PZ Myers Blames Religious Moderates

PZ Myers seems to have become a political atheist leader, in the same league as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. He recently posted on the case of the parents who refused cancer treatment for their son on religious grounds. He says:

I have to say something that is heartfelt, and is also meant to offend. I do not absolve you mealy-mouthed moderates, I do not regard your beliefs as harmless. If Colleen Hauser or Leilani Neumann were in your church, you’d tell them to get medical care, but you’d also validate their belief in prayers. You would provide the soothing background muzak that says prayer is good, prayer is virtuous, prayer will connect you to the great lord who can do anything, prayer will give you solace in your time of worry. You would not raise your voice to say that prayer is useless, prayer is self-defeating, that while prayer might make you feel better while your child is suffering, that is no virtue. You pray yourselves. You think it is a noble and generous act for your representatives to prowl the corridors of hospitals, preying on the desperation of the sick. You abase yourselves before false hopes, and sacrifice human dignity on an altar built from the bones of the dead. You would spread the poison, piously excusing yourselves because you only want to administer sub-lethal doses.

You are Abraham’s enablers. I hope you all feel a small tremor of guilt when you sit your own children down at bedtime to beg a nonexistent being for aid, when you plant the seed of futile supplication and surrender to delusions in their trusting minds. Damn you all.

Some commentators on this entry have tried to assert that all those who hold a belief are not responsible for excesses committed in its name. Although I do not disagree, I think there is an easier rebuttal to make:

Myers has mischaracterized prayer as talking to an invisible person, which is a grossly impoverished analysis ignoring the phenomenology of prayer and the nature of prayer as an introspective and healing act. More important in his mischaracterization is his assumption that religious and spiritual individuals treat prayer as a remedy for all ills. He says: “You would not raise your voice to say that prayer is useless, prayer is self-defeating”, implying that praying at all or viewing prayer as useful or healing in any respect entails viewing prayer as useful in all respects, or in a particular, chosen respect of his (in this case as a cure to Hodgekin’s Lymphoma). Both of these are logical fallacies. Here is a counter-example to clarify what I mean:

Person A: Jogging is helpful to my overall fitness, since it makes me lose weight, become stronger and improves my stamina.
Doctor of Person A: You have a horrible illness.
Person A: I’m sure I can just jog it off!
Doctor of Person A: No, you can’t. Your illness cannot be cured by jogging.
Person A: I’m sure I can just jog it off!
Person X, who is watching the situation: Damn all you joggers! You didn’t tell your fellow joggers that jogging is ineffective. You jogged, thus implying jogging is a useful thing to do. It’s your fault this woman is delusional.

See how this is problematic?

And now, a general word on faith:

Faith is not in conflict with reason.  Faith does not conflict with scientific truth, unless faith claims to express a scientific truth.  Faith can neither be affirmed nor denied by scientific, historical or philosophical truth…  There is a reality that is not a product of rational deduction.  It is not accounted for by strict rational discourse.  There is a spiritual dimension to human existence and the universe, but this is not irrational—it is non-rational. Faith allows us to transcend what Flaubert said was our “mania for conclusions,” a mania he described as “one of humanity’s most useless and sterile drives.” — Chris Hedges

(Cross-posted to Yes and No)

Born believers: How your brain creates God

Here are the some extracts from the article ‘Born believers: How your brain creates God‘ by Michael Brooks which appeared in New Scientist:

‘The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society.

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn’t wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness….

An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.

Darwin vs Wallace – Courage Triumphed Faith

It was Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday on February 12th, and the world celebrated the genius of the man who brought a paradigm-shift in whole of biology with his insights, and had a lasting impact on philosophy, sociology and many other arenas. Few scientific theories have generated the controversy that evolution stimulated; few ideas have been so passionately debated and even fewer have survived 150 years of constant skepticism. Interestingly enough, Alfred Wallace developed the theory of evolution independently of Darwin, but he didn’t have the courage to face the implications of his own theory, and later turned to spiritualism.

Darwin was more intellectually tough and stuck to his ideas. And that is why the world celebrates Darwin today, and few even mention Wallace. Darwin had no access to the information of individual and population genetics or DNA and the exact mechanism of inheritence, and yet despite this lack of knowledge, Darwin was brilliant and insightful enough to come up with the theory of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution. Biology has changed alot since Darwin presented his theory and yet it remains substantially correct even now.

Nicholas Wade writes in The New York Times:

“Darwin knew a lot of biology: more than any of his contemporaries, more than a surprising number of his successors. From prolonged thought and study, he was able to intuit how evolution worked without having access to all the subsequent scientific knowledge that others required to be convinced of natural selection. He had the objectivity to put aside criteria with powerful emotional resonance, like the conviction that evolution should be purposeful. As a result, he saw deep into the strange workings of the evolutionary mechanism, an insight not really exceeded until a century after his great work of synthesis.”