Andrew writes:
The idea of an atheist ‘movement’ “on the march” is not, I confess, something that fills me with great joy.
Especially when its leaders march under such idiotic banners as the British bus ads: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
What genius came up with this copy? It is stupid on several fronts.
First, it associates non-belief with hedonism, a misperception spread by believers such as Michael Novak:
Think of the burdens that slide off one’s shoulders just by becoming an atheist. It’s a helluva temptation.
None of the moral challenges that confront us—how to be tolerant and generous; how to fulfill our duties towards our parents; how to balance the responsibilities of work with those owed to our families or community—lessen with the disappearance of God. These are human dilemmas, answered always by human judgment, even when we ventriloquize our answers into a supervening God.
The bus ads suggest a utilitarian reason for skepticism: you’ll enjoy life more. The only touchstone that I can possibly imagine for deciding whether or not to adopt any particular belief is its truth, in this case: Does the evidence of human experience support the claim that we are attended to by a loving, personal God? Even if the conclusion that we have no “Friend” in the sky leads inevitably to melancholy or dissatisfaction, it is better to live unhappily in truth than happily in delusion, in my view. (As I have written before, however, I am puzzled by the claim that life would be meaningless without God. Schubert wrote some 600 songs, nearly every one of them a gem of lethal beauty and exquisiteness. You want something more?)
(The societal question is perhaps more complicated: if religious belief has irreplaceable utility on a societal level, but is nevertheless false, are we then to recommend it to others even though we as individuals cannot subscribe to it?)
If today’s believers are going around wracked with Calvinist worry over the ultimate fate of their souls, they are sure hiding it well. If anything, God today seems to provide a refuge from worry. Maybe there’s still a lot of terrifying fire and brimstone in America’s churches, but it is at least no longer eliciting the tortured illogic of predestination doctrine to reconcile believers to their own responsibility for a fate wholly outside their control.
I would say that “progressivism” as a political philosophy, is not based on evolution so much as Marxism and similar social revolutionary thought back to the French Revolution.
Would you say this principle applies, in Darwinian fashion, to your “family values, national security, economic rationalism, individual liberty”?
Just off the cuff, without any deep thought:
family values: Darwinians need to breed and have a deep interest in the welfare of their descendants.
national security: Survival of the tribe/community from which we and our descendents will draw our socially derived and transformed resources.
economic rationalism: Efficient use of limited resources for breeding/survival. Trade maximises economic production.
individual liberty: Evolution acts at the individual level. No-one can define/protect my genetic interests better than me. Group selection has nothing to do with Darwinism.
That should read “Darwinian Agents need to breed”, not “Darwinians”.
I believe there is no evolutionary tendency to “progress”. Evolution is adaptive.
Some organisms evolve “up” to more complex forms, like maybe the primates. Some evolve “down” to simpler forms. Maybe some parasites. Cave dwellers.
A common theme of evolutionary thought is that advancement to more complex organization to caused by phenomena like “arms races”.
Ask the real biologists like David Hume (razib). I watch David Attenborough on TV. I read Dawkins.
Perhaps the best argument against progress in evolution is to look at a organism like amphioxus again.
And ask yourself, why has such a morphologically primitive species survived into the present day if there was some kind of evolutionary drive towards progress?
Why hasn’t it evolved into something more advanced? After all we know more elaborate, specialized and complex chordates or vertebrates are possible.
The same is true for jawless fishes, like lampreys. etc, etc.
Everywhere we look we see lifeforms with morphologies that are very ancient. They seem to be “living fossils”. They haven’t changed much in millions of years.
So there is no drive towards progress in evolutionary biology. There is complexity and specialization, but they are adaptations to circumstances that obtained at the time the features evolved. And this in no way precludes the survival of more ancient forms if their environments remain favorable for them.
But there is a critical, repeating evolutionary pattern that is absent from your sketch of “living fossils” like horseshoe crabs, Peripatus, doubtless certain algae, etc. These are truncated branches that in many cases were comparatively speciose in their time but have been reduced to one or a few contemporary living species. Right now beetles, orchids, catfish and a wide range of other groups, especially at the genus and family levels, are “in their time”. I don’t know if this pattern of initiation, speciation and decline holds up generally but I think it is common enough that we should be aware of it. Life is not just a jumble of genes and molecules without organization (not that you are saying this).
I think we are crossing wires on the term “progress”. Maybe the word I need to use here is “success”. This covers relictual species as well as those that are evolving full blast.
As for the so-called living fossils, how do we know that these organisms have survived “essentially unchanged” for millions of years? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it? We do not know if they may have undergone profound changes in metabolism, physiology, reproductive biology and other aspects that fossils cannot tell us. We should be careful about our assumptions in this regard.
Where does any of this get us vis-a-vis Left and Right? The liberals could argue that socialism is the most ancient society type for humans, no?
What you are saying about their biochemistry may have changed; we can make inferences about that from genetic phylogenies. And in many case you would be right there may well be molecular innovations. Or other changes that are undetectable in the fossils.
And I would probably argue that extinction is in the main a chancey process so we expect some branches to decay while others diversify. In fact diversification is probably the best defense against decay. See I value diversity.
Where does any of this get us vis-a-vis Left and Right? The liberals could argue that socialism is the most ancient society type for humans, no?
I would say H.Sap early developed a mixed economy. Tribes provided welfare, communal support, but they also traded with their neighbours. We have identified trade routes for obsidian and flint that extend all over the place. How much was traded that left no trace? Trade may be the most important innovation of our kind of Man.
Even within a tribe, trade, in a very general sense, will have played a major part. I do you a favor – you do me a favor.
Also welfare is more likely to be non-parasitic among related individuals as a consequence of inclusive fitness.
This is what I was getting at in my earlier comment#91 on a previous thread, when I spoke of changing the constitution to make it more family-friendly.
None of the moral challenges that confront us—how to be tolerant and generous; how to fulfill our duties towards our parents; how to balance the responsibilities of work with those owed to our families or community—lessen with the disappearance of God.
The challenges themselves do not disappear, but the urgency behind them does. If you’re not going to answer for how you lived your life in this world to some ultimate arbiter, then the incentive has decreased. It doesn’t make any religion true to say this, mind you, but the consequence of God’s death is there.
I appreciate Ms. MacDonald’s desire for the truth and reason, but we should acknowledge that this is a desire. Not everyone necessarily shares in that desire.
Biology is dynamic, while more or less “static” principles of culture can work quite well for long periods. Religion has historically held them in place. What else could?
Hannon. I disagree. Evolutionary biology is deeply conservative. Whatever works is retained and built on. Parts of our genome go back to structures that are around three billion years old. The most conservative thing we have is our ancient genome.
In fact the only thing we know that can survive 3.5 billion years without change is some of the information coded in DNA. Even mountains are eroded far faster than that.
The Hannon/Daniel Dare exchange is interesting and worthwhile. In a way you are both right. Biology is dynamic and has left a very impressive trail of change seen in every natural history museum.Human genome studies reveal a past in which we were essentially modern humans for some fifty thousand years but underwent a variety of changes that modified our features in usually small ways. However, the discovery of microcephalin, a gene appearing around 37,000 years ago, distributed across Asia and Europe, but not sub-saharan Africa, demonstrates a brain-building gene that could have created quite unequal populations around the world.
So Daniel Dare is right re the basically conservative nature of the ancient genome.Basic physiology must be protected and preserved because it works-as Michael Behe loves to point out- in very intricate ways, as reflected in its molecular activity.Mutations of that basic machinery would be catastrophic.One could trace back the digestive devices of primates a very long way with only minor differences and the notochord would be seen at some stage in species going back millions of years.
The new Harpending/Cochran book called The 10,000 Year Explosion will confirm what I wrote in my own book re culture being far more dynamic once it began to roll some 7000 years ago. It actually accelerates as political and social systems are enriched by the vast array of fruits from science: namely assorted technological wonders that make things like transportation and communication much faster and more efficient.I compare biological and cultural evolution in my Chapter 12 for those of you who really are curious about these processes.
I suggest you read both my book, Apes or Angels? Darwin, Dover, Human Nature, and Race, as well as the Harpending book and then return to this discussion.Both are on Amazon.com and are in considerable agreement.Harpending greatly enjoyed my book, which is a source of pride because he is among the few anthropologists who do serious genetics research and can therefore appreciate the claims I made. You who are still reading this thread should think carefully about the dynamism of culture because we see a new kind of president- nearly a cult figure- emerging in a time of enormous economic crisis due primarily to a “compassionate” but bungling G.W. Bush. Liberalism’s extremist ideas and schemes for redistribution are becoming reality before our eyes.The very nature of American democracy can be changed by these forces of socialism. Lenin did it in only a few years, after all, and Obama can do it without guns!Race relations are already being made a priority for an administration wedded to “diversity” as a panacea when Robert Putnam’s studies says the opposite! Our basic freedoms are at stake, believe me.The secular right, being skeptical of cults and schemes that force diversity as an ultimate good against evolutionary realities,must openly criticize extreme liberalism for its pernicious crusades.
ugh. i’m an atheist, but i think heather’s aestheticism is a bit glib:
“As I have written before, however, I am puzzled by the claim that life would be meaningless without God. Schubert wrote some 600 songs, nearly every one of them a gem of lethal beauty and exquisiteness. You want something more?”
life isn’t meaningless without god, but some lives are. i just watched a documentary about aids orphans in africa, and there was a little tyke so wracked by his parent’s stds his face was peeling off. i am sure it is no consolation to him, in the few miserable years he has left before his squalid death, to know that heather mac donald enjoys “winterreise” in her manhattan apartment.
Magog.
Number one reason to support science: It reduces the frightful burden of human suffering that the natural order imposes on us.
Careful though – there are some who would see the stds as God’s judgement on the wickedness of the parents.
To which the answer is: Oh and what about malaria and its charming mosquito then? Or tapeworm? Or filariasis? All wonderfully adapted parasitic lifeforms that took millions of years to evolve in all their sinister perfection.
Mind you, I suspect cattle wouldn’t be too fond of us if they knew how we chop them up and roast them, so fair’s fair. As Alan Watts once put it: Nature is a system, constantly eating itself to death.
If we need a complex metaphysical structure before our claims of truth and falsehood are meaningful, then how do we erect the structure? Don’t we need the structure in order for us to construct it in the first place?
Metaphysics is an empty discipline, sound and fury. There’s only physics.
@Caledonian
This is itself a metaphysical claim; and a very lazy one at that.
Evolutionary biology is deeply conservative. Whatever works is retained and built on. Parts of our genome go back to structures that are around three billion years old. The most conservative thing we have is our ancient genome.
Parts of the genome are retained and other parts are discarded – that is the opposite of conservatism. In order to retain what works and discard what doesn’t you have to decide between them, which requires a completely unconservative method of judging. In genetic evolution this judgment is provided by the species’ environment in which some variants survive and others die, but in human cultural change (which resembles evolution in some respects and not in others) the judgment of which customs to preserve and which to discard is generally made by the members of the society.
Always, when a custom is targeted for removal on the grounds that it doesn’t work, conservatives insist that it must be kept and there are dire (but unproved and usually unspecified) consequences for changing it. Conservatives defended monarchy, slavery, racism, and many other now-discredited belief systems in the times when they were on the verge of being discarded by society.
This is not to say that liberals are always right, of course. Some old ideas do have value, and some new ones are worthless. But the age of ideas isn’t what gives them value – to return to the evolution analogy, it shows that even well-established lineages can be transformed or destroyed at any time when conditions are no longer favorable to them. Tradition carries no weight of its own – each generation must test it again against their own surroundings.
Chris,
You’re confusing conservatism for reaction.
Tradition carries no weight of its own – each generation must test it again against their own surroundings.
Actually, no, you can’t run tests on a lot of policy reforms. Let’s take a look at the stigma on bastardy. Getting rid of it has had tremendous social consequences and it’s affected tens of millions of children. However, even acknowledging this, it will, at best, take generations to undo the damage. That’s why we have to to be careful of eliminating traditions, even ones that seem cruel. A tradition’s age indicates that it has been tested. It doesn’t make it sanctified, but it should make us cautious–even conservative–about undoing it.
Bear in mind, too, that evolutionary biology is not super dynamic. For every change it “accepts”, there are countless changes that are “rejected.” Those changes that do make it are incremental and accrete over long periods of time, which is fairly consonant with Edmund Burke’s vision.
So, Chris, what you’re saying is that evolution is pragmatic and nonpartisan?
Troost, thanks for your comment. That last paragraph was reassuring; this site seems to elicit more in the way of evolutionary (or religious) thought than politics. I’ll check out the books, though I read slowly. Hopefully the site will still be up…
You say culture “actually accelerates as political and social systems are enriched by the vast array of fruits from science”. This seems logical but I think we need to make a judgment call here. I think the way science-minded atheists feel about believers is a good match for how the latter feel about those whose faith is scientism. Science brings us more problems than solutions in many areas, in fact it is a self-perpetuating cycle that allows its industries to grow exponentially. This follows in politics as well, where liberals obviously have been able to wheedle from Mother Science, where applicable, most of what they need to destroy the old traditions. Out with the old, in with the new. Maybe that’s why the atheist-scientific-conservative view seems so strange to me. That’s not negative criticism, mind you, but tradition and faith are by comparison very natural. And I think the faith part keeps science in better balance with society.
A veneration of scientific theory and application, whose altar we have been kneeling at all along, has its price. The price has been to sacrifice our traditional norms to efficiency, profit, economy, convenience, innovation, ad nauseam. So yes, there is enrichment and acceleration, but who puts the brakes on the runaway train? Certainly not the politicians and industry wonks who profit by power and money. For me “conservatism” means, inter alia, withholding from the full embrace of any tradition whose origin in still in living cultural memory.
Dare– “Number one reason to support science: It reduces the frightful burden of human suffering that the natural order imposes on us.”
Yes and No.
Where does this thinking lead us? To reasoning like this: if we can find ways to improve crops and ag practices in poor tropical countries we will help feed people who sometimes suffer terrible starvation in bad years. So let’s breed (now it’s GMO tech) better crops and get with some NGOs and get this stuff into the hands and mouths of the needy. Result? *Even greater numbers* of people suffering at the same level because the food goes to accommodate higher survival rates or increased birthrates brought on by the increased food supply. Same rotten, corrupt government, same position of powerlessness and susceptibility to environment. Same goes with medicines– more people than ever before (per unit area) to endure the same baseline strife and misery. Absolute B.S. You might ask yourself where is the profit in such efforts for the companies?
This is the kind of science we don’t need.
Allow me to qualify that last message. Of course you can say there’s nothing wrong with the science itself, which may be largely true but certainly not in all cases. It’s the careless application of the science by bureaucrats or untrained technicians. So is this pattern some grand scheme for evading responsibility altogether?
Does that mean you’re volunteering to starve to death, Hannon?
Westley– Only if you’d be willing to help as a control.
So you’re willing to have other people starve to death, just not you, eh?
I don’t want to see anyone starve to death. But people who live in areas where periodic drought and famine kill off their neighbors and family members, they know the score. That is what fate, and their climate and lifestyle, have dealt them. It is what they are *adapted to*. Like we are adapted to urban noise, stress and heart disease.
The question is whether outside, artificial “aid” to these people, thanks to good will and science, and doses of political fraud and manipulation, really is a help to them. If they cannot manage their quality of life by their own standards (not ours) any better than they could 100 or 1500 years ago, even with this aid, the answer is no. It is not a matter of my willing it or accepting it.
Hannon raises very serious questions. His indictment of science is somewhat rhetorical because it is precisely the absence of science that separates the Third from the First world.One cannot have a high quality of life with very great longevity, among other good things, unless there is a scientific base for technology.It is not a question of science or no science, but how we are to guide its activities toward useful and ethical ends while nurturing the conditions of freedom essential for the best science.
Africa is a basket case that defies rational solutions. China’s solution is to exploit the hell out of them by quasicolonial methods while building infrastructure that will promote economic independence. The problem is that the Chinese will extract the minerals and do the brainy engineering, leaving hapless Africans in charge of better roads and better sewers.It didn’t work with the Brits in an earlier time so why will the modern Chinese approach work any better? Certainly science can add to their woes if HIV is greatly reduced while they increase fertility to 7 per female.Birth control is a key issue.
It would indeed be a strange world without religion.The USSR is a shining example of the vast excesses of a runaway political experiment that rips religion from its society in a barbaric way. Solzhenitsyn is reactionary in part because of this barbarism. He sees the dangers of liberal extremism that deifies man and tries to level and homogenize human nature.From what I see of secular humanism I find it a very uncongenial philosophy in some respects because it blindly accepts the worst features of liberalism.For one example they believe in infinite malleability of human nature and biological equality of the races, a proposition that is utterly wrong.Iam much more comfortable with the Christian forces fighting for “family values” against humanist forces for legalizing drugs and promoting open marriage. Cultures do maintain some stability via feedback mechanisms from forces like religion but the sweeping destruction of adult authority from the Sixties and the inexorable decline of public morality pose a terrible existential threat that the diminution of religion will surely exacerbate.Our cultural stability in the face of humanist multiculturalism is on the edge of some kind of oblivion. Accelerating cultures must have some controls via law, politics, and morality to offset the tendency to descend into a morass like Brazil or Mexico.Liberals, no matter how accomplished and wealthy, have a lemming’s desire to reduce all of us to a miserable sameness.If we lose meritocracy, ambition, a taste for high culture,and some sense of hierarchy, we will descend into a shantytown culture.In the end I know that Shakspeare is much better than Judy Bloom and hope that the nation will find its way out of its downward spiral.Science cannot save us from this crisis of values.
Troost, reading through your sensible outline I thought: Yes, the problem is the ascendancy of liberalism and the possibly reciprocal decline of conservatism. This is a vastly more important debate than theism vs. atheism. As the British like to say, religion is really a private affair. I agree with this and would welcome a ‘colorless’ political debate that is about principle and philosophy. Whether the latter derive from Christianity or Enlightenment heritage should be of minor importance in most such discussions.
I get the feeling that many see science as guiding society, or as master of society, having overtaken its role as servant long ago. As if technology, pharmaceuticals etc. will cure all. It is at about this point that some of us start getting nervous. Would you agree that this trend or perception is something like the antithesis of conservatism?
For the record, I do not condemn science as science in its own right. I do condemn the mindless worship of it (scientism)– and also the idea that we are as nothing without its provisions. I have visited among people who are actually completely science-less and I think we would have more difficulty adapting to their intellectual level than to their material standard. The evident ‘life force’ in these people, endemic TB notwithstanding, makes most of us look like Dunkin’ Donuts habitués. I value the comforts and technology as much as anyone, but I could not subscribe to a “propositional science” that must be exported to every corner of the globe. Science, as an uninterrupted stream, is something that very few cultures have evolved with.
Hannon,
2 comments:
1. “Number one reason to support science: It reduces the frightful burden of human suffering that the natural order imposes on us.”
2. Remember what I keep telling you Hannon, about non-interference.
I believe that those who choose to reject science and modernity, for whatever reasons, have to live with the consequences of that choice.
Ultimately every culture is responsible for their own choices, just like every individual is. That is the meaning of freedom.
@Hannon
Like we are adapted to urban noise, stress and heart disease.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death because we are not adapted to it.
I do condemn the mindless worship of it (scientism)–
I keep reading theists make the claim that such a thing as “worshiping” science occurs. Honestly, I’ve never seen or known anyone who is capable of thinking scientifically that “worships” it. Mostly it appears to be a defense by theists, as if to say, “I may worship a god, but you worship science. Just like my religion, YOUR religion is scientism.” Do you have any concrete evidence of anyone worshiping science?
Worship is probably too strong a word. But I would be among those who regard science and reason as our personal Tao or path of enlightenment, as rational beings.
When you combine it with monism, the idea that nature is the one and only reality, then the concept of a Tao of Scientism is very far-reaching.
But even so, I don’t think one is worshiping science. I think perhaps one is worshiping Nature, or perhaps Nature’s order or Cosmos. Science is merely the Tao or path by which one discovers Cosmos.
If you try to place it in a Western framework, it is perhaps a form of Platonism.
Religion should be a private affair in a free society. The debate re atheism vs. theism will persist on the fringes because thinking people want to solve mysteries.For most it will be a matter of habit and reflex but it will bring happiness to the masses, as Marx once said.Christianity, for all its postmodern woes, still provides some direction and sense of decency for the general population.It is a counterweight against secular humanism.The sanctity of the family and the issue of abortion are two key examples of a values gap that religion helps to stabilize.
However, you are right that liberalism is getting the upper hand as Hollywood, the MSM, and academia indoctrinate a new generation that ambivalently live in gated communities while they send money to “Save Africa” campaigns and vote for a lightweight socialist Obama.Thus,the once conservative, religious America I knew as a somewhat outcast atheist has evolved after the devestating Sixties into a far more liberal, “pluralistic” society dearer to the hearts of the far left.I say “pluralistic” because we use propaganda, affirmative action, and wholesale cheating against whites to shoehorn minorities into colleges and employment.In doing so we no longer operate the glorious meritocracy we once had and we have lowered our standards on many fronts despite the continued progress of science and technology.Not only does conservatism decline as liberalism rises, whites suffer various indignities as blacks and often semi-literate Hispanics “beat” them into the better jobs.It is a stacked deck!
It is the multicultural agenda that will wreak havoc as it is pushed forward by the nefarious Obama, an anomaly only because he converted skin color into cash in broad daylight while nurturing a political record of no distinction other than leftist sentiments.The voting public simply showed us how misguided they are. Are Americans as ignorant as Europeans say they are? Yup.
You worry too much about scientism. Most scientists are quite private and tend to be conservative in lifestyle. In general science improves life and acts as a foundation of cultural life.The arts are critically important in fulfilling other aesthetic and emotional aspects of human nature.We need both human endeavers.States, however, conflict in various ideolgical ways and science in the service of the state could be deadly.How science is used is separate from its badsic function as a part of human nature due to intellect.We still want to understand our universe.
So, Chris, what you’re saying is that evolution is pragmatic and nonpartisan?
More or less, yes. Death defers to no ideology – what works, works. It’s a little more complicated in sentient species because of our ability to “reduce the frightful burden of human suffering”.
Let’s take a look at the stigma on bastardy. Getting rid of it has had tremendous social consequences and it’s affected tens of millions of children. However, even acknowledging this, it will, at best, take generations to undo the damage.
What damage? Bastards are both absolutely and relatively enormously better off than when they were stigmatized. If you want to argue that their *parents* aren’t stigmatized enough, and that leads to antisocial effects like higher rates of bastardy, fine, there’s a possible case for that; but inflicting the stigma on the children was a monstrous injustice that we couldn’t possibly have ended soon enough. And the main reason we didn’t end it sooner was – not judging the custom on its merits, but accepting it simply because it was old. If you want to call that something other than “conservatism” then exactly how *do* you define conservatism?
A preference for old ideas over new ones interferes with a preference for good ideas over bad ones, because those two divisions don’t always align. That’s why I prefer to be, as Tulse put it, pragmatic.
When one party is peddling religion and pseudoscience almost entirely, and the other has a mix of good and bad ideas, obviously a rational pragmatist isn’t going to end up being *completely* nonpartisan – one party really is noticeably better than the other at the present time – but it’s a contingent partisanship defined by the realities of the parties, not partisanship for its own sake.
P.S. The idea that reducing the frightful burden of human suffering is a *bad* thing – that we ought to allow a few humans to be crushed under that burden pour encourager les autres – I can’t even put a name to.
What damage?
The increase in bastardy, which has led to a number of pathologies, like increased abuse, neglect and crime. Look at the effect on black areas, where bastardy rates approach 70%.
A preference for old ideas over new ones interferes with a preference for good ideas over bad ones, because those two divisions don’t always align. That’s why I prefer to be, as Tulse put it, pragmatic.
How self-satisfied of you. The catch is actually getting there. When it comes to people’s lives experimentation with new ideas creates a lot of rubble. Trial and error means you will have error. Would you like to be one of the “errors” or live through one? That’s why it’s far better to prefer old ideas to new unless there’s both a pressing need for change and plenty of evidence showing that the new idea has a chance of succeeding.
“This is itself a metaphysical claim; and a very lazy one at that.”
Only if you define ‘metaphysics’ to include anything with informational content. Now *that’s* lazy.
The actual concept of metaphysics –“the philosophical enquiry of a non-empirical character into the nature of existence” — is meaningless.
You make it sound like I am using dynamite instead of a geologist’s pick to look at science. Perhaps I have overstated my case, but when I hear people talking about science as if it is the only human endeavor that can take us into the future and “deliver”, I see this as symptomatic of a kind of blind faith. “Worship” may not be the right word, but what do we call it when people reserve their highest awe and veneration for what science provides or reveals? The average person cannot avoid the afterglow of scientific advances in their daily lives, especially if they are urbanites who never develop a reverence for nature. Even the arts bow to science (digital imaging, etc.). I think many tend to believe that modern civilization would simply collapse without science. Well, I suppose it would, but this is still a type of dependence conditioning that is based partly on misleading or skewed information. We should not base our total sense of security and modernity on the one modern advent of science. The “transhumanists” go even further and throw humanity in the mix as well. In other words, no one thinks to challenge science itself, as science, except of course prerational theists. It is untouchable but if religion is not untouchable then science should not be either. I am speaking here of looking at science, considering its effects and tendencies; some people seem to be quite sensitive to any “attack” on science and this seems overwrought.
Still the question begs: do you see any more important human enterprise than science? Or is it just a part of the mix, a very important part?
The scientists I know, over 50 of them, work in the natural sciences and they are liberal to very liberal in their politics as far as I am aware. The intellectual elite tend to be liberals since conservatives are shunned or discouraged in the first place. Maybe those on the secular right can make better inroads than theists.
Dare, you seem to have skipped over my qualifying statements where I say that I do not begrudge science for its own sake, nor do I reject the modern world. Have I violated your non-interference clause? I’m still not clear what that means, or who it applies to.
Hannon,
My point about non-interference, was referring there to your comment #67 and after:
frightful burden of human suffering that the natural order imposes on us.”Yes and No.Where does this thinking lead us? To reasoning like this: if we can find ways to improve crops and ag practices in poor tropical countries we will help feed people who sometimes suffer terrible starvation in bad years.
I would not be interfering in prescientific cultures. I would limit to purely commercial relations. Purely private sector – if the other culture wishes it. They must solve their own problems, or deal with us from a pov of mutually-beneficial trade.
Still the question begs: do you see any more important human enterprise than science? Or is it just a part of the mix, a very important part?
Only part. I am a monist. I do not deny that God or gods or powers or “Jedi forces” could be part of the Cosmos. But science is the Tao. It is the one-and-only path to truth in the one-and-only reality. Religion is a dead-end and leads nowhere.
If there is a God. Science alone will lead us to him. If science cannot find him, then there is no God.
Monism.
So it is not so much God that I don’t believe in. It is religion that I don’t believe in. i.e. For me the argument is about ways and means not ends.
I have zero faith in “Faith”.
The increase in bastardy
If you had read my post, you would have seen that I distinguished between stigmatizing the children and stigmatizing the parents. The former can’t possibly affect the rate of bastardy because the children’s actions or decisions don’t contribute to it.
On the merits, though, you haven’t presented any evidence that the rate of bastardy even increased at all (as opposed to merely becoming more visible), let alone that destigmatization was a significant cause. Considering all the other possible changes affecting the urban poor (a class which hardly even existed for most of human history), this seems like a significant failing.
When it comes to people’s lives experimentation with new ideas creates a lot of rubble.
As opposed to the complete costlessness of preserving such time-tested traditions as, say, slavery, patriarchal family structures, and gay-bashing? Conservatism (as I define it, and you have not responded to my challenge to present another definition) defends the tried *and failed* just as much as it defends the tried and succeeded. That’s why it gets in the way of distinguishing true from false.
If you had read my post, you would have seen that I distinguished between stigmatizing the children and stigmatizing the parents.
I don’t think the two are inextricable. Unfortunately, one goes with the other. It’s sad, but there it is. It works the other way, too. Look at how we now lionize “single mothers”.
On the merits, though, you haven’t presented any evidence that the rate of bastardy even increased at all (as opposed to merely becoming more visible), let alone that destigmatization was a significant cause.
You can begin with Moynihan’s famous studies. Bastardy has increased among all races and classes in this country, and it tracks with all sorts pathologies, like criminality. There’s plenty of other work out there. Heather MacDonald herself has discussed this issue, too. Really, I picked the topic because the damage is so well known.
As opposed to the complete costlessness of preserving such time-tested traditions as, say, slavery, patriarchal family structures, and gay-bashing?
Nobody ever said holding any tradition is without cost. You’re erecting a straw man. Everything has a trade-off, and at some point some traditions can and should be discarded. The point isn’t to establish ossified stability, but change within a structure, and that structure should default to more traditional methods. Change should have the burden of proof, not tradition.
Looking at your examples, I’d say the first is simply a red-herring. No serious conservative recommends physically abusing people, or even verbally abusing them. If you’re referring to criticizing a group’s morals, that’s not “bashing”, and trying to term it such is a sign of bad faith.
As far as “patriarchal family structure”, I have no idea what you mean by that. Do you mean polygamy or normal heterosexual marriage, which has been equated to rape by some lunatics on the left? I’m not saying that’s your position, just that your term is so wide open as to be pointless.
Now, slavery: in fact, I can name a number of conservatives who opposed slavery. Edmund Burke, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, John Adams and George Washington (somewhat hypocritically in his case, I grant) all opposed the institution. It’s time had come. The nettle that few had the courage to grasp was how to do it without triggering a more costly war.
Conservatism (as I define it, and you have not responded to my challenge to present another definition) defends the tried *and failed* just as much as it defends the tried and succeeded. That’s why it gets in the way of distinguishing true from false.
There is no such thing as perfect prescience. Each method comes with its failing, and you will find conservative backing old and bad ideas. I’m frustrated with conservatives not back civil unions for homosexuals as meaningful compromise. However, radical experimentation often has worse consequences, as we’ve seen with countless government programs that yielded all sorts of predictable and unpredictable consequences.
And, of course, those programs create their own constituencies who engage in the very same behavior you condemn in conservatives (mulishly justifying their existence) which compounds the problem even further. In your system, you get the worst of both worlds: bad experiments and people tenaciously defending those bad experiments.
Dare– “So it is not so much God that I don’t believe in. It is religion that I don’t believe in.”
I think many would agree with this sentiment. The two obviously are separable, but at this stage both still require faith of some kind. So you are waiting for your faith, your proof. OK by me.
I have no quarrel with your points on non-interference in matters of other cultures, trade, etc., although I don’t see how one can *not* interfere by engaging in trade with other cultures.
“If there is a God. Science alone will lead us to him. If science cannot find him, then there is no God.”
This holds out a perennial hope for “proof” of God’s existence. When exactly will science say unequivocally, “We’ve looked and looked and can’t find God. There is no God. Thank you for your support.” ?
You seem awfully close to the edge of belief here. The notion of “God” makes sense to you on some level– not the God of the Bible naturally but some higher organizing principle that is transcendent and also paradoxical. But something that is transcendent is by definition outside our comprehension and definition, no? That is a puzzle!
Will Durant: “As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.”
Erratum: Not “waiting for your faith” but “waiting faithfully” perhaps?
Hannon,
This holds out a perennial hope for “proof” of God’s existence. When exactly will science say unequivocally, “We’ve looked and looked and can’t find God. There is no God. Thank you for your support.” ?
The answer to this lies, I think, in the Bayesian foundations of reason.
God is a hypothesis like any other hypothesis. For an unbiased observer, the strength of belief in any hypothesis is equal to the strength of the evidence that supports it – no more no less.
So you could argue that we are forever theist-in-waiting. But this is no different to one’s position on the existence of extraterrestrial life or UFO’s or Faster Than Light travel or Time Machines, or a whole host of other currently low probability hypotheses.
I have no problem with entertaining a multiplicity of possible but unproven hypotheses. They are filed in my “not currently believed in” drawer.