Salto sobrius

Dear Reader, welcome to Salto sobrius and the 50th Carnival of the Godless! Salto is a blog about archaeology and skepticism and stuff, kept by a Swedish archaeologist. The Carnival collects good godless blog writing every second week.

There is currently another carnival going on here as well, the 44th Skeptics’ Circle, and that’s where you’ll find skeptical writings about non-religious issues. But if, for instance, you feel your faith in Amaterasu the Sun Goddess beginning to fail, then this is the carnival for you. It's actually for you even if that belief is getting stronger every day. Dawkins knows you need it.

I'm a board member and journal editor for the Swedish Skeptic Society, and we quite often run into the demarcation line between these two blog carnivals: mundane skepticism vs. the sacrilegious variety. Non-profit organisations in Sweden by tradition avoid political and religious affiliations (unless they're political parties or gatherings of the faithful, that is). So does our association, even though the members tend to be atheists and agnostics. When someone sends us a gods-bashing piece for the journal, we regretfully have to direct them to the Swedish Secular Humanist Society. But blogging imposes no such restraints. Mwahaha.

We've got two main sections this time: one on general godless issues and one on creationism, that is, the belief that ancient creation myths are historical truth. Hold on tight to your prayer rugs and joss sticks, folks -- here we go.

Amy Alkon, famed Advice Goddess, passes on some remarks by Daniel Dennett on Pope Ratzi's recent islamophobic speech.
Mark over at the Skwib has the latest news about Dr. Maximilian Tundra, the self-proclaimed Prophet of the Viking Pasta, or the First Church of the Noodly Norsemen. (I'm a Noodly Norseman myself. Mark should read my recent entry on spiritual kimchi and righteous ramen.)
Beware of the Dogma's NonProphet discusses a recent study on religious affiliation in the US which reported a lower level of nonreligious than prior studies had found.
vJack at Atheist Revolution answers the common challenge, "If you are an atheist, why do you spend so much time reading/thinking/talking about religion?".
Doug at Eight Hour Lunch riffs psychedelically on fish car-stickers and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Varkam at the Neural Gourmet goes after eschatology with all cannon blazing: "The very notion of an afterlife is both inhumane and immoral".
Paul at Aurora Walking Vacation muses sadly about fundamentalist terrorism and the sense of insecurity it has forced upon Americans.
Alon at Abstract Nonsense follows up with a discussion of Christian and Islamic terrorists. Why are there no Islamists among Canada's many Muslims? Could it be that provocation is somehow lacking there?
Alonzo the Atheist Ethicist discusses recent US legislation supporting Christian theocracy.
Mojoey at Deep Thoughts discusses conservative radio host James Dobson's views on abortion rights.
Matt-Olly at 10,000 Reasons to Doubt the Fish has an entry on a godless system of morality.
Dave at the Picket Line looks at the sadly current issue of government-endorsed torture from the perspective of godless morality, turning to the works of Hannah Arendt for materials.
Jon Swift muses that the debate over torture illustrates how Christians can get back to traditional values by changing with the times.
Peter of Lunartalks reports from a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. It's discussing small matters like the future of life on Earth.
Paul at North Gare analyses the atheism and/or agnosticism of biologist Richard Dawkins and writer/blogger John Scalzi.
The Ridger at the Greenbelt discusses why she thinks science and religion could coexist, but won't.
Tammy at TriSanity wants no more toxic myths about big daddy in heaven looking over us all.
Jim Benton reports chillingly on some reading of Christan literature on physical discipline in child rearing: Bible-based baby-beating.

Creationism

Hwaet! Akusai at Action Skeptics skewers an unsubtle creationist re-telling of the Beowulf poem.
Stuart at Daily Irreverence encourages evolution-doubters to go all the way and start doubting all science. Really, folks: is it reasonable to believe that airplanes fly and cars move without the aid of horses? And he follows up with an entry on the relationship between revealed belief and scientifically tested truth.
Jim Benton explores the logical ramifications of a belief in divine creation.
Shalini at Scientia Natura re-refutes the old creationist argument that evolutionists reject the notion of an all-powerful God because they want to escape the responsibilities for their actions. (Of course not. To achieve that end, evolutionists drink six-packs.)
Zeno the maths teacher at Halfway There offers a long strait-shootin' refutation of an essay by James Doggone Melton of the Bible Baptist Church in Sharon, Tennessee. Yee-haw! And then he done kick sand in the face of y'all's favoritest B.C. faith-based cartoonis', Johnny Hart.
Mark at Good Math, Bad Math re-bunks (that is, de-de-bunks) evolutionary algorithms.

Amen to that! This has been the 50th Carnival of the Godless. The next one is due up at the Greenbelt on 15 October. Until then -- if the Witnesses knock, take half a day off from work, serve them tea and cookies and make them read this.

[More blog entries about atheism, agnosticism, religion, creationism; ateism, agnosticism, religion, kreationism.]

Labels: atheism, carnival, creationism, religion

The Sage of Brooklyn graces this blog with another cool guest entry.

Even If They Are Right They're Wrong
Another Fallacy of "Intelligent Design"
By Jim Benton

I can have a certain respect for honest creationists -- at least the ones that don't claim that evolution is a lying plot of evil godless scientists. We skeptics call them illogical, but that's not quite correct. Their logic is perfectly good, the problem is in their premises. ("Garbage In, Garbage Out" isn't just for computers, it's a general rule for life.)

They simply accept as a premise that the Bible is the word of God, and therefore has to be correct. If other evidence seems to support a long-lived earth and evolution, then sooner or later better evidence will be discovered that will resolve this contradiction. It's actually a perfectly good piece of reasoning.

More to my point, if there were ever to be evidence that the Universe is younger (and smaller) than we believe, that there is a better explanation for the fossil record that would allow it to have been created in a short time, and that species were immutable, then their case would be proven that there was a creator-god. Throw in proof of the Noachian Flood, find the pillar of salt that was Lot's wife and the remains of Sodom and Gomorrah (poor Gomorrah, they always get the short end of the publicity stick. When's the last time you ever heard of anyone being condemned as a Gomorrhaite?) and the bodies of a whole army of Egyptians in full battle array underneath the Red Sea (or Sea of Reeds, or anywhere) and presto, you've gone a good way towards establishing the literal truth of the Bible and therefore the existence of the god who wrote it.

Of course the chance of this happening is a good deal less than the likelihood that the six typing monkeys will ever complete their task.

Intelligent Design people are different, because -- where they are not simply creationists who lie a lot (most of them are) -- their argument, even were it to be successful, doesn't prove what they want it to prove. They are arguing that the complexity of the Universe proves the existence of a Creator, and that theism is therefore true. For the time being give them the first part of it. Give them the proof of a Creator.

This goes not one step towards proving the existence of any theistic god, and especially not the one they are, in reality, trying to demonstrate. Deism is a perfectly legitimate position. In fact, in a future post, I'll demonstrate that there is no operational difference, no way of distinguishing between the following:
a self-existent Universe,
a deistic Creator,
a theistic Creator who is still biding his time to communicate with humanity,
a theistic Creator whose concern is with the inhabitants of, say, Mizar 7, and who views humanity merely as an unnecessary and unnoticed by-product of his creation, or
the "New Agey" concept of "creator and creation being identical", of the Universe as god and god as the Universe.
To establish a theistic god, like the IDers want to do, does not require, and cannot be done through, reasoning.

There are many arguments that attempt it -- unfortunately, a close look at them shows a presupposition for a Universe consisting of Earth and a few lights going around it, a geocentric Universe, and man being co-existent with this Universe. Those that accept to expand this, to argue that the Universe is as big and as old as it is, but that we are the only thinking creatures in it, and thus the only ones worthy of God's attention, fail because they are unable to demonstrate why God needed to be as extravagant as to create a billion galaxies of a billion suns each just for us. Or, if the argument is that there are many races each of whom worship the same god, the trouble is that he also put in that damned speed of light limitation. Until we get round that, we will probably never be able to reach other inhabited planets, and almost certainly never reach another galaxy, so again, why bother with the superfluity of them?

We can't argue our way to a theistic god. A theistic god -- whether a monotheistic creator or just one of the Olympians, Asgard, or whatever -- is one that has interacted with humanity, and the only way to demonstrate that is through evidence. There are plenty of claimed interactions, but none with proof. (And certainly some that are implausible on their face.)

Okay, let me put this as a challenge. There are five key claimed interactions with a god that are the basis of a major religion. Anybody want to give some way of demonstrating that any of these took place?
Moses' conversations with God during his lifetime and specifically on Sinai.
Paul's vision of the Son of God "on the road to Damascus."
Zoroaster receiving the Avesta at the foot of a mountain directly from the hands of God.
Mohammed having the Qur'an dictated to him by an angel sent by God.
Joseph Smith being guided to the brass plates by God and having them translated by an angel.
And, for the theists out there, if any: remember that you not only have to prove that one of these events took place, you have to prove that the being that interacted with humans was identical with the Creator, and not a demon, a Go'a'uld, or another type of impostor.

(Of course, it is possible to disprove some of these by proving another interaction that, if not central, is confirmatory. Thus it is demonstrable that if any "cure" at Lourdes is authentically the action of God, this makes the idea of the Qur'an untenable. Or it makes God a capricious liar, which also eliminates theism, but that's another article. Any miracle, vision, or other interaction that testifies to the existence of the Christian god which took place in the last century rules out Mormonism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism as well as Judaism. I keep on including Zoroastrianism, not just because I like to show off, but because many of the concepts of both Christianity and Islam in fact seem to have been imported from Persian monotheism and not from Judaism, no matter what is claimed. Satan, for example is much closer to the adversary of the Ahura Mazda than the Old Testament character.)

Similarly, of course, any authentic "Jewish miracle" or revelation rules out the others. Certainly it is possible to accept a progression of revelations, but once a new one comes along, the old ones must be absorbed or thrown out. The idea of a god sitting back and saying, "Oh, we haven't given the Christians a boost for a few years, let's do a miracle for them, then next month we'll toss a vision to the Muslims, and hey, there are still some Zoroastrians in Gujarat, let's give them something too" makes God a liar. Oops! No, the idea that "we all worship the same god in different ways" is only possible if the god we all worship doesn't exist.