Sunday, February 10, 2008

Book Selection of the Month: "The Irrational Atheist" by Vox Day

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ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (Two of Four), February 2008: The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens by Vox Day

Vox Day (Christian, conservative columnist, videogame designer, electronica composer) is in agreement with me on one thing, and that is that in some sense there isn’t much to say about atheism. There is no God, and life goes on. End of story. That’s why I don’t normally blog about atheism (this “Month Without God” is special) nor seek out local atheist clubs or Godless community groups or what have you — to my mind, that’d be a bit like saying that my friends and I are bound together by our common belief that there isn’t a tenth planet named Gybrat. Who cares?

Further, I am always wary of people who want to pack a broad cultural agenda into a small philosophical compartment, so I would never insist that there is a distinctly atheist brand of ethical thinking, aesthetics, or attitude — just as libertarians, whose philosophical common ground is merely the belief that markets work and government doesn’t, should be wary of anyone claiming that there’s a definitive libertarian lifestyle or artistic mode (or theology, for that matter). Anyone who asks me what “the” atheist moral code will be or how atheists shall spend their Sunday mornings is barking up the wrong tree — like someone who demands to know how I expect him to find water underground if I insist that divining rods don’t work — though I’m certainly happy to make recommendations based on other considerations having nothing to do with the existence or non-existence of God, namely utilitarianism.

Day is inclined to see the recent crop of prominent proselytizers for atheism — Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Michel Onfray — as people who “protest too much.” If there’s nothing to atheism proper except an absence, why do these people have to go on about it so much? Day has decided to fight back.

He is annoyed by, as he puts it (in words that I must confess have come almost verbatim out of my own mouth at times), Harris-style atheists’ claim “that Man is on the verge of vanishing in nuclear fire unless billions of idiots can be forcibly stripped of their belief in nonexistent sky fairies.”

•••

After some initial insulting of atheists, Day makes some powerful, damning points about the stats on people murdered by atheists vs. people murdered by religion. One’s impression of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris — who rely on claims of religion’s murderous tendencies more than I realized — must be diminished (I should confess I have only read Onfray’s atheist book but have seen Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris speak in the past two years, and they’re good enough to be preachers). Still, there is no God to be seen, and Day wisely says the book’s goal isn’t to convince you there is one, only that the recent crop of atheist authors make bad arguments.

He also makes the powerful and fair point — based largely on his gamer-spawned knowledge of military history — that only about 1% of wars have in fact been attributed to religious motives and, perhaps most damning of all, argues that the Hitchens/Harris/Onfray tactic of shunting 100 million nominally-atheist murders at the hands of communism over into the religion column by declaring communism a sort of “secular faith” is bogus. Fair enough. (He conveniently totes up the number of people killed by avowedly atheist regimes in tabular form.)

Of course, Day sometimes pulls semantic fast ones analogous to calling communism a religion, as when he lumps “Low Church” atheists (that is, people who simply describe themselves as unaffiliated with a church or religion in surveys without actually calling themselves atheists — people who I’d say are more likely “those too apathetic to care about anything including religion” rather than true atheists) in with atheists proper in order to shoot down a stat from the UK showing atheists are far more well-behaved and law-abiding than the religious. Lump in those who fail to call themselves atheists but also fail to attend church or affiliate with any particular religion, and the crime stats suddenly skyrocket. But so what? Sounds less like an indictment of atheism and more like evidence that religions can’t hold onto their flocks (likewise, atheism cannot be blamed for teens turning to Satanism and engaging in bad behavior as a result — it wasn’t atheism that taught them they had to choose between Jesus and Satan, so in some sense there’s nothing in the world more Christian than Satanism).

More to the point, the poorly-behaved unchurched remind me of the stats showing that church attendance itself is correlated with good behavior — but that’s no surprise: I would hardly expect someone prone to mugging people to be a stickler for punctuality, friendly social activity, or weekly moral lectures, whether divinely inspired or purely secular (as it happens, the Ethical Culture Society building in New York City was host to the Harris speech and one of the Hitchens appearances I saw and was also the site of the Christian services I briefly attended after being talked into accompanying my Christian then-girlfriend, Dawn Eden — and I doubt too many of the attentive, well-behaved audience members at any of those events were heroin-addicted burglars).

•••

It is interesting and a bit alarming that for all Day’s jabs at Bush and the Iraq War throughout the book, he actually recommends the Crusades as a model for Western survival, saying (oddly for a libertarian, as Day turns out to be) that democracy, secularism, and material wellbeing are weak things to oppose to jihad and that the West must instead recognize that it faces the same choice that it did 1,000 years ago: the crescent or the cross. Jesus, I hope not.

He’s more convincing pointing out (again, in a delightfully rational-looking tabular form) the huge numbers of people killed in various nominally-atheist historical actions compared to the trifling number killed, for instance, by the Inquisition (the latter being only about three per year — tragic though any death is — or roughly 1% of those put on trial), primarily for falsely claiming to be Christian converts rather than for mere unbelief itself. The Inquisition had no authority over professed Jews or Muslims and followed courtroom procedures that were very advanced and civil by the standards of the day, which, remember, was not so far removed historically from the era of trial by combat and other barbarisms, as my historian friend Christine Caldwell Ames can explain, delighting and appalling listeners with her explanation of the Inquisition’s forgotten good points, not to mention its sado-masochistic impulses, depending on what sort of party crowd she’s talking to.

Day does us all a service by exposing as false some of the glib slogans of atheism, such as “religion is the cause of most wars,” but he is himself so vituperative that at one point it’s as if he literally can’t think of any words damning enough to direct at his enemies (a bit of a relief) and simply lists — in tabular form again — dozens of statements from Hitchens’ book that Day considers self-evidently absurd, though I actually found most of these statements to be among the more reasonable ones Day dissects…which leaves me suspecting that Hitchens in his own words would not seem quite as absurd as he does when paraphrased by Day (hardly a surprise).

One of Day’s strangest point-missing arguments is his criticism of atheists’ One Less God argument. This is the argument that since (most) religious people don’t believe in Zeus, Odin, etc., they are already well on the way to atheism and have implicitly accepted a certain amount of skepticism about supernatural claims — they just need to go one God farther in their skepticism to arrive at the intellectual consistency of the atheist. This actually seems like a pretty solid point to me, but Day’s bizarre, off-target response is to point out that Christians do not believe in just one more supernatural being than atheists — they believe in multiple supernatural beings, including God and Satan.

•••

Day is at his best when he avoids the philosophical and semantic arguments, where he tends to get tripped up, and sticks to the practical ones about religious vs. secular human behavior. He makes the interesting point, for instance, that if the possibility of nuclear war with Iran (or nuclear terrorism) is one of the chief pieces of evidence that religion is dangerous, surely those dangers could be used as arguments against science as well. Religion has existed for thousands of years without destroying the planet, observes Day, yet science risks killing us all after a mere three centuries on the scene. (This argument is not so different from the concessions I make to cautious Luddites in my article on nanotech in the March issue of Reason.)

But then, the cure for such problems as mass-murder by the state and acts of terrorism is not necessarily religion or Luddism — as a libertarian like Day should know — but something more akin to the pragmatic utilitarianism that he repeatedly dismisses. Not all atheists are communists, just as not all religious people are terrorists. Instead of arguing over secondary cultural characteristics when trying to prevent slaughter, why not just stick to condemning the slaughter directly, promoting an awareness of and aversion to human suffering?

But hey, such moral concerns are precisely why I’m still something of a conservative — even, by some (non-statist) measures a moderate social conservative — instead of a left-libertarian. And why I’ve even been expressing my sympathy for the students of Leo Strauss (who feared that if intellectuals let it be known there’s no God, there’d be social chaos) for twenty years now and picked Strauss as the first author praised on ToddSeavey.com, lest anyone think I’m oblivious to the immense moral stakes involved here.

If one insists on trying to tote up the social effects of religion vs. secularism, though, it must be admitted that no matter how good religion’s track record arguably is so far, the present-day situation involving Iran and al Qaeda has to weigh into the calculus. I for one do not trust divinely-inspired mullahs to be the peacekeepers of the new era. Nor, it seems, does Day, since he admits Islam is the cause of a hugely disproportionate share of violence and ethnic conflict around the globe. All it takes is one nuke going off in New York or London to skew his stats back in a pro-secularist direction, so I for one would like to see theism defused (so to speak) before it comes to that.

But again, I think Day should know, as a libertarian, that his secular political philosophy — which is also mine — is a better guarantor of respect for rights than people’s notions about the grand structure of the cosmos. If the New Atheists and I must concede that a religionist like Day can be respectful of people’s rights, Day must concede that I can be — and furthermore, that this calls into question Day’s repetition of the common religious assertion that without God there can be no basis for moral judgments.

Does Day really behave well only to avoid Hell? Somehow, I find myself thinking too highly of him to believe that, but maybe he really is a barely-restrained monster. I, by contrast, am a nice guy, and not because I think God’s watching. Interestingly, and contrary to the thinking of many Christians, Day claims that motives are irrelevant and that only actions matter — and were he a utilitarian, I might say he was being coherent. Presumably, though, he thinks God judges character, not just utilitarian outcomes — as would any good Aristotelian concerned with predicting people’s future actions, of course. I don’t see how, given his philosophical beliefs, Day can say only actions matter, though I think I know why he says this: having argued forcefully that (as a practical matter) only Heaven and Hell can incent good behavior, he can’t bear the thought that the dreaded atheist who nonetheless does behave well without such incentives has done something Day considers difficult and implausible. If motives mattered to Day and he were to confront the fact that I behave as well as a Christian without the carrot and stick of Heaven and Hell, he might just have to admit that I am his moral superior.

•••

Alas, Day spends only a page on the one atheist argument that actually matters: The Argument from Lack of Evidence. In a very sloppy way, he admits that there is no evidence for God yet insists that one has no good evidence for much of anything, from quantum mechanics to whether your relatives love you (utterly false — there is ample experimental evidence for quantum mechanics and every reason to base one’s belief that one is loved on observational evidence such as how people treat you). There is simply nothing else in ordinary human life believed with the utter, yawning abyss of evidencelessness that is religion. And that is why — in all likelihood — there is no God, and no fully rational, sane person who considered the arguments would ever again believe otherwise, even if Day were to prove conclusively that Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris are mentally retarded and that nine out of ten atheists become amoral menaces who commit mass murder. Still no God. Suck it up and face reality.

But then, Day’s relationship to reality and evidence may be shakier than he lets on. He tells us by way of argument against The Argument from Hallucination that he has had both a supernatural experience and drug-induced hallucinations and therefore knows the difference between the two, which, needless to say, is not the most reassuring eye-witness testimony one could ask for.

Since just a few pages later in the book, he asserts that Jesus’s claim to have existed before Abraham suggests that Jesus was privy to multiverse theory and modern conceptions of the spacetime continuum, I would not be surprised to learn Day was actually experiencing drug-induced hallucinations during the writing of the book itself. He also asserts that the Book of Revelation accurately predicted the European Union, which is the sort of reading-into of vague prophecies that makes one question his trustworthiness even when assembling some of his more numerical-historical data (almost any vague-enough prediction is likely to come “true” given 2,000 years or more of history to play around with — something worth keeping in mind not only when dealing with people who believe in Bible prophecy but when listening to the supposed insights of Nostradamus).

Day manages to hold the high ground logically and morally at times, when he points out irresponsible hyperbole by the New Atheists, but within pages he is accusing atheists of being “childish” and “irrational” and amoral and parasitic and “insane,” until his whole screed degenerates rapidly (in what he might himself concede is a flagrant example of “projection”) into lamentations/paeans about the ineradicable, inevitable, and profound irrationality of humanity in nearly all aspects of life, supposedly making skepticism and scientific reasoning futile. All of which is a bit like saying that because crime is rampant, the man who proposes to live honestly must be fooling himself. Rationality is possible, and so is a respect for the lives and liberty of others. The fiction of God is not necessary for these things, regardless of the good or bad done in His name, and regardless of the quality of the arguments advanced for or against Him.

20 comments:

Samuel Skinner said...

Thanks. It is always hard to find the arguements people advance in their books (theists seem to be allergic to it). Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have anything new to add. Well, except the flaws in the other guys books, but some of them aren’t flaws and some of them are real interesting (red county, blue county).

Russell Hanneken said...

“. . . libertarians, whose philosophical common ground is merely the belief that markets work and government doesn’t . . .”

Or at least that markets work better than government.

“. . . the common religious assertion that without God there can be no basis for moral judgments . . .”

I confess I don’t understand the argument that with God there’s an (objective) basis for moral judgments. If God says “X is good, and Y is bad,” what makes His opinion more valid than anyone else’s?

Mike (FVThinker) Burns said...

“More to the point, the poorly-behaved unchurched remind me of the stats showing that church attendance itself is correlated with good behavior — but that’s no surprise”

Let round that out with a rigorous study by Creighton University (a Christian university) that correllated level of religiosity with societal health. Religion fails. The ‘prosperous democracies’ that have the lowest levels of organic atheism had the lowest levels of (their list of) societal ills. The converse was true also. See the study here: http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html

or a nice, graphical summary here:

http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n03_are_religious_societies_healthier.html

Vox said...

A fair, reasonable and detailed review, Todd. If you don’t mind my attempting to clarify a few things for your readers, I have the following responses for them:

Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have anything new to add.

You obviously haven’t read the book. The first thing stated by nearly every review by nearly every person who has read the book is that it brings a great deal that is new to the discussion. Among other things, TIA includes a refutation of Euthyphro, which isn’t exactly a major feature of the average apologetic.

I confess I don’t understand the argument that with God there’s an (objective) basis for moral judgments. If God says “X is good, and Y is bad,” what makes His opinion more valid than anyone else’s?

To put it crudely, if God did create us, then the law God’s Game, God’s Rules applies. This ties in with the Game Designer God concept mentioned by Mr. Seavey, that ever-so-common feature of Christian apologetics throughout the ages.

Let round that out with a rigorous study by Creighton University (a Christian university) that correlated level of religiosity with societal health. Religion fails.

A study based on comparing historically Christian nations, plus Japan, with each other…. you don’t see the flaw in that? I note that the same basis for comparison will show that increased secularism is bad for science. More importantly, using Sam Harris’s definition of atheism requires substituting Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Laos, and Vietnam for Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Switzerland, etc. Care to guess how that comparison of social health computes?

merkur said...

The first thing stated by nearly every review by nearly every person who has read the book is that it brings a great deal that is new to the discussion.

I fear that this may reflect poorly on the people who read your book, rather than reflect well on the content on the book itself. As I made my way though your attempted refutation of Euthypro, I actually felt embarrassed for you.

“This ties in with the Game Designer God concept mentioned by Mr. Seavey, that ever-so-common feature of Christian apologetics throughout the ages.”

I also realise that you think that the “Game Designer God” is somehow incredibly original, but I feel bound to point out that it is really only weak deism with some geek decoration added.

Vox said...

Todd, perhaps I should explain. Merkur is a strange individual who has been repeatedly banned from commenting at my blog. He has taken up the quixotic jihad of following links and sharing his unique views with everyone who will listen. You’ll note that he doesn’t actually write anything of substance, but instead is content to call into question your intellectual capacity and that of everyone else who happens to see any merit in the book.

Of course, when called on his claims, he invariably fails to back them up… I, for one, should be very interested to see his demonstration that my refutation of Euthyphro is merely an embarrassing attempt at one.

Russell Hanneken said...

Vox wrote, “To put it crudely, if God did create us, then the law God’s Game, God’s Rules applies.”

I’m not sure what “applies” means here, unless you’re begging the question. Let’s suppose that God exists, He created me, and He made up some rules. How does that imply I am somehow obligated to follow those rules? Anyone can make up games and rules.

JohnM said...

How does that imply I am somehow obligated to follow those rules?

Maybe because one of the rules is that you are obligated to follow the rules, or else suffer the consequences?

Russell Hanneken said...

I can make a rule that says you’re obligated to follow my rules. I could also threaten to hurt you if you don’t follow my rules. That doesn’t mean you’re obligated–in an objective moral sense–to follow my rules.

Blogger said...

“I can make a rule that says you’re obligated to follow my rules. I could also threaten to hurt you if you don’t follow my rules. That doesn’t mean you’re obligated–in an objective moral sense–to follow my rules.”

The difference between your rules and God’s rules are that (assuming the existence of God, which this scenario is) God’s rules have eternal consequences whereas yours only have temporal ones. Violating your rules may carry a threat to one’s life in this world, but if God’s rules were obeyed, eternal reward would be granted (one of God’s rules). Choosing to obey your rules in this life may grant prosperity, but if it violates God’s rules, eternal punishment follows (another of God’s rules).

You may respond that ’since God doesn’t exist, His rules don’t apply’, but in the “God’s game, God’s rules” scenario, He does exist and His rules do apply.

Blogger said...

Of course you are free to decide that God’s rules of morality don’t apply to you (another one of God’s rules and a decision once made in a certain garden), but the rules of God’s game always will.

Russell Hanneken said...

Sure, if God existed, He would be in a position to deal out worse punishment than I can.

So what you’re saying is that it would be prudent for me to follow God’s rules, assuming I don’t want to suffer. Fine, but that’s not the same thing as saying it’s immoral not to follow God’s rules, or that God provides a basis for objective morality.

Blogger said...

Fine. Take as the axiom the simplicity of God. Then His existence and goodness are one in the same, thus, we have an objective morality.

Or don’t take that axiom. Go with hedonism, or happiness, or avoiding pain, or whatever else has been posited as “good”. Then what is moral is what gives you eternal reward and immoral is the opposite, that which doesn’t.

Regardless:

As stated, you are free to determine your own morality (Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil…), but you won’t necessarily be judged on it…in the God’s Game, God’s Rules (← objective morality) scenario.

Russell Hanneken said...

“Go with hedonism, or happiness, or avoiding pain, or whatever else has been posited as ‘good’. Then what is moral is what gives you eternal reward and immoral is the opposite, that which doesn’t.”

Yes, if God existed, obedience to His rules might be an instrumental good, in that it might help you get something you wanted, or avoid something you didn’t want.

In the same way, it might be prudent to obey anyone who has power over you, whether he be a prison guard, kidnapper, terrorist, policeman, bureaucrat, parent, etc. That doesn’t mean that it’s immoral to disobey, or that the person who has power over you has provided the basis for an objective moral code. It just means someone else’s will is a fact you have to consider when you’re figuring out how to get what you want.

“Take as the axiom the simplicity of God. Then His existence and goodness are one in the same, thus, we have an objective morality.”

I don’t understand what simplicity has to do with goodness.

In any case, if you want to define “God” as an objective moral good that we all ought to seek, then you’ve “proved” (in a tautologous fashion) that “God,” if it existed, would be the basis for an objective morality. But you’ve done so by sacrificing the usual notion of “God,” the one that theists and atheists argue over. The word “God” does not normally refer to some sort of end state to be attained or maximized.

Blogger said...

“In the same way, it might be prudent to obey anyone who has power over you, whether he be a prison guard, kidnapper, terrorist, policeman, bureaucrat, parent, etc. That doesn’t mean that it’s immoral to disobey, or that the person who has power over you has provided the basis for an objective moral code. It just means someone else’s will is a fact you have to consider when you’re figuring out how to get what you want.”

If God’s rules are established as the objective morality, it may or may not be moral to do what someone threatening you demands, you have to make the (prudent) choice, perhaps leading to martyrdom.

“I don’t understand what simplicity has to do with goodness.”

The “simplicity of God” is that His Goodness, His Will, His Existence, etc are all the same thing. This resolves your last point as well.

Russell Hanneken said...

“If God’s rules are established as the objective morality, it may or may not be moral to do what someone threatening you demands, you have to make the (prudent) choice, perhaps leading to martyrdom.”

I suppose. The question is, if God existed, would His rules be an objective moral code? Or would His code just embody another set of preferences, albeit the preferences of someone very powerful?

I see no necessary reason to believe the former. Which is why I don’t see why so many theists think the existence of God would be both necessary and sufficient to establish the existence of objective morality.

“The ’simplicity of God’ is that His Goodness, His Will, His Existence, etc are all the same thing.”

That is incoherent.

Blogger said...

You’ve returned to the initial point in an effort to rehash your position. If it is God’s Game, God’s Rule, He gets to establish the order of preference. If you wish to know what theists think, read theologists, not bloggers or religious writers.

The “simplicity” is not incoherent as it has been well understood for close to 900 years (perhaps “able to be well understood by those that apply themselves”: “Anyone who is just looking for religious inspiration and shies away from the demands of patient, laborious, and at times tedious reflection should not enter into this investigation.” Karl Rahner)

Russell Hanneken said...

Blogger wrote, “You’ve returned to the initial point in an effort to rehash your position.”

Yes, I’ve returned to my initial point to rehash my position because no one has addressed it to my satisfaction.

Blogger quotes Karl Rahner: “‘Anyone who is just looking for religious inspiration and shies away from the demands of patient, laborious, and at times tedious reflection should not enter into this investigation.”

I can quote people too:

“So what are we left with? A collection of assertions about the ultimate nature of existence that are riddled with contradictions, defy reason and logic, convey no intelligible meaning, invalidate our consciousness, destroy our concept of reality–and that we are meant to take seriously while being told our limited development makes it impossible for us to understand them. If one does not have have an intellectual inferiority complex and is not easily intimidated, this is not impressive.” –Nathaniel Branden

merkur said...

I’d love to demonstrate why your refutation of Euthyphro is embarrassing, Vox, but unfortunately you appear to have banned me from your blog and your forums. This is because you welcome open debate and you like it when people challenge your position.

Your “refutation” is embarrassing because – like many of your arguments – it relies on deliberately misinterpreting what Socrates means by “piety”, and then deliberately conflating two different meanings of the word “love”. This is popularly known as a “straw man” argument, and is one of your favourite tactics. Anybody who wishes to see evidence for this can read the section in question themselves, and judge for themselves.

Incidentally, the accusation that I call into question the intellectual capacity of other people is dreadfully ironic and faintly amusing. I’m not the one who has just published an entire book predicated on calling other people’s intellectual capacity into question.

jim said...

People who rely on their admittedly limited, subjective moral senses are deemed inferior; but, what’s the offered alternative? Just follow orders, unquestioningly. Of course, upon whose authority do you choose, say, these orders instead of those orders? Upon your own, subjective, limited authority, of course. And so, what goes around comes around, the difference being that one moral perspective can ultimately expand within the framework of human thought and experience, while the other lies static and stagnant, being based upon unchanging, primitive pronouncements by some who said they spoke for God. Sounds a lot like the difference between science and religion to me.