Posted on 10/17/2003 4:04:27 PM PDT by TXLibertarian
Excerpted from a longer op-ed. Author discusses the danger of legal proselytizing by a few firebrand secularists. Worth a read, IMHO.
What Atheists Want
By Chris Mooney
....
Unfortunately, in my experience, the U.S. atheist and secularist communities contain a number of activists who are inclined to be combative and in some cases feel positively zestful about offending the religious. Madalyn Murray O'Hair, easily America's most famous atheist firebrand, wasn't dubbed "the most hated woman in America" for nothing. Despite her landmark 1963 Supreme Court victory in a case concerning the constitutionality of school prayer, O'Hair's pugilistic and insulting public persona hurt atheists a great deal in the long run. A head-on attack on the pledge seems to epitomize the confrontational O'Hair strategy.
....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Atheist former Christian, friend to Jews, Muslims and Christians. One of my best friends is even a Rabbi.
Precisely! And if morals is a matter of personal choice, then there is no such thing as objective truth. And without objective truth there are no rights.
And that leads to total disaster in any country or culture that adopts it. If America as a people strays from the Christian faith then God help us.
Actually you could apply it to any group, not just religious ones. As long as ravers don't come knocking at my door telling me I should take some extacy, I really don't care what they do either.
People can claim to accept anything I suppose. I was just curious about your standards of evidence for, well, claims that really defy all experience and observation.
I suppose if the Buddha was a good and decent man, and he preached reincarnation, then that's a pretty darn good case for the existence of reincarnation. Especially against some nasty slob skeptic who probably beats his cows.
You're right, we tend to put far to much weight in the merits of arguments and not nearly enough in the characters of the arguers.
It depends on the agenda. The writers of the Bible have a natural motivation to prop up their prophet as the most important thing around. Same with the Quran and the Book of Mormon (although that one was written by their prophet).
Other texts such as Josephus or Roman record have no interest in Jesus in particular, thus could be trusted to provide a more unbiased account.
This doesn't mean that everything in the Bible is false, but it may often be exaggerated. For example, archaeology is showing that Sodom and Gomorrah, and Lot's wife as a pillar of salt, was most likely a simple volcanic event. So the Bible recorded a historical event, but it heaped a lot more onto the story to further its intent.
You've just annihilated the universe. Since, as a matter of fact, morals ARE a matter of personal choice. I guarantee you that my morals are NOT the same as Jeffrey Dahmer's or Adolf Hitler's. They chose theirs, I chose differently.
Yet despite the fact that we chose different morals, I don't see how the objective truth of, e.g., 2 + 2 = 4 no longer holds for Hitler as well as for me.
How about a compromise. First, let's establish which version of the 10 Commandments you are talking about. I'll take the Protestant one for this discussion.
So, four of the commandments have absolutely nothing to do with morals, only adherence to Christianity. If someone walks into a courthouse and sees "You shall have no other gods but me" as the first item in the most respected legal code in that courthouse, as a non-believer he may question the type of justice he may receive in that court.
That leaves us with six commandments that follow your justification for putting them up in public places. So the compromise is, let's forget Moses' 10 Commandments and go with Jesus' 6 Commandments, which basically mirror the six moral ones out of the original 10. Why not? They are Christian, they should follow Christ's words, right?
I'm glad to hear it. But can you condemn Hitler's choice? By your logic it was, after all, his choice. If you answer "yes, I can condemn it" then answer how, since all morality is a "personal choice."
Yet despite the fact that we chose different morals, I don't see how the objective truth of, e.g., 2 + 2 = 4 no longer holds for Hitler as well as for me.
Perhaps I have not explained myself well. Of course the physical laws of the universe apply to everyone. That is how God constructed the universe. But that is not what I am talking about. I believe that God has put in place moral truth that is eternal, and as human beings we suffer when we try to violate it.
Okay, now continue that line of thinking just one more step.
Everyone tends to view the world through the lens of their own experience, some more than others. Critical thinking demands that we step outside our own worldview and try to gain an understanding of viewpoints different than our own.
So far, I only see you trying to shoehorn every worldview and every person's experience into something that all comes back to God (I presume Jehovah God of the Christian faith), even if it's unbeknownst to that person themselves.
Not only is this smug and arrogant, it seriously hinders your ability to have a discussion on this subject with anyone who doesn't share your faith and already agree with you.
How about "harm" as a legal concept? Do you honestly think that harming someone to the point of taking their life is a concept that is rendered invalid in the absense of God?
I don't think it takes as much moral hand-wringing to answer these questions as you seem to think. I think you simply like hearing yourself propound seemingly intelligent sophistry.
I have a better idea, what are your odds?
Sorry, but *I'm* not the one claiming to have sufficient knowledge of the parameters of the problem to be able to make a specific and confident probability calculation on it. Centurion2000 *is*. So it seems reasonable to ask him to show his worksheet -- or admit he's just guessing with no real understanding of the issues.
I'm happy with saying, "I'm not sure, the issue needs more work before I, or *anyone*, can claim to know with any degree of certainty whether the universe was wildly unlikely, or nearly inevitable, or something in between." But since Centurion2000 claims to know, I'm *really* curious to see his calculations and assumptions. Because while I don't currently know the answer, I *do* have somewhat of a handle on just how big and complicated the problem is (i.e., many of the difficult questions that will have to be resolved before anyone can claim to have nailed down anything approximating an answer that amounts to anything more than a wild guess).
Or are you one of those who insist that a room full of monkeys with keyboards can write the complete works of Shakespeare?
In theory? Yes they can, if you're willing to wait long enough (where "enough" is an amount of time that boggles the imagination). In practice (by simple random output)? No they can't.
But they can do it pretty quickly and easily if a replication and selection process is involved.
You wanted to see a calculation, so let's do one.
Consider the Shakespeare phrase, "If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me." That's 109 characters (including spaces and punctuation). Upper and lower case letters, plus digits and puntuaction, make up a pool of about 70 different characters. This means that the odds of producing the Shakespeare phrase in one random trial is 1 out of 70109, or 1 in 1,305,227,939,201,292,014,528,313,176,276,968,928,001, 249,110,077,400,839,115,038,451,821,150,802,274,449,576, 205,527,736,070,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Needless to say, that's a big number. It's so huge that if every atom in the universe (about 1080 of them) were a computer capable of making a billion (1,000,000,000) random trials per second, the expected time required to produce the above line from Shakespeare would be 2,585,011,097,170,911,314,802,759,827,024,569,612,393, 783,728,161,759,843,736,212,615,624,189,581,658,716,078, 309,043,891,309 times the expected lifespan of the universe. That's close enough to "never" in my book.
But that's for *purely* random production process. How much do you think an evolutionary process could cut down that figure? Knock a few zeros off the end, maybe?
Well let's try it. Using an evolutionary process, which couples random variation with replication and selection and *nothing* else, the above Shakespeare phrase can be produced on a *single* computer (mine), using a breeding population of 1024 character strings in a whopping... 15 seconds (using this applet):
Generation: 0Hmm, 15 seconds is a hell of a lot faster than zillions of times the lifespan of the universe, isn't it? Evolution sped things up (compared to a purely random process) by a factor of more than 1045 (that's a "1" followed by forty-five zeros).
Tries <= 1024
Best Critter: "xSeOSEpc3Lm6rnRWnpFYL?QEDY7a67XlfRoJ0e8Len'X'1u'BhdrNqSNaXr7kVjondNozkf2CH9d96SaI?'f43M.CUGJ5XHbqfeR.UJP'tgNP"
Score (0 is best) 101Generation: 100
Tries <= 26624
Best Critter: "vf,ioV c3RKlooioifBFQXh, PeHTskof!oJ0e,Lrn'X'1u BhkchESNaXr kVjo dNozpanSI div1Qwi8h taQ,jswMkk,us1S'ugYtmm7."
Score (0 is best) 72[...]
Generation: 1115
Tries <= 286464
Best Critter: "If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me."
Score (0 is best) 0Checked 286464 critters in 15 seconds == 19097 tries/sec.
Lesson: Evolutionary processes are *incredibly* more efficient and effective than simple randomness alone.
You might argue of course that DNA has only 4 letters so its "alphabet" is even smaller---but you can't start with the assumption of DNA. DNA was not present at the outset of the universe, it would have to have been spontaneously created.
This reminds me of a joke. An atheist was debating with God, and said, "Look, in Genesis you said that you formed Adam from the dirt. Well that's not that hard, man is after all nothing but a bag of chemicals."
So God responded, "OK, fine, let's see you do it."
The atheist says, "Fine," and reaches down to scoop up some dirt...
...to which God says, "No. Get your own dirt."
The government is to be neutral as to a persons religion in regards to his civil rights, not atheistic or secular. Government can acknowledge that there is a God, they can also acknowledge His power over them in regards to God's sovereignty regarding the freedom of the individual. Government is also allowed to acknowledge it's own Christian history and foundations. Government is not allowed to show favoritism to any one religion or denomination by decree or establishment of a national religion that everyone must adhere to.
Those in government do not have to deny their Christianity or secularism or place it in a drawer. Nor does government have to strip itself of the religious symbols of the majority of the citizens of the United States or deny or cast aside it's identity as a government based on Christian principles that adheres to those principles. It is you that has bought a bill of goods, probably comes from public school indoctrination.
As for you inability to understand there will always be those perverts attempting to move the moral line behind them a little investigation into their agendas would be in order. Already phedophiles are finding judges friendly to their lifestyle in Europe the same place that homosexuality found the acceptance that has spread to this continent. Already phedophilia is making the same claims that homosexuals based their legitimacy on.
I assume you mean by this that you feel atheists are trying to stop you from worshipping as you please. Well, if you're telling me that atheists are trying to stop you from worshipping in your home or church, I would like to see some proof of that because I simply don't believe it otherwise.
What I said was, atheists have no business defining where Christians worship or defining where they cannot worship. As for the public schools and the courthouse, government should reflect the community it serves and support that communities efforts to build a moral foundation for their children and fellow citizens to stand on. The majority population in the USofA is of the Christian religion, government should in no way hinder their free expression of their religion in their courthouses, public schools or other institutions.
Like I have said, and back up with the Constitution, the government cannot establish a religion, that in no way means that government must hide it's own religious history or remove "Under God" from the pledge, or "In God we Trust" from it's money, or file down references to God from the marble of it's buildings in Washington D.C.
No where in the Constitution is this mandated, nor was it ever considered that government must be athestic or secular, nor does it deny government a religious identity, it merely prevents government from demanding that all citizens adhere to Christianity. Just because a few judges with a radical agenda have taken the Constitution on a wild ride doesn't mean you have to buy a ticket to ride.
Actually, it does a lot of hand-waving and misapplication of scientific/mathematical concepts. For example, Dembski's (mis)application of the "No Free Lunch" theorem -- the theorem only says that there is no stochastic search process which is optimal if applied to *ALL* possible fitness functions. Dembski, however, misapplies this by (incorrectly) concluding that therefore no stochastic search process (including evolution) is any use on a *particular* fitness space (i.e. our biosphere), which is so trivially false (just ask any numerical analyst) that one wonders whether Demski is being purposely disingenuous.
For an analysis of numerous errors and such in Dembski's Design arguments/examples, see Not a Free Lunch But a Box of Chocolates: A critique of William Dembski's book No Free Lunch. It also contains material on the flagella issue you raise next.
As for Behe (the other author):
One small example is the flagella on a paramecium. They need four distinct proteins to work.
Actually they need a lot more than that. And as far as I know, Behe never used the cilia on paramecia as his example, he has primarily concentrated on bacterial flagella.
They cannot have evolved from a flagella that need three.
Contrary to creationist claims (or Behe's) that flagella are Irreducibly Complex and can not function at all if any part or protein is removed, in fact a) there are many, many varieties of flagella on various species of single-celled organisms, some with more or fewer parts/proteins than others. So it's clearly inaccurate to make a blanket claim that "flagella" in general contain no irreplacable parts. Even Behe admits that a working flagella can be reduced to a working cilia, which undercuts his entire "Irreducibly Complex" example/claim right off the bat.
For a semi-technical discussion of how flagella are *not* IC, because many of their parts can be eliminated without totally breaking their locomotive ability, see Evolution of the Bacterial Flagella
But even if one could identify, say, four specific proteins (or other components) which were critically necessary for the functioning of all flagellar structures (and good luck: there are three unrelated classes of organisms with flagella built on three independent methods: eubacterial flagella, archebacterial flagella, and eukaryote flagella -- see Faugy DM and Farrel K, (1999 Feb) A twisted tale: the origin and evolution of motility and chemotaxis in prokaryotes. Microbiology, 145, 279-280), Behe makes a fatal (and laughably elementary) error when he states that therefore they could not have arisen by evolution. Even first-year students of evolutionary biology know that quite often evolved structures are built from parts that WERE NOT ORIGINALLY EVOLVED FOR THEIR CURRENT APPLICATION, as Behe naively assumes (or tries to imply).
Okay, fine, so even if you can prove that a flagellum needs 4 certain proteins to function, and would not function AS A FLAGELLUM with only 3, that's absolutely no problem for evolutionary biology, since it may well have evolved from *something else* which used those 3 proteins to successfully function, and only became useful as a method of locomotion when evolution chanced upon the addition of the 4th protein. Biology is chock-full of systems cobbled together from combinations of other components, or made via one addition to an existing system which then fortuitously allows it to perform a new function.
And, lo and behold, it turns out that the "base and pivot" of the bacterial flagella, along with part of the "stalk", is virtually identical to the bacterial Type III Secretory Structure (TTSS). So despite Behe's claim that flagella must be IC because (he says) there's no use for half a flagella, in fact there is indeed such a use. And this utterly devastates Behe's argument, in several different ways. Explaining way in detail would take quite some time, but it turns out that someone has already written an excellent essay on that exact thing, which I strongly encourage you to read: The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of "Irreducible Complexity" .
(Note: Several times that essay makes a reference to the "argument from ignorance", with the assumption that the reader is already familiar with it. I'd like to point out that contrary to the way it sounds, Miller is *not* accusing Behe et all of being ignorant. Instead, he's referring to this family of logical fallacies, also known as the "argument from incredulity".)
That is called irreducible complexity.
That's what Behe likes to call it, yes. But the flagella is provably *not* IC. Oops for Behe. Furthermore, while it's certainly easy to *call* something or another "Irreducibly Complex", proving that it actually *is* is another matter entirely.
As the "Flagellum Unspun" article above states:
According to Dembski, the detection of "design" requires that an object display complexity that could not be produced by what he calls "natural causes." In order to do that, one must first examine all of the possibilities by which an object, like the flagellum, might have been generated naturally. Dembski and Behe, of course, come to the conclusion that there are no such natural causes. But how did they determine that? What is the scientific method used to support such a conclusion? Could it be that their assertions of the lack of natural causes simply amount to an unsupported personal belief? Suppose that there are such causes, but they simply happened not to think of them? Dembski actually seems to realize that this is a serious problem. He writes: "Now it can happen that we may not know enough to determine all the relevant chance hypotheses [which here, as noted above, means all relevant natural processes (hvt)]. Alternatively, we might think we know the relevant chance hypotheses, but later discover that we missed a crucial one. In the one case a design inference could not even get going; in the other, it would be mistaken" (Dembski 2002, 123 (note 80)).For more bodyblows against the notion of Irreducible Complexity, see:
Bacterial Flagella and Irreducible Complexity
Irreducible Complexity Demystified
Review: Michael Behe's "Darwin's Black Box"
But the crusher is the CONTINGENCY ARGUMENT. It states that everything is contingent upon something else; you are contingent upon your parents, the chair upon the carpenter, etc.
I see -- so what is God contingent upon?
Uh oh, I just crushed your "crusher".
More formally: Handout for the Contingency Argument
For a shorter approach, let's look at your claim that: "everything is contingent upon something else" (known in philosophy as the "PSR", or "principle of sufficient reason"). Question: How did you manage to examine "everything" in order to determine the truth of your assertion? Oh, right, you didn't.
This reminds me of a translation I read of an essay by an ancient philosopher, I think it may have been Aristotle. He was wrestling with the question of whether matter was infinitely divisible, or whether there was a miminum unit beyond which matter could not be divided without losing its properties (i.e, atoms).
As he saw it, he ran into a logical problem either way. If matter was infinitely divisible, then upon what did the physical properties of a material (i.e. color, density, hardness, etc.) rest? One would never be able to "peel open" a particle of a material to find what made it tick, you'd just find more of the material no matter how deep you looked, with nothing to provide its properties.
Conversely, if you reached a point where you found a minimal unit of the material (e.g. an atom), how did *its* internal workings produce the familiar physical properties of the material which it formed? Lacking any modern understanding of elementary particles, electromagnetic forces, quantum effects, etc., he finally arrived at a plausible explanation, which sounds good, reasonable -- and wrong.
He suggested that when an object gets hot, for example, it hurts to touch it because the heat makes the atoms pointy and likely to prick your fingers. Wrong.
He suggested that if the material was green in color, it was because the atom contained an elemental "greenness" within itself. Wrong again.
And so on. What led him astray was the presumption (plausible but wrong) that things at the atomic (and sub-atomic) level had to work in ways similar to our experience at human-sized levels. Wrong. Instead, for the most part they work by very different "rules" entirely, and the human-level properties we're familiar with (e.g. color, texture, hardness, etc.) are made up of *emergent properties* formed by configurations or interactions at levels *above* the atomic level, and do not exist at all (or in the same form) at the atomic level itself. If you look "deep" enough, most of the rules change entirely.
...and similarly for extremes of temperature (weird things happen near absolute zero, and also at temperatures high enough to cause breakdowns in the laws of physics), velocity (e.g. Relativity), etc. etc.
And why, exactly, should it be any different for causality itself? Causality is pretty standard behavior at human-level scales, but is hardly guaranteed to hold true at various extreme conditions of size, time, or energy, etc. In fact, many quantum experiments already look pretty bizarre from a standpoint of classical causality. We may already be exploring the fringes of where causality as we know it no longer applies.
So getting back to your point -- just what basis do you have for your belief that causality holds universally, for all things, under all conditions? For all we know, just as time itself was created by the Big Bang, causality itself may have been -- the trigger of the Big Bang may have occurred outside of our familiar causality, or by another form of it entirely.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
-- Hamlet. Act i. Sc. 5.
I can condemn it because I have the freedom to condemn whatever I choose. I do condemn Hitler's choices because by my morality they were abominable. That's how. Easy, isn't it?
I believe that God has put in place moral truth that is eternal, and as human beings we suffer when we try to violate it.
How do you measure that? I mean, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao all lived long and fruitful lives, implementing their choices freely. Their moral choices were antithetical to mine. On the other hand, I know of many good peaceful hardworking and kind people whose lives, though short and miserable, barely conflicted with my morals at all.
Does that mean Pol Pot, Stalin, and Mao, who suffered relatively little, were following God's moral truth and all those other young diseased people I know were receiving God's wrath for not following his moral truth? Are you saying Mao is a good guy and I'm a bad guy?
I suppose if the Buddha was a good and decent man, and he preached that one could have oblivian after death, then that's a pretty darn good case for oblivian after death. Especially against some nasty slob skeptic who probably beats his cows.
You're right, we tend to put far to much weight in the merits of arguments and not nearly enough in the characters of the arguers.
There is no conclusive evidence of life after death. But there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know. So why fret about it? Makes sense to me.
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