Here's an interesting interview with Michael Shermer, talking about atheism, evolution and the theory of "intelligent design", why religion should not be enshrined in American law, and much else besides.
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/08/23/shermer/
Here are a few excepts:
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Why do people fear [the theory of evolution]?
They've been sold a bill of goods by people who like the warfare model of science and religion, particularly fundamentalists and militant atheists. Both sides want to force a choice and debunk the other side. But it need not be so. It's an incorrect interpretation promoted by extremists. The tendency is for liberals to embrace science and conservatives to mistrust it. Conservatives like technology but tend to be leery about science because it threatens their religions. They fear the Darwinian worldview is the liberal worldview, which says that if there is no God, there is no absolute right and wrong. And without an Archimedean point outside of ourselves that says this is right or wrong, then anything goes, there's no basis for morality. Therefore America will go to hell in a moral handbasket.
...
Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, recently told Salon that he believes in God, the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus. "If you believe in God," Collins said, "and if God is more than nature, then there's no reason that God could not stage an invasion into the natural world, which -- to our limited perspective -- would appear to be a miracle."
What does he mean by miracle? If God is intervening into our world, he must be doing so in some measurable way. That's what we do with science. We measure. OK, Francis, where's your data? There was just a big study done on prayer and healing. If praying to God is supposed to heal people, this was the best, most rigorous study ever done, conducted by a world-class scientist who believed he would find a positive result of praying. Here's what he found: zip, nada, nothing.
So, OK, Francis, what else have you got? The virgin birth? I mean, come on. The resurrection? Now we're talking about mythic events, we're not talking about science. What he's doing is rehashing old theological arguments that have been hashed out by evangelicals for a long time. The bit [from C.S. Lewis] that Jesus can't have been a liar or a lunatic and so therefore he's the Lord? That's not science, that's creating straw men you can knock down to leave the one standing you already believe in. It's an example of the hindsight bias we're all susceptible to. We've already made a decision and then we go back and justify it. Scientists like Collins are just particularly good at it.
...
What's your best answer for why there is no God?
It's not why there is no God, it's why there's not compelling evidence to believe in God. That's a better way to put it. And from my perspective, it's just not there for me. With training in science, I have high standards of evidence. If you said God is real, and you sent your evidence to the journals Science or Nature for publication, you'd be laughed out of the room; you wouldn't get past the first reviewer.
On the other side, the best evidence that there probably isn't a God is that belief in God is so deeply culturally embedded. When you study world religions, it's obvious that, throughout time, all of these different people are making up their own stories about God. If you lived 1,000 years ago, hardly anybody would be a Christian. If you were born in India, you'd likely be a Hindu. What does that tell you? From a Christian perspective, it means we need to get more missionaries over there to tell them the truth! From an anthropological perspective, it's another case. Christians today might say, I don't believe in Zeus, that was a silly superstition. Yet for many people that was a real god.
So it turns out there are 10,000 gods and yet only one right one. That means we're all atheists on 9,999 gods. The only difference between me and the believers is I'm an atheist on one more god.
...
Earlier this summer, George Gilder, the supply-side economist and guiding light to the techno-libertarian crowd, wrote an essay in National Review. He's a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, the foundation, as you know, that promotes intelligent design. In the essay, "Evolution and Me," he argues that physics and chemistry will never yield insight into the origins of life or consciousness. He says complex life results from a preceding intelligence. He's pretty hard on you Darwinists. He writes, "As an all-purpose tool of reductionism that said whatever survives is, in some way, normative, Darwinism could inspire almost any modern movement, from the eugenic furies of Nazism to the feminist crusades of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood."
That's completely absurd. He's listing all the liberal issues and wants us to see them as fascism. That's the typical right-wing response. What a political or ideological or racist movement does with a scientific theory is quite independent of the scientists. It's hardly fair to blame Gutenberg for the printing press that allowed "Mein Kampf" to be distributed. Science is just a tool, a way of understanding the natural world. We've got to get past this idea that science is a thing. It isn't a thing like religion is a thing or a political party is a thing. It's true that scientists have clubs. They have banners and meetings and they drink beer together. But science is just a method, a way of answering questions. It's a verb not a noun.
...
Intelligent design [ID] boosters say that if life only develops by random chance, as Darwinists say, then we're living meaningless lives.
Right, that's the moral meme. But they're confusing human meaning with natural meaning. There is no natural meaning in the universe. Nobody, Christian or otherwise, would look at a star and go, What's the meaning of that? It doesn't mean anything. It's a bunch of atoms. Believers and non-believers alike are comfortable saying human life has meaning because we make it so. That goes for Rick Warren and Dr. Phil. They say, hey, look, man, you got to go out there and do it yourself. You got to volunteer and help the poor. We give our life meaning by being helpful and sociable.
Well, that's Darwinian. We evolved as a social primate species in which we had to cooperate to get along. It's not random, there are parameters defined by our own human nature. If these guys want to say, well, that's how God did it, OK, that's fine. But let's keep studying it scientifically to understand why that would have come about through natural forces.
In the end, you don't need a top-down entity to give life meaning. If anything, if nobody is out there, it is much more important to find meaning ourselves. Instead of this world being a mere staging for the next world of eternity -- meaning it doesn't really matter what we do now -- it's better to realize there is no eternity, that this is it. In that case, we better be careful what we do, make our choices consciously, treat people kindly and be moral because this life is what really counts.
Stephen Meyer, one of the vice presidents of the Discovery Institute, says, "Contrary to media reports, intelligent design is not a religious-based idea but instead an evidence-based scientific theory." You write in "Why Darwin Matters" that the "veneer of science in ID theory is there purposefully to cover up the religious agenda." How do you know that?
Because I asked them and they told me. I know these guys. I have debated Meyer at conferences and gone out to beers with William Dembski, another major I.D. theorist. They're all evangelical born-again Christians. They all believe in Christ as their savior. They believed it before they got into all this stuff. I've asked them that if the main tenets of intelligent design turned out to be false, would they then give up their belief in Christ? No, they say. And that's because they believe in Christ for reasons that have nothing to do with their theory.
So what's the real agenda of I.D.?
They want the Judeo-Christian worldview accepted into American public life as policy. But the First Amendment says you're not supposed to do that. America is based on a diversity of beliefs and was founded on the principle of religious freedom. The conservatives want to blend public life with private life. But religion is private. It's nobody's business. Politicians have to announce they believe in God, and God bless America. But religion as public policy leads to a reduction of liberty and freedom for those who don't believe. It makes it harder for us to express our own beliefs without fear of condemnation.
Let's say that we passed legislation that requires the teaching of one dominant religion in public schools, which right now is Judeo-Christian. Hooray! Everybody's happy. Now let's say that Islam is the dominant religion 500 years from now. It most likely will be Europe. You still want that law on the books? Girls in public schools will have to wear burqas and, in fact, there will be no education for them after sixth grade. You still want the dominant religion legalized in America? No way!
--------------------
Comments?
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/08/23/shermer/
Here are a few excepts:
-----------------------
Why do people fear [the theory of evolution]?
They've been sold a bill of goods by people who like the warfare model of science and religion, particularly fundamentalists and militant atheists. Both sides want to force a choice and debunk the other side. But it need not be so. It's an incorrect interpretation promoted by extremists. The tendency is for liberals to embrace science and conservatives to mistrust it. Conservatives like technology but tend to be leery about science because it threatens their religions. They fear the Darwinian worldview is the liberal worldview, which says that if there is no God, there is no absolute right and wrong. And without an Archimedean point outside of ourselves that says this is right or wrong, then anything goes, there's no basis for morality. Therefore America will go to hell in a moral handbasket.
...
Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, recently told Salon that he believes in God, the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus. "If you believe in God," Collins said, "and if God is more than nature, then there's no reason that God could not stage an invasion into the natural world, which -- to our limited perspective -- would appear to be a miracle."
What does he mean by miracle? If God is intervening into our world, he must be doing so in some measurable way. That's what we do with science. We measure. OK, Francis, where's your data? There was just a big study done on prayer and healing. If praying to God is supposed to heal people, this was the best, most rigorous study ever done, conducted by a world-class scientist who believed he would find a positive result of praying. Here's what he found: zip, nada, nothing.
So, OK, Francis, what else have you got? The virgin birth? I mean, come on. The resurrection? Now we're talking about mythic events, we're not talking about science. What he's doing is rehashing old theological arguments that have been hashed out by evangelicals for a long time. The bit [from C.S. Lewis] that Jesus can't have been a liar or a lunatic and so therefore he's the Lord? That's not science, that's creating straw men you can knock down to leave the one standing you already believe in. It's an example of the hindsight bias we're all susceptible to. We've already made a decision and then we go back and justify it. Scientists like Collins are just particularly good at it.
...
What's your best answer for why there is no God?
It's not why there is no God, it's why there's not compelling evidence to believe in God. That's a better way to put it. And from my perspective, it's just not there for me. With training in science, I have high standards of evidence. If you said God is real, and you sent your evidence to the journals Science or Nature for publication, you'd be laughed out of the room; you wouldn't get past the first reviewer.
On the other side, the best evidence that there probably isn't a God is that belief in God is so deeply culturally embedded. When you study world religions, it's obvious that, throughout time, all of these different people are making up their own stories about God. If you lived 1,000 years ago, hardly anybody would be a Christian. If you were born in India, you'd likely be a Hindu. What does that tell you? From a Christian perspective, it means we need to get more missionaries over there to tell them the truth! From an anthropological perspective, it's another case. Christians today might say, I don't believe in Zeus, that was a silly superstition. Yet for many people that was a real god.
So it turns out there are 10,000 gods and yet only one right one. That means we're all atheists on 9,999 gods. The only difference between me and the believers is I'm an atheist on one more god.
...
Earlier this summer, George Gilder, the supply-side economist and guiding light to the techno-libertarian crowd, wrote an essay in National Review. He's a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, the foundation, as you know, that promotes intelligent design. In the essay, "Evolution and Me," he argues that physics and chemistry will never yield insight into the origins of life or consciousness. He says complex life results from a preceding intelligence. He's pretty hard on you Darwinists. He writes, "As an all-purpose tool of reductionism that said whatever survives is, in some way, normative, Darwinism could inspire almost any modern movement, from the eugenic furies of Nazism to the feminist crusades of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood."
That's completely absurd. He's listing all the liberal issues and wants us to see them as fascism. That's the typical right-wing response. What a political or ideological or racist movement does with a scientific theory is quite independent of the scientists. It's hardly fair to blame Gutenberg for the printing press that allowed "Mein Kampf" to be distributed. Science is just a tool, a way of understanding the natural world. We've got to get past this idea that science is a thing. It isn't a thing like religion is a thing or a political party is a thing. It's true that scientists have clubs. They have banners and meetings and they drink beer together. But science is just a method, a way of answering questions. It's a verb not a noun.
...
Intelligent design [ID] boosters say that if life only develops by random chance, as Darwinists say, then we're living meaningless lives.
Right, that's the moral meme. But they're confusing human meaning with natural meaning. There is no natural meaning in the universe. Nobody, Christian or otherwise, would look at a star and go, What's the meaning of that? It doesn't mean anything. It's a bunch of atoms. Believers and non-believers alike are comfortable saying human life has meaning because we make it so. That goes for Rick Warren and Dr. Phil. They say, hey, look, man, you got to go out there and do it yourself. You got to volunteer and help the poor. We give our life meaning by being helpful and sociable.
Well, that's Darwinian. We evolved as a social primate species in which we had to cooperate to get along. It's not random, there are parameters defined by our own human nature. If these guys want to say, well, that's how God did it, OK, that's fine. But let's keep studying it scientifically to understand why that would have come about through natural forces.
In the end, you don't need a top-down entity to give life meaning. If anything, if nobody is out there, it is much more important to find meaning ourselves. Instead of this world being a mere staging for the next world of eternity -- meaning it doesn't really matter what we do now -- it's better to realize there is no eternity, that this is it. In that case, we better be careful what we do, make our choices consciously, treat people kindly and be moral because this life is what really counts.
Stephen Meyer, one of the vice presidents of the Discovery Institute, says, "Contrary to media reports, intelligent design is not a religious-based idea but instead an evidence-based scientific theory." You write in "Why Darwin Matters" that the "veneer of science in ID theory is there purposefully to cover up the religious agenda." How do you know that?
Because I asked them and they told me. I know these guys. I have debated Meyer at conferences and gone out to beers with William Dembski, another major I.D. theorist. They're all evangelical born-again Christians. They all believe in Christ as their savior. They believed it before they got into all this stuff. I've asked them that if the main tenets of intelligent design turned out to be false, would they then give up their belief in Christ? No, they say. And that's because they believe in Christ for reasons that have nothing to do with their theory.
So what's the real agenda of I.D.?
They want the Judeo-Christian worldview accepted into American public life as policy. But the First Amendment says you're not supposed to do that. America is based on a diversity of beliefs and was founded on the principle of religious freedom. The conservatives want to blend public life with private life. But religion is private. It's nobody's business. Politicians have to announce they believe in God, and God bless America. But religion as public policy leads to a reduction of liberty and freedom for those who don't believe. It makes it harder for us to express our own beliefs without fear of condemnation.
Let's say that we passed legislation that requires the teaching of one dominant religion in public schools, which right now is Judeo-Christian. Hooray! Everybody's happy. Now let's say that Islam is the dominant religion 500 years from now. It most likely will be Europe. You still want that law on the books? Girls in public schools will have to wear burqas and, in fact, there will be no education for them after sixth grade. You still want the dominant religion legalized in America? No way!
--------------------
Comments?
