Category: Atheism

When the Cranes Cry

Mark Davis1 Comment

The crane has a symbolic resonance in Celtic mythology. A magician, assuming an elaborate pose—one eye open and one leg drawn up—was said to see into the otherworld, just as the crane itself moved from sky to land to water. But there is the other meaning of the word crane: the ancient lifting contraption that helped build Greece and likely had a role in Egypt and Sumeria before that. And now they protrude into the urban sky, raising up our buildings and even other cranes as we densify our cities. It was this mechanical meaning that Dan Dennett at Tufts chose to contrast with conceptual skyhooks, the unsupported contrivances that save protagonists in plays by dangling gods above the stage. For Dennett, the building crane is the metaphor we should apply to the mindless, simple algorithm of evolution. The algorithm raises up species and thus creates our mysterious ideas about meaning and purpose. No skyhooks or Deus ex Machina are needed.

Dennett passed away at 82 in Maine leaving a legacy as a public intellectual who engaged in the pursuit of reason throughout his adult career. He was committed to the idea that this world—this teeming ensemble of living matter—is intrinsically miraculous, built up by something dead simple into all the convolutions and perilous ideas that we now use to parse its mysteries. He was one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse during the so-called New Atheism craze of 2008-2010, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, but even then he was committed to the crane metaphor to displace these ancient skyhooks of belief rather than, say, a satirical impact-analysis of religion a la Hitchens.

There is another phrase that Dennett championed in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life: universal acid.… Read the rest

Humility is Pervasive

Mark Davis2 Comments

We are having an intimate holiday season with food, family, and small adventures along the Oregon coast. There were hints of Christmas with presents and music, as well as new Yule poetry that celebrates the cycles of the ocean in a natural dialogue with the seasonal flow: “King tides pull the world upward / … / Whales coast through gabled waters…” And then there are the swirling culture wars out there somewhere trying to deny us our diverse ideas and new traditions. We don’t worry much about their misdirection, but find the lack of creativity disheartening. Why not learn and invent new ways of thinking about society and culture?

Rabbi David Wolpe at Harvard Divinity has a more historical and intellectualized take on modern life in the Atlantic where he tries to collapse all the complexity of modern political instincts into an amalgam about insufficient humility about our own ideas and capabilities. I like critiquing these kinds of intellectual histories because I am humble enough to doubt that singular ideas can explain all the myriad ways of flourishing in human history. “The Return of the Pagans” maps the contemporary left with their environmental worship—and the right with heroic icons like Donald Trump—to something like the Greco-Roman idolization of beauty, power, wealth, and creativity. It is the invention of monotheism that focused the ancient mind on a singular divinity that we poor humans can always prostrate our tiny plans before. Elon Musk shouldn’t strain to get to Mars. Tech Bros shouldn’t accelerate technological change without deep humility about the impact on society. The ultra-wealthy used to be more concerned for using their wealth for good. Everyone should instead contemplate their imperfect sin-nature in the face of perfection.… Read the rest

The Rubbery Road from Original Position to Metaphysical Naturalism

Mark Davis1 Comment

From complaints about student protests over Israel in Gaza, to the morality of new House Speaker Johnson, and even to the reality and consequences of economic inequality, there is a dynamic conversation in the media over what is morally right and, importantly, why it should be considered right. It’s perfectly normal for those discussions and considered monologues to present ideas, cases, and weigh the consequences to American life, power, and the well-being of people around the world. It also demonstrates the fact that ideas like divine command theory become irrelevant for most if not all of these discussions since they still require secular analysis and resolution. Contributions from the Abrahamic faiths (and similarly from Hindu nationalism) are largely objectionable moral ideas (“The Chosen People,” jihad, anti-woman, etc.) that are inherently preferential and exclusionary.

Indeed, this public dialogue perhaps best shows how modern people build ethical systems. It looks mostly like Rawl’s concept of “reflective equilibrium” with dashes of utilitarianism and occasional influences from religious tradition and sentiment. And reflective equilibrium has few foundational ideas beyond a basic commitment to fairness as justice using the “original position” as its starting point. That is, if we had to create a society with no advance knowledge about what our role and position might be within it (a veil of ignorance), the best for us would be to create an equal, fair, and just society.

So ethics is cognitively rubbery, with changing attachments and valences as we process options into a coherent whole. We might justify civilian deaths for a greater good when we have few options, imprecise weapons, and existential fear (say, the atom bomb in World War II).… Read the rest

Contrasts and Failures, Hope and Awe

Mark Davis2 Comments

Russell Moore writes in the Atlantic that American evangelicalism is in crisis. There is a Faustian pact of unholy MAGA politics, conspiracy theories, and religious feelings that can only be remedied with a revival of the faith itself, laser-focused on Moore’s conceptions of what Christianity should strive to become. He acknowledges that there is a dark history to America’s evangelical movement through the 20th century. It was always political in close focus, with the maintenance of racism and exclusion at its core well before abortion was even a talking point. Anti-Catholicism and antisemitism were equally bundled up with the evangelical mindset. Beyond the moral failings that sloshed into politics, there was the structural marketing of the faith by televangelists and traveling ministries that turned the hoped-for internal conversion into a more cynical plot:

In the end, a market-driven religion gives rise to a market-driven approach to truth, and this development ultimately eviscerated conservative Christianity in the US and left it the possession of hypocrites and hucksters.

I’m not at all surprised. As information has become unlocked from the vaults of academic pursuits by modern technologies, the ripples of uncertainty about faith claims have spread and clashed with the desire to totalize the political, personal, pragmatic, and moral dimensions of evangelical beliefs. If a thing is so unquestionably right and good, it must infiltrate and own the mind, the body, the soul, the community, and the nation. So why is the world drifting away, seemingly inexorably?

But even those who leave their faith communities feel adrift, clinging to vague spirituality or buffet gorging across traditions in search of something that is satisfactory but different. But that is only in the best of moments, when a song triggers nostalgia or late after eggnog on Christmas Eve.… Read the rest

Follow the Paths

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There is a little corner of philosophical inquiry that asks whether knowledge is justified based on all our other knowledge. This epistemological foundationalism rests on the concept that if we keep finding justifications for things we can literally get to the bottom of it all. So, for instance, if we ask why we think there is a planet called Earth, we can find reasons for that belief that go beyond just “’cause I know!” like “I sense the ground beneath my feet” and “I’ve learned empirically-verified facts about the planet during my education that have been validated by space missions.” Then, in turn, we need to justify the idea that empiricism is a valid way of attaining knowledge with something like, “It’s shown to be reliable over time.” This idea of reliability is certainly changing and variable, however, since scientific insights and theories have varied, depending on the domain in question and timeframe. And why should we in fact value our senses as being reliable (or mostly reliable) given what we know about hallucinations, apophenia, and optical illusions?

There is also a curious argument in philosophy that parallels this skepticism about the reliability of our perceptions, reason, and the “warrants” for our beliefs called the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). I’ve previously discussed some aspects of EAAN, but it is, amazingly, still discussed in academic circles. In a nutshell it asserts that our reliable reasoning can’t be evolved because evolution does not reliably deliver good, truthful ways of thinking about the world.

While it may seem obvious that the evolutionary algorithm does not deliver or guarantee completely reliable facilities for discerning true things from false things, the notion of epistemological pragmatism is a direct parallel to evolutionary search (as Fitelson and Sober hint).… Read the rest

Kalam the Incorrigible as a Moral Good

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I’ve previously complained that the Kalam Cosmological Argument is drivel, but a recent video reminded me that intellectual sophistication can arise from confronting drivel, because it helps expose more people to the tenuous, changing, and incomplete journey of modern science and philosophical interpretation/translation. I knew I was largely in alignment with modern science when I wrote that particular post (and others), but the video, considering the figures involved, provides additional compelling insights to push the viewer into thinking more carefully about the challenges and limits of our collective understanding of who we are, where we came from, and what it means to be here now.

I highly recommend it:

And what I think is most worth emphasizing and that may not be understood by laypeople and religious supplicants, or may not be internalized as deeply as it should be, includes:

  1. Our everyday experience and intuitions about similarly-sized matter are simply not applicable to quantum and relativistic scales, or to the implications of cosmological theories. “Causality” is one of those concepts. We see this in everything from the simple case of radioactive decay to contra-causal quantum experiments, and ultimately in the question of causation as applied to the universe itself.
  2. Science operates by applying metaphors, finding the limitations of those metaphors, filtering by empirical results, and then using the refined science as a new metaphor. Most of those metaphors are incompatible with everyday experience. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be so vexingly difficult to understand.
  3. Many philosophical worries about logical inconsistency are abstractly derived from everyday reasoning and may not apply to modern understandings of causality, space, and time.
  4. Humility about what we don’t know and effort to unravel it remains the best approach to our mysterious selves and the world.
… Read the rest

Intellectual Capital, Religion, Audiofools, and Irrational Poynting Vectors

Mark Davis2 Comments

Twin New York-associated articles of note today. First, we have the New York Times with Ilana Horwitz of Tulane University on the topic of how religion helps working-class young people—especially boys—to better achieve after high school. This is part of the ongoing saga of better understanding the sagging social support network (“social capital”) that has been suggested to explain high rates of despair, opioid addiction, alcohol abuse, suicide, and even white supremacist ideation and Trumpism among working-class Americans. What is particularly interesting to me is that the same religious enhancement of educational attainment doesn’t apply to the children of college-educated professionals and the author notes that strong religious belief systems—especially among young women—may interfere with future decision-making by directing them towards traditional female careers and roles.

Meanwhile, Cornel West has a wide-ranging interview in The New Yorker where he repeatedly decries Harvard for becoming a spiritual wasteland of sorts, dedicated to the education of a professional-managerial class that lacks some elemental soul needed to translate ideas into public intellectual and social engagement:

That’s not just brother Trump, even though he’s a neo-Fascist one. He’s on the continuum with so much of the professional-managerial class in terms of their lack of accountability to working people and poor people. Once you have that kind of spiritual decay and moral decrepitude, man, then it’s just gangsterization on steroids, man. That’s where America’s headed.

So it seems many of the religious working-class college achievers are just working towards some kind of soulless professionalism. Without converting their intellectual achievements into activism, and by just focusing on jobs and further achievement, they are content to let the backslide towards authoritarianism continue apace. West sees a neoliberal hypocrisy at every turn, as well, and almost as toxic as the fascist urge.… Read the rest

The Evolution of Theological Commitments

Mark Davis1 Comment

My wife studies pagan mythology, among other pursuits, and she recently undertook some of the Norse background in a far deeper way than my own shallow assemblage of role-playing references, fictional mentions, and Marvel movies. She happened to mention the other day that Christian chroniclers like Snorri Sturluson likely adapted the pre-existing mythos in order to achieve a syncretic outcome. Loki was demonized to create a dualist conflict. Ragnarök may have been created out of whole, fresh cloth in order to extinguish the pantheon and make way for the new religion.

John McKinnell studies the narratives that the Norse proselytizers used to achieve the conversion of the pagans, as well as the influence and outcomes of those people. There is a theological problem for them in terms of explaining the existence of the pagan deities that is largely solved by simply describing them as devils or as personifications of natural phenomena. They transmogrify from real to a netherworld nestled somewhere between mythic, poetic, and literal evils.

I had nearly simultaneously joined the Bart Ehrman Blog because of a post that got repeated in one of his podcasts I happened to catch. The post is from a guest contributor who uses scholarship from Mark Smith and others to detail a model of the transformation into monotheism from earlier Canaanite pantheons. In this model, during the Second Temple Period, the success of the god Marduk’s people over Yahweh’s tribes requires a theological reinterpretation in order to explain Yahweh’s defeat. How can YHWH be the greatest god under such circumstances? The answer is easy, though. Marduk is just a puppet of YHWH and the literal military victory is a divine punishment. YHWH remains supreme.… Read the rest

Measuring Belief and Quackery

Mark Davis1 Comment

While reviewing reporting on the RNC this afternoon, I found myself curious about the protocols at news organizations with respect to their editorial boards. For instance, does the Washington Post editorial board require that claimed facts within all opinion pieces are not clearly disputed? Does the New York Times? I suspect yes, which is what we see in the lawsuit filed by Sarah Palin against the New York Times concerning the suggestion that Palin’s campaign was relevant to the shooting of Gabby Giffords. There was at least a debate that rose to the level of the Opinion Editor, if not the board.

I was investigating this because I am curious how WaPo handles Trumpy columnists like Mark Thiessen and Hugh Hewitt, who are mostly cheerleaders without baggage for the current president, with only occasional whataboutisms and other distracting suggestions about Biden’s candidacy. They don’t defend lies and cons. They just cheer. Meanwhile, the board itself came down hard on the repeated falsehoods of Pamela Bondi and the ongoing slaughter of truth in the service of the Trump 2020 campaign.

The mainstream press represents Trump and cronies as conmen and women, manipulative, self-serving, corrupt, cruel, ignorant, ineffectual, morally questionable, and out-and-out liars. And the press uses facts to do so. Yet Trump maintains a remarkable following despite this evidence, with many quizzical onlookers at a loss as to the psychology of Trump’s followers.

In this modern example, there are many, many resources that can be used to fact check and form opinions. Yet people choose to rely on only a few and discount others as being biased.

I was recently reading some fairly detailed Bayesian analysis by philosophers concerning Hume’s argument against miracles.… Read the rest

Post Pale and Nerdy

Mark Davis1 Comment

White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert Jones is making the interview and excerpt cycle, here and here. I’m on the fence whether to read it since I think I get the gist from the excerpts and interviews, though I do often read controversial social criticism, social science, and religious thinking (Charles Murray, Coming Apart; Ehrman, Heaven and Hell; etc.). I inevitably learn something new. Here, though, the meta question is how a major religion that makes truth and moral claims to its adherents can harbor and tolerate something as repugnant as slavery and racism. Now, it might be argued that slavery and racism were simply part of our shared human past where tribes and nations vied for resources and land, but this of course argues against the possibility that religious traditions reflect some kind of special truth insofar as we are wedded to the idea that slavery and racism are bad, always and everywhere. Yet, from the “curse of Ham” to the endless support for slavery in the Old and New Testaments, and even the skin color tribal curses in Book of Mormon, there was plenty of ammunition for recent religious communities in America to be supportive of white supremacy, much less slavery.

And this is where the pale and nerdy comes in. In his review of Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing (which I also own) in the New York Times, physicist and philosopher David Albert took Krauss to task for bothering with the whole effort of trying to seriously engage with religious arguments concerning the origins of the universe at all:

When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for every­thing essentially human.

… Read the rest