Are You Required To Vote For Someone Who Believes Freedom and Morality Are Delusions?

Last month, after reading a post by Jerry Coyne repeating the materialist party line that denies free will I asked the quite obvious question of why anyone should trust someone who believes that with a public office.    Since these questions are far more important to the continued existence of liberalism than most of the ideological fixations of blog blather, going to the very heart of freedom, equality,  a decent life and the democratic government that is the only effective means of having those,  I'm going to go into it again.   Coyne convinced me that materialism poses one of the most serious dangers that faces liberalism.  That isn't  bigotry, as an e-mailer froths at me, it's a question of  basic reason.

Here is what Jerry Coyne said:

Almost all of us agree that we’re meat automatons in the sense that all our actions are predetermined by the laws of physics as mediated through our genes and environments and expressed in brains.  We differ in how we interpret that fact vis-à-vis “free will and “moral responsibility,” though many of us seem to think that the truth of determinism should be quietly shelved for the good of the masses. 

I wouldn't entrust political power to someone who believes that while professing religious belief, declaring fealty to the Bill of Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights .  The idea that there is some constitutional requirement to vote for someone who believes that kind stuff is one of the nuttier superstitions current in contemporary pop-liberalism.

And it's certainly not just Jerry Coyne who believes that we are meat automatons  programmed by physical laws -almost always by "our genes" these days - that is an increasingly common belief in the general culture, one which comes directly from scientistic materialism, which is a deterministic ideology.   Here is another of the heroes of contemporary atheism, Richard Dawkins, on the topic:

In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

There is nothing in materialism that can overcome that determinism* which is so at variance with the experience of most people.   There is nothing in the ultimate reality of materialists that can overcome the assertion of that view of life.   There is no reason for anyone to believe that a materialist who believes there is "no evil, no good" will reliably tell the truth, refrain from stealing,  or killing or committing any other crime that they think they can get away with.  The fear of not getting away with it has proven to be quite ineffective in promoting good behavior and beneficial government, especially among the powerful and wealthy.   If you heard a politician say that they belived there is no such a thing as good or evil, but that  a god of "pitiless indifference" governed the universe and, furthermore, that the ones chosen by that  god to be "lucky" just plain win,   you would be insane to vote for them.   Yet that kind of thing, replacing physical forces for god,  is regularly said by atheists to, at most, muted objection by other atheists or even religious liberals.  

If you don't believe that there is moral obligation in life that requires people not be hurt and exploited by those who are "lucky" or those who aspire to be "lucky", through that kind of exploitation  if you don't believe that there is moral obligation that not only supersedes the far more destructive passively  indifferent observation of intentional harm and exploitation,  there is no amount of merely expressed good intention that anyone should believe will result in anything but harm and exploitation.   The results of believing in materialism will always devolve, at best, into something like a putrid social Darwinism because there is nothing to stop that.  The government and culture of Victorian Britain was an experiment in the ability of mere stated good intentions,  cultural preference and habit based in religious professions, to overcome similar assumptions and it was a disaster for the large majority of people.   And that is the best possible outcome.   Atheist governments since the late 18th century have uniformly been  an actualization of the amoral assertions of materialists where the only guarantor of being spared from brutality is mere chance.

If an atheist wanted me to vote for them they would have to explain to me how they account for all of those things that are the moral foundations of democratic government which are denied by contemporary materialism.   Due to the record of those kinds of assertions by the heroes of atheism and the horrific record of what happens when atheists take hold of governments,  it is entirely rational for a voter to demand assurance from an atheist before they vote for them.  I have knowingly voted for atheists twice, in my memory, based on my knowing them and knowing that their atheism was not based in any kind of firm ideological position such as materialism.   I don't think I'll continue to vote for atheists on that basis of trust now that this kind of materialist undermining of democracy has gained currency among atheists.

As I've said for years now, the "no religious test" of the constitution is binding on the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the government and the agencies of the government, they are not and have never been binding on individual voters or even groups of voters.  Individual voters are perfectly free to consider the religious and ideological beliefs of people who ask for the privileges of having their vote and their permission to assume power.   There is no right for anyone but the winner of an  election to assume an elective office.   And it would be far better if that was looked on as a privilege and a responsibility than as a right.  


I have every confidence that if you asked them,  a huge majority of atheists and most professed liberals would say they would not vote for a biblical fundamentalist,  something which is certainly as much a "religious test" as not voting for atheists.   I would tend to doubt I'd vote for a biblical fundamentalist for similar reasons to those that now make me skeptical of voting for materialists.   Of course, if you believe that equality is also a delusion you wouldn't be troubled by a failure to act evenhandedly.   Which is a definitive example of the fact that when you  look at the problems that materialism causes for liberalism, those are fundamental, inescapable and pernicious.   There are many ideologies that rationally prevent a liberal voting for a person holding that ideology.   And, more importantly, there are moral reasons to not vote for them as well.

Ironically,  if you believe what Coyne and Dawkins say,  there is no moral or rational basis for atheists to complain about their unequal treatment by voters.   The very complaints of unequal treatment that atheists make are undermined by their own materialist determinism.  In a morally indifferent universe, atheists have no right to equal treatment, no one does.  "Meat automatons" have no rights that anyone is morally obliged to recognize, which is the fatal blow to liberalism which is inherently a part of materialism.  People who declare themselves to be nothing more than that have no rational basis for asserting their right to other peoples' votes.  It would be foolish to vote for people with such poor reasoning ability as to not see that discrepancy.

The current ideology of atheism is a huge obstacle to believing that democracy is a valid form of government or even possible. I say that due to things which atheists, themselves,  say,  atheists like Coyne and Dawkins who have large followings among atheists.   That some of them try to back track and come up with patch jobs to try to make their materialist ideology tolerable for the majority who believe that human history and experience are more effective proof that democracy is the only legitimate form of government doesn't change that.  I have yet to see one of those patches that didn't fall off at first washing.   Far from being an expression of bigotry,  the decision to not vote for an atheist, in the absence of a convincing refutation of determinism and amorality, is an entirely rational decision.  

*  I've heard Daniel Dennett come up with some pretty absurd stuff which manipulates this problem by redefining free will into scenarios of mere indeterminacy,  something that hardly meets either the concept of free will or its efficacy to produce effectively beneficial government, the goal of democracy.   I'm not impressed enough with Dennett's arguments to want to go into them.   I think they are shallow, unserious word juggling.   I might change my mind and go into them later.

Do the 1st and 2nd Dimensions Really Exist? Materialist Ideology as a Pollution Source of Science: Now With Fun Ideas

The anti-religious motivations of many well known materialists within science are seldom far from the surface of their theories.   These days, as the debates I've recommended this week have featured, one such theory that is that of "the" mulitverse, explicitly, proposed to deny the possibility of a Creator of the universe.   You don't have to take that on my authority,  here's what the hero of so many new atheist-"skeptics", the late Martin Gardner said:

The MWI should not be confused with a more recent concept of a multiverse proposed by Andrei Linde, a Russian physicist now at Stanford University, as well as by a few other cosmologists such as England’s Martin Rees. This multiverse is essentially a response to the anthropic argument that there must be a Creator because our universe has so many basic physical constants so finely tuned that, if any one deviated by a tiny fraction, stars and planets could not form-let alone life appear on a planet. The implication is that such fine tuning implies an intelligent tuner.

The pure vessel of science is supposed to be filled with evidence and logic,  not ideological spin.   Or so the PR of science has it.   What these scientists are doing, inserting their materialist ideology into science, is supposed to be forbidden, a prohibition that I fully endorse.     And  it would be forbidden if it wasn't the preferred ideology of atheists that is so inserted.   And in that,  one of the biggest pillars in the public image of science as it is supposed to be is contradicted by science as it really is.   Atheists are the foremost polluters of science these days,  they have been at it pretty much non-stop for the last couple of centuries.   Whether eugenics, abiogenesis, evo-psy,  "exo-biology", and even theoretical physics, the anti-religious motivation is, over and over, explicitly stated by atheists within science.   As seen in the debates I've been recommending, they explicitly present science as an attack on religious belief*.   That much of the science surrounding these ideologically motivated ideas eventually turns out to be as durable as Young Earth Creationism never seems to register in the attention of even the specialists of the history of science.  By the time such science is demoted to "science" and denied, it gets taught in schools, built upon and promulgated in the wider culture.  Even as scientists decide that such shenanigans are not to be remembered,   the public remembers and the reputation of science suffers.   Not a little of the disrepute that science finds itself in is due to that kind of ideological bait and switch.**


When a scientist spills the beans as to their ideological motivation  you would think it would caution extra care in reviewing their work, but that is never done when the ideology is atheistic, or, generally,  materialistic.  Why that ideological insertion in science is ignored even as covert religious fundamentalist infiltration  is wildly asserted in the absence of evidence and the certainty that any attempt would be immediately discovered and the guilty thrown out in infamy,  is a clue as to some of the weaker aspects of science as a cultural and intellectual phenomenon.

One of the things I've heard said about the jillions of muliti-universes that are proposed to keep us safe from God is that many, perhaps an infinite number of those universes are one or two-dimensional universes.   I had heard that said for a long time before I started thinking of what that idea implies.   The assertion of the reality of the first and second dimensions raises some curious questions for materialists.

If only matter and energy are real then do the first and second dimensions really exist?   I mean even in our universe, never mind in imagined ones where those are the only dimensions.  Neither could contain matter as matter is known in materialism, which is three dimensional.  I'd ask what physical properties such universes could have, only without the necessary space and matter how can there be physical properties?    And what about time?   Is there some special dispensation given to negate what is believed about time coming into existence with matter and space?   How would anything that could possibly be said on the basis of our physics be known to hold as true in one or two dimensions?   How can physics be relevant to such universes?

I'd wondered about whether or not one or two dimensions could really exist in the curved space that I was taught we really exist in from when I was in high school, though not enough to see if physics had any answers to that question.  If space is curved by mass in the universe then what is the relevance for our physics to universes that can contain no mass?  I say "answers" in the plural because, over time, I've come to expect that science will have more than one answer to questions like those.

Isn't it most likely that the first and second dimensions are merely inventions of human imagination, means we use to impose order on the universe of our perceptions and manipulate intentionally with our mathematics just as we invent units of measure?   And if that's true, what conclusions does that force about the absolute reality of all of the mathematics and science that uses those concepts.   And just about all of science does make reference to those dimensions.   And if they are real, what does that do to the foundational definition of materialism?  Could it be that the useful concept of dimensionality is an artificial reduction of a complete reality that isn't wholly known?   Does referring to it produce a biased view of nature that is merely conventional?  OK, I'll stop posing these fun, though serious,  questions with that one.  For now.

The atheist extraordinaire of my youth,  Bertrand Russell,  in his Autobiography, recounts how his older brother proposed to teach him geometry and began in the common way by giving him the propositions and axioms of Euclid.   His brother told him that those couldn't be proved and had to be accepted.  The seedling iconoclast asked him why he should accept them.  The answer was that they couldn't go on unless he did.   It's hardly ever mentioned that the entire edifice of  mathematics and science are based on things that just have to be believed and, as you learn when you take physics in high school, that some of those things are not really the way that the universe works.   Though the discrepancy between plane geometry and its mathematical derivations and modern physics were never filled in anywhere in most peoples' educations.  I'll bet not one in a thousand of the big mouthed, enormously egoed blog atheists could even conceive of these issues, never mind cope with an explanation if one was proffered.   I'm absolutely confident that most of the big names in organized "skepticism"-atheism couldn't do more than mock them in an attempt to make them go away.

I think that's the same thing that the scientists who invent multi-universe theory are doing on a more detailed level.  Or, at least, I wonder if that's what they're doing.   And you can ask the same question about one assertion after another made by scientists, very often atheists and materialists, very often in theoretical science with little to no evidence available,  very often with their explicit declarations of their anti-religious intentions.  Very often doing what they accuse the religious of doing, inserting their ideological beliefs into science, on the basis of their authority***.

--------

I can guarantee you that the response to his would be to point out the use of cosmological and scientific ideas within religion,  exactly what William Lane Craig was doing in those debates.  BUT THE DIFFERENCE IS THAT IT ISN'T AGAINST ANY RULE OF RELIGION TO DO THAT.  There is nothing in religion to prevent the use of any and even every idea that science holds and proposes.   That isn't a two way door.  Science can only deal with those parts of the material universe that are susceptible to its methodology, it can't import ideology into science without violating its rules.  Or, rather, that's supposed to be one of the things that preserves the reliability of the product of science.   The use of mental Venn diagrams to produce an analysis such as Gould's NOMA is, actually deceptive.   Science is far, far more restricted than most other activities that human beings engage in but those other activities, including religion, aren't  restricted in consulting science in the same way.

People who believe in a Creator of the universe believe that that Creator made everything as it is, in all of its detail, in every way.  No matter what people know about the way the universe is at any point in time,  such a belief includes everything in the universe, even what is unknown, or misunderstood.   So most religious people actually accept the reality of  the things science studies.   The universe belongs to religion as much as it does to science.

In fact, since religion can include aspects of the universe that science can't process, including many human experiences of it, religion can claim more of the universe than science can.  So can history, so can philosophy, so can any other discipline that is so constituted.   The arrogant assertion of  scientific hegemony over the entire universe extending far, far past where science can actually go, such is made by so many scientists today and, even more so, by the ignorant fan boys of science is a symptom of ignorance as to the most basic realities of what science is, what it was invented to do.  The fact is that its essential methods don't allow it to exceed those bounds without producing damaged, unreliable goods.   As disappointments mount, as those products fail, as the massive ideological and professional corruption of science and scientists becomes more apparent,  the public understanding of what science has become will not be to the liking of scientists.

Tragically, the resulting disrepute leaves some of the most essential science surrounding topics such as climate change vulnerable to corporate attack.   Of course, the scientists who work for the oil and gas industries,  seen shilling for global warming on TV 24 hours a day will make out.   For the time being.   Their colleagues will be too professionally polite to condemn them for that, in contrast to the massive ridicule and condemnation of religious scientists that is all the fashion these days.

* I won't write natural selection in the list because Charles Darwin, himself, said that his theory was not incompatible with religion,  though his followers, beginning with Francis Galton and Thomas Huxley and down to today have used it as a weapon against religious belief.   Alfred Russell Wallace, who very likely came up with the idea before Darwin did (and there's a hornets nest to kick over in that story) certainly didn't see it as disallowing belief in the supernatural.    The misuse of science  in atheist polemics by scientists is hardly ever considered to be a problem for the public acceptance and understanding of science, though it is one of the clearest violation of the alleged control mechanisms of science and makes trouble for the political existence of science.   The ideological motives of such materialists should be considered far more problematic because the history of science shows that such ideological distortion has been a problem.

**  As to assertions without adequate evidence, the literature of science is filled with them, especially the literature of popular science writing. Carl Sagan's list of the "best contemporary science-popularizers" includes E.O. Wilson, Lewis Thomas, and Richard Dawkins, each of whom has put unsubstantiated assertions or counterfactual claims at the very center of the stories they have retailed in the market. Wilson's Sociobiology and On Human Nature⁵ rest on the surface of a quaking marsh of unsupported claims about the genetic determination of everything from altruism to xenophobia. Dawkins's vulgarizations of Darwinism speak of nothing in evolution but an inexorable ascendancy of genes that are selectively superior, while the entire body of technical advance in experimental and theoretical evolutionary genetics of the last fifty years has moved in the direction of emphasizing non-selective forces in evolution. Thomas, in various essays, propagandized for the success of modern scientific medicine in eliminating death from disease, while the unchallenged statistical compilations on mortality show that in Europe and North America infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and diphtheria, had ceased to be major causes of mortality by the first decades of the twentieth century, and that at age seventy the expected further lifetime for a white male has gone up only two years since 1950. Even The Demon-Haunted World itself sometimes takes suspect claims as true when they serve a rhetorical purpose as, for example, statistics on child abuse, or a story about the evolution of a child's fear of the dark. 


Richard Lewontin:  Billions and Billions of Demons 

*** An especially interesting interesting case is the attack made on the Big Bang theory by John Maddox, the prominent and openly ideological editor of Nature,  one of the most prestigious scientific magazines in the world.   The rejection of ideas within science can be based in their being problematical for materialism and atheism as well.   Maddox used his position in the culture of science to attack ideas that he believed were insufficiently materialistic.


Maddox, J.: 1989, 'Down with the Big Bang,' Nature 340

The Disappointing Argumentation of Lawrence Krauss

Lawrence Krauss is a physicist who I've got quite a bit of respect for,  I had more respect for him before he took up with the new atheism.   As recently as 2006 he was far more reasonable on the relationship between science and religion than he has become since:

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.

“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

His debate with William Lane Craig is very interesting,   I'm sorry for the poor quality of the recording but it's worth struggling to understand.   You might want to watch the video, even though the audio quality is even poorer.

I'm disappointed in his arguments against Craig because so many of them devolve into the most banal of threadbare atheist tropes. His beginning by using the recent line that Craig "is a professional debater" sets the tone. Apparently an articulate professor of philosophy who is an expert in the philosophy of time (which physics has consulted) and on cosmological arguments which are a central issue in the topic Krauss agreed to discuss is to be dismissed because he is experienced in debating these topics.

TIME OUT:   I'm going to promulgate one of those instantly created blog rules, you can call it "Anthony's Law" if you want to.   
"Anyone who resorts to discrediting their opponent on the basis of her or his proven competence loses the debate."  

 I also was disappointed in the derisive tone that Krauss resorted to when argument failed him, as it so disappointingly did several times.     At times Krauss approached the very pomposity he decried.

Considering the role that Krauss has had in current controversies in cosmology,  a subject about the physical universe that has generated widely divergent sets of beliefs, some of them strongly and heatedly asserted as being part of science, only to be pushed aside, he might have thought twice about resorting to the absurd argument that Christians don't believe in Baal or Zeus QED : no God.

If physicists can have strongly divergent beliefs about the physical universe and not hold that physics is discredited by those, why should people having greatly divergent beliefs about religion invalidate the subject matter of religion?     Considering that the universe is asserted to be governed by physical laws that are known,  and that God is usually held to transcend not only physical law but human understanding,  there is far more of an excuse for divergent ideas about God over time.   Consider the length of time that people have been addressing God and the physical universe,  I don't think that the pre-classical and classical period ideas about the universe need to be addressed by contemporary physics anymore than than pre-classical ideas about God which aren't found useful need to be addressed by 21st century Christianity.  Thinkers in the 21st century are not responsible for the ideas of people in the past except those ideas which they adopt.

Krauss seems to be entirely unprepared to discuss the philosophical issues that Craig refers to and seems to not realize their relevance to thinking about physics and their relevance to persuasion for or against the topic of the discussion.   That's something that is all too common with physicists today, it hasn't always been true.  I think that contemporary education in science might have specialized most scientists out of competence in addressing issues relevant to religious thinking.  He began in the worst possible way by asserting, as atheists generally do, that the onus is on religious believers to prove their case when that is an absurd stipulation.  You would think that the rejection of atheism by the majority of people would prove that the majority doesn't accept that stipulation and there is no persuasive reason presented for them to accept it.

Most absurd of all for a scientist to hold,  he parrots the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" line popularized by Carl Sagan.   Considering the extraordinary claims regularly made by physics for the past century, including many claims within cosmology that other cosmologists reject as extraordinary, you can be certain that he would reject that requirement  made within his own subject matter.   If he would like a good example, he should consider the decades long controversies concerning black holes in which he is a prominent participant.  Not to mention the wildly controversial and divergent  string-M theories, multi-universe theories etc. that constitute a prominent part in contemporary scientistic antagonism against religion.

It is one of the most basic ideas that you cannot require a higher level of evidence against one part of science than you do of other parts of science without calling the legitimacy of the less stringently controlled science into question.   Scientists, especially those who hold the creed of scientism, regularly claim the mantle of reliability for their work.   Scientism, such as Krauss seems to be veering into, claims that it is the only legitimate means of discovering the truth.   I hate to have to break it to such scientists,  they are not going to convince people that the frequently changing, wildly swinging holdings of cosmology, hardly universally held by specialists,  to a lesser standard of evidence than people judge their own experience by.

Who does Krauss want to determine what  constitutes an "extraordinary claim" in his branch of physics and  who does he want to determine what level of "extra-ordinariness" of evidence that he and his colleagues will have to meet in their work?   If the claim is "extraordinary"  where is the limit of the requirement of necessary evidence and who sets that limit?

If he wants to address extraordinary holdings of scientists that have no evidence whatsoever to support them he could address the evolutionary dogmas of Richard Dawkins.   Some of the things he has promulgated, "selfish genes" "memes" are entirely baseless, undemonstrable and, especially in the case of memes, illogical.

Marcello Truzzi, the man who Sagan ripped off his most famous line from, became skeptical of it with time, friends of his say that before his death he was planning on debunking it.  It's too bad that scientists like Krauss don't think the issue through, especially in reference to their own work.

Another embarrassment is Krauss'  accusation that Craig is trying to find God in the gaps when he obviously isn't. It's clear when he does this that Krauss doesn't even understand the argument he's engaged in.   I've found that to be a common tactic of atheists who can't handle the argument they are having,  they try to argue what they think they  can.   By the way, God of the gaps is an idea that was first brought up by and its use in argument for God  condemned by Henry Drummond, an evangelical lecturer, almost a hundred years ago.    

I  think this debate might have been one of the biggest reasons that Richard Dawkins chickened out of defending his most famous book.   If you look at the new atheist discussion of that event you can see lots of absurd stuff said about it.  If Krauss wants to be associated with that kind of reasoning,  he's free to do that.   The extent to which the culture of science is willing to accept the kind of ideological clap trap of the new atheism as intellectually respectable will be the extent to which those of us who look at it from the outside will be required to take that culture seriously.   As it is, I've got a lot less respect for it than I used to have, these days.  I no longer take what scientists say on the basis of their credentials.  That is due to professional lapses and intellectual dishonesty among many of them which are not corrected by their scientific peers.   Maybe scientists should consider that they hold a lot of the reputation of science in their own hands and they don't do a lot for it by associating with the new atheists.   If they don't take responsibility for the reputation of science in the wider world, no one else can.    It's a big mistake to leave that to the boys of scientism on the blogs.

Update:   I've got to mention one extraordinary idea that seems to be ubiquitous in the science-religion brawl.   Science was invented to study the physical universe, it restricts its methods to the observation, measurement and analysis of aspects of the physical universe.   Professional scientists study the physical universe with methods that exclude anything that can't be processed with its methods and tools.

There is no reason to believe that the most brilliant physicist or biologist would be able to address anything asserted by religion except any physical claims made in religion.   Science doesn't give its practitioners competence or expertise to address ideas about the supernatural, morality or any other non-physical aspects of reality.   A scientist of the prominence of Lawrence Krauss has no more ability to address religious ideas by virtue of their science than a plumber can using his knowledge of plumbing or a store clerk can with their professional competence.   Time after time, when eminent scientists address competent thinkers in religion, they are at a total loss and often betray angry frustration by their inability to force compliance with their opinions on the basis of their credentials.   Maybe if they understood the basis of science better and especially the limits of its subject matter they could save themselves a lot of self-imposed aggravation.

Richard Dawkins Is a Liar and a Coward And That's Good Enough for the New Atheists

The last two weeks I've had time to listen to several debates and one infamous non-debate between several relatively prominent atheists and  the philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig.   Craig is an evangelical theologian as well as a philosopher so, as you can imagine, I, as a religious and political liberal, have got several areas of disagreement with him.   I regret to have to say that I haven't heard a liberal who is as effective a defender of the reality of God, though I have heard a few who are as good a defender of their religious persuasion.

William Lane Craig has creamed every atheist in debate which I've listened to on  the question of whether or not it's reasonable to be persuaded to believe in God .  Unlike them, he knows his stuff and he comes fully prepared.   It would be impossible for anyone who cares about logic and evidence based argument to not be impressed  by his presentation.  You can hear that in his debate with as prepared an opponent as his fellow philosopher Peter Millican at Birmingham University.   You can be impressed with  the thoroughness of his preparation and his pretty astonishing depth of knowledge of his points.   While you're doing that, notice the lack of derision, sneering, appeal to audience prejudice on his part.   While Peter Millican, to his credit, also largely forgoes those cheap debate tricks,  he's one of the rare atheists who doesn't make that the dominant feature of their case.

A week after that debate,  Richard Dawkins was challenged to debate Craig at Oxford  on the question, Is God a Delusion, to defend what is probably his most widely read book.   From what I understand, after quite a long time of letting the invitation go unanswered and increasing criticism for being afraid to debate Craig, Richard Dawkins said that since Craig was an "apologist for Genocide*"  he wouldn't appear with him.  And speaking of derision, sneering and appeals to prejudice,  Dawkins began his excuse note this way:

Don't feel embarrassed if you've never heard of William Lane Craig.  He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name either. Perhaps he is a "theologian".**

As much of the more informed criticism of  The God Delusion noted that Dawkins pretty much demonstrated his complete lack of knowledge of the topic including theology, he seems to be willing to continue in his ignorance of the topic on which he is basing his wider and current claim to fame.   It's clear from his activities in the last decade that Dawkins' fan club is satisfied to hear him expound on topics he clearly knows next to nothing about and is about which he is proud to flaunt his ignorance.   But, in the absence of an effort on his part to inform himself, what else can Dawkins do but assert that his ignorance constitutes a superior position to that of his opponents expertise.   That Dawkins is a total fraud on the subject is good enough for his supporters and the media which is as ignorant of the topic as he is.

To Peter Millican's credit, and due to his actual knowledge of the topic in question , he introduced William Craig Lane at Oxford when he appeared with the empty chair that Dawkins would  have occupied if he hadn't proven to be a coward and a fraud.  Also appearing were three professors to raise points for Craig to answer.  One of whom  was Daniel Came, lecturer in philosophy at Oxford.   He, to his credit, was very critical of Dawkins' cowardice and dishonesty in refusing to debate Craig.  In his open letter to Dawkins,  advising him to correct his ignorance of the topic of his most famous book,  he said:

You dismiss Professor Craig as a ‘professional debater’ and state that you are not willing to debate anyone less senior than a bishop. Professor Craig has a PhD in philosophy and a PhD in theology. He is Research Professor in Philosophy at Talbot University. He has published more than thirty books and over a hundred papers in reputable peer-reviewed journals. Given your passionate and unconditional commitment to truth, I can only think that you were not aware of Professor Craig’s credentials when you made the above reference.

He also said:

I understand that you have also commented that ‘a debate with Professor Craig might look good on his CV but it would not look good on mine’. On the contrary, the absence of a debate with the foremost apologist for Christian theism is a glaring omission on your CV and is of course apt to be interpreted as cowardice on your part. I notice that, by contrast, you are happy to discuss theological matters with television and radio presenters and other intellectual heavyweights like Pastor Ted Haggard of the National Association of Evangelicals and Pastor Keenan Roberts of the Colorado Hell House.


"Apt to be interpreted as cowardice" on Dawkins' part,  is putting it as mildly as possible.  Being very polite, Came didn't point out that Dawkins' CV contained hands-down evidence that his excuse for not appearing with Craig was, to put it plainly, an obvious lie.

Richard Dawkins,  the most famous and widely respected voice of atheism today,  is obviously ignorant and dishonest as well as a coward.    Yet, as Craig says in the beginning of his address at the Sheldonian,  new atheists who demonstrate that they are entirely ignorant of theology and philosophy,  and often even of science,  are always using Dawkins as an instant refutation to someone with his proven competence and accomplishment.    The new atheism is almost entirely dependent on that kind of appeal to authority.  Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, Sagan***, etc.

The new atheism is a shallow, bigoted, hypocritical, intellectual fad which, unlike most intellectual fads, is firmly based in ignorance and falsified history.   It is a symptom of the rot that materialism makes of liberalism and intellectual life.   I think that it has played a major and mostly unadmitted role in heading science and society down one dead end after another.   I think that Richard Dawkins' scientific claim to fame is a prime example of materialism producing superstition masquerading as science.  He joins many other materialists who have used the appearance of science and promissory materialism ideologically to attack religion, constructing an entirely speculative, evidence free and even illogical "science" in the process****.   I have become ever more convinced that materialism is an ideology which is fatal to liberalism which can't be founded in anything but an assumption that people possess free will,  inherent rights and other non-material qualities which are the basis of their civil rights and their claim to a decent life.   And there is nothing to it.  

I am far more interested in politics as a tool for preserving life and to enhance the decency of life for people and the rest of life on Earth than I am in this ideological war.   I had hoped for years to avoid it but this issue is inescapable in defending the very basis of that effort.   It is a huge surprise to me that, as I've learned more and thought more about this issue that someone like William Lane Craig actually defends the basis of liberalism more strongly than political liberals.  I've gotten over the discomfort that having that in common with an evangelical philosopher and theologian gave me because the position that we both oppose is absolutely destructive of liberalism.   As he points out in one of his debates,   Dawkins explicitly rejects the reality of morality and the other qualities of human beings that are essential for civil rights to be valid.   He also points out the massive inconsistency of Dawkins and the new atheists between their materialist denial of the reality of morality and rights while asserting their preferences on the authority of morality and rights.

As I said here several weeks ago,  I have known atheists who were moral and good people even as those qualities can't be accounted for with materialism.    Somehow, they bridge that gap in their own behavior, for some reason.   I am absolutely convinced that a society that is dominated by materialism will not do that, the individual virtues of such atheists are not universal or even very commonly found among people.  Not even those who are not materialists.   Even among those who profess to believe that God requires us to treat other people as we would like to be treated, that is more said than done.   But the fact that there is nothing in atheism that can produce that moral stand is real and does have results.  I'm convinced of that by the moral atrocities that materialist governments have been in every case.

Liberals got in the habit of averting their eyes from those histories, largely on the basis of opposing the extravagant and sometimes dishonest, anti-democratic, anti-communists here and in other Western countries.   I grew up in that milieu, though I did notice that materialism can't support free will and inherent rights just about from my first encounter with it.   Back then the left was not so dominated by materialism as it has come to be.  Then it was Martin Luther King and other religious leftists who were the face of the left.  As time has passed and materialism came to dominate the left there has been a hollowing out of the basis of liberalism due to materialism.  That is,  I am sure, the reason that the left has failed.  As Dawkins and other atheists gain influence among liberals, that corrosion will continue.

If liberals cede the role of defending the metaphysical and religious basis of human decency to conservatives, liberalism will die.  If it's not already dead.   Religious liberals have to stop withholding what they have to say on these points.  There is no reason to,  what the new atheists have to say is absurd and refutable,  their replacement of informed advocacy with derision and their weirdly dishonest folklore is not worthy of respect.

*  You can hear Craig's response to Dawkins' charge that he was an apologist for genocide against the Canannites at the end of his appearance sans Dawkins.

** As one of the comments to Dawkins' excuse at The Guardian pointed out,  it's unbelievable that Dawkins was telling the truth about the professors of philosophy he knew not knowing who Craig is:

Richard Dawkins is clearly being disingenuous when he says that "none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name either." How about AC Grayling and Daniel Dennett? Those are two first-rate atheistic philosophers who Dawkins shares a very close relationship with. Grayling is a partner of Dawkins for the BHA and Dennett is an admittedly close friend who is on the front page of this site! Here is the key point: they have both participated in public and formal dialogues with Craig! So I cannot even imagine what other philosophers he contacted. It should be rather humiliating for those uninformed scholars. Surely we can all agree that Dawkins is being disingenuous here.


I think it's reasonable to conclude that Dawkins is lying when he claims to have consulted "professors of philsophy" as to Craig's identity.   If he'd consulted YouTube he would have found that out.

***  I'm hoping to get around to deconstructing the bizarre reputation of Carl Sagan in the future.

****  Listen to Craig's discussion of multi-universe and related theories in relation to the implications of the fine tuning of physical constants.    While those arguments, just as all arguments in this area, materialist as well as religious, are matters of persuasion instead of unavailable proof,  I'm going to say that I find the teleological arguments far more persuasive than unpersuasive.

There is some disagreement over just how many such independent factors there are, but by some counts there are over 100, although not all requiring the above degree of precision.^[38]But the apparent probability of all the necessary conditions sufficient to allow just the formation of planets (let alone life) coming together just by chance is utterly outrageously tiny—by Roger Penrose's calculation, the probability of chance alone producing cosmoi capable of producing planets is 1 in 10 raised in turn to the 10¹²³ (Penrose 1990, 343–4). With respect to key enzymes occurring by chance, astrophysicist Fred Hoyle throws around numbers like 10^-40000 (Hoyle 1982, 4–5). (Although there is no consensus, some, following e.g., Emile Borel, suggest that a probability of occurrence of less than 10^-50 can be taken as equivalent to practical impossibility.) Apparently crushing improbabilities of that order tied to the apparent value of a life-permitting (or intelligence-permitting) universe has given rise to cosmic fine-tuning arguments for design, according to which improbable fine-tuning of the cosmos for life and intelligence is taken as empirical evidence of design, purpose, and deliberate intent. In fact, the tighter the constraints, the more reasonable it becomes to see design in the conditions meeting those constraints. Other things being equal, deliberate, intentional design would constitute a plausible explanation for a universe like ours existing against the odds and out of all the myriad possible life-precluding or life-hampering universes.

I am also persuaded that the automatic, derisive dismissal of arguments like those are, entirely, a matter of ideological fashion instead of reason. I don't think there is any reason for religious believers who find them persuasive to apologize for that, considering that the materialist response are speculations like multi-universe theories and illogical assertions about their persuasive power for atheism.  As Craig points out, multi-universe theory very likely compounds problems of fine tuning for that line of atheist argument.   Multi-universe theory could require far more fine tuning than our known universe appears to.

Mary Lou Williams "Nicole"

Carla Bley Steve Swallow Andy Sheppard "Ups and Downs"

Betty Carter - Geri Allen Giant Steps

Taking the Housman Cure

First Posted  February 20, 2010 at the blog I used to write for,  reposted because public radio said it was Housman's birthday today.

February, twenty six years ago. By this time of the month I was slowly convalescing from the first of two cases of pneumonia that I’ve ever had. The long bed rest was the first intimation of middle age, which I wouldn’t officially enter till a few years after.

 I’d been to the library two weeks before and had opted to pay off more of that perennial duty to read the great classics which you had somehow never read before. By some fate, the book was A Shropshire Lad, by A. E. Housman.  Like everyone, I’d read several of the poems deemed suitable for Jr. High and Highschool anthologies, the woodlands hung with snow, of course. That perpetually moldering athlete dying young, as well. It didn’t impress me much. But S.L. was a slim volume, as the chestnut has it, and the poems were short and it wouldn’t cost much time to see what joys Housman held. I knew, of course, that he had been gay. That’s probably the reason I took it off the shelf. Though for him that term is one as ill suited as has ever been appended posthumously.

 I read it through the first time as I was getting sick and, I’ll confess, it struck me to my core. The grey toned sadness, the yearning, the longing for connection, the sheer, obvious desire for love with a man, the erotic attraction of a strapping farm boy unsullied by the pollutants of city or university - though an abstract one who seemed to be rather cleaner and freer of sweat than farm boys of my experience*. The underlying theme of Housman is the assumed, permanent state of exile of gay men from the comfort of normal society, from the impossibility of believing that you belonged in the world.

Of course that would speak to any gay man who was leaving youth, alone, without the wonderful, unconscious knowledge that you had deep emotional relationships that would be unmolested by a hostile general culture. Without the possibility of entering into an unremarkable and secure home life. Though fully knowing I was not one, I fell fully into the consolation such that Housman had left to such luckless lads, now that he was dead and gone. More about which in a while. Shropshire girls, apparently were hardly worth mentioning, except in so far as useful to the lads who were, one assumes, trying to pass.

Reagan had been in office three years, Margaret Thatcher and John Paul II around, longer. The televangilists were flowering putridly everywhere, and there was the first realization that your gay friends in New York were coming down with an unknown and yet unnamed illness. The very beginning of that long death watch. It was the perfect time for a sick, gay man to be converted by Housman to his regime of cold comfort, the attractions of suicide, the view that the world was inalterably not for you. Comforted only with the inevitable return to dust and an insensate non-being. Except for that brainless and impatient man of bone that would remain, the part that Housman, apparently, saw as the most significant.

Needless to say, it wasn’t reading that lent itself to therapeutic optimism while facing the onslaught of hacking coughs, painful breathing, fevers and at the lowest point, the real possibility that this could just be the end.

Still, it carried what one might want to grasp on to as a kind of stoic comfort, the assertion that facing the inevitable was the right and brave thing to do. You had to look not left nor right because the only road ahead held nothing but the night. It appealed to the deep agnosticism which I had arrived at by my reading of logic. For agnosticism is as far as logic can honestly lead you. Having thought my way out of the romantic view of science, I was, nonetheless clinging to the rock of logic, unable to, yet, admit that it was, at its core, no more knowable than God. Unable to stand that this most solid of all intellectual positions, was, in itself, not founded on rock. I will say this, agnosticism makes a better life jacket than Housman.

After the crisis passed and it appeared I wouldn’t suffocate in my own lungs I read Shropshire Lad a second time. There were certain erotic themes, I guess that held my interest at that point. This time my spirit rebelled violently against Housman’s invitation to suicide, “so quick and clean an ending” as that might be. I must have noticed that on first reading but suppressed it in view of the said attractions of Housman. Whatever else, I knew it was a horrible idea. With the hardships of growing up gay, it was hardly an act of friendship to promote suicide as an ethical program. It’s pathological in a gay man, it’s self-hatred by proxy. By then, making the effort to breath through the coughing and phlegm must have seemed fully worth it.

I’ve known more straight men than gay ones who have esteemed Housman, though there have certainly been gay men who have. Maybe it’s the en passant uniform fetish. There seems to be a kind of rather nice, often science department based, straight man who relishes The Lad. I recall one such naming it as one of two books he would willingly be shipwrecked with. I don’t recall the other one. I’ve known few women who have had that much use for it, though I know they exist too. The promotion of suicide, dying young, and other such delights of Housman are far easier to take as self-presumed spectator than as intended spectacle. 

By the third reading I’d noticed that there was little real love in the book. Yearning, yeah, lots of that of a self-indulgent kind, but not of a kind that carried any hope. There didn’t seem to be much faith in the possibility of it. Better to figure that it’s not worth getting too attached. In fact, other than to kill yourself, I didn’t find there to be a lot of encouragement in the book. By that time I’d learned of the great unrequited love of Housman’s life, Moses Jackson, a straight man who emigrated to India, then Canada, after going to extraordinary lengths to keep Housman from attending his wedding. The first thing that came to mind is if I had Housman yearning after me I might want to put an ocean between us too. His hand of friendship extended doesn’t carry a lifeline, it carries an anvil. I think by then, I was trying to fight my way out of the hole I had gotten into on the first reading. I’ve read recently that Housman, knowing that Jackson was dying in Canada was eager for him to read his unpublished poetry, one does wonder if it was to encourage him to end it all.

I read some of it a fourth time as life turned back to normal, though not every poem, and ended the book knowing I was about through with Housman. I knew the old fart hadn’t shot himself through the head. For himself, at least, he concluded that was not right, that was not brave.

And so Housman endured on in his faculty apartment, reported to have all the ambiance of a public waiting room, sniping at young classicist lads, and I’d imagine, the rising class of classically inclined lasses, who trespassed on his flagstones. The geezer might express sufficient care for their well being to encourage young folk to shoot themselves in the head or to just die, but the desiccated old classicist had no intention of offing himself or tolerating the frolics of youth in the solely imaginary fields and vales of Latin or Greek he’d staked a claim to, grousing at their youthful follies. He was famous for being horrible to his students and never learning their names.

Housman left me with a peculiar taste that I had known before but had never quite identified. A sourness stripped of any bracing tang, bitterness without the persistent effort required by that emotional obsession. V. S. Naipaul is a contemporary specimen. I came to think of the bard of Shropshire as an old fraud. Having read about his jaunts to Paris to indulge in pornography and rent boys and other continental delights forbidden to pollute the green and apparently not so pleasant land of England- I’d asked my brother to pick up a bio of him from the library, perhaps to try to finally get shut of him.

By the last time I got to the penultimate poem, “Terence this is stupid stuff”, another of those sufficiently sexless to enter into the required reading of an American 9th grader of the early 60s, I saw it for the pantomime of mirth it is. Exactly like those numerous and insufferable pieces by knighted British composers that trudge along in jolly good fun, of the most pedestrian and tedious variety. Like Mithridates, Housman intended to die old, stewed in his self-administered poisons.

I went on through to approximate completeness by reading the thankfully few “Last Poems”, so named because by then the aging and very famous poet of young folks dying and oblivion, had said what he could on his abortive theme of discouraging people from hoping and living. It finished in the “More Poems”, which he had left to his brother Laurence to destroy.**

From being obsessed with Housman and the easy attraction of his poetry to a lasting disgust for him and his death cult within the shortest month of the year.

What remains of Housman for me is the key to understand why I dislike a kind of recent British writing (See update below) and so much English language writing influenced by it*** . First there is just the plain meanness of so much of it, a lack of sympathy, even a distaste for human love. There is the rancid rejection of actual life, the cowardly refusal to abandon the easy way of secure classicism and the conventional attitude.

The conventional attitude. For all its homoerotic content, etc., Housman was unobjectionable to the Victorian audience that first took his cranky poetry to their bosom. That alone should show you that there isn’t anything unconventional about it. Like its author it doesn’t much do without the benefits of comfort and security and the prestige of university life. Its popularity also marks it with the profitable allure it shares with the cosy school of British crime fiction. It is intellectually and emotionally unchallenging and proudly wears its dead-on normal average temperature as if that was sufficient virtue. Billy Collins seems to me to be the direct American descendent, replacing Housman’s mild dyspepsia with cute cynicism.

After Housman I was done with all that. And with more. Once you abandon the cowardice, an attitude that comfortable endurance and the intellectually safe and reputable are the standards to live by, you are free of the morose manacles which held me during that long illness. Any sense of duty to Housman, the eminent gay poet, died. And I think my sense of duty to the officially great, dead writing of white male authors of the English Speaking Peoples and those who imitate them, died with it. For which, I suppose, I might be grateful. Maybe I would be if I didn’t have to worry about gay kids shooting themselves in the head. I’d kind of like for them to grow up and have a real life.

* Being a farm boy myself.  There is in Housman’s stately pose of veneration a feeling of class exploitation, of the young laborer being viewed as an object of use, the poems a recommendation of a varietal to others of Housman’s own class. Like a favorite ale. It has been wondered how much of the local brew he had actually tasted before he wrote the book, famously not having set foot in Shropshire until after he’d written the poems. Perhaps he’d imported.

** A hypocritical pose which any fool who knew him would know he wouldn’t do. Of course Laurence would publish them, and he did. Housman wanted it published but wanted his brother to take any flack from its publication I haven’t bothered to read the last thing that even his brother held back, the Housman observations on love.

*** Also developed through reading William Carlos Williams essays on Rebecca West and others. It is remarkable how much of British writing in all forms is full to the brim of completely dislikable people and no other kind.

Update:  Not just British writing, though.  The disease is more widespread and not dependent on language as the putrid Girl With the Dragon Tattoo mania shows.

Peggy Lee Dave Barbour I Only Have Eyes For You

Stella Rambisai Chiweshe: Rwavasekuru

Egberto Gismonti & Naná Vasconcelos: Dança das Cabeças

Nana Vasconcelos, Jack Dejohnette: Preludio Pra Nana

About Posting Music Videos

I post music videos hoping that you'll like what you hear and that you'll buy discs or mp3s of the artists, supporting living artists and to encourage the preservation and perpetuation of the recordings of artists who are no longer living.   And that you will want to patronize live performances.   And as a sacred duty to the artistry and personalities of both.   


So, go out and listen more and support musicians and music.   You'll like it. 

Gary Burton: Intermission Music by Carla Bley

Carla Bley 

Intermission Music 


from A Genuine Tong Funeral


Gary Burton Quintet 

Gary Burton Quartet: Open Your Eyes You Can Fly

Flora Purim: Open Your Eyes You Can Fly

Geri Allen: Faith Carriers of Life

Geri Allen Trio Dark Prince

Perhaps This Was What Santorum Meant About The French Revolution Under The Bed

Maybe This Has Something To Do With Why People Don't Vote for Atheists

The increasingly unhinged blogging of Jerry Coyne is at odds with his professional work in biology.   Whereas his blogging is frequently a semi-obscene screed of bigotry and irrationality,  seemingly a Chick publication dropped here from an alternate universe,  Coyne manages to keep his lid on when he has professional credibility at stake.   Coyne's complete oeuvre could serve as a definition of the compartmentalization he and his cult followers are always going on about in relation to religious scientists.

But this is a post about politics and why, despite all my inclinations to ignore it, there is, actually, a huge problem with the ideology of atheism that could lead a reasonable person to wonder if they should vote for an atheist.  And it is what many atheists, themselves, say that provides the reasonable reservation.

.......

Now, having pointed out that atheists are a covered class under U.S. civil rights laws, and that they have been since the mid 1960s, one of the favorite whines of the new atheists are surveys which show that a majority of people questioned say they wouldn't vote for an atheist for president.   That issue was the one I wrote about the first time I ever wrote a critique of the new atheists, before I started using that phrase.   I pointed out several things, among those that atheists were hardly alone, identifying other groups which would not be able to win the presidency, including members of a number of other, religious minorities.  I also pointed out that voters were not bound by the constitutional "no religious test" clause and could and did vote on the basis of a religious test quite often.   I also pointed out that if atheists wanted to change their situation it depended on the opinion of the religious majority and that blanket ridicule was hardly a proven method of winning friends, not to mention the votes of strangers.    I'll note in passing that I've read atheists who have said they'd never vote for a Biblical fundamentalist to absolutely no objection.  I'm not sure I would either. Needless to say, these points were hardly well accepted among the atheists in the audience.

Since then I've gained more and more experience with the new atheism and the scientism and materialism that, in fact, comprise the secular religion of just about all atheists I'm aware of.   While I still stand by the points I first made more than five years ago,  I think there is something more basic to the ideology of modern atheism that might reasonably make people in a democracy reluctant to vote for anyone holding those ideas.

In each and every case, when materialism considers questions of free will and related concepts, the result is, inevitably,  the assertion that they are delusions, the products of imagination.   For a bunch who typically consider themselves to be "free thinkers" the belief in the biological determinism of our thinking is remarkably freely expressed among materialists.   Their belief in their own ability to transcend their biological programming  in their thought is, apparently, the result of compartmentalization,  making an exemption for themselves and their beliefs that have been noted by others before now*.    And, as is true with free will, there are frequent denials of the existence of inherent rights, the right to justice (in its biblical sense), equality and a host of other ideas which, while science is incompetent to find them, history and the first and most basic of all sources of evidence,  our experience, are more than adequate to locate them and defend them.  I'll say again, those are not things that these materialists are generally willing to do without themselves, even as they deny their reality.

Of course, these atheists "know" that free will doesn't exist because "science" tells them so.   Their "science" which is, as the product of their very biologically programmed brains, presumably as subject to the conditions of that determination as the belief in free will or God, for that matter,  cannot escape the same impeachment of its reality as the belief in free will, inherent rights and other, presumed,  mental products of biological chemistry.  Though that doesn't seem to enter into it for the materialist mind, yet another carved out exception**.  Which brings us back to Jerry Coyne and one of his recent posts about these issues.

Almost all of us agree that we’re meat automatons in the sense that all our actions are predetermined by the laws of physics as mediated through our genes and environments and expressed in brains.  We differ in how we interpret that fact vis-à-vis “free will and “moral responsibility,” though many of us seem to think that the truth of determinism should be quietly shelved for the good of the masses.

Considering the central place that the belief in determinism holds in the blood baths of the 20th century,  genocide, racial enslavement,  gender oppression ...  the belief in biological determinism should not be merely shelved out of niceness, it should be subject to THE HIGHEST level of skepticism.  Any alleged science which leads to determinism  should be subject to the very highest levels of review, by DISINTERESTED scientists, possible.   In fact, that history makes the consideration of these issues far too important to leave to the scientists.   When we mere lay folk have been the victims of scientific assertions of biological determinism,  that gives us the right to make a direct critique of the idea on the basis of our experience.

If free will exists, as I freely say it does, there is an aspect of it that would make any scientist purporting to say anything about it on the basis of science, open to that highest skepticism.   The claim to have discovered anything about it, even its non-existence with science is fundamentally irrational.    Free will, in order to be free, would have to exist independent of causality.   If it was the product of causation it would be determined and not free.  Despite that concept being repugnant to materialism as well as scientism,  the concept of free will requires its independence of causality to be taken into account in the fantastic claims about it made by scientists.  Science, being absolutely dependent on casual relationships, it could not find free will if it searched for it for an eternity.

Fortunately there are far superior methods of determining the truth and reality of free will available.  The history of societies and countries which assume the existence of free will and other ideas that give these materialists the screaming fantods,  their relative freedom of oppression and freedom from violence,  as opposed to those which assume that human beings are "meat robots",  as a far more impressive and far more definitive experiment in the existence of free will and rights than plugging a tiny number of subjects into an fMRI machine could produce.   One of the foremost assertions of the validity of science is that "science works", meaning that science produces useful things of benefit to the world.   Well, in human experience,  free will, inherent rights, etc. have a far more certain validity because they work and determinism doesn't.  The enormous differences in real world results of the belief in determinism and the belief in free will constitute far more powerful evidence than the products of contemporary science which produces the denial of free will.

Consider this paragraph from Coyne's post:


Second, I don’t see why on Earth he uses the word “free”?  Why are people “free” if their actions are determined? The phrase “Brains are automatic, but people are free” may sound appealing, but it seems to lack content. We can consider them free if somehow helps us psychologically in assigning responsibility, but we can also assign responsibility if we consider ourselves “unfree” in the deterministic sense.  If you committed a crime, you are responsible for that crime, whether or not you had a choice to do it.  You have to be punished for societal protection and deterrence of yourself and others.

You would have to be either entirely ignorant of recent history or an irrationally credulous member of a scientistic cult   for that to not raise all kinds of red flags.   Of course, Coyne, given his faith in determinism, would question the existence of freedom, every determinist eventually does when these questions are pressed.  Determinism is nothing less than the complete denial of the basis of democracy, egalitarian democracy and the once strong ideology of liberalism***.

The more genteel of determinists will come up with some artificial substitute,  utilitarianism or aesthetic preference or something  merely to be preferred to mitigate the real meaning of their denial of freedom.  But these stop gaps will always have the same quality, of  being merely something that  they "help us psychologically",  as if that will prevent the bloodshed and  the horrible oppression that have characterized every single officially materialist, officially atheistic government that has existed.   Not one of their proposed substitutes is any less vulnerable to denial than any religious assertions of morality and their preceding ideological basis will lead towards nihilism because science can't produce morality.

It is especially telling that Coyne chooses to focus on the desire to punish crime "for societal protection"  instead of some  more benign aspect of government for the creation of what he obviously believes is merely a necessary, what I assert would be very easily rejected, myth.  Presumably the crimes that Coyne would care about  and which will incur punishment, could be no less arbitrary based in nothing more solid than his necessary myth, temporary preference.   How can science devise a code of civil law?   Scientism would have to hold that those laws would be without real existence or meaning.   Given his deep hatred of religion, I wouldn't expect the expression  suspected as betraying religiosity could escape being criminal, eventually, in a government ruled by his preferences.  Of course, it would be "for societal protection".   That frequently mythical virtue is always given as an excuse for official depravity.  It must be noted that, as bad as other governments have been at consistent application  of legal codes, officially atheist governments have shown far less interest in abiding by their own laws.

Atheism, when based in materialism, has a history of denying freedom and with that comes a denial of rights, a denial of equality, and eventually risks the whole host of historical and political evils that come with the denial of those moral concepts.  The major backing that racial, sexual, class and other forms of societal and political oppression have in the modern period taken on the form of science.  It took the witness to the biologically based genocides of Hitler to shock Western socieites out of the deterministic "science" of eugenics.  And, as the memory of that fades, eugenics, by other names, is reemerging and has gained a strong foothold among people with greater influence****.   Science - for "science" is what is commonly taken to be science at any given time -  has more than matched primitive excuses for the objectification of people, removed inhibitions to people being used and  disposed of that are found in religions and philosophies.  The very habit of science treats what it looks in that way, it objectifies even the organisms it looks at.   Science can assert the reliability of its objectification with the prestige and authority it has, on the absolute foundation of materialism.   It can assert knowledge instead of mere belief, in the popular imagination of certain knowledge.   And it matches the resulting brutality of that objectification with increased efficiency in methodology.   Science is efficacious in achieving ends.
.
I have not encountered many atheists who were not materialists, whether conscious of that or not,  I have never met one who was not a true believer in scientism.   If anyone has examples of atheists who are not infected with those anti-liberal, anti-democratic ideologies I'd like to read them.   If some materialist has come up with a plausible argument for the real existence of freedom and inherent rights and equality I'd like to read them because I don't believe that valid materialist explanations of them can exist.  I've looked and haven't found any who come up with something strong enough to counter the very strong force of selfishness.

I have no faith in the political or social efficacy of utilitarianism or the other proposed imaginary or post-post modern style arguments for the mitigation of the brutality of materialist scientism.  I think people believing that other people are "meat automatons" or bags of chemical reactions, or any other form of objectification is an open invitation for them to try to use people as  brutally as they do animals.   And that they can do so with impunity if they are not stopped.  That has been the history of atheism with political power, those experiments have been run.   I believe that much of the crime and brutality of life in the United States is based in that kind of objectification,  even among those who profess religion.

If I'm skeptical of the good intentions of someone who begins by professing a belief that people are imbued with a spark of divinity, that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent rights, having looked closely at the history and contemporary culture of atheism for the past five years,  I'm far more skeptical of people who believe that people are merely objects,  I don't believe that they are inclined, by their ideology, to see it as absolutely wrong to exploit, hurt or even kill human beings on the basis or utility or in furtherance of their personal (or ideological) desires.   I absolutely believe that any society which regards people as "meat automatons" will eventually turn into a horrific, oppressive blood bath such as those which history provides as the clearest and most soberly real warnings.

Many people who read this will be deeply offended and angry.   I am sorry that that will be the case.  If I didn't believe that I was morally required to regard their feelings I probably would have said much of this in that original post linked to above.  I don't see how any scientistic materialists could complain that, in response to one of their own, I have now said it.   They don't have a right to my silence on these issues, especially when Coyne and many others makes these arguments in the very real, very dangerous realm of politics.

I am sure many will point to this or that atheist who demonstrated great benevolence and kindness.  And I acknowledge that such individuals are there.   Though I don't believe that their benevolence and kindness are the products of their materialism or their scientism.  That isn't possible because neither provides the moral compass necessary to stick to those inclinations.  I could speculate on where they developed the habits of thought and action that allow them to overcome, at least sometimes, the brutality of materialism but that's something they might best tell us, just as a religious scientist is the only reliable source of information as to their mental habits.   But I have no faith in the abilities of large numbers of materialists to compartmentalize their materialist faith from the selfish desires we all have.   History gives overwhelming evidence that selfish desire is only sometimes overcome by societies.   And, as said, the history of atheistic governments gives overwhelming reasons to suspect that a country governed by materialism will always revert to brutality, it will deny the basic rights of other living beings as desired.  Most brutally of all, those societies have been able to commit enormous slaughters on the basis of managerial efficiency.   There is no evidence in the history of atheistic governments and groups that reason is anything like an adequate deterrent to committing evil.   In their most developed forms, scientistic materialism will deny that moral categories are more than illusions.

The litany of crimes of that kind by Christian governments are undeniably a part of history, though, these days they are often exaggerated in anti-religious invective.  Of course any crimes that were committed are an undeniable evil and must be remembered and condemned.   But those crimes are of a distinctly different character from those of atheistic governments.  The Gospel of Jesus forbids the violence and pillage that has often been done in his name,  whereas materialism and science do not provide that kind of  legal prohibition.   Materialism and science can't tell that it is immoral to attempt a genocide. The resultant lack of hypocrisy by atheistic governments in their slaughter and oppression, due to that lack of discrepancy between profession and act, though,  is hardly to be praised.

I believe that it is only a morality which absolutely holds all people as being inherently endowed with rights and free will and which explicitly holds that fact requires justice be done is an absolute moral obligation ON PAIN OF REAL CONSEQUENCES, which will keep individuals, alone or in groups,  from treating other people as animals are universally treated by people.  Without that moral force people will consider themselves as allowed to exploit and destroy without considering the questions of  equal rights.   Nothing short of that will work,  it is hardly guaranteed to work even when it is present.  And one of the most important of all those moral positions is the absolute belief in equality.   It is also an absolute moral duty of government to not selectively shield some favored members of society from the consequences of their actions, making others pay and suffer the consequences of their greed and folly.   People have equal, inherent rights.   That is an idea you could never derive from materialism or science,  Coyne provides no convincing case for holding powerful people responsible for their "crimes" without it, no materialistic system of thought could.

I believe that the history of peoples' treatment of other people and animals are far superior ways of knowing the fact that people have free will and rights than the highly vague, very poorly founded and very conveniently asserted "findings" of "brain science" in this matter.  But that's an issue for another day.

*To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our DIS-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor's body at the time.

It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent.

William James:  The Varieties of Religious Experience,  Lecture 1.  Religion and Neurology

In the opinion of many thinkers, human freedom is closely connected with human rationality. If we were deterministic beings, what would validate the claim that our utterance constituted rational discourse? Would not the sounds issuing from our mouths, or the marks we made on paper, be simply the actions of automata? All proponents of deterministic theories, whether social and economic (Marx), or sexual(Freud), or genetic (Dawkins and E.O. Wilson), need a covert disclaimer on their own behalf, excepting their own contribution from reductive dismissal.

John Polkinghorne: Science and Religion


**  The existence of these exceptions to what is taken as rigidly established reality is remarkable in itself as they would seem to be first degree relatives of the religiously proposed "exceptions" such as miracles which are rejected as an unallowable exception of "physical law".    I've wondered about the relationship of the existence of routinely allowed outliers in scientific data to proposed miraculous events, but these huge exceptions in materialist scientism, automatically asserted according to subject matter and the individuals holding ideologies,  are far more serious violations of their assertions of "law". 

***  Marilynne Robinson has made a very persuasive argument that, despite widespread current belief, liberalism was a development from religion and not the so-called enlightenment.

****  It was, in fact,  The New Republic, the pseudo-liberal magazine,  which infamously promoted The Bell Curve.  Coyne frequently writes anti-religious invective for it, these days.   Though somewhat more decorously than he does for his blog.