State of the Discussion

Atheists, (literalist) believers, and agnostics
all succumb to the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.
The fallacy brings forth an imaginary playing field,
where the atheists and believers take opposite sides
and the agnostics refuse to decide where to stand.

E.D. , hope you understand I am not calling you a fool personally :).

My point is that every one has only two rational positions: myth or nihilism. Hitchens and Dawkins preach nihilism, but in truth, it is aesthetically to disgusting for them to embrace, so they keep singing nonsensical words over Christian melodies.

E.D.:

Then why try?

As I think you implied above--to sell books, or, more creditably, to ensure these ideas get injected into the civil discourse.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease and empiricism hasn't been very squeaky these last fifty years or so, leaving the loud and persistent purveyors of metaphysical specualtion as a substitute for objective reality in control of the discourse.

The "New Atheists," as they're called, simply would never have broken through the media clutter without those aspects of their argument that you object to.

I think that your summary of Russell's teapot and the Spaghetti Monster illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the point those metaphors.

"Essentially, they claim that the likelihood of God is similar to the likelihood of a Flying Spaghetti Monster or an interstellar magical teapot orbiting the Earth."

It’s easy to point out the fundamental unlikeliness of things. There’s a story about a professor who stood up in front of his class one day and said, “Today I was walking and I saw a car with a license plate of ZZ9AAA. Can you believe it? How many different combinations of license plates are there, and I see the one that says ZZ9AAA? The odds are astronomical!” Anything can seem stupendously unlikely if you think about it in those terms.

But Russell’s teapot has absolutely nothing to do with probability, and everything to do with proof, and with burden of proof. Russell’s not saying that the teapot and a Christian God are equally likely (although in my opinion, the teapot might actually win out in that scenario); he’s saying that they both have about the same amount of concrete evidence to back them up. Probability doesn’t enter into it, and to describe the thought-experiments as you have is to completely alter the debate.

I will agree with you, if a bit reluctantly, that it’s more important to find a common ground upon which to talk to people about religion than it is to convince people of atheism’s correctness. I’m passionate about my own beliefs, and I think that atheism should be defended where it’s attacked and explained to those who are curious about it, but a lot of atheists take the next step and try to actively spread their beliefs. This, I think, is taking the worst elements of the religions that we decry, and moreover I don’t think it’s necessary. My own experience with atheism, and that of other atheists I’ve talked to or read about, is that we came to it because we were dissatisfied with the other options available, and this process is inevitably described as a natural, freeing one. I think that simply by virtue of our existence we gain converts, and when we are preachy, we only push them away.

I agree that this post was over-generalized and downright wrong in some places, including your follow-up comment that "I don’t mean to lambaste their body of work, just the work that tries to proselytize atheism. I’m an anti-missionary, no matter the faith."

First, I completely disagree that "We all believe what we believe, and no 300-page diatribe will change that, be it religious or atheistic or agnostic." Dawkins pushed me from indifferent deism to atheism, so he has had some effect on those already on the fence.

Second, the facet of Dawkins that pushed me over to atheism was NOT his arguments against God. He fully admits that the beginning of his book that you cannot disprove God - he just goes on to point out that an interactive God is very unlikely. But after dealing with that point, he goes on to describe the harm that theism can cause. That is the part of the book that really did it for me. As many of the atheists writers have pointed out at length, their biggest problem with religion is the form of thinking it requires. As you yourself put it, "people are religious because they require no proof to back their beliefs." This type of thinking has consequences - many of them pernicious. (Many of them good, but the writers argue that we could have the good without the bad.)

Don't take my word for it, look at the chapters in the books.

For the God Delusion, I count 2 of the 10 chapters that deal with argument for/against God's existence. (And the beginning of the book takes special care to define God as an interventionist God.)

Lets turn to Hitchens' God Is Not Great. By my count, only 1 of his 19 chapters focuses on arguments for/against God. The rest focus on the negative way that religion affects our lives here on earth.

You said, "What matters is how humans interact." I agree, and I expect the "atheist writers" do too.

Call me naive. I'd much prefer to lead by example. When all federally mandated programs are fully funded, when trade is balanced and debts have been paid, I'd be willing to re-look at intervention on an extremely limited level.

You folks are pretty quick with the posts around here! I have not been part of earlier conversations on this topic here at the site, so excuse me if I reiterate points made previously.

You are right E.D., in that interventionism is far from dead. While “neoconservative” has come to mean any position advocating interventionism, many of its critics are quick to realize that the United States still must use its military force overseas, both to protect its tangible interests and defend rights and liberty elsewhere. Francis Fukuyama has Realistic Wilsonianism, Robert Wright says Progressive Realism, John Hulsman argues for Ethical Realism. Some NeoCons have clarified their specific position in the face of recent changes, like Charles Krauthammer and his Democratic Realism. All of these arguments offer a different view of America’s foreign policy, but all of which make the case for interventionism in one form or another.

I find the isolationist argument Freddie used previously not representative of how intervention has operated throughout history. I recommend a book by Gary Bass titled “Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention.” He reminds us that many nations working for independence have been midwifed by foreign powers; critics of interventionism may wish to believe that national liberation movements achieved their ends without the “meddling” of another force in their affairs, but history tells a different narrative. The very existence of the United States was made possible by foreign European powers intervening in British affairs. Hitchens, reviewing the book wrote, “remember what most people forget: how much international humanitarian intervention the United States had required in order to get that far. Not all of the aid to the fledgling 13 colonies was entirely disinterested -- the French monarchy's revenge for its earlier defeats in North America being an obvious motive.” Freddie argued that interventionism has produced far more failures than successes; a dubious estimation, but one I am willing to accept in this discussion. Even if we grant interventionism will fail more often than it succeeds, have the successful cases justified the application of the principle as a legitimate prospect on the world stage?

None the less, even the most idealistic interventionist must recognize that over-extension is a reality, and that our ability to maintain long nation building operations will be limited in the coming years. Discussing the failures in Iraq and democracy promotion as a whole is worth having, but don’t fall into the naïve trap of believing the United States (or any world power) can plainly turn away from military intervention abroad.

I don't know, Bob. I think the whole "ownership-society" is problematic. Then again, I think the concept of single-family homes is problematic. I think the drift away from extended-family living is not the direction humanity was supposed to move. It creates undue burdens on workers, on the State, on the individual. Ironically, I just began Gladwell's Outliers, and there in the first chapter is at least a little validation for this point. Everything is bound to community, and yet we now do our best to tear away at that most essential fabric of society.

Was the world built to sustain homes for every family? Perhaps, but perhaps families were meant to work together, multi-generational efforts, to realize this. Now we all want everything.

There is a lot of interesting stuff here, and I tend to not be a big picture thinker, but I want to point out one quote to animate where I come from:

"Well, I am reminded of my teacher Shannon Stimson's lectures on early Victorian political economy. She noted that to the Victorians private charity should be ample (because that was what Jesus taught, and to keep the poor from starving in masses the streets) but never comprehensive, so that there would always be a few of the poor visibly starving in the streets, so that the poor would know that charity was not something they could count on, so that the poor had the proper incentive to work, to save, to stay married, to have children and bring them up properly. She tries hard to recover this mode of thought, in which the purpose of the economy is to create morally prudent servants who live in the Fear of the Lord. And her students--hedonists living in the California sun early in the 21st century--find it very strange: the purpose of the economy is obviously to enable people to realize their human potential and to satisfy their needs, wants, and dreams."
Brad Delong

I tend to discount the idea that conservatives (blanket USA term) want capitalism because it invokes security/stability/safety - it always struck me that that is more of a center-left line. The payoff for the right strikes me as a balance between individualism and the visible rewards/punishments for the quality of one's life/decisions.

The notion of capitalism acting as a self-goverence care-of-the-self mechanism is well-founded upon the early marriage of markets and conservativism. You can still hear it; people not rooting for its failure per se on the right, but nodding their heads at the unemployment numbers as if God's judgement has finally come down upon us (I'm looking at crunchy con survivalist types).

Now it seems like the bull has gotten out of the cage and is wrecking havoc among even those who were leading virtuous lives.

I agree, Freddie. Douthat and Salam are not always correct, I think, but their work on GNP and elsewhere is fantastic in that it is fresh, and new, and actually attempts to deal with the concept of governance and society rather than whatever it is the rest of the conservative movement is doing whilst twiddling its proverbial thumbs...and crying foul at any move by those "damned libruls!"

Sorry, this all reminded me of the opening lecture in my introduction to music composition class many moons ago. The professor decided to tell us about the career of a music composition major:
"You arrive and begin your studies. Either you got a head start in high school or take a few years in another major, but you are accepted into the music composition program. After four to five years, you get your bachelors degree in music composition.
"There is no work for you.
"So you go back to school and spend a few years until you achieve your masters degree in music composition.
"There is no work for you.
"So you go back to school and spend a few years until you get your doctorate in music composition.
"There is still no work for you.
"So you go back to school and get a job as a professor in order to teach other people to do the same thing you just did. Perhaps along the way you will write some pieces that people will enjoy and remember."

Let's not forget one of Freddie's original points, which is that people REALLY love doing what they get to do. I love doing chemistry every day, which is something you get to do (and do and do) in graduate school. Paul, I'm sure you loved learning how to act well...

But when you're asked to bear huge financial costs (anything over 50k aggregate, IMHO), you need to have a "Schumer box" of some sort to get informed consent.

I wonder if there is no more insidious example of this pyramid scheme idea than that of theatre/acting grad programs. There are few industries in which the supply so overwhelms the demand, and actors become a-dime-a-metric-ton, but still countless schools charge enormous tuitions to teach armies of young actors the finer points of their craft, all so they can graduate, starve, flood the marketplace, and then eventually do something else. I say this as one who abandoned work on an acting MFA, and I have never regretted it, though I certainly still bear the debt of that one year.

Speaking for the scientists here, you liberal arts types get screwed. The dirty little secret of graduate school in the sciences is that you get paid to do it (tuition + stipend). Sure, it's a pittance ($15-25K), but you'll have a car, roommate and you'll eat more ramen and less meat than you'd like, but you can live on it and you won't accumulate massive piles of debt like law students.

(I took out a couple of student loans in grad school (~$22K), but that was basically for quality of life, not actual tuition/food, etc.)

Once you leave grad school, you can either go get a job (much better money, but a tough time finding a job these days) or you can go for a postdoc. The physicists and the chemists have been better at clearing out their backlogs of postdocs and the like than the biologists, who toil for years without finding jobs in either academia or industry. You can't blame it on academia, totally -- it's the industrial job market that just can't absorb the new entry-level folks.

I've always worried about academia basically being a pyramid scheme, where folks are recruited to teach students. What will the students do when they've graduated? Why, teach, of course! Who will they teach? Why, students, of course...