Magi Mike’s Blog

When those who deny the existence of God at the same time reveal that they ardently want Him not to exist, are we justified in feeling skeptical? It seems a parallel case of the one presented a couple of posts back, in which we decided we were justified in being skeptical when an ardent believer asserted that God exists.

The trouble is that the case of the atheist is not truly symmetrical with the previous one. The argument which held before now fails. The two cases are not symmetrical because God is not now the base case. That is the natural world we experience. We do not experience a supernatural God. Believers may say they do, in one way or another, but while they may experience something, it is their assumption or hypothesis that it is God. After all, the same experiences can be simulated by means that can only be natural ones—drugs, fatigue, starvation, electrical stimuli to the brain.

God is formulated as the explanation of experiences we cannot otherwise explain, but we are no better off, no nearer an explanation to say that a figment of our imagination explains these things. With nothing more than wishful thinking to support the hypothesis of God we have to eliminate it on the basis both of skepticism and Ockham’s Razor.

The base case is the skeptical case, not the credulous one—we reject what we cannot demonstrate as true. By Ockham’s Razor, we have no need of the entity, God. So far, like Laplace, we have been able to explain our experiences without that hypothesis.

Michael Nugent on 8 June, 2011 writes at Atheist Ireland that the “World Atheist Convention in Dublin” (WACD), which met on Sunday 5 June 2011, discussed and adopted the following declaration on secularism and the place of religion in public life. He asked that everyone should discuss and promote the WACD declaration with friends and colleagues, and to discuss and promote it among atheist, humanist or secular groups, and with the media and politicians.

Dublin Declaration on Secularism and the Place of Religion in Public Life

1. Personal Freedoms

   1. Freedom of conscience, religion and belief are private and unlimited. Freedom to practice religion should be limited only by the need to respect the rights and freedoms of others.
   2. All people should be free to participate equally in the democratic process.
   3. Freedom of expression should be limited only by the need to respect the rights and freedoms of others. There should be no right ‘not to be offended’ in law. All blasphemy laws, whether explicit or implicit, should be repealed and should not be enacted.

2. Secular Democracy

   1. The sovereignty of the State is derived from the people and not from any god or gods.
   2. The only reference in the constitution to religion should be an assertion that the State is secular.
   3. The State should be based on democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Public policy should be formed by applying reason, and not religious faith, to evidence.
   4. Government should be secular. The state should be strictly neutral in matters of religion and its absence, favouring none and discriminating against none.
   5. Religions should have no special financial consideration in public life, such as tax-free status for religious activities, or grants to promote religion or run faith schools.
   6. Membership of a religion should not be a basis for appointing a person to any State position.
   7. The law should neither grant nor refuse any right, privilege, power or immunity, on the basis of faith or religion or the absence of either.

3. Secular Education

   1. State education should be secular. Religious education, if it happens, should be limited to education about religion and its absence.
   2. Children should be taught about the diversity of religious and nonreligious philosophical beliefs in an objective manner, with no faith formation in school hours.
   3. Children should be educated in critical thinking and the distinction between faith and reason as a guide to knowledge. Science should be taught free from religious interference.

4. One Law For All

   1. There should be one secular law for all, democratically decided and evenly enforced, with no jurisdiction for religious courts to settle civil matters or family disputes.
   2. The law should not criminalise private conduct because the doctrine of any religion deems such conduct to be immoral, if that private conduct respects the rights and freedoms of others.
   3. Employers or social service providers with religious beliefs should not be allowed to discriminate on any grounds not essential to the job in question.

It seems that new research from Rice University has found that more than 20 percent of atheist scientists are spiritual. 72 of the 275 natural and social scientists interviewed said they have a spirituality that is consistent with science, although they are not formally religious. If this is the measure quoted as 20 percent, it is actually 26 percent!

Elaine Howard Ecklund, assistant professor of sociology at Rice, is the chief author of the study which she conducted with Elizabeth Long, professor and chair of the Department of Sociology at Rice. Ecklund says:

Scientists hold religion and spirituality as being qualitatively different kinds of constructs. Spirituality pervades both the religious and atheist thought. It’s not an either/or. This challenges the idea that scientists, and other groups we typically deem as secular, are devoid of those big “Why am I here?” questions. They too have these basic human questions and a desire to find meaning. There’s spirituality among even the most secular scientists. These spiritual atheist scientists are seeking a core sense of truth through spirituality—one that is generated by and consistent with the work they do as scientists.

Apparently these scientists see both science and spirituality as part of their individual quest for meaning without faith that can never be final. Their spirituality is congruent with science and separate from religion. Spirituality is open to a scientific journey requiring empirical evidence, religion demands the “absence of empirical evidence”.

The terms scientists most used to describe religion include “organized, communal, unified and collective”. The terms used to describe spirituality include “individual, personal and personally constructed”. All of the respondents who used collective or individual terms attributed the collective terms to religion and the individual terms to spirituality. Ecklund said:

In their sense of things, being spiritual motivates them to provide help for others, and it redirects the ways in which they think about and do their work as scientists.

The spiritual scientists saw boundaries between themselves and their nonspiritual colleagues because their spirituality facilitated engagement with the world around them. Such engagement, according to the spiritual scientists, generated a different approach to research and teaching. While nonspiritual colleagues might focus on their own research at the expense of student interaction, spiritual scientists’ sense of spiritualty provides nonnegotiable reasons for making sure that they help struggling students succeed.

Much of the comment on the study by the authors is waffle. What is valid in it is not original, and what is original is not valid. It really is not surprising. The lead author seems to have done the research under a grant of $283,549 from the John Templeton Foundation to study “Religion and Spirituality among Natural and Social Scientists at Elite Research Universities”, and must have felt under pressure to find something to please the sponsor.

The researchers seem to have used the results of the research to define what they mean by spirituality, rather than defining the terms they wished to study first. Thus, it is a curious finding that only the science professors who do their teaching job properly are spiritual. It seems to mean that conscientiousness is at least one facet of spirituality. If so, the nonspiritual teachers could never get tenure, and so selection would push up the ratio of these mysterious spiritual ones in any science faculty.

In fact, the word “spirituality” defies definition, it is so meaningless. Etymologically it derives from the Latin for “breath”. Breath relates to life for which breath is essential in mammals, including humans. It is an early metaphor for life, actual breathing life, and came to be associated with an immaterial entity that gave life to inanimate matter. Thus God made Adam of clay and “breathed” life into him! The life that God has breathed into him and all of us is literally “breath” or spirit (spiritus).

Thus to accept the concept of spirituality is to accept a dualism that science can find no evidence for. When there is no evidence for any proposed phenomenon or hypothesis, the null hypothesis is that it does not exist, not that it does exist. That is scientific skepticism.

Some scientists might not think about these things too much because they are irrelevant to the practice of science, so some might not have strictly coherent views on spirituality. Even more so, given that the term, quite apart from its linguistic origins, is now so widely interpreted that no two people ever are speaking about the same spirituality. Proof is the discussion that the PhysOrg.com report of this research generated. Approaching 200 comments submitted showed it superbly. Few posts were talking about the same thing.

It seems, though, that a lot of people did think that a spiritual experience was a personal—subjective—sense of awe. It is this sense of awe that many scientists who are not a bit religious may be willing to describe as spiritual. It has nothing to do with religious belief, and the attempt of religions to hijack it as the presence of God, or whatever, is typical religious dishonesty. It is almost invariably a sense of awe at Nature or something natural, like a childbirth. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, says his “Road to Damascus” experience came when he suddenly came across a frozen waterfall, an awesome but entirely natural phsnomenon. It should have strengthened his desire to investigate Nature, rather than stimulating his return to God. However, the wonder of human architecture, say, as in the spectacle of the interior of a cathedral, can induce it too. That was undoubtedly the objective of the medieval bishops in building such wonderful buildings.

Perhaps Professors Ecklund and Long will do a much more thorough study with a more representative sample, proper definitions, and greater objectivity. Let’s not hold our spiritus! A Templeton Prize might be awaiting.

Scientifically, or any other way, we cannot prove anything that is imaginary or simply a thought. Centaurs, vampires, werewolves, philosophers’ stones, elixirs of life, fairies, demons, angels, gods, God—such things can be imagined, but cannot be proved because they are purely imaginary, figments, and so do not exist in reality to leave behind any evidence for them. The absence of evidence for them is evidence! It is evidence against them.

A basis of science, a feature without which it could not work, is skepticism, one does not postulate anything for which there is no evidence. Its opposite is credulity, the inclination to believe anything on the least of evidence or none! Related to skepticism is the principle of Ockham’s Razor, or Parsimony, which says that one postulates only what is necessary and feasible—one does not glibly invent things. Using these principles science has no need to hypothesize God. Nor does it have to disprove God, an entity for which it has no need, any more than it has to disprove centaurs or elixirs of life, etc, or needs them.

An agnostic is deliberately wavering, wavering out of choice and not reason. To claim there is no evidence either way, is simply to say there is no evidence, and so to be scientific and skeptical the postulate of God has to be rejected until convincing evidence forces a reassessment. It is impossible to be simultaneously a scientist and a believer in God, so long as science cannot accommodate credulity. Credulous science becomes religion!

Moreover, if God existed and has the effect on the material world that believers think He has, He is necessarily leaving evidence behind. Science ought to be able to detect it. As Victor Stenger shows, nothing so far suggests anywhere in the universe that we have checked out that requires a God to explain it. Science is highly successful at explaining things without the hypothesis of God. So, if God exists, He is not manifestly changing the world in any discernible way. Worship and prayer are having no effect.

Of course, a purely mental God, a purely imaginary or psychological phenomenon, can effect one. It is a form of autosuggestion. That is probably why people are able to convince themselves that God does answer prayers. It is the Placebo God.

I have recently noted elsewhere that R Stark and G Glock found 86 percent of Catholics and 79 percent of Protestants could not name a single prophet from the Old Testament. It suggests that the much vaunted high percentages given for the proportion of Christians in the USA, would not be so impressive if a few simple questions were added to verify that these people actually know anything about the religion they profess. Of the supposed 90 percent or so of Americans who claim to be Christian, it seems from Stark and Glock that only around seventeen percent would know enough about their faith to justify their claim to be Christians.

Well a Pew Survey has now asked the few simple questions I mentioned. An online test asks similar questions, giving a multiple choice of answers so that a guess could be correct 20% to 50% of the time! Here are the results of a confirmed atheist, namely myself:

Pew online survey by religious inclination

Pew online survey results by religious attendance

Pew online survey results by education

I got two wrong, one about a “great awakening” that I did not attempt because it would have been pure guesswork, and one that I took what I thought was an “educated guess” at, and got wrong! The latter was not about religion but about the US constitution, but gave only two choices, so 50% would have had it right just guessing, and the former was about some obscure (to me, and to most Americans, it seemed) religious revival [added note, Wikipedia: “The Great Awakening was a religious revitalization movement that swept the Atlantic world, and especially the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, leaving a permanent impact on American religion.”], which 33% could have got right by guessing. Maybe the marking allows for the guessing factor.

Dr Stephen Prothero, author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t, and involved in the survey, commented:

We have a weird kind of Christianity in America if Christians don’t even know what Christianity is.

He means American Christianity is not Christianity! The Pew survey confirms what Stark and Glock found ages ago.

Most Americans are not religious, they just think they are.

Michael Lindsay, a religion sociologist at Rice University, essentially admitted it, saying:

This study gives convincing proof that Americans may be deeply committed to faith, but that commitment comes most from the heart, not the head.

In short, faith is a synonym for ignorance.

Test yourself with our 60-item Christianity Test.
Click the picture

Christianity Test

Richard Dawkins’s speech delivered in Whitehall at the London rally against the Pope, 18th Sept 2010, was shorter than the full text, mostly because the rally was so huge—an estimated 15,000—that the speeches started late and had to be curtailed. This is the original speech from Dawkins’s own website:

Should Joseph Ratzinger have been welcomed with all the pomp and ceremony due to a Head of State? No. As Geoffrey Robertson has shown in The Case of the Pope, the Holy See’s claim to statehood is founded on a Faustian deal in which Mussolini handed over 1.2 square miles of central Rome in exchange for Church support of his fascist regime. Our government chose the occasion of the pope’s visit to announce their intention to “do God”. As a friend has remarked to me, presumably we should expect the imminent hand over of Hyde Park to the Vatican, to clinch the deal?

Should Ratzinger, then, be welcomed as the head of a church? By all means, if individual Catholics wish to overlook his many transgressions and lay out the red carpet for his designer red shoes, let them do so. But don’t ask the rest of us to pay. Don’t ask the British taxpayer to subsidize the propaganda mission of an institution whose wealth is measured in the tens of billions: wealth for which the phrase “ill-gotten” might have been specifically coined. And spare us the nauseating spectacle of the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and assorted Lord Lieutenants and other dignitaries cringing and fawning sycophantically all over him as though he were somebody we should respect.

Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II, was respected by some as a saintly man. But nobody could call Benedict XVI saintly and keep a straight face. Whatever this leering old fixer may be, he is not saintly. Is he intellectual? Scholarly? That is often claimed, although it is far from clear what there is in theology to be scholarly about. Surely nothing to respect.

The unfortunate little fact that Joseph Ratzinger joined the Hitler Youth has been the subject of a widely observed moratorium. I’ve respected it myself, hitherto. But after the Pope’s outrageous speech in Edinburgh, blaming atheism for Hitler, one can’t help feeling that the gloves are off. Did you hear what he said?

“Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews… As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century…”

You have to wonder about the PR skills of the advisors who let that paragraph through. Oh but of course, I was forgetting, his senior advisor is that Cardinal who takes one look at the immigration officials at Heathrow and concludes that he must have landed in the Third World. The poor man was no doubt prescribed a bushel of Hail Marys, on top of his swift attack of diplomatic gout—and one can’t help wondering whether the afflicted foot was the one he puts in his mouth.

At first I was annoyed by the Pope’s disgraceful attack on atheists and secularists, but then I saw it as reassuring. It suggests that we have rattled them so much that they have to resort to insulting us, in a desperate attempt to divert attention from the child rape scandal.

It probably is too harsh to expect the 15-year-old Ratzinger to have seen through the Nazis. As a devout Catholic, he would have had dinned into him, along with the Catechism, the obnoxious idea that all Jews are to be held responsible for killing Jesus—the “Christ-killer” libel—not repudiated until the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). The German Roman Catholic psyche of the time was still shot through with the anti-Semitism of centuries.

Adolf Hitler was a Roman Catholic. Or at least he was as much a Roman Catholic as the 5 million so-called Roman Catholics in this country today. For Hitler never renounced his baptismal Catholicism, which was doubtless the criterion for counting the 5 million alleged British Catholics today. You cannot have it both ways. Either you have 5 million British Catholics, in which case you have to have Hitler too. Or Hitler was not a Catholic, in which case you have to give us an honest figure for the number of genuine Catholics in Britain today—the number who really believe Jesus turns himself into a wafer, as the former Professor Ratzinger presumably does.

In any case, Hitler certainly was not an atheist. In 1933 he claimed to have “stamped atheism out”, having banned most of Germany’s atheist organizations, including the German Freethinkers League whose building was then turned into an information bureau for church affairs.

At very least, Hitler believed in a personified “Providence”, presumably akin to the Divine Providence invoked by the Cardinal Archbishop of Munich in 1939, when Hitler escaped assassination and the Cardinal ordered a special Te Deum in Munich Cathedral:

“To thank Divine Providence in the name of the Archdiocese for the Führer’s fortunate escape.”

We may never know whether Hitler identified his “Providence” with the Cardinal’s God. But he certainly knew his overwhelmingly Christian constituency, the millions of good Christian Germans with “Gott mit uns” on their belt buckles, who actually did his dirty work for him. He knew his support base. Hitler most certainly did “do God”. Here’s part of a speech he made in Munich, the heart of Catholic Bavaria, in 1922:

“My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who—God’s truth!—was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.”

That is just one of numerous speeches, and passages in Mein Kampf, where Hitler invoked his Christianity. No wonder he received such warm support from within the Catholic hierarchy of Germany. And Benedict’s predecessor, Pius XII, is not guiltless, as the Catholic writer John Cornwell devastatingly showed, in his book Hitler’s Pope.

It would be unkind to prolong this point, but Ratzinger’s speech in Edinburgh on Thursday was so disgraceful, so hypocritical, so redolent of the sound of stones hurled from within a glass house, I felt that I had to reply.

Even if Hitler had been an atheist—as Stalin more surely was—how dare Ratzinger suggest that atheism has any connection whatsoever with their horrific deeds? Any more than Hitler and Stalin’s non-belief in leprechauns or unicorns. Any more than their sporting of a moustache—along with Franco and Saddam Hussein. There is no logical pathway from atheism to wickedness.

Unless, that is, you are steeped in the vile obscenity at the heart of Catholic theology. I refer—and I am indebted to Paula Kirby for the point—to the doctrine of Original Sin. These people believe—and they teach this to tiny children, at the same time as they teach them the terrifying falsehood of hell—that every baby is “born in sin”. That would be Adam’s sin, by the way, Adam who, as they themselves now admit, never existed. Original sin means that, from the moment we are born, we are wicked, corrupt, damned. Unless we believe in their God. Or unless we fall for the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell. That, ladies and gentleman, is the disgusting theory that leads them to presume that it was godlessness that made Hitler and Stalin the monsters that they were. We are all monsters unless redeemed by Jesus. What a vile, depraved, inhuman theory to base your life on.

Joseph Ratzinger is an enemy of humanity

1. He is an enemy of children, whose bodies he has allowed to be raped and whose minds he has encouraged to be infected with guilt. It is embarrassingly clear that the church is less concerned with saving child bodies from rapists than with saving priestly souls from hell—and most concerned with saving the long-term reputation of the church itself.
2. He is an enemy of gay people, bestowing on them the sort of bigotry that his church used to reserve for Jews.
3. He is an enemy of women—barring them from the priesthood as though a penis were an essential tool for pastoral duties. What other employer is allowed to discriminate on grounds of sex, when filling a job that manifestly doesn’t require physical strength or some other quality that only males might be thought to have?
4. He is an enemy of truth, promoting barefaced lies about condoms not protecting against AIDS, especially in Africa.
5. He is an enemy of the poorest people on the planet, condemning them to inflated families that they cannot feed, and so keeping them in the bondage of perpetual poverty. A poverty that sits ill with the obscene riches of the Vatican.
6. He is an enemy of science, obstructing vital stem-cell research, on grounds not of morality but of pre-scientific superstition.
7. Less seriously from my point of view, Ratzinger is even an enemy of the Queen’s own church, arrogantly endorsing a predecessor’s dissing of Anglican Orders as “absolutely null and utterly void”, while shamelessly trying to poach Anglican vicars to shore up his own pitifully declining priesthood.
8. Finally, perhaps of most personal concern to me, he is an enemy of education. Quite apart from the lifelong psychological damage caused by the guilt and fear that have made catholic education infamous throughout the world, he and his church foster the educationally pernicious doctrine that evidence is a less reliable basis for belief than faith, tradition, revelation and authority—his authority.

Stephen Hawking: God no longer has any place in theories on the creation of the Universe

In A Brief History of Time, British scientist Stephen Hawking had suggested that the idea of God or a divine being was not necessarily incompatible with a scientific understanding of the Universe. In extracts from a new book The Grand Design, Hawking now says God is not necessary for creation. He has no place in theories on the creation of the universe. The Big Bang was a consequence of the law of gravity.

Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.

What of the fortuitous place we actually have to live in, the planet earth in the solar system? Didn’t God have a hand in that? In 1992, a planet was discovered orbiting a star outside our own solar system. It makes our own solar system no longer unique, and not as fortuitous as it seemed. If we live on one, and can see others, there could be millions of them.

That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions—the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass—far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings.

Hawking has achieved worldwide fame for his research, writing and television documentaries despite suffering since the age of 21 motor neurone disease that has left him disabled and dependent on a voice synthesiser.

Some Comments Made On Facebook

Virginia Keyes replied to this but on Facebook. Here is the converstion so far.

Virginia Keyes could,nt possibly agree with this. One best seller stephen leave it at that!!

Mike Magee It’s no argument just to say you couldn’t agree with something. If God is not necessary for Creation, then the universe can begin without Him. Then again, as I have written elsewhere, time having a beginning might be an illusion rather like… the railway tracks coming to a point at the horizon. Once we get to times less than the Planck time, it changes, receding towards an absolute zero time ever more slowly so that it never gets there. (Look at: http://www.askwhy.co.uk/truth/570BigBang.php)
It means time never began, the universe is eternal, and that must suit a Christian, mustn’t it? Even if Mrs Keyes couldn’t care less .

Virginia Keyes Stephen hawkins believes that gravity started everything. i ask therefore where did gravity come from. We do need a moral compass and hawkins way is rather free for all. Maybe his secular views could be partly responsible for the decline around us. I do care Mike only not as yet found the correct path for myself!

Virginia Keyes Hawkins, for a scientist very unscientific. i.e. without experiment, with out proof!

Mike Magee I haven’t read this new book, but do not think Hawking is saying that gravity is God. He will not be saying gravity started everything, so he is not being illogical as you seem to imply. But as I said about a week ago, it is my preference to discuss things I have blogged about on the actual blog, where the original item can be read, and the debate followed from the outset, if a debate ensues. If anyone gets to the post by Google or whatever, they will have no idea that you are criticizing it here on Facebook.

Someone calling himself Pater Pelligrino has written very truly on a list:

What is really interesting in all these debates between IDers (Christian Fundamentalists) and those who accept evolution, is that nothing, no matter what is said or read in online forums, will ever change a believer’s convictions. No argument or discovery or fact can ever be convincing enough to change a believer’s mind.

The most famous example of this is Kurt Wise who, incredible as it may seem, has a PhD in Geology from Harvard University where he studied under the supervision of Stephen Jay Gould(!). Wise is famous for stating that:

if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate

The obvious objection is how can one know that what is written in the Bible is, in fact, the word of god, while what is written in the Koran, or the Bhagavad Gita, or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy isn’t? Faith, by definition, is belief in that for which there is no proof. So, it all comes down to the circular reasoning of “I believe it because I believe it”.

Evidence is irrelevant. The people who argue against evolution think they see holes in the theory. There is still work to be done in explaining the details of how natural selection drives the creation of new species. However, the theist does not believe in creationism because he finds the argument for evolution unconvincing. Rather his religious faith takes precedence and determines his view on evolution. Like Wise above, even if the theory were rock solid perfect, with all the details accounted for, the creationist would still believe what he wants to believe. To someone wearing red tinted contacts the world will always appear red.

As I have learned from years of such arguments, there can be no fruitful dialogue between creationists and atheists. Either they end up talking past each other, or the debate degenerates into name calling.

Christians believe that if God does not exist then anything goes. Then there is no morality. And without morality we are no different from a dog. Religion lifts us from immorality to the moral plane.

Yet prosperous and well brought up Saudi Moslems could callously crash hijacked aeroplanes into the twin towers and kill around 3000 innocent people. It convinces Christian America that Islam is the work of the Devil, like any creed, world view or religion other than Christianity! Only the Christian God is God.

Yet, to judge by these US Christians, their God is the Devil too. Americans, under the Clinton, and the hyper “Christian” Bush, killed, directly by bombing and other military means, or by starvation and deprivation from medical supplies by operating punitive sanctions, over a million Iraqis. Currently, they are killing an estimated 1000 Afghans a month, but they refuse to tell us how many. Now Wikileaks confirms it is a substantial enough number for the authorities not to want us to know. “Kill ratios” of 50 to 1, begin to look suspiciously as if they are just picking off anyone who looks eastern for the sport of it, a sport one US general admitted he enjoyed!

The question is why is this vast degree of murder and mayhem all right for the Christian in defence of their way of life, but lesser numbers of deaths caused by the Moslems in defence of theirs is evil incarnated. Going back to Vietnam figures were worse—an estimated two million Vietnamese being murdered, often horribly, by chemicals, high explosive bombs, helicopter assaults, even being thrown blindfold from helicopters. The “kill ratio” even then was over 30 to one. Just what is moral about this? What is good about the Christian God when Christians are ruthless, uncaring monsters towards others, even if they are weepingly sentimental over anyone of their own who gets killed in retaliation?

Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, says the lesson of all this is that if God exists, then murdering thousands of innocents is permitted to anyone who claims to be acting on behalf of God. Whatever they do is good because they see it as fulfilling God’s will, and it earns them salvation.

Yet atheists do good deeds because doing them is the right thing to do, not to curry favor with a superbeing. That is just what proper morality is. It is done to feel good as a human being. Morality is its own reward. David Hume wrote that the way to show respect for God is to ignore His existence but still act morally.

Atheism unlike religion creates a safe public space for all believers. New Yorkers have been asking themselves should Moslems, mostly Americans, be allowed to build a mosque? Religions will always find objections to the freedom and equality of rival religions. It is the liberal, most often the atheist, who has no objections. The secular society tolerates all religions, and even protects the rights of equality of the ones persecuted by their stronger rivals, but it is free to criticize them honestly and without perseution. What about submitting all religions to a fair but ruthless, critical analysis? Believers should not be coddled like infants, but treated as adults responsible for and able to defend rationally their beliefs.

W K Clifford (1879) proclaimed “it is wrong always, everywhere and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”.

Martin Smith of Glasgow University, Scotland, thinks he has found some reassurance for the theist who is interested in personally reconciling their religious beliefs within their own mind, when confronted with various kinds of criticism. He has nothing, though, for the evangelical interested in spreading their religious beliefs to other people.

If Smith’s views are right, religious beliefs from the believer’s own perspective need never exceed the authority of available evidence. Religious belief perhaps exceeds the authority of available evidence in Clifford’s view, but that need not trouble a religious believer.

One arm of Smith’s argument rests on what Wittgenstein wrote in On Certainty—inquiry has to stop somewhere. Certain things have to be accepted without inquiring into—the so called “hinge propositions”, which have to be free from doubt:

…the questions that we raise and our doubts depend upon the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn. That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that some things are indeed not doubted.

If a proposition supports or undergirds our practice of inquiry in this way then it can be accepted without the need for evidential support. A belief in the existence of the external world plays this kind of role vis a vis ordinary empirical inquiry. Well, Gödel proved the same thing mathematically, but while it is true that a set of propositions cannot be self contained, it does not mean that all sets are equally useful. Geometry is an example. Euclidian geometry seemed to be appropriate for notions of a flat earth, but others were discovered, not so generally useful in everyday life, but valid still, and useful in special circumstances. The point is that we have an external world to apply them to, to test them objectively.

Belief can be criticized as being factually false, or as being unjustified or irrational. Plantinga described the first as the de facto criticism, and the second as the de jure criticism. The second might be a valid criticism, though the belief is true. The belief is simply held on poor grounds. Prominent examples of de jure criticisms are:

1. Freud who argued that religious belief was wish fulfilment—the wish in adulthood for the security and protection of the father of childhood.
2. Marx who thought religious belief was a delusion induced by a ruling class to keep hoi polloi quiet.
3. Nietzsche who said religious belief was the resentment of the oppressed, buttressing the weak and self righteous.

In each case, though the reasons for belief were soundly criticized, the belief could still be true. An argument then emerges that the justificatory status of religious belief cannot be argued while suspending the question of its truth—so Alvin Plantinga (2000). Religious belief, if true, is necessarily justified, and so the de jure argument is futile. Smith tells us Plantinga goes on dubiously to maintain that religious belief is justified, irrespective of whether it is true!

God and the External World

Anyway in developing the argument, Smith sees parallels between belief in God and belief in the external world, and thinks neither belief can be defended. Essentially, he says both require a prior belief in them, and so any empirical evidence for either really begs the question.

Though a priori defenses of God were once generally accepted, now only a few diehards find any value in them. To defend their belief in God, theists now cite quasi empirical evidence, such as having felt the presence of God, or some other supposed experience of Him, types of revelation, direct experiences the theist interprets as being direct evidence for believing in God. It places no credence on faith, if faith is believing without evidence. Many ordinary religious believers claim evidence for their convictions. Faith then is simply a conviction, immovable once established on the basis of some evidence.

An atheist would be unpersuaded by any such religious experiences. Unusual and moving experiences like these can be accepted as genuine, but provide no evidence for God. They are wish fulfilments caused by insecurity, delusion or mundane, human foibles. The theist argument begs the question—such experiences could not be attributed to God without already believing in God. Question begging is not a sound method of arguing, and nor is evidence which begs the question.

Catholic Cardinal, John Henry Newman, found that such skepticism about religion goes too far, for, if true, it is equally true of the real world. Examples of empirical evidence for it also seem to assume it, and are also begging the question. So belief in an external world may be just faith.

To illustrate, Smith asks us to imagine a real world skeptic who sincerely believes there is no external world. For him, all reality is generated by the mind. He would not be persuaded by perceived evidence because, though the perceptions are real, they are not evidence for an external world, but are always explained as phenomena of the mind. So arguing from such evidence simply begs the question just as it did in arguing for God. The externality of the experiences assumes they are from the outside world, when they are entirely sensed internally. As begging the question in argument is invalid, and so is evidence for God which begs the question, then the same is true of evidence for the real world that begs the question. It is just as false, Smith thinks.

The question of whether the external world exists cannot be solved without first settling the question of how the relevant evidence is to be interpreted, but we cannot settle the question of how the relevant evidence is to be interpreted without first settling the question of whether the external world exists.

The dispute is a dispute over a world view. A world view is a secular expression for a set of views held by someone which lets them think coherently. It is what religion offers to the religious. So the disagreement is equivalent to one between religions. The opposing world views offer no common ground as to how evidence should be evaluated.

So far, Smith has been arguing, as philosophers do, and as Descartes did, from the viewpoint of a single mind surveying the landscape to decide whether it was real or just a figment of the observer’s mind. Such views are therefore subjective ones. The real world skeptic’s argument necessarily is subjective because he accepts only his own mind as producing the sensations experienced. The one who accepts the external world accepts that there are other minds in it, who can arrive at common answers to problems by comparing each of their experiences. When they agree about some event in the real world, they can accept it as objectively true. Objectivity is a social agreement about a common observation.

That the real world skeptic cannot accept evidence for the external world does not mean it is not real evidence, but Smith says its problem is that it is not “transparent”. Not everyone can appreciate it. But the believer in objective truth can easily test the real world skeptic’s sincerity by asking him to prove his conviction that the real world is simply some sensation in his mind by asking him to jump in front of a tube train, or from a multistorey car park. If they refuse to do it, then they are showing their conviction is not sincere.

That is the point at which the evidence becomes transparent even to the real world skeptic. To maintain skepticism thereafter is simply to be a fraud or a madman. Smith’s real world skeptic argument is invalid, so it is not counter to the criticism of the arguments of believers. Believers in God cannot turn round to their tormentors and say, “OK, then prove yourself by doing so-and-so”, though they try to use Pascal’s wager instead. The point of the real world case, is that it immediately resolves the issue, whereas Pascal’s wager, like most religious arguments, is deferred until we die. We have to buy the religious pig in a poke to get a chance of knowing the answer, but the odds remain on us knowing nothing after death, as we knew nothing before we were born.