A commenter at Uncommon Descent wrote
Keith, I am not convinced that you are an atheist. I believe that you are angry at God and suffer from cognitive dissonance. And to say that the evidence supports your materialist belief system is completely absurd!
I’ve seen versions of this “angry at God” accusation levelled at non-believers quite often and I wonder why those that use it think it makes sense.
The indomitable KeithS responds later in the same UD thread:
Okay, here’s some psychologizing for you guys:
You realize that atheists have good reasons for disbelieving in God and that they make good arguments to which you have no intelligent response. This makes you very anxious. In a vain attempt to lessen the anxiety, you try to convince yourselves that the atheist isn’t really an atheist, he’s just angry at God. That way you don’t have to take his arguments seriously. It’s much easier to write them off rather than acknowledge the painful truth: you cannot answer them, and your faith is irrational.
I’m not sure I agree with Keith on “…atheists have good reasons for disbelieving in God” and I would say myself that I have never had an inclination, need or desire to believe in “God” and thus never needed to convince myself that disbelief is a better option. I have never been a smoker. As a kid I tried to emulate others and puffed away but I couldn’t get past the point where addiction presumably kicks in. I have great respect for those who, having succumbed to addiction to nicotine, have been able later to kick the habit. Similarly, I can admire an ex-believer who has decided to quit. It must involve a great effort of will but at the same time I just can’t grasp the appeal of believing in the first place.
I’m sorry if the analogy regarding addiction is somewhat pejorative to people with religious convictions but I do find great difficulty in understanding the whole concept of “virtuoso believing“. I’m sure it involves emotion much more than reason. So while I’m puzzled that anyone could categorize an atheist as “angry at God” I can see why there is mutual incomprehension between believers and non-believers. Also being a non-smoker makes me less of a campaigner against smoking. As long as people don’t insist in blowing smoke in my face or that I should try this new/old brand of cigar, then I claim no right to stop other people from enjoying a quiet smoke.
I think there are one or two non-believers here. Is anyone angry at God?
Robert Byers,
Heh heh. Or Scotsman.
So, if you believe very strongly in god, you are in doubt. Desperation leads to clinging to anything.
Divorce is pretty unusual in my family. My parents were married for over 70 years. I’m approaching my 44th anniversary. Among my closest relatives — siblings and their children — there have been two ugly divorces in marriages with teenage children, where the parents were churchgoing evolution deniers.
Among the unchurched, zero. Among all my known relatives, there have been no arrests ever. Unless you count some Civil War draft dodgers.
I do not seek admiration for this. I simply have no desire to do anything that would hurt other people. I don’t know whether to attribute this to genes or to culture or to upbringing. I feel a bit like a skinny person who eats everything he wants.
I personally wonder if it’s any more possible to kick the smoking habit than to kick religious indoctrination. I speak as someone who smoked for over 30 years, then quit cold. I haven’t touched a cigarette for nearly 15 years, and I crave one every day, all day long. I don’t think this ever goes away. And like someone raised into a relgious faith from birth, I could relapse at any time. Hell, I smoke in my dreams!
Flint,
That’s an interesting thought. Most of the deconverts I know, including myself, tapered off religion gradually and never relapsed.
Maybe people who quit cold turkey, or have a “road from Damascus” experience, are more likely to relapse. I wonder if anyone has investigated that.
I could never get into either of ’em.
Flint,
I don’t know. I was pretty devout and faithful for a number of years when I was younger. I taught biblical readings, lead bible studies, prayed every day. But like Santa Clause, all that seens childish and silly to me now. It was never an addiction, so I have no craving for it. I don’t miss any of it (well…ok…the potluck dinners were pretty good) now. I can’t imagine what would cause me to “relapse”.
I think that many of us were “religious” simply to please our parents. For people like this, quitting religion is easy. It is natural as we get older to realize that your parents aren’t the infallible beings that you thought they were when you were young, and dependent on them.
But for those who bought into the narrative at an early age, I can see where it would be like an addiction. Rationally, you may come to conclude that it is all fiction, but in the back of your mind you wish it weren’t. After all, who wouldn’t want to live for ever?
I guess my dad might have fallen into the ‘Angry at God’ camp – although even he was really angry at doctrine. He had been a church-goer in late adolescence and early adulthood, but cites working as a nurse on a ward of congenital syphilitics as the final straw. “The sins of the fathers” he found obnoxious in that context.
Ironically, apologists might interpret his ‘failure’ to bring us up as Bible-believin’ Christians as the real paternal sin with pan-generational consequences – if a father turns away from God, his children will naturally suffer, yea unto the third or fourth generation, because he has withdrawn them from the Believers’ Club. Meh. I made my own mind up. So did my kids, one of whom is a practising Christian.
I saw a study once some years ago (don’t know if it’s been superseded by more recent investigations), that the correlation between religious activity/non-activity as a child and such activity/non-activity as an adult is fairly low. They DID find, however, a fairly high correlation among those who ARE active as adults between the particular church/temple/etc. one is engaged in as an adult and (if there WAS activity as a child) the particular church/etc. chosen. That is, if one is active both as a child and as an adult, there’s a good chance it will be in the same denomination. Otherwise, nothing much.
Hmm.
My mum would drag my brother and me off to evensong (the best thing about the event was its name) but my father never came to church. In our buttoned-up English way, these issues could not really be discussed. I suspect my Dad’s antithesis for the Church of England was to do with his father’s experience of World War I. My grandfather, who died in 1936 long before I was born, volunteered and went to France although he was 38 at the outbreak. He worked as head gardener for one Baron Crawshaw and I guess volunteering may have had a different interpretation in those circumstances.
This is anger at God:
The theory of relativity and the theory of evolution are rather less convincing ways of being mad at god, unless that’s what it takes to dismiss the arguments and evidence.
Glen Davidson
Allan Miller,
Allan,
Do you remind your son what an idiot you think he is?
Maybe his son isn’t much like the fanatical xtian loonies who post here.
phoodoo,
It’s my daughter. And where, in all that may or may not be holy, do you get the idea that I think Christians are idiots? I don’t think I have ever expressed that in anything I have ever posted online, nor do I think it privately. I actually take a bit of a stand on bigotry in any form. You, however, seem to just see a single ‘everyatheist’, and all are assumed guilty of the sins of some.
When we look at individuals rather than abstractions, things get complicated. Most of the people in my family have been churchgoers, but not proselytizers and not fundamentalists.
I have two close relatives, a brother and a nephew, who have allowed their extreme religion to ruin their relationships with friends and families. One is divorced and has seen nothing of his adult children for a couple of decades. One is about to be divorced and has lost all his friends.
Perhaps if religion did not exist, they would have found some other ism or ideology with which to justify or rationalize their behavior.
Let me recommend junkyard 747 maintenance theory. Really interesting theoretical discussions as well as hands-on empirical work. Best, while it’s clearly up and coming, there aren’t too many people into it yet.
petrushka,
I have a friend who was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, and whose sister left the church about 25 years ago. Her mother would have nothing further to do with her, and hence he lost contact too. He recently began to doubt the whole thing, and he too has left the church, and had a reconciliation with his sister. His relationship with his mother, I don’t know.
It just seems bizarre to me. I would no more lose contact with or stop loving my kids for their beliefs as I would for their sexual orientation or sporting allegiance. Although of course sexual orientation is another issue that causes severe difficulties for the fundamentalist parent.
Why do you assume every christian is like you?
Allan’s daughter surely understands the ToE…
Guillermoe,
Yep, she does 🙂 And not because I ever rammed it down her throat, any more than I taught her calculus or French. She’s studying medicine, and gets exasperated at her (very few) classmates who deny evolution. She sees it as deeply embedded in anatomy and physiology.
Allan Miller,
So you daughter believes that God created the world, created some living replicator, and then just let a process of bad copying do whatever it could. That it just so happened to create intelligent beings which then have a special relationship, a divine relationship with the creator, was an accident, and if it turned out that the winner of the evolution game was instead a grey toxic slime, the creator would have had that same relationship with it? He would have made a heaven for grey slime?
She believes something like this?
I would be surprised if her classmates don’t get exasperated at her.
Allan Miller,
It was not a declarative statement, it was a question. The rest doesn’t follow.
Don’t you believe God Almighty could create intelligent beings by means of a “process of bad copying”?
How do you know he care for the result of this process? How do you know we would mean more to him than the “grey toxic slime”? You assume too much..
We know the process of bad copying is real.. That’s for sure.
The point is not wether you should or should not believe. The point is you should not confuse belief with science. You should not misuse maths and statistics to “scentifically” support belief, either.
phoodoo,
Civilised people can live and let live. I have no problem with others having a different outlook on life, nor is it my business until thought becomes action that interferes with the lives of others.
phoodoo,
It was clearly a rhetorical question, and one you had no particular reason to ask me other than point-scoring, since I have never said that I think Christians are idiots. You might as well ask “do you remind your son you think he’s an ugly bastard?”, and then pretend it was a genuine question.
phoodoo,
Any cognitive dissonances inherent in the theistic evolution worldview are for theistic evolutionists to sort out, not me. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming, though I’m well aware you are not, and never will be, remotely whelmed.
My daughter’s religion is a comfort to her, and I love her, so that is pretty much the end of the matter. She finds no major conflict between science and religion. You evidently do, and your petulant portrayals of the evolutionary process betray a certain insecurity. If it’s a choice between the evidence and faith, the evidence has to go, and be mangled, misrepresented or denied as you see fit. It’s still there, though.
Incidentally, what’s ‘bad’ about the copying errors that lead to greater survival/reproduction? Natural selection eliminates the bad. Which is good.
I think phoodoo makes a good point above. That Allan thinks that the matter is not something to strain his relationship with his daughter with is reasonable, perhaps even admirable, but there certainly IS an apparent conflict between some sort of divine creation and evolutionary descent and maybe with the existence of evil in the world too. That’s largely why theists take the matter so seriously. Evolutionary theory is, at least apparently, a threat to their belief system. As they say in philosophy, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens, and the (again entirely defensible and understandable) fact that Allan doesn’t want to argue with his daughter about this is neither here nor there.
I have two daughters and they’re more important to me than any internet debate is ever likely to be….but I often think they’re full of shit.
Hi Allan, I think that the phrase “copying errors” has a lot to do with ID-creationists or anyone else seeing that what that phrase represents is “bad”. Scientists often use language that implies or strongly asserts that some things in the processes/events/results of evolution are bad, flawed, negative, mistakes, errors, and other such terms.
In my opinion, scientists should not use such terms. I don’t think that they’re scientifically accurate, and ID-creationists take advantage of the use of such terms in their twisted arguments against evolution. Even the word ‘mutation’ has a negative connotation to it, to most people, although I personally don’t see mutations as necessarily “bad”. I usually think of mutations as changes, alterations, or differences, especially when I’m thinking from strictly a scientific point of view. If I think with my ‘feelings’ I’m much more inclined to see some mutations as “bad” if they are the cause of disease and/or death.
walto,
The apparent conflict between evolution and theism is a problem of theists. As Alan said it’s up to them, as long as they don’t turn it into everybody else’s problem.
IDiots are not being judged here for their beliefs but for rejecting evidence and science. That’s one way to turn your conflict in a conflict for everyone else.
Will someone please tell me why my comments are held for moderation?
I have no idea why they are going into moderation. But I am approving them as soon as I notice, though I don’t always notice immediately. I’ll try to remember to check more often.
Last I checked, Bill Dembski is advancing an argument along the lines that the laws and constants of nature were set up by his god such that evolution is possible, and complex, intelligent life inevitable. In other words, evolution happened, through random mutations and all that, it’s just that the entire universe was engineered with this process in mind from the very beginning(constants and initial conditions + time, which his god presumably has an infinity of). This is his “search for a search” schtick. In Dembski’s argument, the fitness landscape had to have been set up(searched for, by god) such that a random search(mutation + natural selection) could traverse it and find peaks of functionality (complex phenotypes with high fitness).
I have to say, regardless of the merits of the argument, I find this picture of god who can set up the game from the beginning and let amazing stuff happen on it’s own, quite a lot more beautiful and awe-inspiring, than the idea of god as a cosmic lamp-genie who had to individually zip organisms, bacterial flagella and rare mutational combinations into existence, and constantly have to intervene and tweak it’s faulty creation all the time with magic and miracles. Sorry.
It’s amazing to me that you aren’t even aware of the arguments of one of the chief apologists for your position.
Absolutely. But phoodoo pointed out that, as this is (as you say) a problem for theists, it’s a problem for Allan’s daughter. Again, he may have laudable reasons for not wishing to take it up with her, and maybe it has a solution along the lines that rumraket suggests above–though, of course, the acceptability of any such solution will depend on the nature of the deity the theist is claiming exists–but either way, intellectual thickets don’t disappear because our kids happen to take a side in them.
I completely agree, however, that it’s no problem for non-theists.
Obviously its not an issue of Allan’s relationship with his daughter, I was simply commenting on the logic of one person’ belief compared to another.
As Allan said, his daughter gets exasperated with her classmates, to her illogical, beliefs about evolution, even though her beliefs are at least as illogical as anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution. But I am certainly not one who says one need have rational beliefs. One of the points of having a belief is that it is a belief, not a knowledge.
Allan, if as you say, you never hold others in contempt for their beliefs, that’s great. I suspect I could find posts of yours in the past which suggest otherwise, but it is not important enough to me to go searching for them. If they don’t exist, all the better.
I don’t know what Bill Dembskis beliefs are, but a central tenet of Christianity is that there is a special and divine relationship between man and God. I am not sure how anyone can square that with the notion of a random, unguided process, creating whatever happens to get lucky. Was the decision to have a relationship with man, before or after he allowed a runaway process to make anything, including nothing if that is what worked best? You are not saying he knew beforehand it would lead to a man are you? In that case it doesn’t sound like he started a random process. More like a guaranteed one.
I don’t think a grey slime could pray. It seems to require hands.
Your deity is weak. It cannot create a system that itself can create, rather it has to create a system then intervene in it to create what it wants to be created.
Your deity is weak.
Shit in one hand and pray with the other. See which fills up first.
A grey slime mould’s prayers are as effective as yours. Not. At. All.
The word is “understanding”. It’s “understanding” of evolution. Not “belief” in evolution.
Of course not. Understanding HAS TO BE rational. That’s why your lack of understanding – your denial of understanding – is unacceptably irrational.
Valid argument against ID. Not against evolution, which is knowledge.
Then, adjust your beliefs. Not the interpretation of objective evidence.
That decision is a belief. Believe what you want; as you said, doesn’t have to be rational.
Another belief. Believe what you want. Just don’t add twisted statistics to it and call it science. Above all, don’t assume the intentions of the god you imagine are something real and try to explain scientifically biodiversity from that point of view – which seems to be the reason of “specified” in specified complexity.
What a limited imagination.
You have, I think, only just registered (you are showing as having made three comments) and the first comment from any newly-registered member is held in moderation automatically. Approval of the first comment by an admin should allow all subsequent comments to appear immediately. Like Neil, I’ve had a look at your profile and permissions are the same as for all other subscribers so I hope all is OK now. I’m sure we can sort it if the problem persists. If Neil needed to approve more than one comment there may still be an issue.
Too bad for Christian amputees as well.
Guys, I think phoodoo enjoys being provocative and getting a rise out of you. Try and treat his comments like Kennedy treated Khrushchev’s telegram. 😉
Yes, that’s phoodoo’s job and it does it well. But, in it’s heart, phoodoo knows it’s just a way to distract phoodoo from what phoodoo knows is the real problem – phoodoo’s belief system is based on things phoodoo knows are unsupported by evidence and there’s enough of a scientist in there to know it and be worried by it.
So phoodoo comes here to project. It’s fine. I know the score, phoodoo knows the score (in phoodoo’s darkest dreams anyway).
phoodoo,
You suspect you could find posts that suggest … ? Go ahead, Captain Innuendo! I certainly don’t claim that my every utterance has been kind, and the internet is a bugger for preserving the hasty or regrettable.
But fundamentally, if I think someone’s an idiot, it’s because I think they themselves are an idiot, not the entire class they may represent. Idiocy does not correlate with religiosity, and, as I noted, I try to avoid judging people based upon labels, whether it be gender, colour, religion or whatever. I know some wonderful people, and some assholes, right across those lazy labels.
walto,
It’s not, to be honest, a subject that comes up very frequently! But we do discuss our worldviews, and science, from time to time. I say what I think, she says what she thinks … it’s not necessarily about changing minds. I have always encouraged them to think for themselves.
But anyway the connection between evolution and religion is not as clear-cut for me as it is for some, so it’s not a line I pursue very far. I’m not an atheist because of evolution, nor do I consider evolution true because I am an atheist.
Bottom line: evolution is the cornerstone of biology, and I’ve always been fascinated by biology. Religion? Meh. Never been that interested.
Is it illogical to consistently infer common descent wherever the same limitations of inheritance are found to be in effect, rather than to infer common descent and then to refuse to do so past an unmarked and indefinable point as so many IDists do?
OK, that explains it.
Glen Davidson
There are several possible conflicts between science.
On might be a conflict between religion and fact. A religious person might disagree on the cause of disease, on the shape of the earth, on the configuration of the solar system, and so forth. Science appears to have won over the majority of religious people on these facts.
Then there’s the layer of fact in which many religious people disagree with science. The age of the earth and the history of life. These are the usual topics of discussion on forums like this.
Then there’s a layer (which Gould might call an non overlapping domain) which does not lend itself to support or refutation by evidence. Such things as the existence or attributes of god. Also, we might include actions of god that in principle cannot be put to the test. Such things as the configuration of physical existence (Deism and the like). These are often discussed, but appear to be unresolvable.
If someone wants to believe in an invisible deity that can never be detected, I have nothing to say, except that it cannot change historical facts or make any difference to the methods or findings of science.
There is at least one more possible point of disagreement, and that would be claims that scriptural miracles are matters of fact. I would say that to the extent that claims are made regarding history, they need to be supported by evidence. To the extent that extraordinary claims are made, they need to be supported by extraordinary evidence.
petrushka,
“To the extent that extraordinary claims are made, they need to be supported by extraordinary evidence.”
I assume you mean aside from the claim that random copying errors have ever created complex novel functions.
Michael Behe, an ID advocate, and a bit more qualified than you, has no problem with copy errors accounting for new proteins and for the differences between related species.
Yes, like when Wikipedia dishonestly censors evidence to promote their worldview, and the evolutionary evangelists fight to keep discussions of the mechanisms and flaws of evolutionary theory out of public classrooms, so they keep our children dumb and uninformed.
I agree with you Alan, I hate that type of religious preaching also.
But what are you going to do, you can’t get rid of all the Jerry Coynes, and Richard Dawkins, and Larry Morans and Pz Meyers and Donald Pretheros and Eugenie Scotts and the other Talibans of the science world, who just can’t help trying to interfere in the lives of others. Its a disease I guess.
Phoodoo,all you have to do to win this is cite a genomic sequence that could not have arisen by copy errors, and show your math.