Transcript The GOD Delusion - Memorial University of Newfoundland

The GOD Delusion
DESERVED RESPECT
Definition of God
1. Personal God: a supernatural creator that is
‘appropriate for us to worship’
2. Awesome structure of the universe/nature
Einstein sometimes used the name of God
–
Einstein defined religion differently
•
Imperfect comprehension/admiration of the laws of
nature
Definitions
Theist
– Believes in a supernatural intelligence (creation +
supervision)
Deist
– Supernatural intelligence (creation only)
Pantheist
– No supernatural intelligence
– Synonym/metaphor laws of nature/universe
Atheist
– A commitment to naturalism
UNDESERVED RESPECT
Widespread assumptions that religion is off limits
for debate
Overweening respect
– US supreme court ruling, Feb 2006.
– 2004 Ohio, anti-discrimination rules
– Feb 2006 Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten
The God Hypothesis
The God Hypothesis:
– there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who
deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in
it, including us.
This book advocates an alternative view:
– any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design
anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an
extended process of gradual evolution.
– God is a delusion
POLYTHEISM
Many Gods
Monotheism vs. Polytheism
Polytheism -> Monotheism
– Catholic Encyclopaedia
• The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is
God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God.
POLYTHEISM
The Catholic Forum lists 5, 120 saints!
Pope John Paul II created more saints than all his
predecessors over the past several centuries.
This book refers to all deities, whether poly- or
monotheistic, as simply “God”.
– Mostly refers to Christianity
MONOTHEISM
Three anti-human religions:
Judaism 1st, Christianity 2nd,
and Islam 3rd
Buddhism/Confucianis are
not treated as religions but
as a philosophy of life
SECULARISM, THE FOUNDING FATHERS
AND THE RELIGION OF AMERICA
Many of the founding fathers of the American
Republic were deists.
– But also evidence to suggest that many were
atheists
– Collectively, they were secularists
Atheists have strong numbers today…
David Mills, Atheist Universe
Prejudice against atheists in America
Story of a Christian faith-healer’s “Miracle
Crusade”
THE POVERTY OF AGNOSTICISM
Agnosticism:
• notion that the existence/non-existence of God is an
untouchable question
2 kinds
TAP- Temporary Agnosticism in Practice
PAP- Permanent Agnosticism in Principle
1 Strong theist. 100 per cent probability of God. In the
words of C. G. Jung, 'I do not believe, I know.
2 Very high probability but short of 100 per cent. De facto
theist. 'I cannot know for certain, but I strongly believe in
God and live my life on the assumption that he is there.
3 Higher than 50 per cent but not very high. Technically
agnostic but leaning towards theism. 'I am very uncertain,
but I am inclined to believe in God.
4 Exactly 50 per cent. Completely impartial agnostic.
'God's existence and non-existence are exactly
equiprobable.
5 Lower than 50 per cent but not very low. Technically
agnostic but leaning towards atheism. 'I don't know
whether God exists but I'm inclined to be skeptical.
6 Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. 'I
cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable,
and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.
7 Strong atheist. 'I know there is no God, with the same
conviction as Jung "knows" there is one.
NOMA
Non-overlapping magisteria
Huxley declared that the God question cannot be
settled on the basis of scientific method.
If science cannot answer the question, then by
implication, religion can.
NOMA
The difference between two hypothetical
universes
– Presence of absence of a creative super-intelligence
is a scientific question
NOMA is popular because there is no evidence
to favour the God Hypothesis
THE GREAT PRAYER EXPERIMENT
Francis Galton
Russell Stannard
– Does praying for sick patients improves their health?
– 1,802 patients at 6 hospitals
– Results in American Heart Journal, 2006
• No difference between those who were prayed for and
those were not
• Those who knew they had been prayed for suffered
significantly MORE complications
THE NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN
SCHOOL OF EVOLUTIONISTS
Evolutionary science is under political attack from
populist creationism
NOMA- agree that science is completely nonthreatening, because it is disconnected from religion’s
claims
Aids in understanding publishes statements of scientists
on religious matters
LITTLE GREEN MEN
Life in outer space, Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Rational stance is agnosticism, but can talk
about probability based on incomplete evidence.
SETIsearch for
extraterrestrial
intelligence
THOMAS AQUINA’S ‘PROOFS’
1 The Unmoved Mover. Nothing moves without a prior mover. This leads
us to a regress, from which the only escape is God. Something had to
make the first move, and that something we call God.
2 The Uncaused Cause. Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a
prior cause, and again we are pushed back into regress. This has to be
terminated by a first cause, which we call God.
3 The Cosmological Argument. There must have been a time when no
physical things existed. But, since physical things exist now, there must
have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that
something we call God.
THOMAS AQUINA’S ‘PROOFS’
4. The Argument from Degree. We notice that things in the world differ.
There are degrees of, say, goodness or perfection. But we judge these
degrees only by comparison with a maximum. Humans can be both
good and bad, so the maximum goodness cannot rest in us. Therefore
there must be some other maximum to set the standard for perfection,
and we call that maximum God.
5 The Teleological Argument, or Argument from Design. Things in the
world, especially living things, look as though they have been
designed. Nothing that we know looks designed unless it is designed.
Therefore there must have been a designer, and we call him God.*
Aquinas himself used the analogy of an arrow moving towards a target,
but a modern heat-seeking anti-aircraft missile would have suited his
purpose better.
THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT AND
OTHER A PRIORI ARGUMENTS
Ontological argument proposed by St. Anselm,
1078
– A being that doesn’t exist in the real world, is by the
very fact, less than perfect.
– A word game
Mathematical proofs
– (a + b^n)/n = x, therefore God exists.
OTHER A PRIORI ARGUMENTS
Proof Number:
36 Argument from Incomplete Devastation: A plane crashed killing 143 passengers and
crew. But one child survived with only third-degree burns. Therefore God exists.
37 Argument from Possible Worlds: If things had been different, then things would be
different. That would be bad. Therefore God exists.
39 Argument from Non-belief: The majority of the world's population are non-believers in
Christianity. This is just what Satan intended. Therefore God exists.
40 Argument from Post-Death Experience: Person X died an atheist. He now realizes his
mistake. Therefore God exists.
THE ARGUMENT FROM BEAUTY
Shakespeare, Michelangelo, music etc…
Link between existence of great art to existence
of God
Assumed to be Self-evident
THE ARGUMENT FROM
PERSONAL ‘EXPERIENCE’
Convincing to those who have had one,
unconvincing to an audience
George W. Bush says that God told him to
invade Iraq
Sam Harris, The End of Faith
THE ARGUMENT FROM PERSONAL
‘EXPERIENCE’
Our brain plays tricks on us:
Optical illusions
Creation of images or visions
based on imagination and
misinterpretation of stimuli
Sept, 11, 2001: Twin Towers:
face of Satin in the smoke
THE ARGUMENT FROM SCRIPTURE
Bible is not reliable historical evidence
Discrepancies
– Where Jesus was born
– Christmas story
– Book of Luke is ‘historically impossible and internally
incoherent’ -Lane Fox
– New Testament
• Four gospels made it into the official canon, others did not
THE ARGUMENT FROM ADMIRED
RELIGIOUS SCIENTISTS
Darwin
– False rumours about his deathbed conversion
confession
Newton
– Claimed to be religious because of social and judicial
pressure
Mendel
– Augustinian monk in order to pursue his science
(research grant)
PASCAL’S WAGER
Insurance of God
– Penalty for guessing wrong
Argument for feigning belief in God
BAYESIAN ARGUMENTS
Bayes’ Theorem, (six facts)
Mathematical engine for combing many
estimated likelihoods and coming up with a final
estimate of whether God exists
Start with 50% starting point
Ends up with a 67% likelihood of existing but
boosts this to 95% because of ‘faith’
THE ULTIMATE BOEING 747
Fed Hoyle
– Probability of life
originating on Earth is no
greater than the chance
that a hurricane,
sweeping through a
scrap yard, would have
the luck to assemble a
Boeing 747.
NATURAL SELECTION AS A
CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISER
Similar to feminism
Power of science to explain how organized
complexity can emerge from simple beginnings
without guidance
Counters the idea that it takes a big fancy thing
to create a lesser thing: trickle-down theory of
creation
IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY
A functioning unit is said to be
irreducibly complex if the removal of
one of its parts causes the whole to
cease functioning
Eyes, wings.
Natural selection is a cumulative
process, which breaks the problem of
improbability into small pieces:
accumulation
THE WORSHIP OF GAPS
If gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default,
must fill it.
Fossil records
– If none to document evolutionary transitions, assumption
is that there is none, God intervened.
THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE:
PLANETARY VERSION
Named by mathematician Brandon Carter in
1974
The origin of life had to happen only once.
Extremely improbable event
We exist here on Earth. Therefore, Earth must
be the kind of planet that is capable of
generating and supporting us.
THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE:
PLANETARY VERSION
Even if origin of life was so improbable as to
occur on only one in a billion planets, life still will
have arisen on a billion planets
The Anthropic Principle:
cosmological version
“We live not only on a friendly planet but also in a friendly
universe.” - Dawkins
• If chemistry and physics had occurred in just slightly
different ways then life would not have been possible
• The Goldilocks value [ 0.007 ]
• Theist Explanation & Anthropic Answer
The Anthropic Principle:
cosmological version
• Multiverse Theory is extravagant but simple.
• God or any intelligent design would have to be
highly complex like the entities it is supposed to
explain.
• Natural Selection…
An Interlude at Cambridge
‘You are so nineteenth century’
• Science & Religion
• 6 Main Arguments
Chapter 5: The Roots of Religion
The Darwinian Imperative
• Natural Selection of Religion
• Benefits of Religion?
• Not restricted to genes of individual organism
• 3 alternative targets of benefits:
– Group Selection
– Manipulative Influence of Genes in another Individual (parasite)
– Central Theorem
» Benefit of the Meme!
The Darwinian Imperative
…“how can we be so smart and dumb
simultaneously…” - Dawkins
• Aboriginals of Papua New Guinea
• Religion & Heterosexuals
Direct Advantages of Religion
• Faith-healing
• Placebo Effects
• Why would a mind evolve to find comfort in
beliefs it can plainly see is false…
– A freezing person finds no comfort in believing he is
warm.
Group Selection
• Proximate cause of religion: hyperactivity in a
particular node of brain
• Ultimate Explanation: Group Selection Theories
• Tribe Wars
Religion as a By-Product
of Something Else
• Dawkin’s Belief
– Moths committing suicide ?!
– Children obeying parents/guardians without question
– Passing on Good Advice & Bad
Psychologically Primed for Religion
• Paul Bloom – dualistic theory of mind
– Humans and especially children are natural born
Dualists
• Freaky Friday Movie
– Children are also native Teleologists
– Dawkins is a Monist
Psychologically Primed for Religion
• Darwinian Advantage?
– Physical Stance
– Design Stance
– Intentional Stance
• By-product of Falling in Love
• Only to supposed to love 1 person
• Polyamory
– The Bachelor
Tread Softly, Because you
Tread on my Memes
“Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived”
– oscar wilde
• Knitting, Carpentry, Pottery can all be reduced to
discrete elements that can be potentially passed down
an infinite number of generations without alteration
• Absolute Merit
• Memeplex
• Unconscious Evolution
Cargo Cults
• Real life example
• The Cult of John Frum
“If you can wait two thousand
years for Jesus Christ to come
an’ ‘e no come, then I can
wait more than nineteen
years for John.” - Sam
Chapter 6: The Roots of Morality:
Why are we Good?
Does our Moral Sense
have a Darwinian Origin?
• The unit of Natural Selection = The Selfish Gene
• Genes influence organisms to behave
altruistically
• Genetic Kinship
• Reciprocal Altruism
– Bees & Flowers
• Reputation
• Buying Unfakeably Authentic Advertising
Case Study in the Roots of Morality
We do not need GOD in order to be good
– or evil
• Most people come to the same decisions when
faced with dilemmas and their agreement over
the decisions themselves is stronger than their
ability to articulate their reasons
Chapter 7: The ‘Good’ Book &
The Changing Moral Zeitgeist
The Old Testament
The Bible is Weird
• Noah’s Ark
• Asian Holy Men: Tsunami caused by Human
Sins
“We do not derive our morals from scripture or
we pick and choose among the scriptures for
the nice bits and reject the nasty” - Dawkins
Is the New Testament Any Better?
• Adds a new injustice & infliction of pain
and suffering
• Wearing a Cross
• Underlying unpalatable aspect of its ethical
teaching
Love Thy Neighbor
• In-group loyalty and out-group hostility
– Religion amplifies and exacerbates tendencies
• Labelling of children
– More in chapter 9
• Segregated schools
– Northern Ireland
• Taboos against “marrying out”
– Perpetuates hereditary feuds
Love Thy Neighbor
“Even if religion did no other harm in itself, its
wanton and carefully nurtured divisiveness – its
delibrate and cultivated pandering to humanity’s
natural tendency to favor in-groups and shun
out-groups - would be enough to make it a
significant force for evil in the world”
The moral Zeitgeist
• Changing Moral Zeitgeist
– Abraham’s “sacrifice”
– Slavery and racism
“…the manifest phenomenon of
Zeitgeist progression is more than
enough to undermine the claim
that we need God in order to be
good, or to decide what is good”
What about Hitler and Stalin?
Weren't they atheists?
“What matters is not whether Hitler and
Stalin were atheists, but whether
atheism systematically influences
people to do bad things.”
“Individual atheists may do evil things
but they don’t do evil things in the
name of atheism.”
Chapter 8: What’s wrong with
religion? Why be so hostile?
Fundamentalism and
the subversion of science
• Truth in holy books
– Contradictory evidence must be thrown out
“I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is
true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in
the southern hemisphere.”
The dark side of absolutism
• Muslim world and the American Theocracy
– Absolutism nearly always results from strong
religious faith
• Reason to suggest that faith lends to evil
• Penalties for blasphemy
– For converting to Christianity (2006)
Faith and homosexuality
• Under tailban the penalty for
homosexuality was execution
• Private
• Harms no one else
• Alan Turing
– German enigma codes
– Offered a choice between 2 years in
prison or chemical castration (1954)
Faith and the sanctity of human life
• The death penalty
– George Bush
• Euthanasia
• Abortion
– Does the embryo suffer?
– Violence of religious opposition
The Great Beethoven Fallacy
“If you knew a woman who was pregnant, who
had 8 kids already, three of whom were
deaf, two who were blind, one mentally
retarded (all because she had syphilis),
would you recommend that she have an
aborton?”
• The human potential argument
– Fail to seize the oportunity for
sexual intercourse
How 'moderation' in
faith fosters fanaticism
“Only religious faith is a strong enough force to
motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane
and decent people.”
• War against “terror”
– No different than killing doctors who perform
abortions
– If religious faith must be respected then we must
respect suicide-bombers
Chapter 9: Childhood, abuse and
the escape from religion
Childhood, abuse and
the escape from religion
• The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
–
–
–
–
Child was secretly baptized
Abducted under papal law
One true faith
Faith vs good of the child
Physical and mental abuse
“Being fondled by the priest simply left the
impression (from the mind of a 7 year old) as
“yucky” while the memory of my friend going to
hell was on of cold, immeasurable fear.”
• Hell Houses
In defense of children
• Nicholas Humphrey
– “Children, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have
their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s
bad ideas – no matter who these other people are.
• What to think, not how to think
• Worshiping the sun
• Female circumcision
– “No adult woman who has somehow missed out on
circumcision as a child volunteers for the operation
later in life
An educational scandal
• Funding for creationism
– Emmanuel College
• Stephen Layfield – head of science
– the bible can “…provide us with a true acount of earth history…”
• An attempt to “…subvert evidence-based science
education and replace it with biblical scripture.”
Consciousness-raising again
• Labeling of children
– Feminism
– Origin of cosmos, life and morals
– Holy Cross Girls
Religious education as a
part of literary culture
• Biblical literacy is essential for the appreciation
of English literature
– Greek and roman gods
– Weddings and funerals
Chapter 10: A much needed gap?
Chapter 10: A much needed gap?
• A god-shaped gap in the brain?
– Or could we fill the gap with
something else?
• Four main roles of religion in
human life
–
–
–
–
Explanation (science)
Exhortation (moral instruction)
Consolation
Inspiration
Binker
• A. A. Milne
• Imaginary friend phenomenon
– Binker for life
– Pedomorphosis
• Retention of childhood characteristics
• Gradual delay of binker termination
Consolation
• Emotional need for God
• Direct physical consolation
– St. Bernard
• Consolation by discovery of a previously
unappreciated fact or a previously undiscovered
way of looking at existing facts
– Death of a war hero
– Happy for those who are terminally ill
Inspiration
• Rhetoric rather than logic
• Lucky to be alive
“The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming
and life enhancing, while at the same time never
being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking,
or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that
life owes them something.”
The mother of all burkas
• Science widens the window
– Visible spectrum
• Middle world
– Environment of savannah programmed and
debugged software
– “…where the very improbable could safely be treated
as impossible.”
– Queerer than we can suppose
– A model of the real world
• Assist survival
The mother of all burkas