Are skepticism and Belief in God mutually exclusive?

GuanYin

Originally posted by Hobart
No, it's not. I don't think I ever put forward that case. If I did please point it out to me.

Ah well then thats grand. And here's me thinking you were actually believing all the genetics hokum in this thread. All that pedantism because I slagged off journalists.

Dasilva94

Originally posted by syke
If you had a close, loved family member with alzheimers who entered mid-stage and suddenly started displaying strong negative feelings towards you, would you say it was her that had changed and decided she didn't like you or would you pin it down as a manifestation of the damage done by the disease.

Both. In this particular case the disease would be manifesting itself in her change of perception and hence behaviour.

GuanYin

Originally posted by Dasilva94
Both. In this particular case the disease would be manifesting itself in her change of perception and hence behaviour.

So surely if its just a result of disease manifestation its not actually a change in "her" morailty. Seeing as the consciousness and personality traits as you knew them would have no say in this new behaviour.

Myksyk

Originally posted by syke
Ah well then thats grand. And here's me thinking you were actually believing all the genetics hokum in this thread.

With all the concern about misunderstanding of genetics, it's perhaps timely to mention that the next Irish Skeptics public lecture is entitled 'Genetics - the most restless, turbulent and demanding form of knowledge' ... and will be presented by Professor David McConnell of Trinity College on Wednesday February 4th at 8pm in the Yeats Room of the Mont Clare Hotel, Dublin. Perhaps an interesting discussion could be had in the bar afterwards (suggestion - people on this forum should wear a hat with their avitar and monikor on it )

davros

Originally posted by Myksyk
With all the concern about misunderstanding of genetics, it's perhaps timely to mention that the next Irish Skeptics public lecture is entitled 'Genetics - the most restless, turbulent and demanding form of knowledge' ... and will be presented by Professor David McConnell of Trinity College on Wednesday February 4th at 8pm in the Yeats Room of the Mont Clare Hotel, Dublin.

And, if that doesn't satisfy the evolution junkies, Feb 8 to Feb 14 is "Darwin Week" at the Museum of Natural History. More details.

Barnowl

And if you still don't have enough, Prof. David McConnell will deliver a lecture on Thurs. Feb. 12th (Darwin Day) in the Walton theatre in TCD at 8.00pm entitled "The idea of evolution - from cosmos to culture". This is organised by the Association of Irish Humanists. Further details on www.irish-humanists.org.

williamgrogan

Ecksor said … Guilt by association isn't any sort of logic. It is reasonable to get a shallow impression of an idea by examining the people who agree with it and those who do not, but ultimately an idea must stand or fall on its own merits.

I'm not exactly a fan of organised religions, but I'm sure that for any worthy idea it is possible to find an organised group of people who use that idea to justify nasty things. That doesn't say much to me about the idea itself.

I completely reject this viewpoint for a number of reasons.

Of course there could be exceptions where a theory or belief was misused and there are some examples re Science.

With religion however there is a notion that it is inspired by a “good” god. Most religions claim their religion is good. If religion was inspired by a good god then one would expect that good would come of it. However the history of religion cannot by any stretch of the imagination be interpreted to indicate that it was good. I think one of the pieces of evidence that religion is superstition is because it has produced and continues to produce such appalling injustices.

I also think its reasonable to judge any organisation by the people in it and what they do and what their goals are. You cannot disconnect an organisation completely from its members.

There are many excuses made for religion and this is just another one. I have often heard people excuse the failure of communism for similar reasons as in, “Communism is great it’s a pity no country implemented it!”

PS

I’m beginning to get the impression that many people joined the nuns and priesthood because they had personality problems.

williamgrogan

Ecksor said ….. Incidentally, that links to an essay by Dawkins that contains a lot of passages that look startlingly similar to a lot of the points you've used on this thread

http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/articles/dawkins.html

I am a BIG fan of Richard Dawkins. I first read “A Selfish Gene”, maybe 20+ years ago? While reading it I could smell evolution. I think its by far his best and most important book.

However I hadn’t read the particular article but certainly some of the comments were familiar. One of the reasons I like Dawkins is he almost completely agrees with me!

I liked this one, “Nigerian peoples who believe that the world was created by God from the excrement of ants”, and “I take astrology very seriously indeed: I think it's deeply pernicious because it undermines rationality, and I should like to see campaigns against it.”
I believe the same about religion.

I do also believe that much of religious education is a form of child abuse.

There is an obvious reason why I say similar things to Richard Dawkins – we are both right!

Hobart

Originally posted by williamgrogan
I do also believe that much of religious education is a form of child abuse.

Why do you think this?

ecksor

Originally posted by williamgrogan
Of course there could be exceptions where a theory or belief was misused and there are some examples re Science.

Which is why it isn't any type of proof ...

Apart the technicalities of what consitutes a proof, discussing the behaviour of a lot of people who happen to have a belief you disagree with is far weaker than actually attacking the idea itself. (for example, I put a lot of store in the strength of science despite the atrocities that have been committed with the name of scientific theories to lend some credibility to them, or the idiotic ramblings that one often hears with "science" as their basis).

I'm prepared to examine your assumptions about the universe, the definition of your position, and a logical progression from one to the other, but you haven't defined your position (except to say that it isn't atheism, because you don't like that word), clearly admitted your assumptions, or tried to show some reasoning. When I've pointed out that your position is inconsistent (or at least your representation of my position was inaccurate, it was hard to tell because you wouldn't answer the question), you seemed to just pick whatever starting point was best to make your point, even if the point was about a different point of view altogether.

I don't know why you keep countering my points with diatribes about specific religions, I don't recall being concerned with any in particular on this thread ...

Most religions claim their religion is good. If religion was inspired by a good god then one would expect that good would come of it.

... and some religions aren't based upon the belief in god and some religions are based upon an irrational belief in the all knowing power of science. So what? Waffle all you want about religion, but you are the one who keeps raising that. The question is about god, not religions.

Of course, religion is usually relevant in the case that someone is a believer in god, in which case it's reasonable to look at the other beliefs that come along with the religion, but the inconsistency or flaw of one or more philosophies based upon a certain idea (existence of god in this case) doesn't actually show that all possible philosophies about that idea are necessarily flawed. Like it or not, a logical philosophical argument is the only way you can hope to reach any sort of coherent argument for your position.

There is an obvious reason why I say similar things to Richard Dawkins – we are both right!

He had very similar arguments to you about religion, but he didn't actually mention god in that article as far as I remember. Perhaps he did elsewhere.

Myksyk

Just received the latest issue of 'SKEPTIC' magazine and it is interesting in the context of this long discussion. It is a special issue on evolution but looks at the god/science question overall. There are articles by Dawkins and an interesting one by Simon Conway Morris (of Burgess Shale fame and one of Gould's heroes) who writes strongly against what he terms ultra-Darwinism. there is a critical review of Conway-Morris' latest book (Life's solution) and a host of other interesting bits and pieces on the general subject.

williamgrogan

Those who argue Muslims have a right to dress their children as faith and tradition prescribe are absolutely right. The expression of spiritual belief is a fundamental right, encompassing, among others, the right to bear witness; the right to assert humility before a Superior Being; the right to nurture a collective religious culture.

John Waters IT 26-01-04

Is it not child abuse to brainwash girls into believing a religion that forces them to hide their faces because they are a source of temptation to men?

williamgrogan

Throughout this thread I made the point that we evolved our sense of morality. Well someone's written a book to say this.

The Science of Good and Evil
Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share, Care, and Follow the Golden Rule
Henry Holt/Times Books. 350 pp. Illustrations. $26. ISBN: 0-8050-7520-8
Michael Shermer

In The Science of Good and Evil, the third volume in his trilogy on the power
of belief (the first two volumes were Why People Believe Weird Things and How
We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God), psychologist and
historian of science Dr. Michael Shermer tackles two of the deepest and most
challenging problems of our age: (1) The origins of morality and (2) the
foundations of ethics. Embedded within these two problems are questions that have
occupied the greatest minds in history: Is it in our nature to be moral or
immoral? If we evolved by natural forces then what was the natural purpose of
morality? If we live in a determined universe, then how can we make free moral
choices? Does evil exist, and if so, what is the nature of evil? Why do bad things
happen to good people? Is there justice in the world beyond the social order?
If there is no outside source to validate moral principles, does anything go?
Can we be good without God?

In this stunning conclusion to an intellectual journey into the mind and soul
of humanity, Dr. Shermer peels back the inner layers covering our core being
to reveal a complexity of human motives--selfish and selfless, cooperative and
competitive, virtue and vice, good and evil, moral and immoral. Shermer shows
how these motives came into being as a product of both our evolutionary
heritage and cultural history, and how we can construct an ethical system that
generates a morality that is neither dogmatically absolute nor irrationally relative
"a provisional morality for an age of science that provides empirical
evidence and a rational basis for belief."

Broad in scope, deep in its analysis, and controversial to its core, The
Science of Good and Evil applies the latest findings of science to offer an
original model of the bio-cultural evolution of morality and a new theory of
provisional ethics that challenges the reader to confront these timeless issues from
a new perspective--one that suggests that both morality and immorality
evolved in human biological and cultural evolution, that we can make free moral
choices in a determined universe, that moral principles can have a sound rational
basis supported by empirical evidence (without being dogmatically absolutist or dependent on an external source of validation), and that we can be good
without God. Shermer calls for a national debate on the origins of morality, the
basis of moral principles, and the need for a more universal and tolerant
ethic; an ethic that will insure the well-being and survival of all members of the
species, and of all species.

PRAISE FOR THE SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL

"This is an ambitious book, and it does not disappoint. The questions Shermer
addresses are as old as rational thought, but they have taken on a new
urgency as we come to understand ourselves through the sciences of mind, brain,
genes, and evolution. His analyses are sophisticated and filled with good sense,
and are enlivened with fascinating material from science and history. The
Science of Good and Evil is an excellent snapshot of contemporary thinking about
the nature and sources of morality."
--Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and
author of How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate.

"Morality must have arisen long before modern religion came around to lay
claim to it. Michael Shermer engagingly brings this controversial topic to life.
This is the most convincing argument to date that the origin of our sense of
right and wrong is to be found within us, that it is part and parcel of human nature."
--Frans de Waal, author of Good Natured

"Michael Shermer's brain is a place where science, history and psychology
meet in the service of common sense. He uses his insatiable curiosity to
penetrate the fog of fuzzy thinking, shedding light on the most controversial issues
of science and society. Yet another courageous book."
--K. C. Cole, author of Mind Over Matter and The Hole in the Universe

"There is no other volume on evolutionary ethics and its history that is as
stimulating, critical, and comprehensive as Michael Shermer's. All of us are
daily challenged by ethical dilemmas, and one's solutions are rarely
satisfactory to everyone; this is particularly true of some of the solutions based on
religion and philosophy. In the end, we must construct a Darwinian answer to the
daily challenges of living a moral and ethical life. The best guide known tome is
Shermer's profound analysis in The Science of Good and Evil."
--Ernst Mayr, author of What Evolution Is

williamgrogan

I think all of this is relevant to what we have been discussing. I get this via email from the USA Skeptics.

---

REVIEWS OF THE SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL

The source of morality is the topic under discussion in Shermer's latest book
to champion rationalism. Religion received a critique in How We Believe: The
Search for God in an Age of Science (1999) and does so again here as Shermer
offers propositions on the origin of our ordinary, innate sense of right and
wrong. Disposing of religion's rival, moral relativism, Shermer dedicates his
effort to convincing readers that his thesis, labeled "provisional morality,"
makes more sense. What that means is that ethical rules are accepted
conditionally and are as falsifiable as any scientific theory. Shermer takes this precept
into the realm of evolutionary psychology, drawing applied ethics from such
drastically different sources as anthropological field studies in Amazonia and
the TV show The Honeymooners. Contending that the source of ethics is solely
evolutionary, Shermer conducts his argument in an assertive but not
gratuitously aggressive fashion. This stance as well as his populistic bent should earn
him the hearing that he clearly hopes believers in God will give him.
--Gilbert Taylor

Kirkus Review
Imagine there's no Heaven (as John Lennon suggested): what, then, is the
foundation for morality? Skeptic magazine editor Shermer (In Darwin's Shadow,
2002, etc.) seeks to answer that question and to discover a scientific explanation
for our notions of good and evil. He quotes Darwin to the effect that all
scientific observation must be either for or against some point of view and avers
his own viewpoint to be "non-theistic agnosticism": the decision that, since
God's existence is unprovable, he will live and act as if there is no God. The
origins of morality and ethics, common to every society on Earth, must then
lie in human institutions, Shermer concludes. Over hundreds of thousands of
years, our ancestors arrived at moral principles designed to maintain peace and
order in communities of ever-increasing size and complexity. The earliest
"moral" principles are those that many animals recognize, such as protecting one's
mate or young. As human society grew, the needs of larger and larger groups
became the basis of morality; at the center of many of them lies somethinglike
the Golden Rule, treating others as we would wish to be treated. At the same
time, early superstitions coalesced into religions, each of which took on the
role of sanctioning the moral principles of its parent society. Shermer goes on
to argue that evil has no independent existence but is inherent in human
nature. Yet no outside authority is needed to make us moral, he argues; atheists
(or temporary doubters) seem no more inclined to kill and steal than the
religious. The true dignity of our morality arises from its basis in our common
humanity. Shermer draws effectively on familiar instances, from the Columbine
killings to the Holocaust, to illustrate and support his thesis. Thought-provoking
and well-honed examination of deep questions.

---

New York Sun Review
Book Review by John Derbyshire

The God of the Gaps had a hard time of it in the 20th century. By 1900
thoughtful people had long since reconciled themselves to the fact that the Sun is
not the chariot of a god, but a ball of incandescent gas whose apparent motions
follow natural laws. They knew that lightning and thunder are caused not by
vis superum but by electrical discharges in the atmosphere. They understood
that the world was not created one Friday afternoon in 4004 B.C., but had existed
for eons. The physical sciences had been reduced to cold mathematical
equations. The human sciences were another story, though. Plenty of gaps there! The
wrath-of-Poseidon theory of earthquakes might no longer be tenable, but how
could one explain the human conscience without invoking Divine inspiration? What
do "good" and "evil" mean in the absence of supernatural ordinances and
sanctions? Must it not be the case, as Dostoyevsky famously wondered, that if
there is no God, then anything is allowed?

Now, a hundred years later, the God of the Gaps has very nearly been chased
out of the human sciences, too. The general air of triumphalism was caught
nicely by novelist Tom Wolfe in a 1996 essay for Forbes ASAP titled "Sorry, But
Your Soul Just Died." (Though Wolfe left an escape hatch for God at the end of
the essay.) A few forlorn rearguard actions are still being fought--in
biology, for example, by the proponents of Intelligent Design--but all in all the
human sciences at the beginning of the 21st century are not far behind where the
physical sciences were at the beginning of the 20th in explanatory power and
the production of testable hypotheses, and in the dwindling requirement for
supernatural explanations of anything at all.

Michael Shermer, who is the editor of Skeptic magazine, has set himself the
task of deriving a universalist ethic suitable for these times, without any
appeal to the God of the Gaps, or indeed to any other manifestation of the
transcendental. The ethic he comes up with is "provisional morality." Shermer
explains the roots of this doctrine as follows:

"I believe that morality is the natural outcome of evolutionary and historical
forces operating on both individuals and groups. The moral feelings of doing
the right thing (such as virtuousness) or doing the wrong thing (such as
guilt) were generated by nature as part of human evolution."

He goes on to derive some simple "golden rules" that will allow us to
determine whether an action is right or wrong. There is, for example, the Happiness
Principle: "It is a higher moral principal to always seek happiness with
someone else's happiness in mind, and never seek happiness when it leads to someone
else's unhappiness." That would seem to rule out any kind of competitive
activity--running for President, for example--since the losing competitors are
bound to be left unhappy. I guess the author's principles need a few hundred
pages of qualification. Was there ever a system of ethics that didn't?

Shermer tells us that he became a born-again Christian when a senior at high
school. He went on to attend Pepperdine, studied theology, and only emerged
into, as he sees it, the cool clear light of agnosticism after long questioning
and wide reading. Certainly he is no angry, dogmatic God-hater. The Science of
Good and Evil is a good-natured book, full of useful and curious facts about
the history of ethics. I had forgotten, for example, the calculus of felicity
worked up by Jeremy Bentham (beneath whose embalmed head I used to walk on my
way to college classes every morning). Bentham tried to quantify the ups and
down of life, with "hedons" as units of pleasure and "dolors" as units of
sorrow. Kant's Categorical Imperative gets an airing here, too; and there is a
useful thumbnail guide to the menagerie of ethical systems available to the
curious enquirer nowadays: Consequentialism, contractarianism, deontology, natural
law theory, and so on.

I would have liked this book more if it had been better written. Clunky
cliches abound. The anthropologist Ken Good, struggling with the morality of his
love for a Brazilian tribeswoman, "was on an emotional roller coaster."
Vegetius's qui desiderat pacem, preparet bellum is attributed to Liddell Hart. We
learn that: "There is a maxim anthropologists often cite...: The enemy of my enemy is my friend." One expects at any moment to be told that man is the animal that drinks when he is not
thirsty and makes love in all seasons. At times one seems to be reading a Mission
Statement cooked up for one's corporation by one of those tiresome diversity
consultancies:

Provisional ethics accommodates the range of individual variation found in
human populations and suggests that we should pass judgments, make awards, and
heap penalties only with regard to our great diversity. Such accommodational
flexibility leads irrevocably toward greater tolerance...

These slight blemishes aside, though, I think Shermer has made his case very
well. The thing one wants to know, but which of course he cannot tell us, is:
Will a few decades more of peace, prosperity, and advances in our
understanding of the human sciences cause the human race at large to abandon ethical
systems based on supernatural premises? Shermer quotes the great evolutionary
biologist Edmund O. Wilson on this point: "The choice between transcendentalism and
empiricism will be the coming century's version of the struggle for men's
souls. Moral reasoning will either remain centered in idioms of theology and
philosophy ... or shift toward science-based material analysis."

The problem with "science-based material analysis" is that it is a cold
temple whose pale blue flame gives little warmth. However well Michael Shermer's
provisional ethics may satisfy sanguine middle-class American intellectuals
with a good grasp of the human sciences, no such system will attain widespread
acceptance if it fails to nourish key components of the human personality.

Most people will always follow the moral precepts favored by their family,
neighbors, and culture, without much reflection. It is an admirable thing for an
ethical system to be founded on nothing but the latest results in published
scientific papers. It is, however, much more important that it has a clear
appeal to the broad mass of unreflective humanity, offer some consolation to them
in misfortune, and cannot be easily misapprehended as a license for sloppy
situational morality. Michael Shermer's prescriptions, though admirable in all
sorts of ways, do not, in my opinion, pass that test.

williamgrogan

---

Washington Post Review
Codes of Conduct
A professional skeptic tries to find evidence for morality in the natural order.

Reviewed by Anthony Brandt
Sunday, February 1, 2004; Page BW05

THE SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL
Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule
By Michael Shermer. Times. 350 pp. $26

[snip]


WG - I haven't read the book yet but I will. However the negative comments in the reviews seem trivial in comparison to the subject matter.


[davros: if you really want to find out about copyright violation, repost an article from an American newspaper. You know how easy it is for them to find this stuff using a search engine?

See: http://www.donder.com/washpost.html
See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/contents/permissions.htm?nav=globebot]

---

williamgrogan

Jehovah’s Witnesses

The debate as to whether or not JW’s can refuse blood transfusions for their children has been going on long time in www.irishhealth.ie

http://www.irishhealth.com/index.html?level=4&id=5108

As far as I can see the reason the JW's refuse blood transfusions is that it says so in the bible and the reason it does is that the blood contains the "life force", whatever that is.