Another Comment

As I have mentioned, I used to overlook the obvious problems that materialism poses for free will, inherent rights, equality, and morality, out of a clearly misplaced hope of leftist solidarity, hoping that the greater good would provide "some new equation" - to steal from Emily Dickenson.  But that was only putting off the problem.

Added to that, the exigencies of preventing a nuclear extinction motivated by the struggle between capitalism and the pseudo-socialist regimes and keeping the United States out of third-world wars to prop up anti-communist despots, as well as giving material to domestic fascists, led to pretending that the results of materialism as a political ideology weren't horrific, massive and clearly visible.

And now, as I read Dawkins, Dennett, Coyne, etc. I see that the moral and political defects of materialism are gaining currency among the pseudo-left and available for the use of those same domestic reactionaries.  There isn't much of a difference between the two.

Well, looking at history just during my lifetime makes me more confident than ever that the metaphysical bases of liberalism are true and essential for survival and a decent life and that those are incompatible with an ideological system that starts off denying that those can be real. The choice to believe in those metaphysical bases informed by experience and history, is a far more rational act than the willful assertion that they are impossible.  Looking at the most thinly veiled nihilism being preached in the last years of the 20th and first years of the 21st centuries,  the refusal to take the lessons of recent history is one of the most irrational, selfish and irresponsible acts possible among an alleged intelligentsia.

I'm a gay, socialist leveler.  I will not acquiesce to a shoddy, threadbare, pseudo-scientific ideology that denies the superior information from the real world about human societies and life that history provides,  on behalf of scientistic hubris.  It is an entirely irrational act to deny that information consisting of piles of bodies, lakes of blood and hundreds of millions of enslaved and degraded lives.

On Quoting Richard Lewontin

Someone has asked me why I so often quote the geneticist Richard Lewontin in my arguments, noting that he's a professed materialist who has written a some things I can be assumed to disagree with.

The reason is that I know that if Lewontin has said something relevant to what I'm discussing it be fully informed, rigorously thought out, honesty addressed and well said.   Despite whatever ideological differences I have with him,  Richard Lewontin is always worth reading and considering.

Arnold Schoenberg Ode To Napoleon

Points Made In a Blog War Earlier Today

I assume when people say they believe people are merely material objects, that there is no free will, that there are no inherent rights, that there is no divine spark in people, when they either elaborate or endorse ideological systems that have no room for those metaphysical holdings that make human beings more than just objects and when their subsequent acts treat people like objects that those acts were the result of their stated beliefs.  That is especially true when they claim the status of science for those beliefs, denying they are beliefs but claiming they are reliably known.

What evidence is there that professed Christians who kill people and rob the poor are motivated by the words of Jesus and his closest followers, who taught against doing those things?  There is every reason to accuse "christians" who do those things of failing to follow the teachings of a man they claim to believe is God. There is no reason to accuse materialists who treat people like objects,  to use or kill them of failing to treat people like material objects.

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The choice of voting is a matter of predicting behavior, at least when considered rationally. You think that I should take a chance that people who say that people are merely objects and that free will, inherent rights, are delusions etc. don't really mean it and won't act out of that often vigorously held position. I'd guess they'd have a reason for saying what they did and it was among the best predictive factors in guessing what their behavior will be.

And I expect some religious believers really have a reason for saying what they do, perhaps even those who have a very hard time consistently overcoming their selfishness and that they're at least as likely to have their belief influence their future behavior as materialists are. My guess is that believing there is are divinely ordered moral laws with real consequences against selfish behavior is probably more likely to produce good behavior than believing that there is no such reason to not be selfish.

Stella Chiweshe: The Speech

Caught In The Sealed Maze of Materialism

Ever since I first found out how capitalism worked, seeing how it institutionalized greed and exploitation, I've been a socialist.   That would be a socialist, not a Marxist.   And, due to the utter confusion of the term "socialist" I've got to point out I'm definitely not a Fabian*.   I'm a socialist who believes that the workers should own the means of production and that that ownership should never be allowed to leave the hands of the workers who use those means to produce what is produced.   My friend at my former blog pointed out that my socialism was more in line with some branches of anarchism, though I'm anything but an anarchist.   As I mentioned, neither am I a Marxist.   And here, just for fun, I'll mention that Marx declared he wasn't a Marxist either.   Howard Zinn's guess at why he said that sounds plausible to me.

This morning, following up links on lefty blogs, I came to this rather dismal post  at Lenin's Tomb giving a wonderfully baroque exposition of why ideology is a material substance.   If you want to peruse it in all its tortured citations and reasoning, go ahead.   I doubt you'll profit from it, you'd probably get more of use from picking through the dry bones of the Abhidhamma  on some esoteric  point of Buddhist dogma more profitably gotten from some simple statement of the Dharmapada.   It's absolutely nothing.  I wouldn't insult the Golden Rule by involving it in a hands down comparison in its favor on the basis of the observation of actual life as compared to the vanity of  ideological romance. 

Here's the comment I left there after reading through it.  

If this is true, there isn't any difference between one ideology and another, they're merely different products of different chance factors of material causation.  There isn't even any reason to adopt one over the other because whatever decision is made is merely another product of material causation.   You may as well be a Republican-fascist as anything else.   Even the idea that your conclusion carries anything like truth or is anything like an objective picture of material reality is illusory.   

Why would you think your conclusions could escape the materialist substrate that you conclude your ideological opponents are a victim of?   No, that's silly, if your materialist ideology is the product of your peculiar line of causation, as you say your opponents' ideologies are, its being materialist isn't any reason to assume it's any more accurate.  Materialist ideologies aren't uniform and there wouldn't be any way to judge one as being more realistic than another one.

You've only sealed up any escape from a maze with no center and no goal.   There isn't any more reason to live in that one than there is to spend your life playing a video game.    I'd rather take a chance on your materialism being an academic delusion, even if what you're saying has some chance of being true. 

* Fabianism is a rich snob's idea of "socialism" from above, preserving upper class belief in their own virtue and the depravity of the poor.   It's among the more putrid uses of the word.   I'd be in favor of coming up with a different word to name my kind of socialism but that's not in my hands. 

Giving Excuses To Alcoholics As They Destroy Themselves

One of my brothers drank himself to death last year,  he'd had a long and horrible history of alcoholism and he was under treatment for almost the entire time.   His was the second disastrous experience my immediate family had with the mental health industry,  he had sought what he believed was the scientific route of treatment, psychiatry, psychology.    Obviously, it was entirely ineffective as he died.   Being a good atheist he rejected AA as being religious.   In the last several months of his life, as he sank farther into chronic drunkenness and his life was falling apart, I looked in vain for one of the alleged non-religious alternatives to AA only to find that, as so many of the "Humanist" anti-religious help groups, it was a Potemkin false front.    I found a grand total of one "contact person" listed in my state with no contact information given.   That was in contrast to well over a dozen AA groups, some of them reportedly quite secular, within easy driving distance of his home.  But, as I said, being a good atheist he rejected each and every attempt we made to help him find a group compatible with his credo.

Alcoholism, being a topic of pressing interest to me and having, by then, had quite a bit of experience with how horrible and encompassing a disease it was,  I got involved in several arguments about it on some leftish political blogs.   I heard all the same lines about AA that I heard coming out of my brother's mouth and more.  That it was "statistically" no better than doing nothing, that it was a religious cult, that it blah, blah, blah.    The greatest accomplishment of the "Humanist" -atheist  party line on AA seems to be to have provided people with a horrible, self-destructive addiction which is extremely difficult to recover from a series of excuses to not try to stop.   Oh, and there were assertions about the alleged atheist alternatives.   I think I might have asked for some evidence that those really existed at one point,  I don't recall any evidence given.    Last year also being the year when Ken Burn's "Prohibition" was shown on PBS,  I outraged a number of people by saying that the worst thing about prohibition was that it didn't work.   Just in passing, it's so funny to find out how easy it is to say the forbidden among the self-appointed "free thinkers".

I have to confess that my experience of last year has influenced my thinking that pop-atheism is anything but a force for good in the culture.  There is a reason that in 2012 you find atheists congratulating themselves on beginning to form charitable groups of the kind that religious people have organized for thousands of years.   I won't, though, be holding my breath to find out if they develop into anything more than the phony shell that the atheist alternative to AA has been.   I doubt it.

Life Isn't A Machine It Is Not Book Keeping It Isn't A Circus Act

Note:  This was first posted at my first blog on September 3, 2006.  It is reposted here as a commentary on NPR's new discovery of reporting.

As used in the context of politics and social life, “balance” is a very strange word. It’s an even stranger virtue. The assumption that finding a balance is the same thing as being correct is part of the automatic standard operating settings of our country. It is one that is accepted without question.

The “balance” fetish sees society and politics as if they are a revolving machine that will fly apart if some kind of mystical governor doesn’t keep things in a state of equilibrium. While this is, I contend, just more of the absurd habit of seeing all of life in terms of mechanics there isn’t any reason to think about public life in those terms. It is an unthinking response that has some dangerous political consequences. What “balances” democracy, equality, freedom? You can balance many things but you can’t balance reality.

The most important political use of this “balance” comes in the context of news reporting and the parasitic limpets attached to it, opinion “journalism”. In that context something called balance has replaced the reporting of facts*. It used to be that a reporter was required to get two independent sources to verify the truth of what their primary source had said. Now, instead, they just have to get a second opinion and that opinion doesn’t even have to present facts in refutation, it just needs to refute. The excuse is that the “reader will get to decide who is right”. Well, I’m very sorry to have to say that I’ve decided that is a lie, a cheat and a fraud entered into for reasons of laziness, cowardice, economy and ideology.

The function of good journalism is to present verified facts that a reader or listener can reasonably rely on at least contingently. A reporter has to do their job well enough to go past the point of presenting a false dichotomy which the reader then chooses a side to be on. This wasn’t always done honestly but it used to be done a heck of a lot more often than it is now. It’s not an unimportant matter, the news is a lot more earthshaking than presenting a choice between clear or cream soups.

The excuse that the “reader gets to decide” is fundamentally dishonest. Presumably a reporter will know a lot more than the readers will even after reading the results of their work. Not even an unusually long report will have enough information for someone to form an opinion. But that question shouldn’t even enter into the business of reporting the news. The reporter is the one who gets to decide but news decisions can’t be a matter of pro or con, it’s a decision about what is supported by the facts as they have it in their power to discover them. If the reporter fails in that task it is up to the editor to decide that they haven’t got the goods yet.

I first started noticing this kind of phony balancing act back in the 70s in response to the already years long effort by conservatives to destroy journalism. It was a cowardly capitulation to an organized effort to paint an objective media as liberal.** The media began by “balancing” their straight news reporting with stuff from the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, The Heritage Foundation, and the Cato whatever. Have you noticed much in the way of ‘balance’ in the direction of the left, that is other than the typically soggy Milquetoast from the likes of the Brookings Institution? And we see today that the usual panel of talking heads on TV has one or more obvious right-wing representatives to “balance” one reporter.

With this decay of real reporting there has been the rise in several levels of “opinion” journalism, complete with excuses within the profession for why they are exempt from accurately presenting facts or even telling the truth. Analysis, op-ed, focus, feature columnist, right down to the lowest of the low, the pundit; the presentation of opinion by these entirely biased and interested parties is almost certainly cheaper than supporting a reporter through the difficult and expensive task of trying to uncover hard news. It is certainly more certain what the point of view expressed will be.

A democracy can withstand wars, depressions, insurrections, plagues and many other calamities, it cannot withstand the ignorance of the People. It cannot exist if a majority of its people believes that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and so the invasion was justified. It cannot stand if the majority of people know more about what goes on in Hollywood than inside the government. It is a measure of the failure of our news that Americans, with the most elaborate media structure in the history of the species are inadequately informed on issues they need to know in order to govern themselves.

I don’t believe in a right to be ignorant but like all opinion what I think doesn’t matter. But unless someone can find an alternative explanation I’ll have to believe that if people choose ignorance they will always lose their rights. People who are ignorant are unable to resist those who would manipulate them and exploit them, even without an effort to impose a dictatorship, they will likely stumble into one. Similarly, if the media chooses to pander to the least common denominator, if they seduce the population with infotanement for their corporate interests they don’t exist as a free press. A free press is always in danger of having the exercise of its freedom taken away from it. If they only report corporate propaganda they will find, in the fullness of time, that they are not allowed to do anything else. A free press is fully dependent on an informed and free electorate. Our media hasn’t given up free speech with a gag but with a simper.

* There is another aspect of this avoidance of news reporting posted at my first blog.

** A couple of years ago there was a letter in the Boston Globe, I believe in response to a story about David Horowitz’ McCarthy style efforts against college teachers. It was the most succinct and sensible answer I have ever seen to these charges. The letter said that College teachers tend to be liberals because they read a lot.

Industrial Advocacy of Ideology Is A Malignant Force

The phenomenon of ideology as a commercial opportunity and a generator of celebrity seems to be very little noticed.   The creation of entire industries by lobbyists, media flacks and hacks, and theme bloggers and their aggressive insertion of bias into intellectual life and politics seems to me to cry out for serious investigation.   One of the most important and potentially malignant roles of these ideological industries is their power to bend the media.   The various industries that push ideological positions on the "Constitution"  and "The Bill of Rights" are some of the most seriously dangerous.   That which includes the Federalist Society and corporate funded ideological efforts is a clear and present danger.   The Cato Institute seems to be one of the weirdest of these industrial efforts in that their research "papers" which, strangely, never seem to fail to support their preexisting  ideological positions are taken as definitive by such parts of the media as NPR.   That real life continually generates evidence that those positions are horse feathers never breaks through the pose of authority that is an basic part of the snake oil show that these industrial advocacy organizations are.

I don't believe for a minute that most of the hired hacks and flacks believe all of what they say,  they are paid to lie when that's what is either commercially or ideologically useful.   I doubt that a lot of them would fail to move over to the other side if that side paid better and provided more to them.    As it is, making a career of lying benefits them and doing it on one side is easier for them.

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About A Blog Anniversary  

Along with its potential to promote some important voices, blogging has allowed many otherwise forgettable people to become celebrities due to their ideological advocacy.   In some cases it appears to allow people who would, otherwise, be unknown associate professors in obscure universities to become famous merely through their advocacy of ideological positions.   That's especially true of right-wing ideologues,  many of whom don't even need that level of bona fides to set up shop as an instant expert for purposes of financial reward.   But it's true of those setting themselves up as being on the left as well.   Apropos of my blogging last week, of particular interest to me are those who peddle materialistic clap trap and set up a following on blogs which declares that anything that deviates from that materialism is uncool and a betrayal of all that is respectable.   But, as I've said, my chosen theme is why liberalism has failed and is in danger of dying.

Three years ago I read an online magazine post that asked two of the independent leftish bloggers I followed about the decline in independent blogging.   They both reported a decline in their readership and, also, their financial position due to that.   It was about the same time that I noticed an ossification into a position of ideological correctness on those blogs, one far more than the other, and also the concentration of their commenting communities into a tightly definable in crowd.   I've also noticed that happening on science themed blogs to an even greater extent and even earlier.  The house ideology of materialism at those blogs seemed to be the reason that ideological deviation, even slight deviation from the common received POV  were not allowable.   I used to welcome going to political blogs as a breath of fresh air after some of the brawls at those places but the atmosphere at the political blogs is often as stale as on the science blogs these days.   The heady freedom of thought at the fondly recalled Media Whores Online and on the leftist blogs that held through about 2007 has declined into ideological conformity on way too many of them.

Maybe there is something like a natural life cycle of blogs that is represented in this phenomenon.   Maybe the commercial necessity of servicing a reader base leads to blogs becoming rigidly ideological.   I wouldn't know as nothing I've ever written has attracted a wide reader base.   I try to avoid taking ideological positions because they become institutionalized and all human institutions carry their own limits and their own defects.   About the only ideas I've considered as absolute in my blogging are that living beings are not objects, that it is wrong to treat living beings as objects and their lives must be treated as important.   Politically, that leads to the position that people, whatever else they are,  possess free will, inherent rights and real equality.   I hold that human experience and human history provide evidence that those are real and important and effective in giving people power to do good that definitively overrules any kind of assertion to the contrary.   Those positions have led me, inevitably, into conflict with the materialist, pseudo-leftist fashions of many bloggers and their commenting communities.   I think they account for a lot of the more thoughtful commentators on blogs who have left the blogs they used to frequent.

I doubt that leftist blogs will play an important role in the continuation of liberalism into the future because too many of their owners and commentators  really don't believe in liberalism, they believe in some libertarian pantomime of liberalism.   The resultant positions often amount to a hollowing out of liberalism from the bottom, leaving a weak libertarian surface that has no political force behind it.

Liberalism is incompatible with materialism, I doubt it can be made compatible with it.   I doubt that the contemporary fashions that go by the name of liberalism and leftism will have the energy behind it take do that most radical of all actions,  change the laws and the culture to make life better.   Materialism contains the poison of disbelief in those things which have powered liberalism to success in the past.   The fashionable poses that are what remains of the cultural habits of that liberalism are ineffective.

Will a real liberalism arise to replace the wreck that is seen everywhere?    That's one of the most important political questions that goes unasked,  that, I'm certain, is a forbidden topic on the self-promoted leftish blogs.

It is corporate interest that funds the right-wing ideology industries, the left doesn't have  that funding source and it never will.  The left used to be powered by moral force,  by its fundamental morality of equality and equal rights.  Like it or not, liberalism is absolutely dependent on some rather complicated metaphysical foundations that are incompatible with materialism, scientism and, let me be frank, the new atheism.   That is what it has, the intellectual positions of liberalism either serve those or it devolves into inequality and the negation of rights.

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.

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