Y (it’s a short hop on the 4 train from my office), and stood in the “Ticket Cancellations” line for the better part of an hour, but, sadly, failed to get in.

The worst part? Now I’ll have to wait till I die to find out the answer.

There are those who would have us believe that the root causes of Islamic terrorism are poverty and political oppression, and that if we Americans weren’t such swaggering imperialists, and could just get along a little more amicably with other cultures, we’d have less to worry about. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Our friend Jeffery Hodges (is he really out of bed and writing blog posts at 4:09 a.m.?) offers further evidence here.

As promised, Steven Pinker has written what I think will be seen as a a fairly important article for the New York Times Magazine about human morality. Having banged on the topic of morality a great deal myself lately, I encourage all of you to read it. I found little to disagree with, though his attempt to ameliorate the discomfort of moral nihilism by arguing that moral systems such as ours are sort of an evolutionary “forced move” — which I also think is about the most one can do in that department — will be unsatisfying to some. (Then again, the Copernican system was unsatisfying to some, too.)

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Dr. William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher upon whose posts we often comment in these pages, has put up a good one today on the topic of God and evil. He makes an important distinction, one that people often fail to keep in mind, between what is called the “argument from evil” and its close cousin, the “problem of evil”. The former is an attempt to prove the nonexistence of God, and the latter is simply a difficulty that the theist must struggle with.

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We wrote recently on the “problem of evil”, and argued that it is hardly necessary that good and evil be absolute, objective features of the world for subjective beings like us to have difficulty reconciling the notion of an omnipotent, loving, and infinitely merciful God with the gruesome and arbitrary suffering we see all around us, and with the many horrendous examples of divinely encouraged murder, rape, torture, enslavement and genocide that are reported in the Bible.

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In a recent post Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, examines an argument an atheist might make about the existence or nonexistence of God in light of the “problem of evil”. What he has written is good as far as it goes, but the argument he examines is not, I think, one that atheists generally make.

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As one of the wretched unbelievers that Mitt Romney has now clearly identified as foes of God’s favorite country, I’d like, as a further act of sedition, to share with you an excellent speech that Sam Harris gave to a roomful of atheists back in late September. Harris has a supple mind, and he has been keeping it limber. Among the points he makes in this excellent piece are several that may have ruffled some feathers even among the damned souls in attendance.

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It should come as no surprise that Christopher Hitchens had something to say about Mitt Romney’s speech last night. From his latest piece in Slate, a sample:

Romney does not understand the difference between deism and theism, nor does he know the first thing about the founding of the United States. Jefferson’s Declaration may invoke a “Creator,” but, as he went on to show in the battle over the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, he and most of his peers did not believe in a god who intervened in human affairs or in a god who had sent a son for a human sacrifice. These easily ascertainable facts are reflected in the way that the U.S. Constitution does not make any mention of a superintendent deity and in the way that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention declined an offer (possibly sarcastic), even from Benjamin Franklin, that they resort to prayer to compose their differences. Romney may throw a big chest and say that God should be “on our currency, in our pledge,” and of course on our public land in this magic holiday season, but James Madison did not think that there should be chaplains opening the proceedings of Congress or even appointed as ministers in the U.S. armed forces. Trying to dodge around this, and to support his assertion that the founders were religious in the Christian sense, Romney drones on about a barely relevant moment of emotion in 1774 and comes up with the glib slogan that “freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” Any fool can think of an example where freedom exists without religion—and even more easily of an instance where religion exists without (or in negation of) freedom.

Amen. Read the whole thing here.

Well, we’re all still drying off after our dousing last night from Mitt Romney’s Gatorade barrel of holy water. Like JFK in 1960, Romney saw that his campaign was imperiled by a controversial religious affiliation; in this case, however, the risk was not that he was afraid of being seen as some sort of religious kook, but rather that he might be seen as the wrong sort of religious kook. Despite previous assurances that the particulars of a President’s religion don’t matter, as long as he has plenty of it, Mitt now feels the need to reassure the fundamentalist Protestant Republican base that he is every bit as tight with Jesus as they are, and that trivial details — such as polygamy, or that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri, and so forth — need not come between them.

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Readers will probably be familiar with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Muslim apostate and political writer. You may have heard of her in connection with the film Submission, about the opression of women under Islam — for which she wrote the screenplay, and for which its director Theo van Gogh was murdered in an Amsterdam street by a Muslim zealot.

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About two weeks ago, I posted a little item called The Teflon God, about the highly evolved and adaptive unfalsifiability of religious “memeplexes”, in response to an item by William Vallicella.

My post attracted the notice of Dennis Mangan, proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, and he commented on it in a post of his own, which in turn prompted me to respond here. The discussion has carried on since then over at Dennis’s place, where he has since posted a third item in the series.

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Thanks to our friend Dennis Mangan, the curmudgeonly proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, for commenting at his website on our recent post The Teflon God. Dennis — with whom, by the way, we generally agree about most things — raises the objection, often made, that some of the worst brutality in recent history was committed by atheistic regimes. This is undeniably true, but I think that it misses the main point, which is that these horrors ought more reasonably to be charged against totalitarian, Utopian, social-engineering schemes — which often take the form of secular “religions” themselves, as I mentioned in this post — than to atheism per se, which, in contrast to most religions, asserts no normative ideology of its own. Indeed, I would lay much of the responsibility for the mass brutality of the Russian, Chinese, and Khmer Rouge regimes upon the pernicious nature of Communism itself, which can only enforce equality of wealth by institutionalizing an enormous inequality of power, with predictably corrupting effect.

The mistake here, then, I think, is to confuse “Godless and wicked” with “Godless, therefore wicked”.

The battle rages unabated between the pious and the heathens. Here’s tonight’s salvo:

All things dull and ugly, All creatures short and squat,
   All things rude and nasty, The Lord God made the lot;

Each little snake that poisons, Each little wasp that stings,
  He made their brutish venom, He made their horrid wings.

All things sick and cancerous, All evil great and small,
  All things foul and dangerous, The Lord God made them all.

Each nasty little hornet, Each beastly little squid.
  Who made the spikey urchin? Who made the sharks? He did.

All things scabbed and ulcerous, All pox both great and small.
  Putrid, foul and gangrenous, The Lord God made them all.

- From Monty Python, of course.

I apologize for the sloppy editing of yesterday’s post. I try to be careful, but it is in the nature of daily blogging that occasionally one’s vigilance will waver, and poorly proofread material will go into print. The post contained both a repeated passage and a mistaken double negative, both of which have been corrected.

I do seem to have been harping on religion and politics too much lately, but unfortunately I’m reminded daily how important they are. There is vociferous debate all around, and I hate to let some of what I read go unrebutted.

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As you know, the debate between theists and a-theists is heating up a bit lately. (That we can even have such a debate is a healthy trend, considering that in earlier days such disputes were resolved by burning the nonbeliever at the stake.) There will, of course, be no resolution of it, as theists make claims that are carefully tuned to be unfalsifiable, then insist that, simply by virtue of being unfalsifiable, they are every bit as respectable as models that include no supernatural agents. (One of this faction’s most articulate spokesmen is Dr. William Vallicella, who has joined the battle again in recent posts, and who defends his theism with considerable agility.)

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The discussion of Divine Command Theory linked to in yesterday’s post is fascinating for me in more ways than one. I find it of interest not only in itself, as a thoughtful examination of an ancient and vexatious philosophical problem, but also on another, deeper level as well.

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Given that I have arranged to sell off most of each day to a medium-sized international corporation, leaving me in possession of only a few meager hours each evening in which to pursue my own diverse interests, I find myself, as does anyone whose assets are insufficient to satisfy his needs, having to scrimp and budget. So this evening, rather than spend an hour or two meticulously whittling into shape an original blog-post of my own, I gave the time over to what I knew would be some interesting reading — and, careful shopper that I am, I was well satisfied with the purchase.

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From our old friend Peter Kranzler comes a link and a question. The link is to this news item, which tells us that the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, has been ordered to pay $10.9 million to relatives of a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq, after church members jeered at people attending his funeral.

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I’ve just watched the debate I mentioned a few days ago: between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza on the topic Is Christianity The Problem? It was as interesting as I had expected; these are two sharp minds.

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On Monday evening Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza squared off for a debate at The Ethical Culture Society’s Manhattan auditorium; the topic was “Is Christianity the Problem?” I first heard about it from my friend The Stiletto, who sent me a link to an item by D’Souza announcing the event.

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In a recent post at his Maverick Philosopher website, Bill Vallicella responds to the following brief remark by philosopher Jim Ryan:

The reason I’m an atheist is straightforward. The proposition that there is a god is as unlikely as ghosts, Martians amongst us, and reincarnation. There isn’t the slightest evidence for these hypotheses which fly in the face of so much else that we know to be true. So I believe all of them to be false.

I agree with most of what Ryan says here, but consider Bill to be as nimble and astute a theist as one is likely to find, so I was interested to see how he would reply.

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