“Communication Is a Two-Way Street” is a trite metaphor that, although useful at times, is an incomplete description of the reality of the process of communications.  Yes, there are senders and receivers in communications.  The senders can only control how they present messages.  They can’t control how messages are received. Only receivers can control their reception.

In intro psychology courses, many of us spent weeks trying to get a solid grasp of the subtle differences between sensation and perception.  Just as two people can experience (perceive) a temperature of 55° F as either warm or cool depending on their preconceptions and other environmental factors, two people can also hear or read my message and either decide that I am “right on” or that I am “not helping.”

I sincerely intend to attend someday a conference where all the cool kids congregate. If I had been at TAM8 in Vegas last weekend, I would have caught this speech that Phil Plait gave on being a dick when it comes to skepticism.  Stephanie was there and wrote about it.

That’s the closest thing I have to a conversion story I have. It’s also why I was a touch disappointed in Phil’s speech, although I appreciated most of it. He asked how many of us used to believe in woo, and he asked how many of us had been converted by people being angry and mean to us. He didn’t ask how many of us had been converted by someone being angry and mean on our behalf or on behalf of the ideals of skepticism.

I’d have raised my hand. High.

I have been wondering what has been learned lately in the blogosphere regarding the best methods to communicate skepticism and interest in science to the general public.  It still seems to me that with the You’re Not Helping self-immolation, the lesson learned was that people don’t like sock-puppets (and for good reason).  Or perhaps that Chris Mooney had better do a better job of checking on someone before vouching for him.

In most of the discussions related to accommodation of religion and science, most of the effort at discovery and focus has been placed on the methods of the message senders.  Who is right?  Who is wrong? Is it okay to be a jerk?  Are jerks making it more difficult for the non-jerks?  Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas even has a post that suggests that we can use science to determine the best way to get people to like science.  He even proposes a (lame) experiment:

Someone grounded in that body of research could develop some testable hypotheses about how folks might respond to NAs. Then you could do lab work, bringing in a large and representative sample of folks with views across the c/e spectrum. Do a pretest, then have some of them read a selection from Dawkins’ The God Delusion, others read from Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, and a control reading something unrelated to creationism and evolution and theism. Then do a post-test. Follow up a month later, and see how their views on science generally, evolution specifically, and on the relationship between science and religion have changed. Follow up a year later. What sticks, and what doesn’t? What do people remember? What do they convey to their friends? Then follow up the study with treatments that vary the extent of contact with New Atheist writings, to see whether people who read all of TGD, or watch a 2 hour talk by Dawkins, react differently than those with more fleeting contact with NA ideas.

The reason that I think that this idea is “lame” is because the concept doesn’t take into account the individual prejudices, the environments and the presuppositions that people bring into a reading of a book that looks at religion to determine that belief in God is the result of a delusion.  It’s a loaded experiment that I think would yield little.  A reading of either Miller’s book or Dawkins’ book is unlikely to find an audience of readers who were initially unbiased towards the concepts of religion and science.  Such an experiment wouldn’t be able to isolate the independent variables enough to create a sufficiently testable hypothesis.

More importantly, though, Josh makes the mistake of assuming that there is a “best” way to do all of this science communicating.  I don’t see how there can be one “best way” to turn an “Unscientific America” into a scientific America when there isn’t any single “America.”  There are 300 million Americans, and each of them have their own looking-glass selves. Communication doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  A message is by necessity interpreted by the receiver.  Communication is colored by the recipient’s background, history and environment.  Perception is a function of perspective.

Suppose the experiment were to be set up using the two books that Josh suggests; Finding Darwin’s God, by Kenneth Miller and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.  Suppose a sizable portion of the Miller readers were anti-Catholic and decided that his book is pure papist nonsense.  Would their non-acceptance be skewed by his catholicism?  How would the experimenter control for such an extraneous variable?  That is just one possible objection, and I am sure that social scientists can find more problems with the idea.

Humans are not psychic.  There is no direct communication available from my brain to yours.  We are limited in communications by the usage of symbols whether visual or audio.  We talk, we write, we listen, we read and use other means to indirectly communicate.  The indirect means we have to communicate are filtered through our perspectives.  We can’t control how other people filter.

Let’s try looking at it this way.  Is there an experiment that can show the “best” temperature to take a shower?  Would Josh be able to come up with a statistically valid sample to prove that 140°F is the “best” temperature and then expect that everyone take their showers at that temperature in order to get a consensus on clean?

Communication is not a two-way street.  It is an intersection.  Sometimes there are four corners and sometimes there are seven corners, and I think it unreasonable to expect that a left turn is always the correct course of action.  People who receive your directions and your communications have varying needs.  Stephanie needed someone to be angry at flim-flammers on her behalf, and Randi was there for her. Some people don’t need to hear that; some people just want discussion.  Some people just want the facts.  The trouble is the communicators don’t know what the receivers need. Most of the time we just know what we want to give. That’s just fine as long as we recognize that the message may vary and still have a desired effect.

So, be a dick or don’t be a dick.  Just don’t pretend to tell me that you know which size fits all.

Once you eliminate the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth (or a close approximation thereof). Almost A.C. Doyle

I have a friend who has often told me that as an atheist I rest too much on my preconceptions that God doesn’t exist for me to be open to evidence that his God does, in fact, exist.  He has told me that because of the problem of induction,  there is no way that I can “know” that God doesn’t exist, and that nothing in the scientific method can be used to support atheism.  Since no one can be justified, apparently, in drawing absolute answers from repeated observations, then it is silly to say that there is no God just because I have never experienced “Him.”

It’s the problem of induction, again.  I hesitate to discuss such a philosophical quandary among those who read this blog regularly; those who will likely school me on where my lack of formal philosophical training has failed me, but I have been thinking about the differences between science and religion as “ways of knowing.”

In order to maintain confidence that a causal relationship between natural phenomena has been established, one scientific method that I learned was to disprove a null hypothesis using statistical tools to analyze my data.  If the null hypothesis is not disproved, that means that the proposed hypothesis probably establishes a causal relationship and my investigation has yielded a good answer within a specified confidence interval. In other words, by following a scientific process, an investigator has come up with a good explanation for why something is so, or how something works.

This is only one of the methods that scientists use to discover how things work, one of the ways that people discover “how the world goes.”

Religion promises knowledge based on non-verifiable acceptance of authority, resignation to “mystery,” and the record of inscripturation.  Apologists for religion promise to provide “other ways of knowing” that aren’t limited to verifiable, positivistic methods. Religion, in general, tells people that we can know for certain that the supernatural exists and interacts in measurable ways with the natural.  Religion explains, in its “way,” the creation, miracles, interventions in personal lives and through catastrophic natural events.  The explanations are authoritative but not testable nor replicable through any reliable means.

There is a difference between the process of science and the nature of religion.  Science provides the “probable” answers, while religion promise certainty as long as the seeker will accept Mystery. ¹ Cosmologists have teased out most of the probable answers as to what happened following the Big Bang to within Planck Time and are still trying to determine how this universe came into being.  They don’t know absolutely if the current understanding of the process of expansion has been accurately described, but they have reason to acknowledge that it has been described very accurately using the process of inductive reasoning.

Inductive reasoning, as I understand it, is the process of analyzing subsets of the whole to make rational judgments of the nature of the whole.  For a common example of how inductive reasoning works, I will use political polling.  A sample of the population of likely voters is queried as to how they plan to vote in an upcoming election.  The larger the sample polled, the more likely the pollster is to obtain an accurate prediction of the eventual outcome.  Once the sample size exceeds a certain level, the returns of accuracy and confidence change little and it would be foolish and expensive and time-consuming to sample more than necessary.  A poll of all the people who will vote would be the most accurate way to predict an election, it would yield an “absolutely true” result, provided that none of those polled were deceptive or changed their minds.

The ideal sample size can be determine through some quick calculations, for example:

Determining Sample Size

((The trick to stats is designing the proper formula.  Once that has been done it is a simple matter of algebra.))

Nate Silver didn’t need to sample all of the voters in the 2008 election to predict that Obama would carry the electoral vote.  He merely needed to analyze the polls that sampled populations within the whole of the electorate.  The results he predicted were accurate to a specified confidence level, the famous “margin of error” of ±3 per cent.  There was a 5% chance that he could have predicted incorrectly.  In experimental design, a scientist will determine what margin of error will allow for the most probable and acceptable description of the causality of a natural phenomenon. Shorter:  Is this what caused that?  The  possible answers are not “yes” or “no.”  They are “probably” or “probably not,” or “that’s funny.”

The “problem of induction” is related to absolute knowledge.  If all knowledge is tentative, then any solution is as good as any other.  There is no certainty and there can be none, so my answer is as good as yours even if I haven’t done any serious investigation.  If you can’t state with a 0% margin of error that something is so, then you really have no useful knowledge. I can’t predict that the sun will rise tomorrow with absolute certainty, because I can’t see into the future.  I can confidently state that it will because I have an understanding that the sun doesn’t really rise, instead the earth rotates and creates an effective illusion that the sun is rising. For the Earth to stop rotating sometime in the middle of the night, events would be a bit more jarring due to the forces of momentum than I would care to deal with.  I wouldn’t then be too concerned that my prediction was wrong.

The “problem of induction” has been misused to claim that since there is no way to “know” that there is no God then God is likely to exist even if there is no direct nor indirect evidence of such an entity.  Not by any professional philosophers has this been done, mind you, but by friends of mine who think that they have stumbled onto something that “no atheist can answer.”

When it comes to the differences between religion as a “way of knowing” versus science as a way of understanding, religion offers something that science doesn’t.  Religion offers the comfort of absolute knowledge.  It offers the absolute answers, the answers that people want:  there is a creator that is watching after us and providing a way for us to experience a blissful afterlife.

The conflict between science and religion is in the means of acquiring knowledge.  Religious authority is often derived from personal revelations of prophets who have experienced something that to them is “real” and “true,” as true as the feeling of a burned hand in a fire. I have “felt” the presence of the Holy Spirit, but I have also “felt” the presence of the pagan Goddess in a drawing down of the moon. Both experiences were very emotional, uplifting, exciting and convincing. God’s presence was revealed to me, as was the Goddess’s. I should also note that both experiences were accompanied by prophecies from the respective supernatural agents.

Through these experiences, I found out how religious people “know” what they know. There could be no doubt, because the words came directly to me while I was experiencing the ecstasy. There was no induction needed, because through those experiences I had the Truth.  As Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason:

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication — after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

I could tell you the Truth of those prophecies, but you would have to take my word for it.

Religion and science are not compatible because of the illusory nature of “truth.”  We all have truths.  Religion claims to provide Truth.  Science is just a process that uses methods to get close to truth.  Religion provides other ways of knowing.  My question is in knowing what?  What does religion help us know, exactly?  And if induction can’t be used to prove an absolute, is that really a problem that religion can solve?

I don’t know.

1. Have you ever noticed that Catholic theologians pronounced the word “mystery” with the “M” capitalized? How do they do that?

There is no possible way to discuss deeply held beliefs without offending someone who either holds or doesn’t hold those beliefs. As a blanket statement laid on with a broad brush and as a generalization to boot, I have not been able to find a way for everyone to be happy when it comes to discussing atheism and religion. I have read and listened; I have spoken and watched. I have said nice things to people about themselves, followed with a critique of religion and then bookended with a nice thing about that person again, only to be told I am a hateful bigot and arrogant.

While I know that the plural of anecdote isn’t data, I wonder how positive “positive atheists” should continue to be, with the awareness that somewhere along the line, no matter how we try, someone is going to be offended. If I were to criticize the Catholic Church for not doing enough to root out the pedophiles in the priesthood, or the Mormon Church for putting time and effort into denying the rights of gays and lesbians to marry their partner-of-choice, or Scientologists for sending a team of volunteer ministers to Haiti to provide victims with “touch assists,” or even to complain that my daughter was told by a fellow little girl that she was “going to Hell” for sticking up her middle finger, then someone would decide that I was being intolerant of others’ religious beliefs and just another example of a militant atheist.

It seems not to matter how civil we are when we complain about religion; we atheists become “bashers” and “nasty” and “militant” for being non-believers. We are out to evangelize the believers to be non-believers, and the only way we can win is to shame other atheists.

To me, there seems to be a growing number of atheists who want to see religion destroyed. I think these people, who may have always been around, are the ones who can make the community suffer. It is difficult to form a community around what you don’t believe in and that is what atheists do. Atheists are an incredibly diverse community, however, those who participate in organizations seem to be overwhelmingly liberal politically, don’t have kids, or their kids are out of the house. Most seem to have been raised with a religion and have sought out a community because it can be difficult to, in some cases, be rejected from friends and family because you don’t happen to share the same views on theology.

I consider the writer to be a friend but I think he is wrong in this post. There is good reason that many of us would like to see religion gone, and it is religion itself, not the people who are religious, that we want to see wither and die. Religion is given too much leeway and power when determining policy in our “secular society.” Religion is used to justify prejudices, to justify destruction of childrens’ bodies in order to “protect them” from having sexual desire, to keep women hidden and out of society in order to protect society from chaos and earthquakes, to opt out of filling prescriptions by pharmacists who object to the particular treatment because of their religion’s teachings and to urge prayer when other work can and should be done.

It’s a sweeping generalization to say that dissing religion is bigotry against religious people. Are atheists actively engaged in not hiring religious people? Are we trying to prevent them from holding public office? Are we censoring them or telling them that they can’t depict our heroes in a bad light (or any light at all for that matter)? Are we telling them that they have no place in politics, nor should they even be considered citizens, let alone patriots? I don’t think so, at least not in the United States and Canada. We are telling them that they don’t have the right to use their religion’s rules as the basis of secular laws. We are telling them that it is a violation of the concept of a secular government, and that the National Day of Prayer is inconsistent with the Constitution as written and interpreted. We are telling them that they shouldn’t pretend that their religion is as valid a way of “knowing” as the scientific process of discovery and interpretation.

No matter how carefully I tread on subjects I will find myself accused of being a meanie for violating somebody’s rules, and I will be subject to some “concern” about the way that the overall atheist community is perceived by me. When I was the host of the Minnesota Atheists’ radio show “Atheists Talk,” I invited someone to listen to the show one Sunday because I was personally excited to be on the airways, but his response was not be excited for me. Instead he simply said “Well good for you but I have no interest in spending an hour listening to you bash religion.” He never listened to the show, because he had predetermined that he wouldn’t be interested in it. I cajoled and explained that this was not what the show was about, but was told to change the subject and I was disappointed that as a friend he wouldn’t even give my show a chance.

My dismay comes from an observation that those who don’t like the New Atheists are behaving in the same manner towards them as they accuse the New Atheists of behaving towards the religious, and as the Grassroots Skeptic puts it:

Almost nobody is going to be able to respond to a perceived attack in any positive way. They’re bound to get defensive, or to respond with an attack of their own. If you’ve ever made the argument that some institution or individual was in some way bad for the skeptical movement, ask yourself honestly: did you phrase your assertion in a way that had any hope of persuading your newfound nemesis to take a step back and consider adjusting his or her methods? Or did you grow a big ol’ pair of Internet cojones, call him or her something awful that you’d never say in real life, and enjoy the momentary adrenalin rush you got from stirring the pot with the bitchy stick?

Last November PZ Myers agreed to “debate” Jerry Bergman on whether or not Intelligent Design should be taught in school. During the “debate” Bergman frequently used his own slides to counter a point that Myers was making while Myers was speaking. I found that action to be very rude. I wasn’t as upset over the content of Bergman’s slides, I was angry that while the other person was speaking Bergman was trying to distract the audience from what Myers was saying. During the debate Myers respected the time limits, attacked his opponents presentation methods and conclusions and expressed dismay that Bergman had not even approached the subject of the debate. At no time was Myers rude to Bergman personally, but only to his ideas. And yet, in the comments submitted following the debate people wrote that Myers was the rude and dismissive one. For people who have a set idea that is not gained by reason, any sort of approach that attacks that set idea no matter how nicely done may be considered “rude.”

There are rules we must follow in order to have civil debate, and violating those rules raises concern.

Someone expressed concern that at Minnesota Atheist meetings there was too much religion-bashing going on, and because of that as, she told a friend of mine, she wasn’t going to go back to any more meetings. What I have a hard time with is understanding why someone would go to a meeting at which atheists gather under a banner of atheism and not expect there to be any sort of talk against religion. I think it would be similar to objecting to people bashing Miller Beer at the Surly Brewery, or Apple at a Microsoft Picnic, or contact lenses at a gathering of Lasik Surgeons or Democrats at a Republican Convention. As in “I am for lower taxes and squashing education but those Republicans are so anti-Democrat that I can’t stand to be around them.” I need to ask, “What do you expect?”

There are so many secular groups and organizations to join and have fun and never even discuss religion in any context, positive or negative. Perhaps a bowling league, or a weekly cribbage club may suit you instead of an atheist group. Our community includes people who have been religious and are now disgusted at the effects that an overriding religious tenor to society has on our daily lives and want to be part of a group that recognizes that disgust and gives them an outlet to vent their frustration in a friendly environment. If, as atheists, our only desire and goal should be to be accepted as part of the larger community then our best strategy is perhaps to return to the closet and never say nothin’ about not believing.

Yes, that would be the best way for all of us to “just get along.”

Or we could also stop trying to shame vocal atheists and recognize that some people have a reason to be angry at religion.

I hear the cries and the calls of the religious moderate, and they are, as usual, correct. We have been too uppity, and I apologize on behalf of all of us. We should have known better, of course but in our exuberance at the publication of books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and others, we forgot to realize that even though our numbers seem to be growing, we are really riding the crest of a fad. It was something we should have recognized, and we should have told all those who heard that there are other atheists just to go home and pretend that they are religious, just like Mom and Dad.

It would be better for all of us to just sit back and let our rights come to us, because if we ask for them, we are being ungrateful. We really should learn to ignore all the creches and crosses and banners of churches being promoted by and paid for by cities. They aren’t aimed towards us, so they really shouldn’t be important to us. We can just look away, because we aren’t supposed to be offended. We have been wrong, egregiously wrong to think that our opinions matter, and now I surrender.

So I will go back into the closet and start telling everyone who asks me what church I go to “I grew up Catholic.” It won’t be lying, but if I tell them the truth, it might offend them and I shouldn’t be so bold as to allow that to happen. We need to just celebrate Christmas and sing along merrily to the songs we love, and we shouldn’t point out that many other cultures have long standing celebrations at that time of year, too. It’s not fair to spoil it for the majority who want to add a little churching to the crass commercialism and the credit card binges, because, after all a baby born in April must have his birthday and his birthday only celebrated at the solstice. We need to remember it.

We need to just start going along to get along and to stand up for the pledge, because good Christian soldiers fought for the right for the rest of us to be free, and to exercise the freedoms that they fought for would be to spit on their graves. We need to start saying the pledge, every word that has been part of it since 1954 and not to skip over the “Under God” part, because if we don’t believe the whole thing, then we don’t believe any of it. But we shouldn’t let anyone know, lest they think we are troublemakers.

We shouldn’t be setting up information tables at college campuses, even though people might be curious about why we are atheists. We have been wrong to do that, because anyone who is an atheist or agnostic on campus should think they are the only one. It’s only fair, because the nonatheists really have a right not to be offended. We need to stop having events like the “Superstition Bash,” where we have fun with some of the old superstitions like throwing salt over our shoulders or avoiding black cats. Some people might take that the wrong way, and we don’t want them to think that we are “bastard atheists.”

We need to muzzle the scientists who are atheists, or at least those who are publicly atheist. They should stick to the labs and not poke their heads out. If they let people know that they are atheists, no one will want to learn about science. We need to leave the driving to someone else, someone who knows about both science and religion and who is properly embarrassed by atheists even though he claims to be one himself.

We need to let science communicators repeat the meme that atheism is bad for science, and we need to just relax when they put out a book that only tells a tiny part of a story so they can make PZ Myers look like a nasty little son of a bitch, and then we are right to ignore that the incident that led Myers to do what he did led to death threats against a college student. We really should be ashamed of ourselves for thinking that any sort of mockery has its place in a civil society in which good Christian people threaten harm to anyone who attacks the ideas of their religion. It should just not be done, because that wouldn’t be civil.

No, we really need to be quiet about the situation in a country in which bishops threaten politicians with refusal of the host for refusing to back down on principle. Religion teaches us morals and ethics, and speaking truth to power, but there is only one power that shouldn’t be spoken truth to, and that is religion. Religion has our best interests at heart, and is there to prevent us from going to the hell it invented to scare us into following its teachings. We need to not let anybody know that this is all made up, because if we do, then we are indoctrinating them.

We need to stop talking about Christianity and really hone in on the evils of Islam and the planned Muslim takeover of the world through terrorism. If we do this, the Christians will love us again and maybe take up the slack that we will be letting out on issues of liberty (which we don’t deserve anyway, but they will be nice enough to grant to us if we are good). We really need to return atheism to the intellectual stores, and we need to remind ourselves that we really aren’t good atheists unless we can rebut all of the great historical theologians, however much they contradicted each other.

We are not worthy of our country. We are only riding the coattails of the enlightened Christians who fought against the Christian Monarchy (twice) so that we could have the right to be a Christian Nation. We are not worthy of our country, so that when the American Legion wants to lead our kids in prayer in public schools, we should just let it be, even if that is a violation of the Incorporation of the 14th Amendment. Violations of the Constitution are to be permitted when our youth need saving.

We are not worthy of our cities, so when councils want to open the meetings about zoning variances, curb heights, renewing sewage franchises and authorizing the funding for a new speaker podiums, then we really need to let the council members pray about it. We don’t want any of our residents who are religious to get the impression that atheists walk among them.

It is time for Atheists to Stop It. Things were so good for us, and we didn’t know it. We had to start putting up billboards that say such offensive things as “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.” Or the really, really mean one that says “Millions of People Are Good Without God.”

It is time for atheists to leave well enough alone. We’ve had our say, we’ve had our moment in the sun and now it is time to go back to being nice and quiet and let the Christians guard over us, so that we can all live and let live and no one will ever talk about the ways that religion rules our lives unfairly again.

To all Christians: I apologize for being so uppity. I promise to be good. My hat is in my hand, and excuse me while I go to the back of the bus and get off at my stop and hope that none of you are dishonored again by having to look at me.

(This is a re-post from Tangled Up in Blue Guy.–MH)

In the comments for my most recent post on Atheism, Core Values and Religion, a daughter’s mother and I engaged in what I consider to be an interesting exchange on the use of the labels “agnostic” and “atheism.”  I am not sure that we have it settled yet, so I wanted to do a completely new post to explain why I refer to myself as an atheist.  While I accept that I hold philosophical positions in common with other non-religious people, I have a sincere reason for choosing to label myself as an atheist.

I really need to be clear that as an atheist, I don’t pretend to “know” that there are no supernatural entities.  I agree with those who label themselves as agnostics that there is no way to ever know the unknowable with an absolute degree of 100% certainty.  I think that those atheists who claim to know that there is no such thing as a supernatural realm are overstating their case by tiny degrees.  There is no absolute knowledge of anything, a position that even naturalists accept, and if faced with the prospect of trying to understand that which can not be known there is no way to investigate to find objective knowledge.

Atheists and agnostics, or general doubters of the prevailing cultural religions have struggled for centuries to find the correct label for themselves to carry.  A few self-labels that come to my mind:

1. Freethinker.  Unconfined by the dogma of religion, they see themselves as rational and skeptical and willing to look at their preconceived notions from a critical standpoint, to find if they are justified in continuing to hold those positions. I consider myself a freethinker.
2. Secular Humanist.  A philosophical position allied with atheism.  Most secular humanists are atheists, and most atheists are secular humanists.  I am also a secular humanist, because I believe that as humans we can solve problems without appealing to supernatural actors.
3. Rationalist.  Rationalists think of themselves as those who approach all of their questions by collecting and weighing evidence and, through critical analysis, come to the only valid conclusions possible.  I discount pure rationalism, because we have presuppositions of which we aren’t always aware, and even when we are aware of them, we don’t know how to correct for them.  No agent of thought can be purely rational, and I would argue that even processors in computers are not able to be purely rational because they are directed by human programmers and designers.  Spock, the agent of rationality created by Gene Roddenberry, admitted as much even for himself and was subject to the whims of his own biology every seven years.
4. Naturalist.  Naturalists are rationalists who accept the concept of human imperfection.
5. Bright.  A serious misstep and misguided label coined and conceived by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.  Essentially rationalists who just want to emphasize that they are smarter than everyone else.  It’s one label I refuse to apply to myself.
6. Agnostic.  Don’t know, can’t know and won’t claim to know about the existence of an overriding supernatural presence in the universe. Logically correct in that, but often people use the term so they are less offensive to the religious.  My problem with the label is that in not being “offensive” to the religious, it gives them the impression that we are still open to proselytizing by the religious because we “just haven’t heard the good news in the right way.”  I am also an agnostic, because I refuse to claim that anyone can know either way.  I just know that human descriptions of the attributes of the unknowable are either worthless for using in my approach to life, or inconsequential.  Anything “out there” in the deistic sense doesn’t affect me in the least.  So if “it” is there, it’s fun to speculate about its apophaticness, but that’s all it is and it doesn’t make me a believer.
7. 

   Atheist. Like agnostic, there are scalar degrees of non-belief that people will assign to themselves.  Often the discussion of atheism in a post on a site visited by atheists, theists, agnostics will include people declaring where they fit on the scale from “weak to strong.”  There are weak atheists, weak agnostics, strong atheists and strong agnostics.  I think that they are separate, parallel scales and not a single continuum.  I am an atheist.  And I wear the label proudly.

Two years ago, I was visiting my dad when his health was stronger.  I turned on the radio broadcast of Atheists Talk, streamed through the KTNF website.  Dad had been a lapsed Catholic for several years but had decided following a heart attack that he better put in a chip in the game of Pascal’s Wager and start going to Mass again. He had never been an atheist, to be sure, nor had he ever told me that he was at any point an agnostic. He just hadn’t been going to Mass.

As I was listening to the show, I asked him what he thought about the fact that I am an atheist and belong to the Minnesota Atheists.  He smiled and said, “I think it is a phase.”  I reminded him that I was in my late forties and hardly in the throes of teen rebellion.  He just laughed and went back to reading his paper.  That was all the time that he wanted to devote to it, because he doesn’t feel the need to try to “win me back” for Christ.  He seemed to think that when my time came and my health started to fail, I would come to the realization that I have been wrong to deny God and Salvation.  I am the fifth of seven kids, and three of the preceding four of my siblings are also atheists or agnostics.  The shock value for me to declare myself an atheist to him and to my late mother had worn off before I had the chance to use it.

Now, suppose I had told my dad I was a “capital A” agnostic?  That I was hemming and hawing on my belief so as not to seem too arrogant?  It may have given him an opening to invite me to Mass with him, to catch up on my Confessions and Act of Contritions.  Not that I am opposed to having religious discussions with him, of course, but I think he would have taken a more pressure-laden approach as he tried to nudge me back to the arms of the Church.  The effort on his part would have been similar to teaching a pig to fly.  It would have served merely to annoy the pig.

There is a reason that I use the word “atheist” to describe myself, among all the other labels of disbelief and religious doubt.

In the early 1980s, ideological labeling was shifting in U.S. politics.  Liberalism, which had once been a respectable label, was being attacked in order to build the Republican Party.  Ronald Reagan had won his election as a solid conservative and with no concessions to moderate his views.  He tapped into a blue-collar sensibility that liberalism had been hijacked by socialists and elitists, and by gosh, it was time to put some power back into the hands of the guys and gals who carried lunch buckets to work rather than attache cases full of doctoral theses.  He brought back morning to an America which had seen our intellectual and humanitarian president as being weak against commies and imams.

The ushering in of the Reagan era gave succor to the liberal bashers who had for years been marginalized.  Liberals didn’t want to be called liberals any more.  There were accusations of treason and anti-familyism leveled against liberals, because we had this odd notion that women and gays should have the same rights of self-determination as straight men.  There were accusations that liberals wanted to get rid of the Godly heritage of ‘Merica (to be fair, I did want to get rid of that) and that we were thus tools of Satan whether wittingly or no.  The word liberal was soon the insult that destroyed political campaigns.  A liberal in the mid-Eighties had as much chance getting elected to public office as an atheist does today.  So, liberals started calling themselves progressives.

Not me.  I have never given up the word “liberal” because of what the conservatives want to blame us for doing to their America.  In fact, I decided that I would be even more emphatic about calling myself a liberal.  It was akin to being country when country wasn’t cool.  I hadn’t changed my political orientation because of the Reagan era, so I sure in hell wasn’t going to relabel myself to seem less offensive to the people I would meet. I am a liberal; conservative disparagement be damned.  I should also admit that at least one factor in my refusal to give up the word “liberal” is in large part rebellion.  It is a word that should not be so vilified, so I am not going to play along with that game.  I don’t want to let other people, many of whom I just don’t like but others with whom I merely disagree, pick my label for me.

This also leads to my choice to use the term “atheist” to describe myself. I am not worried that people think it is a negative.  It is a negative. I don’t follow nor do I believe in any gods.  It’s that simple.  The beliefs that I do hold in addition to my lack of belief in supernatural actors are largely positive statements, but they are built from a presupposition that I have no reason to accept the idea that the universe has a dualistic supernatural/natural…um, nature.  There may be unreachable, unknowable entities, but I am not going to waste too much time thinking about it.

I am aware that people have negative impressions of atheists, that it is a choice of word that can lead people to dislike me or claim that I am being fundamentalist or arrogant.  I hold that the atheist position is just as honorable as any other position that anyone else has in regard to religion and theology and that it can’t be made more palatable by atheists shying from the word.  So I tell people when they ask me, “I am an atheist.”

I am also an agnostic, but most importantly I am an atheist.  People tend to like me for some odd reason, and I don’t scare them away when they meet me.  So, if atheism is going to become acceptable in our society, then we had better own up to it and not let other groups dictate to us what we should and shouldn’t call ourselves.  We can’t let people who don’t understand atheism get away with a smugly satisfying claim that we are just as fundamentalist as Christians.  The word “atheist” isn’t too strong.  It’s accurate.

Digital Cuttlefish has written a great poem that helps explain who we are as atheists. Look around you. I am sure that you know one or two and I am also sure that they haven’t stolen your Bibles to be used as toilet paper.

John W. Loftus was our guest on Atheists Talk on May 24, 2009, and he said something very interesting about religious people and their level of intelligence.  He said that they are not wrong nor stupid for being religious and even discussed the skeptical nature of the most intelligent of the apologists.  We can wipe from this list of intelligent apologists the creationists, of course, because they choose to ignore or diminish any factual data that contradict their dearly held notions that the Earth and its resident life are a special creation barely 6,000 years old.

Loftus made the case that, in fact, people such as William Lane Craig are probably more intelligent than he is.  I can name some religious thinkers far more intelligent than I am.  The issue with religion is not intelligence. The issue is that of core values, and presupposition.  (These are not Loftus’ direct words, they are my own interpretation.)

After leaving the station, I was listening to the occasionally entertaining “Speaking of Faith,” by Krista Tippett.  Her guest was Vali Nasr, an Iranian-American with Shia Muslim roots.  He was explaining the source of conflict between the Shia of Iran and the Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq.  Yes, it’s a mess and the American war in Iraq has complicated things.  But that isn’t why I bring it up.  I came in at this spot, and when I listened, it helped illuminate what Loftus had been saying on the show:

Mr. Nasr: And therefore, you know, things don’t matter enough here for people to be killing one another but many, many years ago when Boston was dominated by Protestant English establishment and you gradually had an influx of Irish Catholics who came to Boston, you had a very clear sense of a difference, that the Catholic Church belonged to the Irish and belonged to the poor and the Protestant churches represented the Anglo-Saxon establishment in the city. Now, the differences were not so much theological as they reflected the fundamental identity division in Boston.

Ms. Tippett: Socioeconomic and ethnic.

Mr. Nasr: It’s socioeconomic. If we go to Northern Ireland today, you know, IRA fighters may go to church, may not go to church. I don’t think they’re really concerned with liturgy and what the Vatican says.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Nasr: Catholicism is not faith; it’s who they are. It defines what side of the tracks they were born.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Nasr: You know, who they are, what share of the wealth they get. And you have that in the Muslim world as well. I mean, in Lebanon or Iraq or in Pakistan, the Shia-Sunni difference is not necessarily theological. It is who you are. So the Shia in Pakistan are like the Catholic Irish of Boston.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Nasr: Or in Iraq, they were like the Catholic Irish of Boston. They were not the “in” crowd. They were the “out” crowd. And then above this, you obviously have the theological difference and the major difference is the following: that the Shias believed that when the Prophet Mohammed died that his legitimate successors were his son-in-law and cousin Ali who’s buried in the shrine in Najaf and that God had willed that the charisma of the Prophet would run through his bloodline, and his bloodline would be the legitimate leaders of the community. So you could only have true Islamic leadership if the family of the Prophet ruled.

The Sunnis, essentially, who became the majority and whose writ ultimately carried, believed that the most suitable of the companions of the Prophet would be chosen by the early Muslim community, and he would be the leader. And from that disagreement over succession, over the years the two faiths evolved very differently.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Nasr: They have a different historical experience, and then the two communities developed a very different ethos of Islam and they practice the faith differently.

I am good at math.  It comes naturally to me when someone shows me how to do it.  I have a natural proficiency when tutored in those concepts, and usually I catch on with just a few practice equations.  I learned from having kids with math problems that I am not a very good math teacher.  I do better teaching subjects at which I struggle, because I can better empathize with their struggle.

Having been a Christian, myself, I can certainly empathize with them when it comes to their difficulties in understanding a life without the “presence of God.”  It is part of them, part of their roots and part of their community.  Catholics brought up in the faith take the basic tenets as self-evident, much as do the Irish of Boston or the Irish Catholics of Northern Ireland.  The Proddies were simply quite wrong, and their lack of understanding of the true nature of the Catholic faith led them to oppress the Catholics financially (and with the aid of the Anglican English, militarily).

Loftus mentioned that the atheists brought up without any sort of religion have a hard time emphasizing with the intellectual struggle of doubt that the religious face.  It is easy to see that religion is false if one is not brought up with it as one’s cultural miasma.  Leaving religion when I no longer believed was a struggle, because I thought that if everyone I trusted and loved was enjoying a relationship while I was not, then there had to be something wrong with me.  I kept trying to find my faith and read the Bible and helpful works, but ended up deciding that the struggle was over and became an atheist.

Because it was tough for me, I can empathize with those who are still struggling with the doubt.  The faith that they have is one of their core values. It is not an easy matter of learning that religion is wrong on natural explanations and from there concluding that religion is wrong (or inadequate at best) in dealing with other matters.  Religion has “worked” for them and made the world whole in relation to their cultural experience.  The Irish in Northern Europe, the Shia in Iran, the Sunni in Iraq, the Wahabi in Saudi Arabia, the Hindu in India, the Buddhist in China, the Shinto in Japan and the Native Americans didn’t grow up skeptically responding to the lessons their parents and their societies taught them.  They are skeptical of all other religions, because they don’t make sense.  Their own does, and it is self-evident.

For the atheists who don’t go through this the process is confusing and, like the problems that I have in explaining math to my kids, the non-Godness of the Universe is too obvious.  So, for them religion is just kind of, stupid.  It’s not stupid, it’s just wrong. 

Debates between atheists and religious scholars are entertainment, but ultimately few minds are changed.  People can only come to the atheist conclusion on their own and, until then, will rely on intellectual justifications to support their faith.  I am well aware that the same can be said by a believer about my atheism, and that it is foolish.  But then there is a story of a person risking his family relationships.  Here’s an example from RichardDawkins.net:

At age 18, despite my homeschooling, I managed to get into a university to pursue a higher education and a better life, a pursuit I was able to continue through attaining a Masters degree. After finishing graduate school, I joined the military and went on to fly jets from the flight decks of one of the most spectacular displays of scientific and technological innovation, U.S. Navy aircraft carriers. My parents were very proud of my accomplishments and even made reference to me as their “self-made man.” This reference has a special kind of irony for me.

I actually went more than a decade calling myself an agnostic. One reason for that was the process by which I came to my non-belief in faith-based assertions of truth. More than that was a need to prevent division between my family and me. Agnosticism provided philosophical blinders to allow my family to view me as a “backsliding Christian” instead of a “traitor.” Eventually, I accepted that I am an atheist (under Dawkins’ scale, I am a 6 out of 7) and thus began my fall from grace. All of the taboos of thinking, formally part of my programming, have slowly eroded to a basic understanding of what we know versus what we don’t know – and this has helped shape my cultural and personal values. Now I have become, in the eyes of a few, one of the aforementioned “savage wolves.”

As Marshall woke up, he was aware that people around him were unwilling to accept his new-found realization. It’s a hard thing to give up, those core values, even when they are based on mistaken beliefs that there is an eternal “giver” of values.

(Originally posted at Tangled Up in Blue Guy on May 24, 2009)

It’s a restless hungry feeling
That don’t mean no one no good,
When ev’rything I’m a-sayin’
You can say it just as good.
You’re right from your side,
I’m right from mine.
We’re both just one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind.

Bob Dylan, “One Too Many Mornings.”

At Tangled Up in Blue Guy, I introduced the Symbolic Interactionist (SI) perspective of social psychology in response to a question posed at The Friendly Atheist. I examined the ways in which people respond to logical propositions based on their own personal social and psychological background and experiences. The SI perspective is not settled science among sociologists, and I certainly don’t pretend to be an expert on it. I passed one course with an A, twenty-seven years ago. It did, however, make an impression on me.

One of the interesting concepts of SI is the “looking-glass self.” There are three main components:

1. We imagine how we must appear to others.
2. We imagine the judgment of that appearance.
3. We develop our self through the judgments of others.

Mentally and socially, we begin our lives as tabula rasa, empty vessels waiting to be filled and develop our sense of selves based on the totality of interactions we have while developing.  This then affects the way that we approach questions.  As people we decide what to accept and what to discount based on how the information we receive incorporates into our accumulated experiences and understandings and the sorts of feedback that we have gotten on the way that we process information.

Hemant asked the question I started this post with: “Who is better at converting Christians to atheism?“ So called accommodationists or so called New Atheists.  I question the question: I am not settled that it is or should be a goal to convert Christians to atheism.  However, if we accept that this is fact a goal of atheists, I can proceed with the rest
of the post.  I will then, under protest, stipulate that this is a goal.

Is there a singular approach that would be useful to have the maximum effect of converting swathes of Christians to atheism?

The variability in Christian beliefs is the first factor to consider when asking such a question.  Without listing all of the different denominations, it is obvious that there are a great many forms of Christianity.  There are evangelical, fundamentalist, liturgical, esoteric, exoteric, lukewarm, on fire, etc.  People within these variations  also diverge further on how they interpret the relationship of their religious beliefs with skepticism.

The looking-glass self is helpful in this regard, because it is a reminder that with all of these variations on the approach to religion, there are going to be different types of reactions to attempts to “convert them.”  One approach regularly offered is to explain how logic and reason and science work, then induce them to apply reason to their own religion.  Eventually, according to this plan, they will shed their religion and become freethinkers.

That may work for some, but as has often been pointed out, there are countless examples of scientists who do solid work in their fields and yet remain religious.  There is no simple explanation for why this is, and it bears repeating that their perspective on the issue is not the same as yours.   For the atheist, an insistence that we are the only state of belief/non-belief based on reason is faulty.  It ain’t so, because when we approach logic in any situation, we carry a broad base of preconceptions which bear on how we actually process the data sets.

I see a hazard and a way that this can backfire.  If you have a friend or acquaintance that you have targeted for conversion, consider that your friend has a conflicting goal.  Their beliefs compel them to share their experience and their salvation with you in hopes of saving your soul for Jesus.  Consider that you may have just engaged in a game of strategy and competition.  For them, they have found a way to “get to you.”

If logic and skepticism are going to be your approach, your friend has now embarked on a strategy to use those tools to convince you that their beliefs are entirely rational and will mesh finely with your own looking-glass self, but in a way that you may not have anticipated.  Don’t assume that because they have this belief in a supernatural being, that all of their intellectual background is based on fantasy.

Classical Definitions

Christianity has a long philosophical history, and the writings of enlightenment era philosophy were not strictly atheistic.  Further, philosophy and logic include difficult concepts such as “epistemology,” which is the question of how we “know” that we know what we know.

Logic and reason are presuppositional.  Whatever you perceive to be “base knowledge” is built upon your own looking glass self, and it is very difficult to find a common base in a logical argument with someone who has their own looking glass self.  Rene Descartes’ famous statement, “Cogito ergo sum,” was the final conclusion that the only base certainty that he could find is that we exist because we think.  All else he had tried in approaching epistemology engendered doubt that he was being deceived.

Pinning your friend down to a common set of stipulations for building a logical case that there is no reason to believe in God gets tricky even for the seasoned student of philosophy, and your friend could indeed be well-trained in logic and epistemology.  Further, since your friend has all ready reconciled logic with faith in their own way to come to a religious conclusion, they are going to bring such reconciliation to the discussion.  Part of what they are using is rationalization, but it is also rationalization that seems “obvious” to them and it should also be “obvious” to you.

Atheists and theists have been debating each other for years to try to convince each other of the fallacies of their logic. It is, for many, a game to play with words and concepts.  You will likely be surprised when approaching a Christian that he or she is all ready familiar with your arguments and prepared to turn them back on you.

It is a mistake to think that only a reasoned approach is going to work, if you intend to reach Christians with the “Message of Atheism.”  If reason is what did the trick for you, that’s all fine and dandy, but it’s not the only game in town.  If you want to “convert” anyone, be prepared.

As for myself, I am not all that concerned with evangelizing atheism for new converts.   I am more concerned with making sure that atheists who think they are on their own know that we are here.

Then someone new joined us and wanted Mary’s attention. I turned back to the conversation between PZ and the very earnest young man sitting across from me. He had come to atheism relatively recently and with great relief, and he wanted to give something back. He was shy, though, and diffident, and didn’t know what he could do to help. He asked PZ.

Now, I’m not a big talker. It takes some wind up for me to get to the point of even opening my mouth. However, this time, I interrupted before PZ could answer.

“Be happy.”

He looked confused.

“One of the best things you can do to promote a positive view of atheism is to live a happy, healthy life as an out atheist.”

I don’t know whether PZ agreed with me, or whether he was simply shocked that I wasn’t tiptoeing around the big-name local atheist. Either way, he didn’t disagree.

Of course, how could he? He was sitting there after taking one of his adult children to the airport to go do something fun and productive for the summer. He was having a pleasant breakfast with the woman he calls his trophy wife despite having been married to her for more than two decades. He was living my advice, whether he’d ever heard it before or not.

Since that brunch, it’s been heartening (and terribly, terribly sweet) to note how much atheist love is out there. I have been privileged to watch the developing romance of two of my favorite online people, DuWayne and Juniper. Their love is relatively new, but watching it grow from hints of respect and admiration to giddiness to that beautiful, simple confidence in one another has been an experience I treasure.

Jodi and Jason are a bit further along in their romance. Owning a house together, they were already committed to one another, but Jodi decided it was time to take things another step. So she delighted thousands of atheists and skeptics and science fans by proposing to Jason in an intricate online dance. He said, “Yes,” thousands rejoiced and a bunch of people started talking about how religion and tradition, though often mentioned in the same breath, don’t have to be associated.

Then there is the beautiful and funny wedding that happened this month at The Amaz!ing Meeting in Las Vegas. Skepchick Numero Uno, Rebecca Watson married her sweetheart Sid Rodrigues onstage in a surprise wedding ceremony during a recording of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast. Not only did they have an auditorium full of their skeptical friends to share the moment with them, but the ceremony was streamed live and is still available for viewing. What few dry eyes there are in the atheist blogosphere belong to people who haven’t watched the video or read Rebecca’s post about the wedding.

Minnesota Atheists’ own Bjorn and Jeanette didn’t get married online, but they still shared it with us. I wish I’d had access to their post on their humanist wedding ceremony when I got married, but it’s available for another generation planning their own weddings. And it seems to have worked, too. Bjorn and Jeanette are coming up very soon on their first anniversary. Congratulations, you two.

Greg and Amanda have just a little bit further to go to reach their third wedding anniversary. As they’re friends of mine and I’m privy to more than they might want to share, I won’t go into much detail, but the way they talk about each other is, frankly, not much different than the way Juniper and DuWayne talk. They may be a little quieter, but they are truly a conspiracy of two, which is what a married couple should be. And you should see them when someone brings up their newest conspiracy.

I could go on, of course. There are happy atheist couples around me in all stages of their relationships, and happy singles too. One of the most important parts of the recent shift to vocal atheism is the opportunity for everyone to see that happiness. It isn’t pushed in anyone’s face, but it can’t help but show through. And how can the myth of the dour, miserable atheist stand up against this much love?

What is the meaning of life?  Where is our purpose?  Why are we here and what are we supposed to do?  Where did we come from and what will follow us when we are gone?  Why am I such a lowly worm and a sinner?

In my favorite episode of My Three Sons, Chip Douglas wants to join a club that his friends have started.  They cook up a series of tasks for him to complete for his initiation, and when he completes his tasks they will teach him the “dirty little secret.”  He is dying of curiosity, so no matter how absurd the tasks, his dogged determination carries him through so that he can reach the Holy Grail of the “dirty little secret.”

Chip finally completes the last task and goes to his friends and says “Okay, I’m in.  What’s the dirty little secret?”  They laugh and tell him that “The dirty little secret is that there is no dirty little secret.”

Giordano Bruno

And that, my friends, is the mystical meaning of life.  There is no dirty little secret, no hidden answer “42.”  It rains on the just and the unjust alike. I am not a sinner, nor a lowly worm.  The purpose of “purpose” is to puzzle us, to urge us to try to discern the secrets as a great pastime, inspiring wonder at the world around us.  A deep desire to understand the “why” of the cruelties of fate (or the blessings of good fortune) is born of a curiosity that drives us on through our tasks.  If we just keep on searching for answers to our questions, eventually our gods will give us the 411 on life.  Or something will.

I was out having a conversation with a guy who calls himself an “atheist, mostly” because he doesn’t accept the Christian/Jewish/Muslim concept of God.  Nor does he accept the gods of mythology.  He does, however, think that there is more out there that we don’t yet perceive through our physical senses.  He bases his belief on the shared experiences of humanity encountering ghosts and other unexplainable phenomena.  He has decided that if so many people have reported supernatural phenomena for centuries, there must be some basis in fact.   I didn’t laugh at him, but I did explain to him that I had experienced some weird things myself.  I explained to him that when I looked back at them, I could find a plausible and natural explanation for each.

That’s how it is with the appearance of design in nature, and it’s the appearance of design that leads to the illusion of purpose.  The biological cell is incredibly complex, with multitudes of cooperating organelles and structures.  The process of creating copies of DNA and from there, mapping out the structure of proteins (which then fold in the most efficient structure possible to carry out their tasks), well it’s all just too complex to develop without the guidance of a planner.

If the Planner is capable of such wondrous processes as meisosis and mitosis (and sex), then the Planner must be in control of Purpose and our lives thus have meaning beyond that which we can see, touch, taste, smell and hear.  Religion, in this context, makes a great deal of sense.  It provides answers to the question of purpose.  Follow a path and gain enlightenment and/or eternal life in the Planner’s Presence.

Unfortunately, the answers provided by religion aren’t all that satisfactory, because they don’t provide any means to verify or test the answers.  The answers are based on authoritative declarations from the writings and thoughts of learned people who have analyzed the works of other learned people. The answers are based on the pronouncements of a priestly class who lay claim to a source that we can’t access (unless we have a faith strong enough to believe them despite contrary evidence).

Science steps in and looks at the processes of nature and shows us how to tease apart the secrets of their workings, slowly and carefully and with missteps along the way.  The missteps are readily acknowledged and re-examined.  The successes are retested to make sure they closely approximate (within a high confidence interval) the truth.  Then they are once again examined as new questions arise that cast doubt on the answers.

The problem with science is that it doesn’t provide comforting authority.  It never promises the “truth” of anything, just progressively more useful descriptions.  The result of scientific methodology is often more uncertainty, and that is not comforting to those of us who believe in absolute answers.  This will never do, and from this uncertainty comes for some faith that we can still practice the ritual and pray and get the answer we have been promised.  Science and religion are in a pas de deux, but they are constantly stepping on each other’s toes.

If science can’t produce comforting authority then what is it good for?  It is good for disproving assumptions, is what it is good for.  It has been good at disproving the “certain knowledge” that race is a valid biological construct.  It has been good at disproving the the “certain knowledge” that complex structures such as avian vision can’t develop in stages (half an eye).  It has been good at disproving the “certain knowledge” that there was a global flood 4,500 years ago.  It has been good at disproving the “certain knowledge” that the universe and all of its contents can only have been produced by an intelligent actor.

If, then, religion depends on a creator in order to provide a purpose to life, what happens when that creator is no longer a necessary function in the life equation?  Religion steps back in and says it can still help find purpose because science is limited to a natural methodology, whereas through faith there are “other ways of knowing” and science can’t approach those other ways.

Of course, as an atheist, I can look at the pathetic claims to “other ways of knowing” and scoff.  I acknowledge that I have been using very general terms and examples, and in my examples I allow religion to be relatively harmless.  It is a concept that claims an authority it cannot have.  I could simply sit back and say “Well, if some people want to believe, then that’s their business” and I could leave it at that.  With that, I could be just as accommodating as Josh Rosenau or Chris Mooney or Chad Orzel, and then I could whistle on my way nonchalantly.

My problem is that I am not content to leave it at that.  I didn’t become an atheist because of science; it was a slow realization that I was not born a lowly worm.  I was not born dependent on the sacrifice of a man-god and his resurrection in order to gain “salvation.”  I realized that I had no overriding purpose to uncover; I was not born to any certain fate.

I learned that as religion lost its explanatory power on the workings of nature, it clung to its power of redemption and salvation, and these are problems that it created so that it could provide the solution.  I’ll drop the generality of religion and address my specific objection to Christianity.  I was taught that at birth I carried the sin of Adam and Eve and that I needed to practice certain rituals or pray certain prayers to be cleansed of the sin that I never committed.  I needed baptism, confession and contrition to access the creator. In another version of Christianity I needed to be “born again.”  I could never be good enough for the creator on my own, being human.  And being human, I was condemned to be separate from the creator unless I chose the right way to accept redemption.

I am not a sinner.  I have done bad things, but I am not a sinner.  The sin for which I am supposed to be supplicating forgiveness was a sin committed by someone else.  I just couldn’t buy into the idea that I was born evil and unable to become good on my own.

I dropped Christianity.  That was when I ran into the objection that I couldn’t explain origins without God, and therefore I am foolish to be an atheist.  What I find humorous is that when I explain that scientific methodology has disproven the notion of a necessary supernatural designer, or planner, then I am also told that God is “not an explanation for origins, God is inseparable from Creation.”  The goalposts are continually shifted.

And finally, I arrive at my point.  The organizations fighting (thanks to all of you!) to achieve acceptance of solid education in subjects scientific, are bowing first to the demands of religion to say, “But this shouldn’t harm your faith.”  They are granting privilege to religion that it doesn’t deserve, while the defenders of religion are demanding that science conform to faith.   By giving in to this demand, the defenders of science forget that the process of science is an interloper into the security blanket of cherished, certain knowledge.  Science is a dirty bastard, because it doesn’t confirm the answers we want.

In advancing science education, scientists should not accede to such demands to accommodate religious fear of becoming less and less relevant.  What they should instead do is explain the science and let religion and the religious deal with their own issues regarding the implications of the discovery of how nature works.

They’re grownups. they can handle it.