Prometheus Unbound

Today in Salon, Camille Paglia, an atheist who obviously hasn’t been paying much serious attention to the post 9/11 New Atheist movement, stumbled upon Richard Dawkins talking about religion on NPR, and having never heard his voice before, she thought he sounded a bit, well, ridiculous:  

I was recently flicking my car radio dial and heard an affected British voice tinkling out on NPR. I assumed it was some fussy, gossipy opera expert fresh from London. To my astonishment, it was Richard Dawkins, the thrice-married emperor of contemporary atheists. I had never heard him speak, so it was a revelation. On science, Dawkins was spot on — lively and nimble. But on religion, his voice went “Psycho” weird (yes, Alfred Hitchcock) — as if he was channeling some old woman with whom he was in love-hate combat. I have no idea what ancient private dramas bubble beneath the surface there. As an atheist who respects and studies religion, I believe it is fair to ask what drives obsessive denigrators of religion. Neither extreme rationalism nor elite cynicism are adequate substitutes for faith, which fulfills a basic human need — which is why religion will continue to thrive in our war-torn world.

The thrice-married emperor of contemporary atheists? In Camille Paglia’s broadside of Dawkins I detect the distinctly catty suggestion that Dawkins’s religion bashing is psychosexual detritus from his wars and disappointments with ex-lovers. Not a nice innuendo, but I suppose that most religion obsessed atheists, however many times they’ve been married or discouraged in love, are, at bottom, brides left at the altar. God has disappointed and disillusioned them, and you never hear the end of it.

After Disneyland, the happiest place on Earth? Here’s the historian Will Durant, from his book The Reformation (1957, pp. 473-474), on what John Calvin’s Geneva was like in the 16th century:

Calvin himself, austere and severe, dreamed of a community so well regulated that its virtue would prove his theology, and would shame the Catholicism that had produced or tolerated the luxury and laxity of Rome. Discipline should be the backbone of personality, enabling it to rise out of the baseness of human nature to the erect stature of the self-conquered man. The clergy must lead by example as well as by precept; they may marry and beget, but they must abstain from hunting, gambling, feasting, commerce, and secular amusements, and accept annual visitation and moral scrutiny by their ecclesiastical superiors. To regulate lay conduct a system of domiciliary visits was established: one or another of the elders visited, yearly, each house in the quarter assigned to him, and questioned the occupants on all phases of their lives. Consistory and Council joined in the prohibition of gambling, card-playing, profanity, drunkenness, the frequenting of taverns, dancing (which was then enhanced by kisses and embraces), indecent or irreligious songs, excess in entertainment, extravagance in living, immodesty in dress. The allowable color and quantity of clothing, and the number of dishes permissable at a meal, were specified by law. Jewelry and lace were frowned upon. A woman was jailed for arranging her hair to an immoral height. Theatrical performances were limited to religious plays, and then these too were forbidden. Children were to be named not after saints in the Catholic calendar but preferably after Old Testament characters; an obstinate father served four days in prison for insisting on naming his son Claude instead of Abraham. Censorship of the press was taken over from Catholic and secular precedents, and enlarged (1560): books of erroneous religious doctrine, or of immoral tendency, were banned; Montaigne’s Essays  and Rousseau’s Emile  were later to fall under this proscription. To speak disrespectfully of Calvin or the clergy was a crime. A first violation of these ordinances was punished with a reprimand, further violation with fines, persistent violation with imprisonment or banishment. Fornication was to be punished with exile or drowning; adultery, blasphemy, or idolatry, with death. In one extraordinary instance a child was beheaded for striking its parents. In the years 1558-59 there were 414 prosecutions for moral offenses; between 1542 and 1564 there were seventy-six banishments and fifty-eight executions; the total population of Geneva was then about 20,000. As everywhere in the sixteenth century, torture was often used to obtain confessions or evidence.

Ah, the good old days! I’ll take Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia over John Calvin’s Geneva any day, thank you very much. But still, I bet that if you asked the average resident of Geneva at that time whether or not they were happy, my bet is that they would say: “On balance, yes.” Membership has its privileges. And there’s no fathoming the human heart and its willingness to exchange freedom for certainty and security. Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor reminds us of that, as does John Calvin (and as does the Taliban).

Here’s the Taliban:

And here’s a 16th century depiction of Calvinists engaged in an iconoclastic “cleansing” of a Catholic cathedral:

I’m kind of weirded out by people who express nostalgia for John Calvin, and call themselves admirers of his. I think it a useful correction to this nostalgia to actually recall what it was like, exactly, to live in John Calvin’s Geneva in the 16th century. Here’s the historian Will Durant (from his book, The Reformation, 1957, pp. 478-479) on an incident of high religious tension in the city:

On June 27, 1547, Calvin found attached to his pulpit a placard reading:

“Gross hypocrite! You and your companions will gain little by your pains. If you do not save yourselves by flights, nobody shall prevent your overthrow, and you will curse the hour when you left your monkery. . . . After people have suffered long they avenge themselves. . . . Take care that you are not served like M. Verle [who had been killed]. . . . We will not have so many masters. . . .”

Jacques Gruet, a leading Libertin, was arrested on suspicion of having written the placard; no proof was adduced. It was claimed that he had, some days previously, uttered threats against Calvin. In his room were found papers, allegedly in his handwriting, calling Calvin a haughty and ambitious hypocrite, and ridiculing the inspiration of the Scriptures and the immortality of the soul. He was tortured twice daily for thirty days until he confessed—we do not know how truthfully—that he had affixed the placard and conspired with French agents against Calvin and Geneva. On July 26, half dead, he was tied to a stake, his feet nailed to it, and his head was cut off.

You can’t turn the other cheek if you don’t have a head, can you? In any event, this is the kind of “George Bush” Christianity that John Calvin practiced. (Oh, maybe that’s what people mean when they say that they admire John Calvin. He was like George Bush. Okay then. Never mind.)

Something that I’ve noticed about Evangelical intellectual culture is a certain nostalgic fond spot for John Calvin. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga, for example, calls himself a Reformed Calvinist. But I think, before adopting John Calvin’s theology, that it might be useful to think about how, exactly, John Calvin’s beliefs played themselves out in the real world. In this regard I think it is fair to say that absolutely none of us would have wanted to live in John Calvin’s Geneva, or under John Calvin’s spiritual governance. John Calvin’s Geneva was a place where the mind of human beings was simply not free. John Calvin may have been a brilliant theologian, but his theology led him to the destruction of art, iconography, books—and, ultimately, people—both of male heretics competing with Calvin in the intellectual realm, and females who were supposedly indulging in “witchcraft.” It was, for example, routine for Calvinist city supervisors to do spot checks of people’s homes in Geneva, searching them for such things as dissenting religious books. In short, John Calvin’s world was an authoritarian world, and his religion was an authoritarian religion. Here, for example, is a 16th century depiction of iconoclastic Calvinists taking it upon themselves, in the name of Jesus (of all people!), to trash and “cleanse” a Catholic church:

Okay, Jesus cleansed a temple too, so maybe that’s not the fair contrast. But it’s hard to imagine how someone living in the 21st century could have any desire to revive John Calvin’s pre-Enlightenment ideology, or to build his or her own intellectual religious structure upon ideas that fit so comfortably with authoritarian aggression. Sometimes what people say they believe should be thought about in the light of what they actually do. It’s informative, and shouldn’t be too quickly decoupled. If, for example, it is informative to ask how the French Revolution, under the ideological direction of Robespierre, played out (as conservatives are inclined to do), it follows that it is also informative to ask how, exactly, it might have gone for a lesbian or religious dissenter trying to live and think and thrive in John Calvin’s Geneva.

If, for instance, someone were to say, with regard to Robespierre or Lenin, that—”Their ideas were good, but their practices accompanying them were flawed”—we might perhaps think that rather an odd position to take, and wonder if ideology and practice, especially in the cases of these two men, can be so easily unweaved. Likewise, I think that the same question can be fairly asked with regard to John Calvin. Those who would like to see John Calvin’s ideas and mindset find a revival in the 21st century might at least pause and ask the simple question: “How did all that go the first time around?”

On page 2 of A New Literary History of America (Harvard 2009) is an interesting account of what Christopher Columbus thought he had found when he explored the Venezuelan coast on his third voyage to what would come to be known as America. Columbus, when “he came across four great rivers gushing out into the sea” concluded that he “hadn’t found a new world . . . [but] the oldest one of all”: Eden!

According to Toby Lester, the author of the first essay in this volume:

The idea wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. The Bible placed the Terrestrial Paradise in the distant east, and most medieval maps placed it at the far-eastern edge of Asia. Humanity’s march west through space was also seen as a march west toward the end of time—an apocalyptic notion that medieval theologians had been bandying about for centuries.”

Imagine how Christopher Columbus’s head must have spun to think that he was probably looking into the watery river mouth of Eden, and that he had reached the circular culmination of space and time! God had apparently chosen Christopher Columbus (or so he imagined) to inhabit a very special place in human history, for Columbus seemed to be preparing the way for the End Times:

In his later years, Columbus imagined himself to be playing a starring role in this cosmic drama—a Messianic figure who, by carrying the Christian message across the ocean, was hastening the coming of the End of Days. He was no longer just Colombo or Columbus. He was also Christopher—that is, Christo-ferens, or “Christ bearer.” 

Heady stuff to imagine yourself in such dramatic historical terms, but I think this part of Columbus’s life has two cautionary elements in it:

1. concerning background knowledge; and
2. concerning associative intelligence

First, with regard to background knowledge: What is it that we think we know when we encounter new data? We may wildly misread things if we are not rigorously scrutinizing our presumed background knowledge (the things we think that we already know about the world). In this instance, Columbus had never applied sufficient scrutiny to his assumptions about the Bible. He took it for granted that the Bible contains infallible knowledge about the world’s past and its future, and he thus incorporated these assumptions into what he encountered in the present.

Second: associative intelligence (making connections between things). One of the glories of the human mind is its associative intelligence. It’s what, for example, makes poetry possible. “I measured out my life in coffee spoons” (T.S. Eliot). But what happens when the associative intelligence goes unchecked by empirical reality testing? Well, you start to get connections like these:

• I was born under the sign of Aries the Ram; therefore, I must like to butt heads with others!
• My kid was diagnosed with autism two months after getting her vaccinations; therefore, vaccinations must cause autism!
• I see four rivers entering the sea. Eden has four rivers. This must be Eden!
• God wanted my parents to name me “Christopher” because I am, in these End Times, the “bearer of Christ” to the last nations unexposed to the gospel.

Critical thinking lessons from Columbus’s experience: (1) in the face of new data and novel experiences, check your premises and background assumptions; and (2) exercise your associative intelligence, but also seek evidence for those associations. In the thrill of novel associations, keep your head about you.

If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, is faith the last refuge of a failed thesis?

Or might faith be that place where you reach the end of all that you can figure and do, and, in outrage at the apparently absurd universe, you nevertheless choose hope?

I’m a fan of David Berlinski, and if you live in the Los Angeles area, I notice that he will be speaking at the Beverly Hills Public Library on Tuesday of this week. Here’s the notice that I found:

Noted mathematician, philosopher, author, and senior fellow of the CSC, Dr. David Berlinski will be giving a lecture entitled:

An Agnostic Challenges Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists

Tuesday, October 27
7:30 PM
Beverly Hills Public Library
444 N Rexford Dr
Beverly Hills, CA

Admission: Free to the public
Parking: Free

And here’s more info.

Richard Dawkins has famously said, and on more than one occasion, that Darwin’s theory of evolution has made it possible for him to be, not just an atheist, but “an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

But what, exactly, does it mean to be “an intellectually fulfilled atheist”?

I would like to suggest this as a key element: symphonic harmony. Human beings love the feeling of balance and wholeness in their lives (as any perusal of, say, a health or yoga magazine attests). Perhaps this feeling has to do with our evolution. We feel anxious when the environment is ill-defined around us, and we feel safe and in control when we can account for what’s going on around us.

As a consequence, nobody likes to say, “I’m an atheist”, or “I’m a theist”, or “I believe in UFOs” even as they have things about that belief that they cannot account for. Thus to be not merely an atheist, or a theist, or a UFO believer, but an intellectually fulfilled atheist, or theist, or UFO believer, entails that one has some elegant and satisfying theory that accounts for your belief—something that makes sense of your affirmation. And so it is that:

• Atheists, as materialists, are anxious to account for all phenomena via materialist explanation
• Theists, as believers in a good God, are anxious to account, in some plausible way, for suffering in the world
• UFO enthusiasts, as believers in aliens, are anxious to account for alien absence (perhaps by positing an elaborate government coverup)

In other words, if you don’t have an elegant theory to account for your beliefs, you find yourself anxious and in cognitive dissonance. You either set certain things about your beliefs to the side and don’t deal with them—or even deny that your beliefs have any problems at all—or you seek out satisfying holistic explanations that will account for them to the minutest detail. This latter move can have pleasures all its own—the pleasures of anticipation or imminence (not to be confused with immanence). Something is about to be solved, and it is just around the corner:

• And so it is that atheists anticipate the advance of physics to account for the universe’s material existence out of nothing, and of the advance of neurobiology to account for the appearance of mind via matter
• Theists anticipate the soon coming of a revelation or “second coming” to resolve the perplexities of human suffering or purpose
• UFO enthusiasts anticipate the coming of whistle blowers with physical evidence, from within the government, who will reveal (for example) that at Roswell the bodies of aliens were recovered from UFO wreckage

In each case, there is the hope of a future discovery that will arrive, as it were, as a public revelation and vindication—a satisfying and visually stunning and elegant solution—readily apprehended—that will account for the current perplexities of those who are true believers. Thus, just as UFO believers and theists have cognitive dissonances that drive them into longings that extend into the future, so atheists have cognitive dissonances that make for atheist longings. Richard Dawkins is right that Darwin’s theory of evolution is intellectually satisfying. It’s elegant, it’s beautiful, and it sets in place a large piece of the materialist puzzle (“If there are no gods, where did life’s diversity come from?”). But atheism still has many loose ends that make it less than intellectually satisfying. Most obviously, we have yet to account satisfactorily, in materialist terms:

• for where the laws of physics have come from in the first place
• for how the laws of physics could make matter from nothing
• for where the first cells derived their information
• for how matter could possibly make minds
• for how determinate meat could imagine itself to have free will

Dawkins is right that, with regards to speciation, it is intellectually satisfying to be a materialist. But much of the rest of the atheist project is not wholly satisfying, and anticipates, in promissory form, new and elegant revelations.

In this sense, Dawkins, as a scientist who loves the elegance of structure, is different from some literary atheists of the past. Albert Camus, for example, as a literary stylist, loved elegance and structure, but did not expect it from his universe. Camus’s atheism entailed an acknowledgement that the universe is, at bottom, not a cosmos, but a chaos. The universe is, at some disturbing level, utterly contingent and absurd. Likewise, the human demands upon the universe that it match our desires for harmonic convergences with us is also absurd (at least according to Camus).

Put differently: Dawkins’s atheist vision is symphonic; Camus’s atheist vision is discordant. If you’re an atheist, do you embrace the symphonic or the discordant? Or something in between?:

Or is your atheism more like this?:

In the early 1960s, C.P. Snow (who was both a scientist and a novelist) famously asserted that there is a great (and he thought unnecessary and tragic) divide between the scientific sensibility and the literary sensibility. This divide, I would submit, is seen most obviously within atheism itself. But maybe it’s good that scientific and literary visions of atheism not converge too tightly. Might it be that this is a way to resist excess reduction and scientism?

One last quick thought: in explanatory terms, the left, historically, has had a tendency toward positing structural explanations of phenomena; the right, by contrast, has tended to posit telos—or conspiracies—as forms of explanation. So it is that the left might see the world’s economy in Marxist structural terms, and the right in terms of Illuminati conspiracies. I wonder if the “intellectually satisfying” aspects of atheism aren’t just additional manifestations of leftist sensibility generally—that there are structures as opposed to “big daddies” responsible for history. Likewise, theism’s underlying assumption (that there is ultimately a mind and not a structure deep beneath things) feeds into the conservative psyche rather nicely.

Just a thought.

I’m an agnostic who is not really all that sympatico with movement atheism, but earlier this month, I attended all of the Saturday sessions of the Atheist Alliance International (AAI) annual conference in Burbank, California. Most of the luminaries of the New Atheist movement (Dawkins, Dennett, Coyne, Shermer etc.) were in attendance, or speaking, at the conference, but the person who gave, by far, the most stimulating talk of the day was physicist Lawrence Krauss.

Krauss’s talk was so stimulating (it led off the morning) that the rest of the day felt like a tired and thoroughly predictable let down (at least for me). Krauss is clever and funny and thinks hard and honestly about the ontological mystery. He doesn’t think that the perplexing questions of the ultimate origins of things are silly or uninteresting to ponder. He’s one of those “I’m an atheist, but” kind of atheists who I deeply respect. Anyway, Krauss’s AAI conference talk has been posted to YouTube, and I’ve embedded it below. It is well worth an hour of your time.

And an LA Examiner report on the above talk is here.

Akin to the cooling of boiling water over time, physicist Brian Cox says that we are the things that young and hot “hydrogen atoms do” after they’ve cooled and aged over 13.7 billion years.

Isn’t that ridiculous? As hydrogen atoms cool and age, they make spaghetti in pots, write poems, fret over their sins, and (among a gazillion other weird things) take cats as pets! Where did this weird recipe and stove top that we’ve been left to cool on come from? Is there anybody stirring the pot? 

This whole talk by Brian Cox is great, but if you’re short on time at least let him tell you our contemporary creation story (at the 10:50 mark of this video clip):

Mathematician David Berlinski (from his new book of collected essays, The Deniable Darwin, p. 422):

At some time in the history of the universe, there were no human minds, and at some time later, there were. Within the blink of a cosmic eye, a universe in which all was chaos and void came to include hunches, beliefs sentiments, raw sensations, pains, emotions, wishes, ideas, images, inferences, the feel of rubber, Schadenfreude, and the taste of banana ice cream. A sense of surprise is surely in order. How did that get here?

The list is a bit Freudian at the end (rubber, echoes of Freud in Schadenfreude, and banana ice cream), but his point is well taken (pun intended, I suppose). How, exactly, did the mind get here from matter? Strange alchemy! Base matter turned to mental gold!

In other words, how is strict atheist materialism different from 16th century alchemy? What if mind can’t, in fact, be reduced to base matter or derived from base matter? Maybe the ontological mystery (the mystery of being) extends not just to matter but to mind. Maybe there are two irreducible things in the universe (matter and mind). At the very least (and given our current state of knowledge), the inference that mind might not derive from matter is not unreasonable, is it?

Is it?

I mean think about it. Who would have predicted (if anyone had been there) that the young and hot matter at the Big Bang would cool and congeal over time into, well, us? Isn’t that absurd? It’s like being told that hot water, on the way to cooling down and turning to ice, passes through a stage in which it loves the Beatles and the smell of coffee, and can talk about the plays of William Shakespeare with you at your kitchen table! Like the roiling water in a pot on your stove top, that hot thing at the Big Bang doesn’t appear that it would eventually do such ridiculous things. Matter isn’t like that. But here we are. Base metal turned to gold is a fancy that has nothing on what actually did happen. The cooling carbon “steam” from the stove tops of the stars cooled into us.

Ab. Surd.

Freddie, at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, is not a movement New Atheist. He’s just an atheist. And he likes it that way:

[T]here is an elementary consonance between evangelist religion and evangelist antitheism that I find inarguable, that both insist that their adherents have duties and responsibilities that are a product of their theological stance. I chafed early and often against the social expectations of atheism for a simple reason: I dislike being a foot soldier. I cannot work my mind to the headspace necessary to believe that emptiness insists that we must be conscripted into a grand cultural war. I have said before that the real benefit of being an atheist is that you never have to get up early to go to church or temple. I say that only partly in jest: to me, what makes atheism attractive as a practical matter is that it requires nothing of me.

And he makes a great observation concerning what atheism, when you look at it closely, is (and isn’t):

Atheism is not a project. It proceeds towards no goal. It involves no work. Atheism is absence, an emptiness and, often, a comfort with that emptiness. . . . There is a freedom that is breathtaking and terrible in spiritual and theological nihilism that I find singular. But it is not an experience I share with antitheists; they are too filled with their belief in being unfilled, too bent by the force of what they are rejecting to understand or enjoy the awful quiet of actual atheism.

I’m not sure that living in that empty space is tolerable for more than a very tiny ironic minority. History suggests that vacuums do not go long unfilled. Political religion or some other pseudo-religious activity fills the void. But I admire any atheist who finds a functional and happy path in the full terror of unblinkered nihilism. The Buddhist saints somehow manage it. And Camus managed it.

As an agnostic, I’m still trying to keep my options more open.

This looks good, and it’s hosted by a British scientist (Lord Robert Winston). Winston wrote a children’s book on evolution, and also claims to believe in God (whatever that means). In any case, here’s part 1 of 18:

If you believe in, say, the resurrection of Jesus or the historic existence of Cleopatra based on eyewitness testimony, why don’t you believe what these apparently sincere folks are saying as well? What makes some forms of eyewitness testimony more credible to you than others? Should we believe these people? Or shouldn’t we? Penn & Teller obviously have an opinion. What’s yours?

In the preface to Richard Dawkins’s book, Unweaving the Rainbow  (1998, xi), he writes:

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc  magic.

Too late. The universe starts with the tricked out, the ad hoc, the capricious. As the poet Charles Wright put it in his poem, “Sitting Outside at the End of Autumn” (1995):

Everything comes from something,

                                                  only something comes from nothing.

And read Dawkins’s quote again, this time very carefully. Don’t you detect the whiff of, well, the argument of the theologian concerning suffering?:

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc  magic.

In other words, notice that the quote, with very little tinkering, is in the form of a theological argument! Indeed, it is essentially the conclusion to the Book of Job! Watch again (with my two little additions in italics):

I believe that an orderly universe created by God, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc  magic (such as a universe that arrives by contingency, without purpose, out of nothing, then cobbles itself together blindly, by chance and natural selection).

Richard Dawkins imagines himself an atheist, but in the form of his argumentation here, he displays all the marks of someone who can’t quite let go of certain religious scaffoldings and ideas. Like the theist,

• Dawkins longs for an aesthetically “beautiful” and “wonderful” relation to the cosmos.
• Dawkins does not want a universe that is “capricious”, “ad hoc“, or “magical”, but one that is lawful and underlaid by an ultimately comprehensible order.
• Dawkins looks forward to a time when the existing appearances of incomprehensibility in the world will yield to the eschaton  of full comprehensibility.

Oh, and might I add that Dawkins writes his books for the purposes of persuasion and because he thinks that they serve to advance a moral position. That is, he treats human freedom and morality as if they are things of real value that actually exist (even as his materialist position insists that freedom and morality are illusory and contingent artifacts of more fundamental determinate processes, and without any objective content or ultimate warrant).

Can we say that the way Richard Dawkins has cobbled together his worldview (a bit of atheism here, a bit of theism there, and a whole lot of cognitive dissonance holding these divergent ideas together along the way) is just a bit, well, capricious?

Here’s Dawkin’s quote one more time:

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc  magic.

And Job said, Amen!

One of the narratives that atheists like to tell about themselves is this:

• We are the brave facers of the truth. There is no God, and death is the end of individual existence. We have reached conclusions that are unpleasant to many, but it is a mark of our adult maturity that we have done so. Difficult though it may be, we have not pushed compelling and converging lines of evidence away from our psyches. We are the purveyors of cool reason, and so emotionalists despise us.

By contrast, religious people (at least according to atheists) willfully distort the truth of things because they desperately want God to exist (that they might live forever). As an agnostic, I’m inclined to agree with atheists about this. Religious people are highly motivated by hope and fear, and their apologetic moves often come across (at least to me) as rationalizations designed to salvage relatively weak hypotheses.

Still, I have a question for atheists: Why do you imagine that you are not motivated to be an atheist? Do you really think that you have arrived at your own views as a result of the strict compulsions of reason alone? At some important level, obviously you want atheism to be true, right?

Jerry Coyne, at his blog, summarized Daniel Dennett’s talk this weekend at the big atheist convention ho-down in Burbank, California this weekend (and which I went to) thus:

Dan Dennett talked about interviews with active priests and ministers who are atheists, and also mounted a hilarious attack on theologians like Karen Armstrong, who mouth pious nonsense like, “God is the God behind God.” Dennett calls this kind of language a “deepity”: a statement that has two meanings, one of which is true but superficial, the other which sounds profound but is meaningless. His exemplar of a deepity is the statement “Love is just a word.” True, it’s a word like “cheeseburger,” but the supposed deeper sense is wrong: love is an emotion, a feeling, a condition, and not just a word in the dictionary. He gave several examples of other deepities from academic theologians; when you see these things laid out — ripped from their texts — in a Powerpoint slide, they make you realize how truly fatuous are the lucubrations of people like Armstrong, Eagleton, and Haught. Sarcasm will be the best weapon against this stuff.

And to what Coyne said, Andrew Sullivan today offered this tart take-down:

They’re really charming, aren’t they? It is as if everything arrogant about the academy and everything sneering about cable news culture is combined into one big snarky smugfest. Maybe these atheists will indeed help push back the fundamentalist right. Maybe they will remind people that between these atheist bigots and these fundamentalist bigots, the appeal of the Christianity of the Gospels shines like the sun.

Now, now, Andrew. Love thy nay bear.

Oh, and here’s a nay bear:

And here’s two more nay bears (Jerry Coyne and Russell Blackford at the Burbank atheist conference):

And who is thy nay bear?

I’m coining the term for anybody who puts up a big bear yawn toward things of first-rank importance to you (such as your belief or disbelief in God, or UFOs, or evolution, or Buddhism, or Obama, or whatever). The nay bear is rough with the things you hold dear, and steals your metaphorical loaves and fishes from the trunks of your pampered and polished ideological cars. It’s very important to (at least once in a while) listen to your nay bears, and not push them away all the time, and defame them. We all have our nay bears, and we might be in the role of somebody else’s nay bear, and all of our nay bears are telling us something.

So love your nay bears, even if they take your shirt. Or your fish. This is my evening sermon for the soul (especially my usually narrow shrew of a soul). Good night, nay bears. Good night, soul. Good night. Yawn.

The Atheist Alliance International Annual Convention, held this year in Burbank, California (at the Marriot Hotel Convention Center next to Bob Hope Airport), happened to be not too far from where I live, and so I went. Ironically, the Marriot Convention Center was, just two weeks prior, the host to a UFO convention. (I went to that convention also. See here.)

In any case, I’ll take you on a little photo tour of the event. Here’s the Convention Center from the outside:

As you can see, it’s not a terribly large complex. The room that the conference was held in has a maximum capacity of 800 people, and the event attracted perhaps 700 people. Not bad, but no speaker (except Richard Dawkins in the evening) managed to fill the room to the gills. By comparison, the UFO conference that I attended in the same building a few weeks previous drew somewhat fewer people (perhaps 300-400). So it might be inferred that, in Los Angeles, atheist culture is a bit more popular of a draw than UFO culture (though not by much). No doubt some megachurch within a couple of miles of the Marriot Hotel pulled in more people on Sunday morning (and by orders of magnitude) than Atheist Alliance International managed to draw over a whole weekend (and that even with top-rate scientists and intellectuals speaking, and Richard Dawkins heading the bill). Of course, donut shops also vastly outnumber bookstores in Los Angeles. Nobody ever said the world was particularly just. 

I like bumper stickers, and I noticed that the parking lot was giving off a nice Southern California liberal sympatico  vibe:

And here was a car parked at the conference that had Arizona license plates (which I do not show in the photograph):

And inside were atheist vendors selling their atheist wares. The vendor below was selling a combination of atheist titles and libertarian/Ayn Rand titles. Free market libertarians make a respectable showing among atheists. You might be looked upon askance if you go to a homeopath, but not if you’re into Ludwig Von Mises. Skeptic  magazine publisher, Michael Shermer (for example), seems to also be a Reason  magazine kind of atheist guy:

No, the dude with the beret isn’t Michael Shermer. Here’s Michael Shermer (giving an interview, perhaps to a podcaster, just outside of the conference building):

The Libertarian book stall had political competition, but it was weak. The Marxist left had a little table with “Power to the people!” and “Communism is wonderful!” book titles, but it was a small set up, and off in a low trafficked back corner, and looked lonely. Ironically, it was nearly the only place where you might find nonwhites at this “international” atheist conference. By the average age, affluence, ethnic, and gender makeup of the conference (more men than women), you might well have imagined that you had stumbled upon a conference of Republican activists. I thought it was ironic that the nearly all white and affluent crowd mouthing off about the evils of religion were being catered to all weekend by a coterie of working class Hispanics who, on Sunday, would no doubt be at Catholic Mass or in attendance at one of the local Protestant megachurches. As the workers moved about the conference hall serving up salmon, beef, or vegan dishes to the comfy attendees, the workers didn’t seem to be listening (or caring to listen) all that closely to what was being said from the stage. Oh, and there were lots of “Darwin fish” around:

And here was the Skeptic  magazine vendor area. I bought several DVDs, one of which was of a debate on the Anthropic Principle that I attended a dozen or so years ago at Cal Tech (where a lot of Skeptic  events have occurred in the past):

This woman’s name is Priscilla Herochik. She’s an attorney, and she wrote a humanist positive novel, and was selling it. I bought her book:

There were also young bohemian atheists, mostly Gothic in their dress style, selling t-shirts, necklaces and bumper stickers. They were wise in where they set up their tables and racks (next to the bathrooms). Older men. Enlarged prostates. Lots of toilet runs. Ka-ching! Here were some of the bumper stickers that they sold:

And here’s the necklaces that some of them had made by hand. They were $18 dollars. You gotta make a living, right?:

Okay, so that was outside the conference hall proper. What happened when you entered the inner sanctum? Here’s what that looked like:

And as you approached the screen, it was like entering the theater of Dionysus, with all the chief priests of atheism gathered at the front and center tables closest to the stage, and sitting together in a clubby way. The best tables were reserved for VIPs. Some people had VIP on their name cards. Perhaps they made big contributions to the event. The rest of us were losers. We were not very important people. This two-tier system was at work throughout the day (or you might think of it as a three tier system if you count the virtually all Hispanic conference staff). Whatever else atheism is, it’s not a critique of hierarchy. Hierarchical religion may be bad, but hierarchical irreligion is, well, natural. Every train needs a caboose. And you gotta network, right? Here’s biologist Jerry Coyne and philosopher Russell Blackford at the center front table closest to the screen:

Sure they’re happy! They’re right up front with all the cool people. Indeed, they are the cool people. Atheism is great! Just like high school. At supper time, when all the nonwhite hotel workers were moving around vigorously, I noticed that Michael Shermer and PZ Myers were sitting together also, chuckling it up. Seeing all this front and center social bonding, I couldn’t help but think of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. (Oh, so this is what the victorious revolution will look like!) And when you turn around at the charmed alpha-male center stage area, you might find yourself bumping into uber-atheist biologist Richard Dawkins, physicist Lawrence Krauss (who gave, by far, the most interesting talk of the weekend), and philosopher Daniel Dennett (I’ll avoid making any jokes about these three being one):

Krauss’s talk, by the way, was so intellectually stimulating (he talked about the multiverse hypothesis and the expansion of the universe, among other things) that, after he spoke in the morning, the rest of the talks on Saturday felt like let downs. Biologist Jerry Coyne, for example, said little that was fresh about evolution. (He rehearsed for a crowd that already believes in evolution the basic converging lines of evidence for evolution. Ho hum. It was like having a historian lay out the converging lines of evidence for the Holocaust to a gathering of Jews. We’re with you, rabbi. We get it.) Likewise, Daniel Dennett was not especially enlightening in his talk about the religious uses of language, and Richard Dawkins was, uncharacteristically, flat as a pancake, reading from his book, rehearsing his slides, and posting on the screen (too long) quotes from Darwin. By this point in the evening, some in the crowd seemed visibly distracted and bored. (In his defense, Dawkins had been introducing people on the stage all day, and he was probably tired).

In the late afternoon, there was an effort to break up all the inner sanctum intellectuality with some music. The organizers (or rather the Hispanic hotel workers) put out a wooden dance floor, and the guitarist below played some songs with atheist lyrics in them. Some people watched, but nobody danced. Too many ironists in the crowd to let go, I suppose:

After Dawkins’s talk ended around 9:30, I was pretty much done. I left a bit disappointed, and not really stimulated intellectually (as I had hoped for the day). Maybe Krauss’s unusually stimulating morning talk set too much expectation in me for how the rest of the day would play out. As I left, the dance floor was still not being danced upon. Perhaps people started dancing later in the evening, but I doubt it.

As an agnostic hanging out with committed atheists for the day, how did I feel? A bit like I needed a shower. I didn’t want to leave this way. From the start, I tried to stay Buddha-open to new ideas, compassion, and surprise. But (at least for me) there’s something dead about atheism that I can’t quite put my finger on. Perhaps it is its vampire like reductionisms (“we murder to dissect”), or its generally dismissive shrugs toward paradoxical and poetic language (Dennett called religious languages “deepities”. They appear deep, but don’t really say anything.) It feels like atheists (to echo the poet AR Ammons) walk the floor of existence even as they display little genuine astonishment that there is a floor to experience in the first place. Existence just is. It’s a quantum fluctuation. An inevitability. No big whoop. Now embrace the blind machine. I asked Dennett, over the lunch break, what he thought of qualia, and the best that I could get from him was: “Define qualia?” He knows what qualia are, and what I meant by the question, but he obviously didn’t care to deal with it. Qualia, he said, is “like God.” In other words, it’s another deepity for Dennett, something to shrug at, to pass over in silence. The ontological mystery, if spoken of at all, becomes just another function to deconstruct.

I drove home listening to my audio collection of poets reading poems. It was my way to detox. I might have danced.

I like these two segments from a long Zizek talk:

And: