Friday, April 2, 2010

to "Ridiculous Atheists (Picking on Dogma)" by Professoranton

This isn't likely to be a coherent essay. It is merely a response to a number of points raised by Professoranton in his video Ridiculous Atheists (Picking on Dogma). I offer this because it seems he does genuinely want intelligent discussion of his ideas.

1. Why do atheists keep on attacking ridiculous creationist arguments?
Creationists continue to attack certain things which we consider important, notably education. They continue to invent new versions of their arguments, so atheists continue to debunk them. For what it's worth, I personally have deliberately stopped engaging with creationists.

2. "Do people really think they've satisfied thinkers' real concerns when they've dispelled things that are basically ridiculous?"
"Ridiculous" is a subjective term - to me, for instance, religion itself is inherently ridiculous. There is plenty of serious non-theistic philosophy being constructed, anyway - look up Dan Dennett, for a start.

3. Why do atheists use straw-man arguments in relation to creationism?
The creationist arguments to which atheists respond are all flourishing in the wild - honestly, we couldn't make up anything as bizarre as what creationists genuinely use.

4. "What ought we mean by 'God'? What ought we mean by 'the divine', by 'the ground of being'?"
Here's a problem - different people mean very different things by 'God'. There is no consensus, and there is no reason why there should be a consensus. Therefore, the initial question is meaningless.

5. It seems 'odd' to Professoranton that 'people of the scientific ilk' put science on the same plane as religion as an explanatory mechanism of grand questions
Religion has no utility whatsoever as an explanatory mechanism for anything at all, except perhaps as fossilised philosophy. Science can in principle discover anything and everything about the physical universe and everything in it, and we have philosophy as a structure for apriori reasoning about anything to which science does not yet seem to apply. Scientifically-minded people therefore tend to place science above religion as an explanatory mechanism for grand questions.
6. "Was there an actual emergence of life out of the inorganic?"
Yes. Here on Earth it happened a few billion years ago, about a billion years after the planet formed. The question is a scientific one - it can be answered by science, and it has been answered by science. We even have some pretty good ideas about how it happened.

7. Is it a mystery that we have the vocabulary to talk about stuff that doesn't make much sense, like "forever" or "everything that ever was"?
No, not really. It's very easy to construct arbitrarily absurd concepts by playing with existing language, even though language evolved for describing reality. Language is infinitely recombinable - there are fairly obvious reasons for this, and it incidentally allows limitless absurdity.

8. "that this is" as an "inescapable" argument for "God-talk"
Granted, the existence of the universe and everything in it is a valid reason to consider why it exists. Many people equate this to a requirement for some sort of god, which in turn means that "God-talk" is inevitable from these people. This does not mean, however, that there must be a 'god' in any meaningful sense. Really, "that this is" as an argument for God is just another form of the argument from personal incredulity (the single favourite argument of creationists).

9. "There is a grand cosmic connection between everything, between all of it."
Technically this is true - all matter originated in the Big Bang. However, there's no particular reason why this should mean anything in particular now.

10. An organism somehow creates disorder ... disorder around itself to maintain an order within itself ... living systems cut against the entropy of physical closed systems."
An organism is not a physical closed system - there is energy input and output. In fact, there is a huge, unceasing torrent of energy entering the biosphere - sunlight. Therefore, this entire point is nonsense.

11. "The word 'tree' doesn't rot, ... you can't tear down the meaning of the word 'tree' - the meaning of the word 'tree' isn't located somehow in the material substance ... that gives humans a taste for the eternal"
a) The word 'tree' is a label for a concept, which in turn happens to refer to a class of physical object. Only a physical object can literally rot.
b) Actually, the meaning of a word can be lost - we happen to still know what 'lunting' (current in 1824) meant, but how many similar words have simply been forgotten? There are millions of coneys in the world, but few people today know the word and still fewer know its original pronunciation.
c) The meaning of a word can change - in fact, it is very rare for a word's meaning not to change in the course of a few centuries. The most obvious examples of meaning shift occur when a word diverges - "glamour" and "grammar", for instance, diverged a few hundred years ago. Likewise "sodden" (thoroughly wet) is the modern form of the word "sodyn" (boiled). The idea of a word being eternal is absurd.
d) The meaning of the word 'tree' is located in the brains of all the people who understand the word, and everywhere that an explanation is recorded in any form. This is independent of actual trees.

12. "Atheism is a religion ... all beings who speak, somehow are religious beings - there's no way out of being a religious being."
Nonsense. I declare that there is no god - therefore I am an atheist. I also declare that there is no Tooth Fairy, but somehow that declaration isn't regarded as a religion. To reify a privative is to commit a basic logical fallacy - atheism is a religion in exactly the same way that phlogiston is a chemical element (ie. not at all).

13. "Non-being exists only in language ... language is the infection of non-being into the world"
Nonsense. Plenty of things don't exist, just like plenty of things exist. It's just a bit hard to point at something that doesn't exist.

14. "you don't need a creator, you don't need big daddy in the sky. You do need, though, to see beyond your eyes and to hear the word of being always held within the love of a vast unknown other"
Er... why is that, exactly? On what grounds am I supposed to imagine a "vast unknown other" which somehow loves me? That makes no sense at all.

15. "Could life have NOT emerged"
Of course. We don't know how likely abiogenesis was, but there's no reason to regard it as somehow inevitable in finite time.

16. "Could the universe have not become conscious of itself?"
Sure - it hasn't. The universe is not a conscious entity. We're conscious, but we're not the universe. We're not even aware of the entire universe.

17. "Is the mystery 'that we are and will remain' Sacred?"
'Sacred' is what I refer to as a transitive adjective - it has meaning only when it has an object. Specifically, to whom is something sacred? That supposed mystery is not 'sacred' to me, though it may be to Professoranton.

18. "Do we need science, and not experience, to reveal whether it is or is NOT Sacred?"
That's a personal decision for each person to make, and that decision has no importance outside that person's head.

19. "Life itself is a sacred gift ... given by an unknown other (not a god, not a being)"
"Sacred" we've dealt with. I personally do regard life as a sacred thing, but I don't expect anyone to care. The "unknown other" here is an absurd concept. How can something which is 'not a being' give a gift, let alone grant life? Meaningless mysticism.

20. "People need to accept death as a part of the price paid for life, and hardship, and difficulty."
Very philosophical, but not universal. I expect to die, but death is being pushed back by modern medicine. The idea of inevitable death already looks different with a life expectancy of 80 than it did a few generations ago when life expectancies were closer to 40, and it's hard to imagine how people might think about life and death when life expectancy reaches (for instance) 150.

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