Friday 16 August 2013

New Atheist Menace?

Well a facebook friend of mine (Christian but that is not relevant here) recently posted an article he revived that did little more than link to two recent articles in the British paper the Telegraph bashing the new atheist movement and Richard Dawkins in particular. His comment actually acknowledged that the articles are somewhat harsher than nessecary but in trying to write a concise response over there I ended up needing to vent all my problems with the article somewhere.

Seems it would be a good idea to address the first linked article first. The basic premise is that the majority of people who currently identify as atheists are smug, self centred, pompous, egotistical assholes who get off on running round and laughing at the mentally inferior religious folks. No doubt these people do exist, but even when I have engaged in overtly atheist/sceptical groups I never spoke to anyone who gave me this impression so I am pretty sure they are just a loud and annoying minority. One that certainly needs addressing but tarring all atheists with that brush would be like me complaining that all religious folks think 'school shootings are a good thing because God', they exist, and someone needs to call them on being obnoxious, but they tend to be a minority.

Cited as evidence of this are Dawkins recently tweeting "All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though" and the ensuing backlash, more on this when it comes up in the second article. Then there is also a recent paper that claimed to show a strong inverse correlation between intelligence and religiosity (translation; atheists are geniuses, believers are averageish and fundamentalists are retarded) interestingly enough the first I heard about this paper was an atheist tearing it apart for being shitty science. His arguments are in a nut shell, condensing intelligence down to a single number is questionable at best, there are more possible conclusions than the authors considered and any study that gives whole countries an average IQ of 70 got something wrong. So I agree with the author of the article that the study is crap, as do a significant number of atheists. Ironically some of the most insane apologetics I have ever seen require a fair bit of intelligence to stick together, the problem is then applying that intellect to critically analysing the evidence rather than assuming their current position as true.

Next we get to the sizeable number of internet memes that mock either religious ideas or the religious people themselves, as entertainment I see nothing wrong with these although it does mean bearing in mind that the religious people are more caricatures than real believers similar to how people you shoot in a FPS are just avatars. In either case it should be obvious that such mockery is rarely an effective way of interacting with believers, especially when mocking the believer rather than the belief. At this point we come back to the atheist gatherings being full of "people afflicted with repetitive strain injury from so furiously patting themselves on the back for being clever" which is very different from any crowd I have interacted with at these events.

I mostly agree with the next section where the author argues that basing your whole world view on what you do not believe is somewhat hollow, although I would not say inherently negative or hostile. But again I have never met these people, all the atheists I know also add on secular, humanist, freethinker and any number of other details of things they do believe in and which much more clearly express their world view that their opinion on a single question.

Right at the end the author tries to blur the line between non religious and nihilist, there is nothing about my atheist, sceptic, secular, humanist, freethinker, scientific world view that supports diving into nihilism and plenty of things about it that bring wonder and joy and all that cool stuff.

The second article is little more than a personal attack on Dawkins, sure he is human and as such makes mistakes but that tweet mentioned earlier is not necessarily one of them, although making the point in a space that allows for elaboration may have been a good idea. For a start the authors assumed subtext of "The lobotomising strictures of Koranic teaching and extremist dogma, goes the subtext, has atrophied the Muslim mind so completely over the centuries that these robotic drones have produced far fewer Nobel laureates than a single weeny college." seems unlikely to be anything but a straw approximation to Dawkins's actual point, such a competent biologist would certainly not expect such a short term environmental detail as Koranic teachings to have any atrophying effect on a population even if it can stunt each individuals development in terms of scientific progress and human rights, the effects are only imposed on descendants for as long as they are immersed in the culture.

The author points out that Muslim dominated regions are "dramatically less wealthy and academically well served than the West as a whole, and the Oxbridge candidate pool in particular.", this is certainly true however at least part (and probably not all) of this discrepancy comes from the strength of religious control seen in the regions so this does little to demonstrate that Islam is an irrelevant factor.

After a bit more jabbing at Dawkins the author goes on to describe himself as "one who became a devout atheist at the age of nine", while this is technically a legitimate use of the word devout the majority of meanings for the word and popular understanding tend to include some sort of religious or unchanging aspect to the context, which always sets me on edge whatever the individual is claiming to be devout about. The author then comments on how hearing Dawkins getting angry when dealing with believers makes him want to find the nearest place of worship and join in just seems ridiculous when these angry outbursts are typically triggered by the believer using their faith as justification for all manner of heinous acts (usually committed by 3rd parties half way round the world). For any decent human being, angry (or maybe bemused) is the ONLY reasonable response when faced with someone who says yes Abraham was justified in trying to kill his son because God said so. Yes Dawkins is a less than subtle figure who argues against religion and yes his direct style seems to offend a lot of people but at the end of the day he is arguing against scriptures which promote the death penalty for all manner of trivial offences, promote slavery and oppress the majority of the population, amongst other atrocities. Just because you are not familiar with the source material does not mean those who are should let it slide when others are promoting what are insultingly immoral books.

As for the claim that "Dawkins is more repressively dogmatic than the Ayatollahs.", first I find the hypothetical that if Dawkins was in a position of political power he would introduce comparably draconian laws laughable, and second, if he actually did then the religious objectors would be joining the queue to drag him out of office right behind a significant proportion, and I would guess large majority of, the atheist population. While I have no doubt Dawkins has his share of obsessive fanatics who will applaud his every action, every atheist I have ever discussed him with has varying amounts of mixed opinions and none of them have anyone they hold up as infallible or worthy of idolising. When leaving a faith for atheism one of the most significant pieces of baggage that tends to get jettisoned is the uncompromising idolisation of anyone or anything, nothing is held sacred or beyond question, anything can be challenged and anyone who does something stupid will be called out on it.  Growing up non religious, this lack of an absolute authority was something I picked up during my school days.

Near the end the author does joke that Dawkins is some religious under cover agent sent to make atheism look bad by becoming a well known and respected atheist, then being a moron. While I occasionally entertain similar ideas about religious individuals it always seems more plausible that they are genuine and Dawkins is far more level headed than any of those individuals, at least until he starts ordering the burning of places of worship while they are full of believers, somehow I doubt that day will ever get here. As for that closing line, I am curious as to how someone gets naming rights over their unofficial biography, but if it was Dawkins idea maybe his ego does need reigning in a little.

Monday 25 February 2013

I have been seeing this a lot lately

Hmm it has been far too long since I updated this, between being busy and being lazy, but I have earned the right to stick 6 letters after my name, even if using them in most circumstances will make me sound like an ass. So here is something that doesn't need references everywhere to get back into things.

There is an argument for god (whichever variant the individual happens to believe in, this line of reasoning is rather flexible like that) which appears to be increasingly common. It goes something like this "But if you do not believe in a god and think we developed through unguided evolution how can you trust your senses, there is no reason for them to be accurate they will just provide whatever feedback is most evolutionary advantageous.", presumably most people either think this is entirely sensible or have a strong suspicion as to how I am going to tear it apart.

First, I am not going to bother with any brain in a jar, matrix or whatever style complication of the question. This world is the only one we have access to and as such, as long as our perceptions match how the actors around us behave/the simulation being fed in by a computer ect. that, for the sake of this argument, counts as perception matching reality. There is also always the possibility that whichever god did create us derives great humor or otherwise benefits from us being a bunch of delusional crazies, so belief in a god doesn't actually solve the problem. Maybe your conviction that it does is just part of the delusion. But the main thing is that the god-free evolutionary explanation does give us reason to think our perceptions are mostly accurate.

Imagine two people, one whos perception of the world is reliable, and the other whos perception is not reliable, each attempts to cross a busy road. The person who perceives reality approximately as it is will either cross fine or find an easier place to cross over. As for the other individual, anything could happen. Maybe they make it across safely, but then again, maybe they see the vehicles as toy cars that can be stepped over or with raised bodies that will pass safely over his head, maybe he sees no cars at all, or he sees a river and tries to swim across, or a solid wall he attempts to climb, clearly if his observation of reality regularly fails to match with reality there is a serious risk of death depending on what delusions are suffered at the time. But that is a little unfair of me, after all we did not evolve in a world with cars, buses and roads, we evolved in a world of hunting, foraging and keeping out of the stomachs of big cats, does the same reasoning hold in that environment.

The individual with an accurate perception of reality will when he finds a tree containing edible fruit, see a tree containing edible fruit, collect it and he has a decent meal to share with his tribe. The other individual, again we can let our minds run wild, maybe there is no tree, or all the fruit appears to be decaying and covered in flies, maybe the fruits appear to me venomous animals, maybe he sees the poison dart frog in a nearby thorn bush as a fig ripe for picking, gets many lacerations on his hand reaching for the frog, which would have a risk of becoming septic were it not for the next part where he eats the frog, flooding his body with enough poison to kill dozens of people. How about the predator side, when our first individual observes a predator he will know what it is and where it is, he is then able to respond accordingly, hide and sneak off, call for help, climb a tree, be very loud and make himself look big, he has a good chance of getting away. Now how might our poor delusional hunter gatherer respond... If he sees the lion bearing down on him as a tabby cat he may crouch down to greet it, if he sees rustling grass but no solid object he may assume it is the wind and ignore it, maybe he perceives a giant 10m tall lion barreling down on him and collapses in a gibbering wreck from the fright.

Admittedly there are some delusions which could theoretically exist that may confer an evolutionary advantage, maybe lions that are close to ambushing range are spontaneously perceived as bright green, standing out from the background and drawing conscious attention more readily, but I don't recall hearing about such a thing. Or maybe animals like wasps are actually a dull green or brown to blend in with foliage/bark but we perceive the bright colours as an evolutionarily developed mark to steer clear, but then close up photos where it is not immediately clear what it is would appear as these dull colours, which again I don't recall hearing anywhere.

Essentially most situations where our perception did not at least approximately match reality would hinder survival, meaning they would be evolutionarily selected against and regardless of if they were advantageous, harmful or neutral we would be able to test them and observe discrepancies by crating situations where incomplete information would prevent the delusion form being triggered and as such close up images or other similar approaches would cause a distinct difference in how the object is perceived that would suddenly switch to the delusion as a critical amount of information is added. When such an article is published in a peer reviewed journal and is then repeated and produces similar results I sill start paying serious attention to the our perceptions are wildly off base hypothesis.

Of course there are all manner of illusions, optical and auditory just for starters, which are capable of exploiting the many effort saving shortcuts our brains exploit when building up our model of the world where, by exposing the brain to novel situations perception is not entirely accurate. Combined with hallucinations and our easily mutable memory, perception should certainly not be trusted at all times. But it is for the most part, under ordinary circumstances, a reliable representation of the world around us. Otherwise each of us would have long ago gone swimming on a railway line and been run over by a dragonfly or met some other grizzly and entirely unnoticed demise.