Ray a Day Guest Post: Petter
For those of you just joining us, I've decided to let my commenters take a crack at doing Ray a Day blog posts. Originally, I was going to start them next week, but I've just been hit with a load of work - I'm graduating in May! Thus, I am eternally thankful for Petter who got his post to me early, which lessons my burden. Here we go:
Hi there, fellow Zizturians. I’m Petter, a materialist rationalist atheist humanitarian who runs Ubuntu, all of which makes me feel kinship directly or analogously with Ziztur herself; and I have been invited to tackle an installment of Ray-a-day. If you read this and want to read more of my thoughts once the exhaustion wears off, you can find my blog here (or by RSS; you can use tags to narrow it down to essay-style posts, or only posts related to skepticism or religion).
When I first saw the snippet from the book that Ziztur had assigned to me, my initial reaction was disappointment—it seemed so trite and vacuous that I wasn’t sure I could write anything about it. Upon further reflection, though, it provides a fairly illustrative microcosm of his style as a whole; and since I am but a guest poster, I shall deconstruct it at some length, such opportunities being rare… I’ll intersperse my own thoughts among the Comfortian ejaculations, but first, let’s set the scene. The “Angry Skeptic” asks,
(May I suggest a side project, Ziztur, of measuring the book’s fallacy density? I suggest that a fallacy density of N per thousand words, N being established by critical analysis, be dubbed a “kilocomfort” [the “comfort” being the average fallacy/word ratio]. People like Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman presumably deal in microcomforts or less, C.S. Lewis in decacomforts, Ray by definition in kilocomforts, and slime like Phelps in the same ballpark.)
Belief in a ‘Creator’ does not necessitate the belief in the god of the Hebrews and Christians, Yahweh. Belief in Yahweh does not necessitate belief in the Bible as inerrant—while this sort of literalism is characteristic of Islam, such a blindly literal and accepting reading is not diagnostic of all Christianity. And even if you believe in the Bible, there’s precious little mention of hell… He never does return to why belief in a Creator necessarily implies a belief in hell; he simply asserts that the one must lead to the other. (Granted, attempts to do so have always been a bit heavy-handed and short on intellectual persuasion. For example, a sect in mediæval France believed in the New Testament, but saw the wrathful tyrant God of the Old Testament as a different entity altogether, and rejected the Old Testament as lies of the devil. They were wiped out in a brutal crusade. It was in the siege of one of their cities that the cardinal leading the attacking army was asked how the soldiers should tell heretics from innocent city-dwellers and famously replied “Kill them all; the Lord will know His own”.)
Ray also trots out that tired old horse, flogged perhaps to death and beyond, that “you can’t see the wind, but you know it exists; God is the same way”. But this is a stunningly naïve assault on empiricism. We philosophical materialists certainly acknowledge the reality of wind, but we do so precisely because it can be empirically verified to exist. In attempting to find something that cannot be seen but both sides agree upon, the apologists necessarily eviscerate their own argument. The painfully obvious reason is, of course, that seeing isn’t the only way of materially perceiving, and we happily rely on our other senses, as well as mechanically, electronically, optically, and otherwise enhanced versions thereof. It’s true that the wind doesn’t cease to exist if I cease to believe in it, but my belief can be shown to be erroneous by use of a balloon, windsock, or weather-vane.
A related argument is that “you can’t see love, but it’s real; God is love or is analogous to this”, which appears to assume from an agreement that “love exists” that we also agree that love is something justifiably reified. But love can be observed to exist only where it is expressed in words or actions. Underlying it may very well be something as material as neurochemicals and electric impulses through neurones and glia. To say that God exists in a similar way is trivial and uninteresting: Certainly God exists as a concept, but not all concepts deserve to be reified, let alone deified.
Next is the moral portion of today’s Ray—by which I mean “the portion concerned with morality”; moral it is not. In fact, it is so full of egregious errors and immoralities that I hardly know where to begin. Here’s what Ray has to say:
But I take a further objection to this whole idea, because it appears to be entirely based on human desires for retribution. These are natural and serve a useful function in our biology and social lives, not because retribution is somehow morally appropriate and good but because it provides a deterrent to wrong-doing. If we weren’t vengeful, bad people wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of us. Knowing that we will take offense and may take revenge, they are deterred. Prisons and corrective facilities serve as this sort of deterrent. We don’t send them to prison because it’s morally right to imprison criminals. Maybe they “deserve” it, but we don’t send them there because they deserve it—we send them there to scare others away from doing harm; or we send them there to prevent them from doing more harm; or perhaps we send them there in the hopes of reforming them. “Deserving” it is the moral justification that gives the rest of society a right to do so, but it is not the motivation. In other words, the whole point of our judicial system (and, I confidently hypothesize, of the vindictive instinct itself) is not predicated on a goal related to criminals, but making life better for non-criminals.
From this point of view, Ray’s view of divine justice seems extremely misguided. Terror of hell is indeed a deterrent in the same way (qualitatively) as fear of imprisonment or execution. The other goals, however, fly right out the window: We don’t need eternal torment to keep dead criminals out of trouble (it’s quite enough that they are dead; obliteration is more than sufficient), and clearly there is no hope of reforming (they are tormented eternally no matter how much they repent).
What, then, is the purpose of inflicting eternal torment to punish a victimless crime? It doesn’t help anyone—there’s no victim to help. It doesn’t help make the sinner a better person; he is denied any possibility to improve. All it does is increase the level of suffering of humanity as a whole. It is the human instinct of vindictiveness raised to an ideal, the inflicting of suffering for its own sake rather than for anyone’s benefit; a horrifying climax of the uglier side of human nature.
Having read and thought about this, it seems abundantly clear to me that Ray’s book is not actually intended to persuade anyone of anything. The arguments are far too vacuous, all questions too consistently evaded rather than answered. I cannot believe that Ray is so stupid—or rather, that the conglomerate of Ray along with his flunkies, editors, agents, and aides are all so stupid, in the face of feedback, blog comments, and so forth—as to be less than perfectly aware of how flimsy his arguments are, how inaccurate the strawmen of concepts like atheism and evolution. He has no intention of addressing them honestly; if he did, he’d have done so by now.
Instead, this book is intended to insult us; its target audience is not skeptics, not even agnostic fence-sitters, but the most insulated and uneducated masses; those either most stupid, or least availed of education and critical thinking skills (or both). It is, in a sense, very much the mirror image of the book that many Christians have claimed that Dawkins’s The God Delusion is, with the difference that Dawkins actually attempts to answer theists’ questions head-on. Ray provides no mirror image of that honesty; he never gives a straight answer where he can deliver an ad hominem; never accuses anyone of being misinformed when he can accuse them of being unreasonable or morally deficient.
And from this perspective, the possibility emerges that it’s not that Ray doesn’t care about representing his opposition honestly; rather, it is in his best interest not to do so. If he presents skeptics’ arguments in a straightforward manner and tackles questions like evolution honestly, if he acknowledges the real intellectual and moral positions of atheists, then he exposes this potential target audience to reasonable counter-arguments. Argue against the reality of evolutionary biology and you have to present present an argument (compelling or not) against a well-reasoned theory; if all you want to do is cater to the ignorant and despise the enemy, it is much easier, indeed strategically a better idea, to say “Hur-hur-hur, those stupid evilutionists think that men and women just happened to evolve to have tab A compatible with slot B”. It also explains the infamous banana video, which otherwise invokes nothing so much as Poe’s Law.
I do not mean to say that he would necessarily undercut all of his arguments and conclusions—I’m sure that he could address the real concepts of evolution and atheism and still believe as he does. But if he presented the real opposition rather than strawmen, his readers would be forced to acknowledge that even though they reject the alternatives, there are alternatives. Some of them might think; some of them might falter. And that’s not what anybody wants: You can lead an atheist to evidence… isn’t about making people think, or tackling serious challenges to apologetics. It’s about keeping the ignorant ignorant and provide a sense of superiority in their ignorance, a theocratic circle jerk; about bolstering the faithful’s misconceptions and ensuring that they continue to take an unreasoned stance against propositions they do not understand.
Hi there, fellow Zizturians. I’m Petter, a materialist rationalist atheist humanitarian who runs Ubuntu, all of which makes me feel kinship directly or analogously with Ziztur herself; and I have been invited to tackle an installment of Ray-a-day. If you read this and want to read more of my thoughts once the exhaustion wears off, you can find my blog here (or by RSS; you can use tags to narrow it down to essay-style posts, or only posts related to skepticism or religion).
When I first saw the snippet from the book that Ziztur had assigned to me, my initial reaction was disappointment—it seemed so trite and vacuous that I wasn’t sure I could write anything about it. Upon further reflection, though, it provides a fairly illustrative microcosm of his style as a whole; and since I am but a guest poster, I shall deconstruct it at some length, such opportunities being rare… I’ll intersperse my own thoughts among the Comfortian ejaculations, but first, let’s set the scene. The “Angry Skeptic” asks,
The difference between the Bible and an instruction book is the myriad of untestable (and detestable) claims the Bible makes. How do you know that if I “sin” I will go to hell? Only from the Bible, which is a source of such dubious credibility as to be laughable. Can you prove to me that ANY of what the Bible claims about hell and “sin” is true? Can you prove to me that hell exists? If not, you, along with all your pulpit-pounding ilk, are nothing more than a carnival ride of empty threats.To which Ray replies,
Hell is no empty threat. If I believed it was, I wouldn’t bother warning you. However, the way for you to avoid the subject is to say that you don’t believe in God. That cuts the problem off for you at the Source. All you have to do is ignore your God-given common sense. He doesn’t exist because you don’t believe in Him. You could carry this further if you didn’t like gravity, history, the wind, or love. These things can’t be seen, and therefore wouldn’t exist if you didn’t believe in them either. Anything that you don’t like will not exist if you just say that you don’t believe in it.We first notice that, true to form, Ray’s immediate response is to avoid meeting the question. The ad hominem accusing every skeptic of being dense, unreasonable, and lacking in common sense has all been seen before—Ray is increasingly looking like a one trick pony. What should leap out at us is that if we go back to the “Angry Skeptic’s” question, the question does not in any way imply that the questioner is an atheist. For all we know, the question could have come from a deist, a non-Christian theist, or a different flavour of Christian who doesn’t accept the Bible as an authoritative source and doesn’t believe in hell. Ray’s accusation, therefore, isn’t just avoiding the question and issuing an ad hominem, but also a red herring, packing a remarkable number of fallacies and dishonesties into such a short space.
The key to being a committed atheist is to be totally unreasonable. When someone denies the obvious, you can’t reason with them. That’s why you can be presented with the absolute and clear evidence of Creation (which screams of a Creator to any reasonable person), and you can say that there’s no evidence for God.
(May I suggest a side project, Ziztur, of measuring the book’s fallacy density? I suggest that a fallacy density of N per thousand words, N being established by critical analysis, be dubbed a “kilocomfort” [the “comfort” being the average fallacy/word ratio]. People like Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman presumably deal in microcomforts or less, C.S. Lewis in decacomforts, Ray by definition in kilocomforts, and slime like Phelps in the same ballpark.)
Belief in a ‘Creator’ does not necessitate the belief in the god of the Hebrews and Christians, Yahweh. Belief in Yahweh does not necessitate belief in the Bible as inerrant—while this sort of literalism is characteristic of Islam, such a blindly literal and accepting reading is not diagnostic of all Christianity. And even if you believe in the Bible, there’s precious little mention of hell… He never does return to why belief in a Creator necessarily implies a belief in hell; he simply asserts that the one must lead to the other. (Granted, attempts to do so have always been a bit heavy-handed and short on intellectual persuasion. For example, a sect in mediæval France believed in the New Testament, but saw the wrathful tyrant God of the Old Testament as a different entity altogether, and rejected the Old Testament as lies of the devil. They were wiped out in a brutal crusade. It was in the siege of one of their cities that the cardinal leading the attacking army was asked how the soldiers should tell heretics from innocent city-dwellers and famously replied “Kill them all; the Lord will know His own”.)
Ray also trots out that tired old horse, flogged perhaps to death and beyond, that “you can’t see the wind, but you know it exists; God is the same way”. But this is a stunningly naïve assault on empiricism. We philosophical materialists certainly acknowledge the reality of wind, but we do so precisely because it can be empirically verified to exist. In attempting to find something that cannot be seen but both sides agree upon, the apologists necessarily eviscerate their own argument. The painfully obvious reason is, of course, that seeing isn’t the only way of materially perceiving, and we happily rely on our other senses, as well as mechanically, electronically, optically, and otherwise enhanced versions thereof. It’s true that the wind doesn’t cease to exist if I cease to believe in it, but my belief can be shown to be erroneous by use of a balloon, windsock, or weather-vane.
A related argument is that “you can’t see love, but it’s real; God is love or is analogous to this”, which appears to assume from an agreement that “love exists” that we also agree that love is something justifiably reified. But love can be observed to exist only where it is expressed in words or actions. Underlying it may very well be something as material as neurochemicals and electric impulses through neurones and glia. To say that God exists in a similar way is trivial and uninteresting: Certainly God exists as a concept, but not all concepts deserve to be reified, let alone deified.
Next is the moral portion of today’s Ray—by which I mean “the portion concerned with morality”; moral it is not. In fact, it is so full of egregious errors and immoralities that I hardly know where to begin. Here’s what Ray has to say:
If you were reasonable, I would say that we know that hell exists because we know intuitively that God is good. And if He is good, He must by nature punish a man who has tied up and raped three teenage girls, and then one by one, strangled them to death. In this case, justice delayed is not justice denied. God will bring that murderer to judgment and see that he gets exactly what he deserves, and hell is the place of God’s justice. It’s His prison. Common sense says that if God is good, it is right that He is also just. However, God is so good He will also punish thieves, liars, fornicators, adulterers, blasphemers, and everyone who has violated His perfect and holy Law. That leaves us all in big trouble. Without a Savior we will get exactly what we deserve, and that is a terrifying thing, whether we believe it or not. If you want proof, then simply repent and trust Jesus Christ, and you will know that what I am saying is the Gospel truth.The simplest way to address this is to say that even if we accept a number of propositions that I am not prepared to actually subscribe to—“God/Yahweh exists”; “God is good”; “God is just”; “God punishes sinners”—it does not therefore follow that all punishments should be or necessarily are equal. While Ray and his peers may claim at the pulpit that multiple rape and murder is equal to telling a lie in the eyes of God, as both are sins and both fall short of Divine Perfection, I expect that no one actually feels that they are equivalent. Rape and murder are terrible crimes that destroy lives; telling a small lie may hurt no one at all (though I advocate and practice a policy of never telling lies, because dishonesty morally offends me and because honest communication is conducive to good and healthy interpersonal relationships). Even if I were to accept that they both deserved divine punishment, I would never accept the notion that they deserve equal punishment. And, as has been often pointed out, infinite torment is by definition out of proportion to any crime it could possibly be inflicted for.
But I take a further objection to this whole idea, because it appears to be entirely based on human desires for retribution. These are natural and serve a useful function in our biology and social lives, not because retribution is somehow morally appropriate and good but because it provides a deterrent to wrong-doing. If we weren’t vengeful, bad people wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of us. Knowing that we will take offense and may take revenge, they are deterred. Prisons and corrective facilities serve as this sort of deterrent. We don’t send them to prison because it’s morally right to imprison criminals. Maybe they “deserve” it, but we don’t send them there because they deserve it—we send them there to scare others away from doing harm; or we send them there to prevent them from doing more harm; or perhaps we send them there in the hopes of reforming them. “Deserving” it is the moral justification that gives the rest of society a right to do so, but it is not the motivation. In other words, the whole point of our judicial system (and, I confidently hypothesize, of the vindictive instinct itself) is not predicated on a goal related to criminals, but making life better for non-criminals.
From this point of view, Ray’s view of divine justice seems extremely misguided. Terror of hell is indeed a deterrent in the same way (qualitatively) as fear of imprisonment or execution. The other goals, however, fly right out the window: We don’t need eternal torment to keep dead criminals out of trouble (it’s quite enough that they are dead; obliteration is more than sufficient), and clearly there is no hope of reforming (they are tormented eternally no matter how much they repent).
What, then, is the purpose of inflicting eternal torment to punish a victimless crime? It doesn’t help anyone—there’s no victim to help. It doesn’t help make the sinner a better person; he is denied any possibility to improve. All it does is increase the level of suffering of humanity as a whole. It is the human instinct of vindictiveness raised to an ideal, the inflicting of suffering for its own sake rather than for anyone’s benefit; a horrifying climax of the uglier side of human nature.
Having read and thought about this, it seems abundantly clear to me that Ray’s book is not actually intended to persuade anyone of anything. The arguments are far too vacuous, all questions too consistently evaded rather than answered. I cannot believe that Ray is so stupid—or rather, that the conglomerate of Ray along with his flunkies, editors, agents, and aides are all so stupid, in the face of feedback, blog comments, and so forth—as to be less than perfectly aware of how flimsy his arguments are, how inaccurate the strawmen of concepts like atheism and evolution. He has no intention of addressing them honestly; if he did, he’d have done so by now.
Instead, this book is intended to insult us; its target audience is not skeptics, not even agnostic fence-sitters, but the most insulated and uneducated masses; those either most stupid, or least availed of education and critical thinking skills (or both). It is, in a sense, very much the mirror image of the book that many Christians have claimed that Dawkins’s The God Delusion is, with the difference that Dawkins actually attempts to answer theists’ questions head-on. Ray provides no mirror image of that honesty; he never gives a straight answer where he can deliver an ad hominem; never accuses anyone of being misinformed when he can accuse them of being unreasonable or morally deficient.
And from this perspective, the possibility emerges that it’s not that Ray doesn’t care about representing his opposition honestly; rather, it is in his best interest not to do so. If he presents skeptics’ arguments in a straightforward manner and tackles questions like evolution honestly, if he acknowledges the real intellectual and moral positions of atheists, then he exposes this potential target audience to reasonable counter-arguments. Argue against the reality of evolutionary biology and you have to present present an argument (compelling or not) against a well-reasoned theory; if all you want to do is cater to the ignorant and despise the enemy, it is much easier, indeed strategically a better idea, to say “Hur-hur-hur, those stupid evilutionists think that men and women just happened to evolve to have tab A compatible with slot B”. It also explains the infamous banana video, which otherwise invokes nothing so much as Poe’s Law.
I do not mean to say that he would necessarily undercut all of his arguments and conclusions—I’m sure that he could address the real concepts of evolution and atheism and still believe as he does. But if he presented the real opposition rather than strawmen, his readers would be forced to acknowledge that even though they reject the alternatives, there are alternatives. Some of them might think; some of them might falter. And that’s not what anybody wants: You can lead an atheist to evidence… isn’t about making people think, or tackling serious challenges to apologetics. It’s about keeping the ignorant ignorant and provide a sense of superiority in their ignorance, a theocratic circle jerk; about bolstering the faithful’s misconceptions and ensuring that they continue to take an unreasoned stance against propositions they do not understand.
Labels: atheism, books, ethics, fallacies, guest post, Intelligent Design, morality, Petter, philosophy, Ray a Day
posted by Ziztur
at
8:00 AM
8 Comments:
Nice read. Thank you. Ray gets far too much press as it is, but in this light, he is shown for what he is. I look forward to more of the same
JC
What a post- i can't even read it all at the moment due to lack of time.
Ziztur, you can expect my post after this weekend, as a load of work is also on me as well.
Good post in general. However I disagree with the idea that terror of Hell is a useful deterrent, since a large number of people don't believe in Hell. It reminds me of the top-secret ultimate weapon in Dr. Strangelove; it's supposed to be an ultimate deterrent, but the people it's meant to deter haven't been told about the weapon's existence.
Also, I think Ray genuinely is unaware (at least on a conscious level) of the vacuity of his arguments. He just is psychologically incapable of genuinely considering the possibility that his religious beliefs are wrong. I think most Christians are like this to some extent, but Ray is a very extreme version of this.
Well, by “useful deterrent” I don’t mean “effective in all cases”, but rather that “an argument can reasonably be made that it has a positive net effect in this regard”. Any social measure has a failure rate, after all.
the bar is set very high... my review so far is nothing but school boy's inanity compared to this guest post.
Gord, my own posts are nothing but a schoolgirl's inanity compared to Petter's post, too. The man hath graced us with his superior skullmeat.
I can't quite decide what's up with Comfort. He could be the living embodiment of Upton Sinclair's principle that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." But then, Hanlon's Razor says we should "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by common stupidity." Since my stash of wise quotations disagrees with itself, it would seem I have to actually think for myself on this one. Phooey.
Okay, fine. Independent thought mode engaged: if Comfort really were as stupid as he pretends to be, he would be a singularity, a point of infinite denseness from which nothing bright could escape. Because he at least seems capable of speech and movement, I'm going to have to pass down a verdict of 'malice' on this one.
Whoopsies, I think I accidentally activated sardonic mode when I switched on independent thought mode. My bad.
I almost decided to put my pen down. But I'll keep it moving if only to have something to aspire to.
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