At risk of being labelled an Islamophobe...

I find it interesting that there is, seemingly, this complete oblivion in the atheist community about when statements made about religious practitioners are unfair generalisations.

We had a look at Richard Dawkins a little while ago. In his case, I concluded that whilst he’s been hanging out with the wrong crowd he is in all likelihood, not evil. But he does appear to have made some new friends who are not quite right. Unsavoury, even.

At the time, I compared Dawkins to Sam Harris, who is prone to gaffs, except in Harris’ case, it just seems to be his own case of peculiar logic. I also consider Harris to be largely benign, although Harris lost a lot of his own cred when he tied himself in knots over racial profiling.

Where Dawkins and Harris have it most wrong though, is on the subject of Islamophobia. They're not the only ones: I know of quite a few in the atheist community who think that Islamophobia does not exist.

Of course it does.

Has Richard Dawkins finally dug a hole that's too deep?

I would have thought that Richard Dawkins had learned something from Sam Harris' mistakes over the past decade.  It would appear not.

Harris' continuing mistake is that he simply fails to understand what is wrong about profiling specific targeted groups of human beings, doing his best to say that he's not crossing any lines by lowballing with straw men containing “racial” or “ethnic”.  And each time he does, there is a collective slap across the globe as faces are buried into palms.  And, like that oil leak that BP couldn't put out in the Gulf of Mexico, he keeps spewing this crap out.

Instead of learning from this, Dawkins has been re-iterating the same tired old arguments as Harris that causes people to think that he's using atheism as a Trojan horse for racism.

Now, I have to say that I'm quite a fan of Dawkins.  I rather liked the Selfish Gene, and even though I had issues with certain parts of The God Delusion, I still thought it was excellent.  But what I find frustrating is that Dawkins doesn't appear to understand where the line has been crossed.

Mojoey's Atheist Blogroll and other stuff.

Mojoey of Deep Thoughts maintains what is probably the internet's longest blogroll for atheists and agnostics which is called, wait for it, "Atheist Blogroll".

Regular reader Plonka, of Plonka's Blog has just signed up and suggested that I join too. And so I did, just like the sheep that I am. It wasn't long before I was happily completing my details in that everlovin' email to Mojoey that gets a blog link at 483 other blogs around the freethinkerspace.

You can see mine down the bottom right hand corner of this blog.

Says Mojoey:

"The Atheist Blogroll is a service provide to the Atheist and Agnostic blogging community. The blogroll currently maintains over 350 blogs. Membership is limited to Atheist and Agnostic bloggers."

I don't really endorse the exclusionism in the last sentence. I may have to chat to Mojoey about this, because this is a little bit uncharitable. It's not like theists would be queueing up to join such a blogroll or anything.

It's a good thing that Mojoey embraces agnostics, because the other blogroll that Plonka has joined is The Richard Dawkins-endorsed OUT Campaign. And they most decidedly don't.

Says the Out Campaign:

"Atheists are far more numerous than most people realize. COME OUT of the closet! You'll feel liberated, and your example will encourage others to COME OUT too. (Don't "out" anybody else, wait for them to OUT themselves when they are ready to do so)."

Oh, yes please!

And by joining the blog roll, you get to wear a big, red letter "A" on your blog, which is your way of telling the world, "We're here, we're, um, atheist, we will not disappear!" There was no mention of agnostics here, so I sent a question off to the blog organisers asking them about this:

Hi,

Why specifically atheists? Why not agnostics as well?

Cheers, Dikkii.

And not long after that, I got this in return:

I'm just one of the many admin's doing link and web stuff so I don't know the official RDFRS answer to that but from my personal viewpoint believing it's possible to have a god but you can't disprove it goes along the same lines as being agnostic about teapots orbiting close to Mars. You can't disprove it but it's silly. You can't disprove something for which there is zero evidence and saying that lack of evidence is proof that it's possible just isn't a valid argument.

Regards,
/Mike

Dawkins schools them well. For someone who doesn't know the Foundation's official line, he knows the next best thing is to paraphrase The God Delusion.

I must admit, I wasn't expecting that ol' straw man agnostic from The God Delusion. You know, the pants-wetting fence-sitter who assigns equal probability to existence alongside non-existence? The generalisation that I blogged about in Why did you end up agnostic (part 4)? The stereotype which doesn't exist? The negative caricature which demonstrates that even scientists as brilliant as Richard Dawkins can put both feet in their mouths at once, occasionally?

Of course, I had to fire off a response to this:

Hi Mike,

Good answer, but agnostics aren't interested in proving the negative, particularly when they know the difference between the null hypothesis and an extraordinary claim. Agnostics also recognise that it's silly.

Some would say that invoking Russell's teapot to an agnostic is a little bit insulting, patronising and irrelevant, but I wouldn't go this far. I noticed in March this year that Dawkins fell into the same trap in The God Delusion, so you're in good company.

Cheers, Dikkii.

I don't expect a response to this.

It appears that this is a blogroll I won't be joining in a hurry.

Why did you end up agnostic? (Part 4)

This is Part 4.

Part 3 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 1 is here.

I've complained over the past three posts in this series that atheists don't appear to understand agnosticism. It's still a bit of a loose end, so in this part, hopefully the final, I'm planning to demonstrate, using a particularly well-referenced example, exactly the level of misunderstanding that exists.

The Oxford defines the word agnostic as follows:

agnostic

/agnostik/

• noun a person who believes that nothing can be known concerning the existence of God.

• adjective relating to agnostics.

— DERIVATIVES agnosticism noun.

As can be seen, there is a belief held by most agnostics that at no time will we know the truth about the existence (or otherwise) of God.

Any agnostic worth his (or her - but I'm going to dispense with the time-consuming task of doing this herewith) salt understands that this is a perfectly reasonable belief to hold. Theists are constantly moving the goalposts on what a god is, and thus this makes it very difficult to actually test in a consistent fashion for deities.

(And before anyone pulls me up, everyone knows that although God - who is normally the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God - is specifically mentioned, this statement refers to all supernatural deities. Don't make me smack you.)

In ancient Greece, the gods were said to live on Mount Olympus.

When people started climbing Mount Olympus, people just moved the goalposts on the home of the gods to an alternate Mount Olympus which existed on another plane.

Richard Dawkins, in his excellent book, The God Delusion, believes that we can test for the existence of God. I say, good luck, because religious folk will always have an out. This makes the agnostic point of view so much more important. Dawkins even says that to 'give up' in such a fashion is intellectual cowardice, and quotes all sorts of arguments as to why we should strive to find a way to test for supernatural deities.

The reason I mention Dawkins is pivotal to this part.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins, who is, pretty much, the world authority on atheism, engages in character assassination of the lowest order on agnostics and essentially invites atheists to join in the fun and games.

In the process, Dawkins uses some surprisingly weak arguments of his own in order to justify this. Which is really a surprise, because for most of the rest of the book, Dawkins nails everything correctly. (I also took exception to his definition of Religion which appears to include Acupuncture and Feng Shui at the expense of Confucianism and Buddhism, but this post isn't about that)

The first thing that Dawkins does when he lets fly at agnostics in chapter 2 is some serious poisoning of the well when, in the first paragraph he issues the following epithets about others' perceptions of agnostics:

[Atheists, at least, compared to agnostics] had the courage of their misguided convictions.

Namby-pamby, mushy pap, weak-tea, weedy, pallid, fence sitters.

Wishy-washy boneless mediocrities who flapped around in the middle.

Dawkins then issues a weak disclaimer, however, like the lady who advertises "massage" in the Personals section of the classified advertising pages along with the phrase, "no sex", this first paragraph is clearly designed to get the word, "sex," metaphorically speaking, out there for all to see.

At pains to exonerate class acts like Carl Sagan, himself a self-proclaimed agnostic, Dawkins creates a delineation between what he calls Temporary Agnosticism in Practice (TAP), and Permanent Agnosticism in Principle (PAP).

Basically, agnostics are OK, Dawkins is saying. Really, they are, as long as they're TAP agnostics, like Sagan, and not PAP agnostics.

Where this leaves Temporary Agnosticism in Principle and Permanent Agnosticism in Practice is really anyone's guess. But we'll leave this point unanswered - Dawkins certainly makes no attempts.

(Incidentally, I completely and utterly accept that Dawkins uses the PAP acronym innocently.)

In a nutshell, a TAP agnostic believes that they can wait until the evidence is in before deciding what it is that they want to believe, whereas PAP agnostics supposedly uphold the dictionary definition on principle, only.

It's fairly early into the chapter that Dawkins leaps to the astounding conclusion that "PAP" agnostics apply an equal probability to the non-existence of God compared with the existence of God.

What evidence does Dawkins give that this is the case? None whatsoever. Dawkins' delineation between TAP and PAP agnostics notwithstanding, this appears to be an attempt to create a pejorative stereotype of an agnostic that simply does not exist.

To point out that all claims may one day be capable of testing, Dawkins repeats Auguste Comte's oft-repeated quote about never being able to know about what stars were made of. So what? Comte was most certainly incorrect, but what's wrong with this?

Never mind that Comte's quote didn't involve metaphysical concepts, nor did he consider goalposts that get moved around like crazy. Comte's quote was straightforward, and wrong, but again, so what?

Dawkins seems to be indirectly implying that agnostics would be unable to accept being wrong about their belief regarding no evidence for or against the metaphysical. Where the hell does he get this idea?

Another gratuitous mention of 'cowardly agnosticism' later, Dawkins then wheels in the big guns, starting with T H Huxley.

Dawkins pours scorn on Huxley for ignoring the question of probability. Then, somehow, Dawkins magically puts two and two together on this and comes to the amazing conclusion that this non-consideration of probability means that Huxley automatically assigns equal time to both existence and non-existence.

Let's take a breather from Dawkins' complete misunderstanding of agnosticism for one moment, and examine his somewhat befuddling fixation with probability.

Suppose I make the statement that I neither believe or disbelieve that the Reserve Bank will either lift or reduce interest rates this year. And let's assume that leaving the rates unchanged is not an option.

Because I haven't mentioned probability, Dawkins would have you believe that I assign an equal probability to either outcome - a situation that is, for anyone who knows me, completely improbable verging on impossible.

Not only that, but in the two archetypes that Dawkins has drawn up, unless a TAP agnostic specifies their allegiance up front, one is now entitled to assume that an agnostic attaches a 50/50 probability to the (non-)existence of God.

Dawkins then appears to contradict himself by creating a spectrum of probabilities, where he considers that a PAP can't be placed on it at the 50/50 mark, because they consider themselves outside such assessment of probabilities.

It's my view that Dawkins is consciously contradicting himself here. He is deliberately misrepresenting agnostics in order to paint them in a pretty poor light.

And then, when most readers of the agnostic persuasion are tearing their hair out in frustration at Dawkins, he invokes Bertrand Russell's teapot. This is folly and Dawkins knows it. Particularly in light of the reverse ferret that Dawkins does at the end.

Let's assume that I'm having a conversation with Russell:

Russell: Let's say that there's this scarecrow and he's orbiting Jupiter...

Me: Hold on, Einstein, why a scarecrow?

Russell: Well, it sounds good. I had to make up something that sounded silly.

Me: OK. Well, go on.

Russell: Let's say that there's this scarecrow and he's orbiting Jupiter. How would you, Mister Agnostic, disprove it's existence?

Me: Well, that's easy, you said, 'Let's say that there's this scarecrow,' and then you said, 'I had to make up something that sounded silly.' You've created what is normally considered to be a hypothetical proposition. It therefore only exists as a figment of your imagination.

Russell: Look, forget what I said. In any event, you haven't actually disproved it. What if one is actually there?

Me: Well, it would be up to you to prove it, wouldn't it?

Russell: Why me?

Me: Well, you're making a pretty extraordinary claim, aren't you?

Russell: Let's forget who is making this claim, the important thing is that if this claim is made, how would you disprove it?

Me: What do you mean, 'Let's forget who is making this claim?' This is pretty important. Why should I bother attempting to disprove this claim if you won't tell me who made the claim in the first place?

Russell: The claim itself isn't important.

Me: Well, clearly it is, if you want me to disprove it.

Russell: Look, just assume that the claim has been made. Now, how would you disprove that a scarecrow is out there?

Me: I wouldn't.

Russell: You mean you couldn't?

Me: No. I mean I wouldn't. I wouldn't even make it as far as showing that I couldn't. First of all, a claim has been made that a scarecrow is orbiting around Jupiter. Secondly, you, Bertrand Russell, come in and ask me, an agnostic, to disprove this claim. Lastly, you tell me that it's not important that the claim has been made, nor who made the claim.

Russell: What's wrong with that?

Me: Well, on the last point I beg to differ. Disproving an unimportant claim is a waste of everyone's time. And in the 'absence' of the person who made this claim, I propose that you're a good proxy for that person, being that you brought this claim to my attention in the first place.

Russell: I'm not sure where you're going with this.

Me: Simple. The onus is on you to present evidence for this unimportant scarecrow claim, and immediately after, I'll work on disproving it. Do we have a deal?

Russell: But... but...

Me: And may I suggest that you use something far less controversial than a 'scarecrow'? An inordinate number of people have this phobia of them. Might I suggest a teapot instead?

It's interesting to note that, as Dawkins himself admits, it is perfectly reasonable to be agnostic about Russell's teapot. Russell cannot provide evidence for the claim, and it is a claim that is impossible to disprove. Dawkins, however, introduces this to set up an amazingly patronising assault on agnostics in the closing paragraphs of the section.

It's in the closing paragraphs of this section that Dawkins, quite offensively, lectures agnostics on what constitutes an extraordinary claim.

Dawkins vicious attack on agnostics during this section nearly had me throwing his book at the wall.

The thing that overrides Dawkins' merry trip to stereotypeland is that all his generalisations about agnostics mean diddly-squat in the real world.

In the real world, the vast, vast majority of agnostics recognise what part is the extraordinary claim.

Dawkins' premise about probability, upon which he has built this entire section, comes crashing down like a house of cards when this knowledge is taken into account.

But I wonder if Dawkins knew this all along.

Dawkins is also smart enough to know that an ad hominem attack is unlikely to be called if it is concealed within an argument of some sort, no matter if that argument is as weak as halal beer.

And I wonder if that was what Dawkins intended. Which begs the question - what would he have against agnostics?

Footnote: I only just noticed upon re-reading this section that Dawkins admits to using that witty yet depressingly banal "one less god..." argument that I discussed in Part 3. I have to admit that I lost a bit of respect for him, here.

Paley's Rock

William Paley's Watchmaker Analogy is held aloft by creationists everywhere as proof that the earth and everything on it was created by God, or at least, a higher power of some sort.

Critics of creationism are quick to refute the Watchmaker Analogy, and rightly so.

Let's just quickly re-cap on what Paley himself had to say about the whole matter, in his book Natural Theology:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. (...) There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. (...) Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.

– William Paley, Natural Theology (1802)

Now this is all largely nonsense. Paley is suggesting, on the basis of his watch example that everything in this world is intelligently designed by someone or something to serve some sort of purpose.

Charles Darwin accepted this while studying theology at Cambridge and came to the conclusion that this argument held up.

He later, after sailing away on the Beagle to study nature and the distribution of species around the world, refuted this analogy quite explicitly in the Origin of the Species by explaining that the Law of Natural Selection was a better model for explaining the diversity of species around the world. In so doing he paved the way for Evolutionary Biology which took Darwin's findings one step further and developed into a field primarily concerned with examining the origins and evolution of species.

By far the most famous evolutionary biologist on the planet today is, of course, Richard Dawkins. Dawkins had a serious bash at the Watchmaker Analogy in his book The Blind Watchmaker and concluded that, as complex as evolution sounds to the layperson, it pales next to any creation argument. The very idea that everything is the subject of complex design implies an even more complex designer.

Which of course implies an even more complex designer for the first complex designer, a sort of "Turtles all the way down" scenario.

Stephen Hawking, in A Brief History of Time explains this concept very well, by quoting a story that may or may not have involved Bertrand Russell:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

- Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1988)

And this is good, because it is pretty clear from these arguments that evolution is easily the simplest explanation for life on this planet.

But it has occurred to me that Paley's argument falls on its face in a much simpler and much more embarrassing way.

Darwin and Dawkins, as well as countless scientists and creationists have been led astray by what was a magnificently well-placed red herring in the story.

The Watch.

How much time has been spent poring over the Watch?

How many mental pictures have been created in peoples heads - what the face looked like? Was the glass scratched? Was it a gold watch? Did it have a 2mm or a 5mm chain? If it was gold, how many carats would it have been?

The problem with Paley's example is not with the watch, though.

If we go back and accompany Paley on his hypothetical walk across the heath again, we'll see that he didn't just hypothetically come across a watch that day.

Paley also came across a stone, which he gave very short shrift to. His answer to what he thought of the stone appears to be complete disinterest:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer.

So why does he not subject the rock to the same level of scrutiny which he gave the watch?

Paley has no, repeat, no idea of how the stone came to be there, nor does he consider it to be important.

What is important, though, is that in dismissing the stone as being unimportant to his story, he is essentially applying a double standard to the stone compared to the watch.

He mentions it in passing, because it is important for comparison to the watch.

But Paley's comparison ends there.

It should not.

Why has everyone, Darwin and Dawkins included, appeared to have missed the bleeding obvious on this? Paley does not at any time discuss the "purpose", "contrivance" or the "design" of the rock at any stage.

Paley has had a free kick on this for over 200 years - so why don't we do what Paley did not, but should have done?

Paley lauds the watch as, "There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer;"

But a rock? We would need to know its "purpose".

The rest of the story serves no purpose unless someone can come up with way of assessing the rock in the same way that Paley evaluates the watch.

Its a great trick - introduce the rock and then dazzle us with implied bling - and for all we know, the watch that Paley finds on his walk might only have been a cheapie made in Sheffield.

And being the humans that we are, the flashy piece of chronometry has everyone's attention, whereas the drab rock - basalt perhaps, diamond, maybe - vanishes into the background.

The wonder of it all this is this: why hasn't anyone taken Paley apart for this?

It's really that simple folks.

Someone should call their blog Paley's Rock.