In speaking of the King James Bible, Richard Dawkins makes the extraordinary claim that “religion must not be allowed to hijack this cultural resource”.
Evidently it hasn’t occurred to him that he is the one doing the hijacking.
To rob the Bible of “religion” is to expunge its meaning and make it merely aesthetic. Someone should tell Richard that he is too late: this has already been tried by the Anglican Church.
The existence of Mind presents one of the greatest problems for atheists. In attempting to understand the universe, Descartes began with what most certainly exists – I think, therefore I am – and then used the ontological argument to demonstrate the next most certain thing to exist: God.
Materialist atheists, though, start with the assumption that all that exists is the material; mind must be explained as a result of the material. Although some softer atheists like Christopher Hitchens like to claim that the material, in producing Mind, has created the numinous, the Dawkins breed of atheist would not agree – and, indeed, Hitchens’ position doesn’t make much sense. So the atheist is left with this problem:
If God does not exist:
Mind is the product of the material
No thought can exist that is not the product of the material
Belief in God is a thought
Some people believe in God
The material creates thoughts that are unreliable
Thought that claims to explain the working of the universe is unreliable
Another way to look at this – although it doesn’t solve the above problem – is that without the transcendent, to explain conciousness we have to resort to something called panpsychism; if Mind is real and there is nothing other than the material, then the material must contain consciousness and all things must posses a degree of being conscious. Thus the atheist’s never ending quest to seek the least likely explanation for existence reaches new depths of unbelievability:
Daniel Dennett is a panpsychist. He wouldn’t admit it in public, and he might not even realize it. Yet Dennett, one of the foremost materialists in the early part of the 21st Century, advocates views regarding consciousness, biology, and philosophy that unavoidably lead to that most ridiculous of philosophical views: that all things have some degree of consciousness, otherwise known as panpsychism.
For those who don’t know, Dan Dennett is a professor of philosophy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. I had the good fortune of meeting Dennett recently and found that he is in fact a very pleasant man, courteous and with a great sense of humor.
Dennett has written numerous books, including, most recently, Breaking the Spell, an anti-religion screed that places him firmly among the “new atheists” school of thought. The new atheists, which include Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and others, take as their primary target the traditional view of God as a creator and patriarch who exercises an ongoing role in his creation. This traditional view, known as theism, is quite hard to defend for anyone who has scientific or philosophical training. But Dennett and the rest of the new atheists go too far, rejecting most notions of divinity as part and parcel of their rejection of traditional religion.
Dennett has also written books on Darwinian evolution (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) and consciousness (Consciousness Explained and Brainstorms, among others). He is, with the British biologist Dawkins, probably the best-known proponent of what I call “crude materialism.” Crude materialism is the hardcore – some would say dogmatic – version of materialism. It is the view, in essence, that the universe is all just matter and space, there is no God, and all things can in principle be explained fully through human inquiry and theorizing.
Crude materialists believe, to speak very generally, that mind (consciousness) is “merely” what brains do. Once we explain the brain’s various functions we have then explained all that there is to explain. Explain the brain and we have explained the mind.
Dennett has acknowledged, however, that “subjective experience” is real. The phrase subjective experience refers simply to the first-person perspective (I, we) as opposed to a third-person (he, she, it, they) perspective. It is the sense of being here—right here, somewhere behind my eyes and between my ears, or so it seems. When philosophers talk about explaining consciousness, or when they speak of the mind-body problem, this is what they are trying to explain.
Dennett has also argued forcefully against the idea of conscious experience being something fundamentally different than what is simply matter. Dennett seems to be most opposed to what is called “dualism.” Descartes was the best-known dualist and he argued that there is physical stuff and there is mental stuff. There is also some organ in the body, most likely the pineal gland at the base of the brain, which allows these two different stuffs to interact. For Descartes, only humans had mind, so all other animals were considered mere automatons devoid of any kind of consciousness or spirit. Dualism is not a common position today among philosophers or scientists, but it’s still fairly common in religious views of the world which refer to “spirit” or “soul” as something separate from mindless matter.
Dennett often mentions the history of “vitalism” in biology, as an argument by analogy, to show why dualism is wrong. Vitalists argued that there is something special, some élan vital, imbuing certain kinds of matter with properties that make it “alive.” Vitalism was a fairly common view until the early 20th Century. This argument has long since been (rightly) discredited because we have found that there is nothing else to explain about “life” once we explain the functions of living organisms. In other words, according to anti-vitalists like Dennett, “life” isn’t a quality or a thing, it’s just a label we give to certain types of matter that exhibit more complex behavior than what we generally think of as being not alive. But there’s not a clear dividing line between life and non-life.
Now here’s my main point, though it’s admittedly a fairly subtle point. If Dennett is a materialist, and he admits that subjective experience is real—and he is an anti-vitalist and anti-dualist—then he must also be a panpsychist. This is the case because if materialism is true, and at the same time subjective experience is real, then matter must include subjective experience—consciousness itself.
If anti-vitalism is true, life does not suddenly appear where it was not present before. It must exist in a continuum from the simplest forms of matter through the chain of being all the way to us, human beings. As an anti-vitalist, Dennett can’t argue consistently that consciousness materialized at some arbitrary point in the history of the universe. Ergo, life and consciousness are present, in some amount, in the simplest forms of matter as well as the most complex forms we know of today. In other words, all things are alive to some degree, and all things are conscious to some degree. This is panpsychism.
A difference between what we consider to be “life” and what we consider to be “consciousness” is that explaining the functions of consciousness does not explain consciousness itself. The various functions of human consciousness, such as sight, dreaming, etc., we may explain, but these functions presuppose a first-person point of view, subjective experience. We must explain this first-person point of view if we’re seeking insight into the nature of the universe—or “merely” of consciousness.
I have in recent years come to the position that panpsychism is the best explanation we have of mind, matter, and spirituality, after pondering these issues for over 20 years. The best-known panpsychists in western history include Spinoza, Schopenhauer, William James, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Teilhard de Chardin, J.B.S. Haldane, David Bohm, and many others. Unfortunately, panpsychism is still not taken seriously by most scientists or philosophers. But it should be.
So why does all of this matter (pardon the pun)? It matters because it shows that crude materialism, an increasingly common worldview in the Western world, holds inherent contradictions, the surest sign that a theory or paradigm is problematic.
And it shows that consciousness is not, as materialists generally argue, a property particular to complex forms of matter (such as human beings). Consciousness is in fact a property of all matter. As matter has complexified, through the process of evolution, consciousness has complexified. This can form the basis for not only a satisfying and consistent philosophical and scientific worldview, it also forms the basis for linking science and spirituality in a rational framework that incorporates areas more traditionally left to faith.
An atheist convention in Melbourne has sold out:
AN ATHEIST convention in Melbourne has sold out six weeks before it opens despite no aid from any level of government, organisers said yesterday.
Convention organiser and Atheist Foundation of Australia president David Nicholls said the state government had ”stabbed the people of Victoria in the back” by not helping, forcing organisers to hire smaller venues.
It is a mystery why atheists feel entitled to support from taxpayers, particularly when one of the speakers is Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University. Singer is a utilitarian whose notion of “ethics” would be more at home in a Nazi eugenics lab than in a civilised society. Among other things, he approves of killing disabled babies, euthanasia for those he regards as mentally deficient and recreational bestiality.
Singer is, effectively, Dawkins unmasked.
Richard Dawkins has written a characteristically emotional anti-Christian philippic in the Times:
Where was God in Noah’s flood? He was systematically drowning the entire world, animal as well as human, as punishment for “sin”. Where was God when Sodom and Gomorrah were consumed with fire and brimstone? He was deliberately barbecuing the citizenry, lock, stock and barrel, as punishment for “sin”.
“Oh but that’s the Old Testament. No one believes those stories literally any more. The New Testament is all about love.” Dear modern, enlightened, theologically sophisticated, gentle Christian, you cannot be serious. Your entire religion is founded on an obsession with “sin”, with punishment and with atonement. Where do you find the effrontery to condemn Pat Robertson, you who have signed up to the odious doctrine that the central purpose of Jesus’s incarnation was to have himself tortured as a scapegoat for the “sins” of all mankind, past, present and future, beginning with the “sin” of Adam, who (as any modern theologian well knows) never even existed?
George Pitcher reckons that Dawkins is not only an embarrassment to thinking atheists, but is an effective recruiting tool for Christianity. He has a point; ten minutes of Dawkins’ rodomontade in an Alpha course would drive out any doubts lingering in the mind of a potential believer.
Pitcher would prefer to make him a bishop:
As I’ve said before, Dawkers is a great recruiting officer for faith. He repels tolerant atheists and inspires uncommitted inquirers to look further into what he so ludicrously and entertainingly misrepresents. I think he should be made an honorary bishop.
Atheists are running out of things to complain about:
An atheist organization is blasting the U.S. Postal Service for its plan to honor Mother Teresa with a commemorative stamp, saying it violates postal regulations against honoring “individuals whose principal achievements are associated with religious undertakings.”
The Freedom from Religion Foundation is urging its supporters to boycott the stamp — and also to engage in a letter-writing campaign to spread the word about what it calls the “darker side” of Mother Teresa.
Atheists are keen to present the appearance of being better people than Christians; perhaps they feel they can’t compete with Mother Teresa and having her photo on a stamp will make them look really bad; poor dears:
He said the Foundation’s campaign stems from concern that the abundance of humanitarian work done by believers will overshadow that done by atheists.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation informs us:
The history of Western civilization shows us that most social and moral progress has been brought about by persons free from religion. In modern times the first to speak out for prison reform, for humane treatment of the mentally ill, for abolition of capital punishment, for women’s right to vote, for death with dignity for the terminally ill, and for the right to choose contraception, sterilization and abortion have been freethinkers, just as they were the first to call for an end to slavery.
This curious concoction of meaningless pap is heartening, in that it reinforces my conviction that those who like to trumpet their freedom from religion are themselves slaves to ignorance and irrationality.
What we really need is a Freedom From Illogical Atheism Foundation.
Atheists seem to get angry easily. They get angry because they think Christians look down on them as Bad, angry because Christians can’t put themselves in their position, angry because they are misunderstood and angry because we Christians don’t agree with them and, after all, atheism is so obvious.
To clear up some of this:
Christians do think atheists are, in a sense, Bad; that is because we think everyone, in a sense, is Bad. To put it into Christian terms, everyone has sinned and needs a Saviour to redeem them from their sins.
Many Christians do understand atheism; that is because some were atheists themselves at some point – I was – and because, since Christianity is attacked from all sides in our culture, Christians have been forced to inspect their basic assumptions and how their beliefs logically follow from them. From the occasional exchange with atheists on this blog, it appears that many atheists have not done the same.
Here are some of the basic assumptions that accompany atheism and some of the unavoidable consequences of those assumptions:
There are some variations in atheism. A negative atheism would claim an absence of belief in God and make it a default position: in the absence of good evidence for God’s existence, negative atheism is the logical choice – the burden of proof is on the theist. Others would argue that this is really agnosticism in disguise and that true atheism is positive atheism which asserts the statement “God does not exist”. I am inclined to the latter view.
Either variety of atheism has some unavoidable consequences:
There is no objective standard for morality. That is not to say that atheists cannot do “good” or be “moral”, using those words in the context of Judeo-Christian ethics; they can. It does mean, though that the “good” or “evil” that an atheist may believe exists has no objective realty: “good” and “evil” are subjective – no one person’s view of what is “good” has any more validity than any other person’s. Dostoevsky summed this with “if God does not exist everything is permitted”
Atheists are materialists: that is to say, they believe that the material universe is all that exists; without God there is no supernatural, nothing outside of the material exerts any influence on the universe. Christopher Hitchens seems to want to dodge this by contending that the numinous does exist, apparently as a by-product of the human mind – most atheists would not go along with this, though. As a result, the human mind is entirely subject to the material. This leads to the following problem for the atheist:
If human existence ceases at death, life has no lasting objective purpose or meaning. Atheists will protest that they do find purpose and meaning in life; Richard Dawkins goes to considerable length to expound on the beauty and the grandeur of the universe. Without God, though, such perceptions are subjective and, for an honest person, inadequate. Atheistic existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre were more direct: Sartre recognised that without God life has no purpose. His solution was to invent a purpose and pretend that it has significance – just to get through life. Sadly, modern atheists are doing much the same thing without the benefit of the introspection necessary to recognise why.
Atheists are evolutionary Darwinists but generally not social Darwinists, preferring instead to adopt the mores of the Judeo-Christian heritage that they despise. The problem for the atheist comes when confronted by a social Darwinist who might advocate, for example, the extermination of the old, infirm, disabled and deformed; an atheist has no convincing argument to offer on why this is a bad thing to do. Without God, values are subjective, one person’s view of what is right is as good as any other’s.
A popular contemporary conceit of atheism is that science has disposed of religion. John Lennox in his book God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? argues eloquently that, far from burying God, science depends on the assumption that the universe has rational laws – rational laws that owe their existence to a rational Creator. Additionally, there is no reason to trust the rationality of the minds of scientists if they are products of a potentially irrational universe.
There; now I expect atheists reading this will become angry.
An organisation associated with Richard Dawkins called Non-Believers Giving Aid is collecting donations for Haiti. This is a good thing, of course, since Haiti needs all the help it can get. A side benefit for atheists, apparently, is that not only will their donations be god-free, but also they will help to dispel the vicious rumour that atheists are a heartless bunch who care only for themselves:
2. When donating via Non-Believers Giving Aid, you are helping to counter the scandalous myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans.
It goes without saying that your donations will only be passed on to aid organizations that do not have religious affiliations. In the case of Haiti, the two organizations we have chosen are: Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières), International Red Cross.
This goes to show that these ‘non-believers’ do actually believe in something: that the suffering of their fellow-man should be alleviated. Since atheists are convinced that the universe is one with at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference, I can’t help wondering why they have at least this one not particularly rational belief. And why does an atheist wish to present an appearance of being less callous than the universe that he claims begot him?
God likes a laugh too:
AN atheist rapist has complained that his human rights were breached by having to share a prison cell with a Christian lag.
Barman Steven Relf, 40, was jailed indefinitely after admitting raping two women he targeted when he served them drinks in a pub.
Police branded him a “sexual predator” and said he could have had as many as 40 victims.
In a letter to an inmates’ magazine, Relf wrote: “I recently had the displeasure of sharing a cell with a Bible-thumping believer.”
A source said Relf was “furious” at having to share at Manchester Prison with the Christian convict and wanted him to be “evicted”.
He said: “He moaned about how the guy wouldn’t shut up about God. He said he wanted to speak to a lawyer about his rights so he could be moved cells.”
Thus begins a new era of crime deterrence: convicted criminals will no longer be incarcerated; instead they will be forced to attend church and listen to sermons.
And for Philip Pullman, it isn’t because it is hitting him in the pocket book:
Philip Pullman, crusader for atheism? Not when it might hurt him at the box office.
The problem with Philip Pullman is not that his kids’ books sometimes peddle subversive propaganda but that he seems to shift his position to suit the occasion.
Last week he was all over the papers insisting that the film The Golden Compass, which is an adaptation of part of his series of books, His Dark Materials, absolutely does not attract children to atheism. This despite the fact that he has been quoted as saying on the record that he is “trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief” and that he says currently on his website that he is an “enemy” of organised religion. He is, by the by, a leading light in Humanist circles (although he did read a lesson at one of his children’s church weddings).
The reason for his proclamation that the film doesn’t attract children to atheism isn’t known, but it’s notable that it comes shortly after the news that the rest of his books are not going to be filmed on account of bad box office takings… largely thanks to its boycott in America by religious types.
Back when Pullman was branding himself an atheist crusader, he admitted that he knew the controversy would lead to media coverage and that in turn brings book sales… But now he seems to be trying to have it all un-said when that same controversy leads, as in the case of the film, to a decline in profitability.
Watch out, Philip. You run the risk of appearing simply mercenary: neither a warrior for Humanism nor a simple story-telling artist, but a wind-up merchant and peddler of anything that’ll sell. That can’t be right, can it?
Dostoevsky was right, for atheists anything is permitted; self interest is all there is.
An update to Atheist campaign targets children. It seems that the British Humanist Association used photos of brainwashed Christian children for 
their ads. God has a sense of humour.
The happy smiley children used by humanists in a don’t-label-me-as-religious billboard campaign actually come from an evangelical Christian family.
The images used by the British Humanist Association (BHA), as part of a nationwide advertising drive, were bought from a stock photo library and the BHA had no way of knowing the children’s background.
The children’s father, Brad Mason, said: “It is quite funny, because obviously they were searching for images of children that looked happy and free.
“They happened to choose children who are Christian. It is ironic. The humanists obviously did not know the background of these children.”
Mr Mason added: “Obviously there is something in their faces which is different. So they judged that they were happy and free without knowing that they are Christians.
