Joan Roughgarden: Evolution and The Bible

This is my fourth weekend commenting on the presentations given at Beyond Belief 2006. This weekend, I start with the third session of the conference, with presentations by Joan Roughgarden (professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford) and Richard Dawkins (Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University).

Roughgarden continues a theme from the first two sessions by addressing the question, “How do we get theists to embrace science?” Her suggestion is that some effort be made to go to where the critics are coming from and find ways to put biological theory in biblical terms. Specifically, she has sought to express evolutionary theory in biblical terms.

She addresses two main elements of Darwinian theory, that “There is variation generated by random mutation and then there is the process of natural selection . . . that operates on the variation and produces changes in the . . . population.”

To explain Darwinian theory in biblical terms takes two references from the bible.

The first is a story from Genesis in which Jacob makes a deal with Labon where Jacob can keep the speckled and brown sheep and the others will go to Labon. God sought to compensate Jacob for injustices inflicted upon him by having the speckled and brown rams to “leap upon” the ewes so that most of the stock became speckled and brown.

The second story she uses has to do with a story where Jesus compares his teaching to seeds falling off of a cart, landing on shallow soil and good soil. Those seeds that land on shallow soil do not grow and those that land on good soil produces fruit. Roughgarden says, “So I even use the phrase in the book that mutation is a mustard seed of DNA tossed into bodies at random, and then you see in what bodies those mustard seeds prosper, and in those bodies then fruit is produced a hundred fold.”

Her lesson then is that, “In this way, one can directly find passages within the bible that can lead to an inherently friendly narrative about what evolution is.”

Richard Dawkins will come up next and ask, “Why bother?” However, I wish to argue that there are reasons to bother (and, please note, I write under the theory that says that the only reasons that exist are desires and that moral reasons are good desires), though not reasons for everybody to bother.

The reasons to bother can be explained using another analogy that I heard repeatedly during college that draw an analogy between a person’s beliefs and a ship at sea. If somebody wants to make repairs to a ship while it is floating at sea, one cannot simply dismantle the entire ship and then put it back together again. Instead, the only option is to rebuild the ship one section at a time, attaching each new or rebuilt section to parts of the original ship that still exist. Over time, in this way, one can construct a completely new ship. However, each change still must be anchored to what already exists.

Roughgarden’s project provides a way to change some parts of the “ship of beliefs” of particularly strongly religious theists that do not require that those theists completely abandon a whole set of beliefs and construct an entirely different world view from scratch. It allows that change can only occur by attaching a set of new beliefs to a set of beliefs that remain. Those remaining beliefs can be challenged later, but then those further challenges can be built onto the first changes.

To be fair, Roughgarden does not speak about changing whole sets of beliefs. In fact, Roughgarden is clearly a very religious person who simply wants her fellow theists to be comfortable accepting evolutionary theory. For her, these expressions of evolutionary theory in biblical terms are the end of the road. Yet, they need not be.

This analogy of rebuilding a ship one plank at a time can also be applied to rebuilding a culture. In fact, cultures seldom, if ever, undergo wholesale transformations from one system of beliefs and institutions to another. Even social revolutions can find an anchor in the traditions and beliefs of the system that is overthrown. If one wants to change a culture, it makes sense to put one’s effort into changing it one plank at a time.

We can apply this model to the problem of the Islamic Jihadists. Anybody who proposes a solution that involves completely overthrowing Islam and replacing it with an entirely different belief system is being irrational. Cultures do not change that way. Instead, a more rational strategy is to find some planks of Islam that one can change – replacing it with a set of beliefs that do not lend themselves so strongly to people killing and maiming others in the name of God.

This is substantially what happened to Christianity in the last four hundred years. One step at a time, Christians removed some old planks of their religion and replaced it with newer planks that were friendlier to science and reason. At the start, they took their planks that said that the Earth was at the center of the solar system, cut them away, and replaced them with planks that said that the Sun was the center of the solar system.

They have removed planks that prohibited the collection of interest with planks that not only ignore those biblical prohibitions but which holds entrepreneurship to be a high virtue. As a result, they replaced economic stagnation with economic growth.

Planks that obligate a person to kill those who profess beliefs in other Gods and that hold that God gives his blessing and a right to rule to kings have been tossed and replaced with planks that demand religious tolerance and the right of the people to select their leaders.

The slavery plank has been replaced with an individual liberty plank.

Christian culture has replaced the plank in which heresy was punished by death with a plank that demands freedom of speech.

These types of changes have created a version of Christianity today that would not likely be recognizable to the Christian of 1000 years ago.

Granted, not all Christians have been open to change. There are many who are protesting these repairs and improvements, and some who advocate taking out certain upgrades and putting the ship of Christian culture back the way it was. Yet, change has happened, it has happened one plank at a time, and it will continue to happen one plank at a time.

It has happened substantially because of the efforts of those people who have said, “Let’s upgrade and repair – not the whole ship of cultural beliefs, but this set over here that is in the greatest need of upgrade.”

Though it is possible to praise those who go through this effort, and to recognize the value of their contribution in bringing about change, I do have to confess that I have no interest in taking up the job of changing Christian culture. When I write, the vision of the reader that I have in my head is that of one who does not believe in God (thus, I spend absolutely no time arguing for or against the existence of God). I have no interest in joining the task of reforming Christian culture.

I can explain this lack of interest in terms of what got me into this business to start with. As an atheist high school student, I wanted to leave the world a better place than it would have otherwise been, and I needed to know what ‘better’ was. This sparked my interest in moral philosophy. One could say that I became more interested in the design and architecture of ships than in their actual construction and repair.

Yet, one of the virtues of desire utilitarian theory is that it makes sense of a system that allows different people to choose different roles in society. Classical act utilitarianism, for example, has only two moral categories – the obligatory (that which maximizes utility) and the prohibited (that which does not maximize utility). Desire utilitarianism has room for three moral categories; (1) the obligatory (that which a person with good desires would do), (2) the prohibited (that which a person with good desires would not do, and (3) the permissible (that which a person with good desires might or might not choose to do).

A society has a need for architects and, with this, a need for people whose desires will draw them into the profession of architecture. It also has a need for people who do refit and repair, and reason for some people to have desires that attract them to this profession. The desires that draw people into architecture or construction are not for everybody, so they fit in the category of ‘permissible’.

I can argue for the value of having some people engaged in the task of bringing about a refit and repair of parts of the traditional Christian ship of beliefs. As a moral architect, I can identify the parts that are in the greatest needs of repair – because what we have is a threat to life and limb at best, and a threat to the seaworthiness of our society at worst. Yet, I confess that I lack the skills (and the interest) to convince Christians to make the repairs that most need making.

At the same time, I argue that the atheist ship is also in need of refit and repair in some areas. There are some refits that I argue for simply because what I see annoys me (e.g., the idea that ‘atheism’ is ‘the lack of a belief in God’ as opposed to – what I would refit it into – ‘the belief that the proposition ‘at least one god exists’ is almost certainly false’). Others, I hold, are as dangerous and absurd as the worst parts of Christian beliefs (that there is no such thing as moral truths and that one can make meaningful references to ‘reasons for action’ that are ‘subjective’ in the sense that one does not have to go to any effort to prove that those ‘reasons for action’ actually exist).

In all cases, it is unreasonable to expect any type of change that does not result in anchoring new beliefs to a framework of beliefs that remain (at least for the moment) fixed. This is simply one of those facts that a rational person will keep in mind as he argues for social change.

Friendly Atheist: Doctors and Morality

The Friendly Atheist invoked my name recently in a post on “Doctors and Morality”. In that post, he discussed a report from the Associated Press, “Study: Moral Beliefs May Sway Docs’ Care” that reported that many doctors will not refer patients to others who might provide treatment that the doctor finds objectionable.

A disturbing number of doctors do not feel obligated to tell patients about medical options they oppose morally, such as abortion and teen birth control, and believe they have no duty to refer people elsewhere for such treatments, researchers say.

He then made the polite suggestion that, “Perhaps the Atheist Ethicist can add more to this discussion.”

I would like to give it a shot.

If I were a Doctor

In the article that the Friendly Atheist refers to, the authors of the survey being reported on seem shocked to discover that people who believe that something is immoral act like they are people who believe that thing to be immoral. In fact, this is all they discovered. Expecting to discover that people who believe that something is wrong act like people who believe it is obligatory is like expecting to discover that circles have corners.

If I were a doctor, I would not help my patients obtain treatment that I found to be morally objectionable. Furthermore, I would find any request that I do so to not only be morally objectionable in its own right, but incoherent.

'Morally objectionable' means 'ought not to be done.' So, if I find some act to be morally objectionable, that means that I find it to be something that ought not to be done. If you tell me that I have an obligation to do something, then you are telling me that it ought to be done. If you insist that I ought to do something that I hold is something that I ought not to do, while saying that it is perfectly acceptable for me to hold that the act ought not to be done, then you are simply not making any sense. An act can either be obligatory, permissible, or prohibited. An act cannot, at the same time, be morally obligatory and prohibited.

In the context of desire utilitarianism, I can speak more specifically. A 'wrong act' is an act that a person with good desires would not perform. That is to say, if I hold that an act is morally objectionable, then I hold that it is an act that a person with good desires would not perform. The only way that I can perform such an act is if I failed to have good desires. In other words, I would have to be a bad person. To say that I have an obligation to do something that only a bad person would do is to say that I have an obligation to be a bad person.

That, too, is incoherent.

So, you’re still not making any sense.

Beliefs

One possible attempt to avoid this incoherence is to say that the act that I am being told that I am obligated to perform is one that I merely believe is morally objectionable. Yet, when I wrote the above section, I wrote as if the act was in fact morally objectionable. If we can throw out the idea that something can, in fact, be morally objectionable, then the claim that one is obligated to do that which one merely believes should not be done can make sense.

Well, actually, it can’t make sense.

A belief is a propositional attitude such that if a person believes that ‘P’ (for any proposition ‘P’), then that person has the attitude that ‘P’ is true. A person who believes that abortion is wrong is a person who has the mental attitude and is disposed to act as somebody who holds that the proposition, “Abortion is wrong,” is true.

Note: I know full well that there are theories that hold that moral statements have no truth value. I have no space in this posting to refute those theories. However, I hold that those views are mistaken. One of the reasons is that if moral statements have no truth value then it would make no sense to say that somebody has moral beliefs. Beliefs are propositional attitudes, and propositions have truth values.

In light of this, if I have a belief that X is wrong, then this means that I have the attitude that ‘X is wrong’ is true. If somebody is telling me that I ought to do X, then he is telling me to adopt the attitude, ‘X is not wrong’. Indeed, he is telling me that X is obligatory. Something cannot be both obligatory and wrong.

Note: Actually, something can be both obligatory and wrong in the special case of moral dilemma. However, moral dilemmas represent a special case and we do not need to clutter this discussion with such considerations.

If the speaker is telling me both at the same time that it is permissible for me to adopt the attitude ‘X is wrong’ and obligatory that I adopt the attitude ‘X is not wrong’, then this person is telling me that I should become insane – or at least acquire some mild mental disorder – since it would require some defect in thought to hold, at the same time, ‘X is wrong’ and ‘X is obligatory’.

Telling me that I must act like a person who believes that ‘X is wrong’ is true is the same as telling me that I must not believe that ‘X is wrong’ is true. I cannot act like a person who believes that X is obligatory unless I believe that X is obligatory.

Acting

Of course, there is an exception to this. Actors often act as if a proposition is true even when they know that a proposition is false. They act as if they are hobbits trying to destroy a magical ring even though they do not believe that they are hobbits and there is no magical ring.

So, is this claim that I am to treat ‘X is obligatory’ as true a claim that I am obligated to act like a person who believes that X is obligatory, even while I believe that X is wrong?

The problem with this solution is that acting does not free a person of moral culpability. Assume that you caught me robbing banks. When caught, I answer the charges by saying that, while I believe that bank robbery was wrong, I was only acting like somebody who believed at least in the moral permissibility of robbing banks. Clearly, my claim to be acting does not let me off of the moral hook.

Note; there is a clear difference between the type of acting I am talking about, which creates actual instances of a wrongful act, and acting that involves simulated instances of a wrongful act. I am not talking about the latter form of acting, only the former.

You are still asking me to adopt an incoherent set of beliefs if you are requiring me to act like somebody who believes ‘X is obligatory’ while saying that I am, at the same time, permitted to believe, “X is wrong.”

Mistakes

Here is another way of interpreting your claim that I am obligated to help my patients obtain medical treatment that I hold to be immoral:

When you tell me this, you are saying, “Your belief that these treatments are immoral is mistaken. As a matter of fact, these treatments are obligatory. As such, I am going to require that you at least act like a person who believes that helping a patient acquire these forms of treatment is obligatory.”

In desire utilitarianism, a right act is the act that a person with good desires would perform. In judging an agent’s action, it does not matter what that agent believes or desires. All that matters is whether his act is the act of a person with good desires. So, it makes sense to assert that my obligations as a doctor are to act like a person who believes that these forms of treatment are not wrong.

However, this counts as forcing one’s morality on others. In this case, those who hold that these forms of treatment are morally permissible are forcing doctors who believe that they are impermissible to act as if they are permissible.

For political and social reasons, it may be useful not to put too much pressure on the doctor with the mistaken beliefs about the wrongness of these treatments. We may allow a slight concession. “You do not have to perform the treatment yourself, but you must make sure that the patient gets the treatment.” Still, even requiring this of me is to require that I act as a person who holds that the treatment is permissible.

By analogy, consider telling a person, “We do not require that you kill the Jew yourself. We only require that you help to make sure that the Jew gets killed,” or “We do not require that you apprehend the escaped slave. We only require that you help the slave catcher to apprehend the escaped slave.”

We can see here that this type of command is one in which the agent is being told to act as if he is somebody who believes that the execution of Jews or the institution of slavery are permissible. One is still forcing their morality on those who hold that these acts and institutions are immoral.

Forcing Morality on Others

Is it permissible to force one’s morality upon others?

I assure you, if you come after me with a knife saying that you are obligated to kill me, I am not going to stand here and passively respect your moral beliefs. I am very much going to enforce my moral beliefs on you (by prohibiting you from killing me) by whatever means are at my disposal.

And if you think it is morally permissible to rape my niece, I will once again take whatever steps available to me to force my contrary moral views on you.

The same is true if you attempt to destroy my home or take my money.

As a matter of fact, forcing our morality upon others is a daily occurrence.

There is a problem with forcing one’s morality upon others. If you believe that something is obligatory, and I believe that it is wrong, one of us must be mistaken. However, there is no prima facie way of determining who it is. Of course, you will believe that I am mistaken, and I will believe that you are mistaken. However, the question remains, “Who is mistaken in fact?”

The possibility of error suggests that there is room for a principle that states that we each be given some permission to act on our own beliefs. If what is at stake is not large, then we may be better off to allow you to act on what you believe, while I act on what I believe, as long as the harm done to others is minor.

Yet, as the harms done to others by those who are mistaken become greater and more obvious, there is less room for allowing those who would do harm the freedom to do so. When it comes to those whose moral opinion permits the killing or maiming of hundreds or thousands, we have greater reason to demand that those people not act like people who hold such an opinion.

Given that people who believe that X is wrong will behave like people who believe that X is wrong, if we are going to force them to behave differently, then we are forcing our morality on them. There is a strong impulse to deny this fact, but it remains a fact nonetheless.

There are good reasons for being concerned with forcing one’s morality upon others. There are good arguments for freedom that state that people should be allowed to do as they please, and the burden of proof is always on those who would destroy freedom. People who force their morality upon others often make mistakes, and those mistakes often have dreadful consequences. There is reason to be nervous about doing this and to limit such actions to those where the need to force morality on others is clearly established.

However, we cannot ignore the fact that this leaves us with an important question to answer that we cannot avoid answering. “What moral beliefs should we force upon others?” We cannot avoid the question by hiding from it.

Sophistry: Engineering False Beliefs

I would like to add another moral crime to our list of common moral crimes.

Along side examples of immorality such as ‘murder’, ‘rape’, ‘theft’, ‘lying’, ‘breaking promises’, ‘negligence’, ‘bigotry’, and the like, I would like to add ‘engineering false beliefs’ or ‘sophistry’ to the list.

I wrote about this last weekend in the post “Discussion: Public Relations”. There, I wrote about an example in which Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA, 48th District)was questioning a panel of climate scientists, attempting to engineer false beliefs about the relationship between human activity and global warming. Rohrabacher asked about the “mini ice age” in Europe that ended in the mid 1800s, and suggested that the scientists were starting their measurements at an artificially low temperature. Rohrabacher insisted that the Europe-only temperature records before 1850 were relevant to the issue of global warming.

Examples

What I mean by adding engineering a false belief to be a moral crime, I mean for experts testifying before Congress or even under oath in a court of law to give an answer like,

"Congressman Rohrabacher, I am here to tell the truth about global warming. I live by a moral code that says that engineering a false belief is the same as lying. I trust that the purpose of your question is not to engineer a false belief, so let me say how that can be avoided.

"Europe experienced a mini ice-age ending around 1850. But Europe is not the world. Inferring that our data on global temperature change is wrong because Europe had a mini ice age is like inferring that data on the average human height is wrong because almost all basketball players are over six feet. Frankly, it is an insult to suggest that the thousands of scientists who worked on this project are either too stupid to see the relevance of European temperatures or somehow conspiring to cover up the truth."

Another of Rohrabacher’s attempts to engineer a false belief involved asking the question, "What percentage of the total greenhouse gas emissions are caused by humans."

Again, I would like to propose that the answer take the form of,

"I would be doing a disservice to this committee if I were to tell you a partial truth that would engineer a false belief about climate change. I would be engineering a false belief if I did not warn you that you cannot draw meaningful conclusions about climate change by comparing human contribution to changes in greenhouse gas concentration to changes in global temperature. Humans are responsible for virtually all of the changes in greenhouse gas concentration.

"I can answer you question, Congressman, but I must trust to your honesty and interest in getting to the truth of this matter that you view it as a moral outrage, as I do, for people to try to cloud the issue by making a false inference from this to the human contribution to the change in global temperatures. Pretending that the answer to your question is relevant to the climate change debate is dishonest, and I swore on coming here that I will not be attempt or to help others attempt to engineer false beliefs about this issue."

Sophists

I need a term to refer to those who engineer false beliefs that can be given the same bite - the same call for contempt - that terms like, 'murderer', 'rapist', 'thief', 'liar", and "cheat' all carry. Towards that end, I thought it might be useful to resurrect the term 'sophist' in something one of its ancient Greek meanings - as somebody who values manipulating others through rhetoric and sophistry. I am, however, not wed to this option and would welcome alternatives

Clearly, we would all tend to be much better off in a society without sophists, just as we will tend to be better off in a society without murderers, rapists, liars, and thieves. In other words, we have many and strong reasons for action for turning our moral sites onto those who engage in this practice.

Clearly, there are times when each of us might profit from a bit of sophistry. Clearly, there are times in which each of us might profit from a lie, a theft, or even a murder. However, these infrequent examples of personal profit are seriously outweighed by the risks of harm we suffer from being made the victims of others. From this, each of us have many and strong reasons to establish a culture with as few sophists as possible, which we can create by turning our tools of condemnation against those who practice this art.

We can see more evidence that we have 'reasons for action' to add an aversion to engineering false beliefs (sophistry) to our list of vices, simply look at the levels of destruction that some sophists are willing to inflict on others.

Sophists are responsible for the costs, in terms of money, life, and limb, from the Iraq war on the ledger. The White House use of discredited evidence to claim that Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy nuclear material was an act of sophistry. When Joe Wilson exposed this, the attempt to discredit him was a second act of sophistry. Sophists, in this case, killed 3,000 Americans, maimed 20,000 more, tore hundreds of thousands of them away from their families and put them at risk, and cost the country nearly $500 billion that could have been put to other use – not to mention the costs they inflicted on the people of Iraq.

We have the death and suffering of smoking attributed to a smoking industry that spread the sophistry that smoking was not dangerous – a campaign designed and executed by sophists.

We have a level of destruction that will make World War II look like a barroom brawl coming from the sophists of global warming, with the executives of Exxon-Mobile and other companies using sophistry to collect billions of dollars in profits by engineering false beliefs that will cost its victims trillions of dollars in damage.

If you have or are concerned about the future of any child, that child faces far more of a threat from the acts of the sophist than from any other group.

Sophistry and Lying

If we are to look at the ethics of sophistry in detail, we will discover that it has much in common with lying.

We need to make room for the innocent mistake. Not every false statement is a lie. Not every bad inference involves engineering a false belief. However, the possibility of innocent error does not prevent us from recognizing the evil of lying and the value of condemning the liar. The possibility of innocently bringing about false belief should not distract us from recognizing the evil of sophistry and the value of condemning the sophist. The possibility of innocent mistake does not change the fact of deliberate deception. It does not change the fact that sophists are killing and destroying the future of innocent people in huge numbers.

Also, we need to allow that sophistry, like lying, is sometimes permissible. For example, just as it is permissible to lie to the Nazi soldier about the presence of Jews in the Attic, it is permissible to engineer a false belief that there are no Jews in the attic. And just as a little white lie can be an act of kindness, there may be some kindness in engineering a harmless false belief.

However, when I talk about the condemnation of sophistry, I am not talking about lies to protect the innocent or to give somebody a benefit at no costs to others. I am talking about people who destroy hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives for personal gain.

Finally, sophistry happens to be a crime of language – of speech. I have argued in the past that the only legitimate response to words are words and private actions. There will certainly be disputes over which speech acts are sophistry and which are not. Maintaining the peace requires a prohibition on answering speech with violence.

However, the right to freedom of speech does not prohibit people from collecting damages when they have been lied to. Nor does it prevent us from making conspiracy a crime when it can be proved that those involved were starting to act with the intent of doing harm. Con men are criminals even when their con consists merely of deceiving others into investing in a company that does not exist, or funding a mission that there is no intention to launch. There is no reason not to subject sophists to the same risks as liars when their sophistry deprives others of life, health, or property.

First Steps

What I would like to recommend in the way of turning sophistry into a more highly recognized evil is simply for people to call more attention to it in others. However, I think it would be even more important for people to publicly express their own unwillingness to engage in sophistry. “If I said ‘X’, I would be guilty of helping to engineer a false belief because I know that people have a habit of inferring ‘Y’ from ‘X’, and ‘Y’ is a false belief.”

It would do a lot to turn public sentiment against sophists for those who accept this recommendation to refuse to use sophistry in their own lives and to make noises about the fact that this is a part of their code. In doing so, the people should start to learn who cares about truth, and who does not.

And I would really like to see people take active steps to hold sophist legislators like Rohrabacher as morally accountable for their poor moral character as they would hold to a degree proportional to the harm to others they are willing to engineer, when compared to those who make sexual advances to congressional pages and the like.

Gun Control II: Constitutional Rights

Two days ago in a post called “Gun Control”, I wrote about some considerations on the question of gun control.

I cut one consideration out of that earlier post because it was large enough and important enough to be given a separate and more thorough examination.

Note the language that the founding fathers used in writing the Second Amendment.

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The founding fathers believed, and founded the Constitution on a belief, that rights existed independent of government. Governments have no power to create or destroy rights, according to this theory. They only have the power to secure or to infringe or violate rights.

So, according to the Second Amendment, there exists a natural right to keep and bear arms. This right is not “invented.” It is not some arbitrary rule picked out of a hat. It is a principle borne from reason that is true even in a state of nature where no government exists. If a government decides to prevent people from keeping or bearing arms, then the right to keep and bear arms does not cease to exist. It is still there. Instead, this right is being violated by government action.

This is the philosophy upon which the Constitution is built.

We see this theory that rights exist independent of government action and governments might respect or violate those rights in a number of places in the Constitution.

Congress shall make no law . . . abridging . . . the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . .

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial . . .

. . . the right of trial by jury shall be preserved. . .

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Of course, this theory finds its strongest statement in the Declaration of Independence. There, the founding fathers wrote that certain rights such as those to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable, that the purpose of government is to secure these rights, and that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.

Clearly, they did not feel that the existence of their rights as Englishmen were dependent on whether the government in England granted them rights. If they held to such a philosophy, the would have had no grounds for objecting to anything the English government might impose.

Implications

If there exists a right to keep and bear arms that exists independent of government, and governments may not violate those rights, then we can determine the limits of government by determining the scope of these rights. If there is no right to keep and bear an atomic weapon, then no government can infringe upon a citizen’s right to keep and bear an atomic weapon. Thus, no law limiting the private ownership of atomic weapons would be in violation of a right to keep and bear arms.

There are some who argue that no rights exist. If this is true, then no government law could ever infringe upon a right of the people peacefully to assemble, or violate a right to be secure in one’s persons, houses, papers, and effects, or violate a citizen’s right to a trial by jury.

This could not be argued that governments may do whatever they please. There may be other ways in which a government’s actions may be wrong other than through the violation of rights. However, it does follow axiomatically that if no rights exist, then no government action can violate a person’s rights.

Do Rights Exist?

This discussion leads us to the question, “Do rights exist?”

Rights do not exist in the form of intrinsic values. Intrinsic values do not exist. If rights are intrinsic values, then rights do not exist.

However, the proposition, “If rights are intrinsic values, then they do not exist” does not imply, “Rights do not exist.” We are still free to examine whether rights exist as something other than intrinsic values.

Typically, utilitarianism and rights theories are seen as mutually exclusive, competing views of right and wrong. Typical act utilitarianism holds that an action is to be judged right or wrong because of its consequences. Rights theory holds that actions are intrinsically right or wrong independent of their consequences. Act utilitarianism gets into trouble when people argue, for example, that it would be permissible to torture somebody to death if enough people got pleasure from watching the torture. Rights theory gets into trouble when it suggests that a right may not be violated even if the violation would prevent every creature on the planet from enduring perpetual, excruciating pain.

I hold that desire utilitarianism gives us a concept of rights that does not depend on intrinsic values, is consistent with the view that an action is right or wrong independent of the act’s consequences, but still leaves room for considering extreme consequences.

The desire utilitarian concept of a ‘right’ says, “People have a right to X” means “A general population-wide aversion to depriving people of X will tend to fulfill other desires.” That is to say, “People have a right to live” means, “A population-wide aversion to taking another person’s life will tend to fulfill other desires.”

Note: I am not talking about whether an act of taking a life will fulfill or thwart desires. I am talking about whether an aversion to taking life will tend to fulfill or thwart (other) desires.

If a person has an aversion to taking the life of another, then that person will be reluctant to act to take the life of another even when that act would fulfill other desires. The stronger the aversion to taking a life, the less likely it is that a person will take a life even when taking a life will fulfill other desires.

A person with an aversion to pain will avoid pain even then the pain would fulfill other desires. A person with a love for his children’s well being will secure his children’s well being even when doing so will thwart other desires.

However, if we pile enough other desires up against this aversion, then they will eventually outweigh that aversion. This person will (reluctantly) kill. So, if we put the taking of an innocent life up against the detonation of an atomic weapon in a distant city, the person with an aversion to killing will find that aversion overridden with concern for the millions of people who would otherwise die. Thus, rights have weight against other considerations.

The Right to Keep and Bear Arms

On this analysis, a “right to keep and bear arms” exists to the degree that “a population-wide aversion to depriving others of their weapons” will tend to fulfill other desires.

Think of how a population-wide aversion to killing, rape, theft, torture, and other evils will tend to fulfill other desires. Then, we need to ask ourselves whether a population-wide aversion to depriving others of their weapons fits into that category.

Now, a general population-wide aversion to depriving others of their freedom clearly fits as a desire that would tend to fulfill other desires. Yet, this desire can clearly be overridden, as it is with laws against murder, rape, theft, and torture (in civilized countries). This population-wide aversion to depriving others of freedom implies an aversion to depriving people of their weapons. However, this, like others, can be overridden by such things as a population-wide aversion to being murdered, or having one’s family, children, friends, or neighbors murdered, or having them suffer the effects of somebody close to them being murdered.

Summary

To the degree that there is no value to an aversion to depriving people of their weapons, to that degree there is no right to keep and bear arms. To the degree that there is no right to keep and bear arms, to that degree no government law can infringe upon such a right.

This, then, is the way a desire utilitarian would weigh an important set of considerations relevant to the issue of gun control.

Paula Zahn and Atheist Discrimination, Take 2

I waited to write this evening’s blog until I saw what happened on the Paula Zahn show on the issue of discrimination against atheists.

As a result, in the time I have, I am going to give a set of disconnected thoughts on the topic, rather than an argument with a single point.

(1) I would like to congratulate those who sent in the “gigabytes” of email that made this, in the words of the host, the most controversial issue brought up. I would like those who participated in this to recognize that you have made a difference – and encourage you to keep it up.

This type of response should have followed President Bush’s statement that only those who believe that our rights come from God are qualified to be judge. I suspect that if this type of noise had been generated then (and Bush repeated that claim during the Presidential debates) that it might have made a difference in the election.

(2) I want to note that those who protested the original episode almost certainly include a few theists who recognize bigotry when they see it and who also took a stand. I find it highly unlikely that, in all the email they received, there was not at least one that said, “I am a Christian, but I was appalled at the statements that your panelists made.” Also, it is likely that many of the people at CNN responsible for rehearing the case were Christian, and yet they did give the case a new and more balanced hearing.

The important point being that a person is to be judged by the position he or she takes on an issue, not on his or her religiosity that matters.

(3) There will always be things to complain about, and things which can be done better. If you are somebody who will always complain about something and that nobody else can ever please, do not be surprised to discover that they give up in frustration after a while.

(4) I do think that there is a need for soundbyte answers to some of the most common questions asked about atheism, and I would like to offer a few.

(a) Inferring morality from a disposition to pray is as bigoted as inferring criminality from the color of one’s skin.

(b) There are many moral people who do not pray, and many praying people who are not moral.

(c) We are a Christian nation in the same sense that we are a white nation, and it no more justifies bigotry against non-Christians than it justifies bigotry against non-Whites.

(d) [In answer to the question, “Where do you get your morality?”] From the fact that this is the only life I will ever have and it’s insane to try to live that life in a hive of murderers, rapists, and thieves.

(e) [In answer to the question of why there is so much bigotry against Atheists.] The Pledge of Allegiance and the national motto teach bigotry against Atheists. They were passed during the McCarthy era to teach children that atheists are not true Americans, and they work.

Anyway, anybody who thinks that they may be confronted with these types of questions should take the effort to have memorized and well practiced a set of short ‘clichés’ to use against standard statements.

(5) I am going to repeat something that I wrote when this story first broke because I think it needs to be repeated.

These victories are worthless and ephemeral, disappearing like smoke, unless they are tied to a substantive objective that can be seen and measured. The substantive objective that I recommend is the removal of “under God” from the pledge and “In God We Trust” as the national motto, because these do, in fact, teach Americans (and the most vulnerable of all Americans – the children) to think of those not under God and who do not trust in God as anti-American.

As long as this attitude towards atheists persist, children will shun atheism as a way of avoiding the stigma of being anti-American, voters will refuse to accept atheist candidates for public office, and demagogues will continue to be able to attack science by associating it with atheism. Furthermore, atheists are not the only ones who suffer from this. Religious conservatives will continue to be able to fight anything they do not like, from homosexual rights to abortion to stem cell research – simply by associating it in the public mind with the hated term ‘atheist’.

It is a common marketing ploy. If you want to get people to have an adverse reaction to A, you associated it in the public mind with B, which they already hate. So, religious conservatives know they can gain a great deal of political leverage by talking about the homosexual/atheist agenda, speaking about the evils of atheist materialist science, and complaining about godless liberals. All of this is fostered, at least in part, by the lessons that are taught daily in our schools, that atheists are anti-American.

They are not only harming us with their bigotry, but they are using their effectiveness at generating hatred against us to harm others – and even to harm themselves, since a scientific understanding of the universe is the best tool we have available for avoiding the worst that the universe can throw against the human race.

It is, I would argue, of crucial importance to start to get educators to understand that when they go along with this ritualistic Pledge of Allegiance, that they are teaching their students to psychologically segregate Americans into a “white” group who is “under God” and a “colored” group who are not “under God.”

And that this is simply unjust bigotry given the status of a national ritual.

Start here, and we start to take a major step in making the world a better place than it would have otherwise been, and leave our children a better world than was left to us.

Gun Control

I have a question from the studio audience.

Here's a studio audience question for you: Gun control. I don't know enough to have a reliable opinion on the subject, so if it's worth a blog posting, I'd love to hear how you approach the topic.

Thomas

The Constitutional Question

Debates on gun control have to take into consideration the Second Amendment to the Constitution

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed

Now, on the Constitutional question, there are a number of things that deserve mention.

Interpretation

Imagine a parent telling a child, “In order to keep you safe and healthy, you have to be home by 10:00 PM.” The child then comes home at 1:00 AM. When the parent begins to scold the child for breaking curfew, the child answers, “You said that the 10:00 curfew was to keep me safe and healthy. Your rule says that I can stay out as long as I want, as long as I do not do anything that is unsafe or unhealthy.”

That child would be grounded for the rest of his natural life (and then some).

The founding fathers said that the right to bear arms is justified because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. A lot of people want to interpret this as saying that it is permissible to take away the right to bear arms whenever it does not violate the requirements of a well-regulated militia. This, as I understand it, is the same as the child saying that it is okay to stay out as long as he wants as long as he is not doing anything (that the child judges to be) unhealthy or unsafe.

The parents’ rule states, “Be home by 10:00”. The Bill of Rights states, “the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” That’s the rule.

Agreement

I have noticed an amazing coincidence. For some strange reason, a huge portion of those who believe that gun control is a good idea also believe that the Constitution permits gun control. At the same time, a huge portion of those who believe that gun control is a bad idea also believe that the Constitution prohibits gun control.

There are extremely few people who believe that the Constitution prohibits gun control, even though gun control is a good idea; or who believe that the Constitution permits gun control even though gun control is a bad idea.

This suggests that there are an awful lot of people out there who are first deciding their view on gun control, and then endorsing whatever interpretation of the Constitution fits their conclusion.

Technically, this is the same type of thinking as deciding first whether one wants it to be the case that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and helped in the 9/11 attacks, then looking at the evidence to support that conclusion. It is the same as deciding first whether it is economically useful to believe that human activity contributes to global warming then looking at the evidence and accepting only what supports that conclusion. It is the same as deciding that the Bible is literally true then accepting or rejecting scientific findings based on whether they are consistent with biblical claims.

And it happens on both sides of the debate. Neither can condemn the other.

The question of what the Constitution says, and one’s view of what it should say, are two different questions which can reasonably be expected to generate two different answers.

Good and Bad Law

Not everything that the Constitution says is worthy of our respect.

All we have to do to prove this is to remember that the Constitution once protected slavery, and counted African Americans as slaves worth three-fifths of a person for the sake of representation in Congress.

When writing the Bill of Rights, the founding fathers offered their opinion as to whether gun control was a good idea. They said that it was not. Elsewhere in the Constitution they offered their opinion on equal rights for blacks, and decided that this was not a good idea. In some things, the founding fathers were correct. In some things, they made a mistake. One of the questions that we have reason to ask is whether they made a mistake regarding gun control.

In this regard, we need to consider such things as the fact that the founding fathers probably never dreamed of a “musket” that can fire 100 rounds per second or a cannon that can lob a single cannon ball to the other side of the world and destroy a whole city. Even if they were right with respect to what counts as a good idea in an age of muskets, this does not imply that the same policy will work in an age of machine guns and missiles.

Considerations

Presumption of Liberty Argument

One argument that is relevant to the issue of gun control is the issue of a presumption of liberty. It is never the duty of those who argue in defense of freedom to explain why it is useful. If I wanted to walk to the store for some milk and bread, it is not my job to justify this action. Instead, it is the duty of those who argue that I should not be permitted to do so to make their case.

This argument is the same as the argument for the principle that an accused person is to be presumed innocent unless proven guilty. A love of freedom and an aversion to do harm suggest that we make an assumption in favor of innocence, and that we place the burden of proof on those who would have us do harm to prove that harm is deserved. Similarly, we should presume liberty, and put the burden of proof on those who argue that liberty must be infringed.

So, nobody needs to say a word in defense of the right to keep and bear arms. It is up to those who argue against such a right who must make their case.

The Personal Security Argument

One of the ways that they can make that case is by demonstrating (beyond reasonable doubt) that we will be more secure in a society that has gun control. If gun control means that one has a smaller chance of being maimed or killed, or of suffering the fate of somebody one loves being maimed or killed, then the aversion to being maimed or killed and concern for others are both “reasons for action” for gun control.

However, because the advocates of gun control need to overcome a burden of proof, it is not enough to argue that “it seems kinda make sense that gun control will protect innocent lives.” Those who advocate gun control do need actual proof.

I will admit at the start that I have not examined this specific issue in enough detail to know whether that proof is available. I cannot say one way or the other whether the case for gun control has been made.

The Defense from Tyranny Argument

One argument against gun control notes that the biggest threat to the liberty and security of the people has been their own governments. The Declaration of Independence states that we have certain rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.” The best defender of liberty has never been governments (who are the natural enemies of liberty) but the people themselves. Of course, for the people to protect their liberty from their own governments, they must have the means to do so.

The current Bush Administration, and events in Europe, create reason to question this argument. The Bush Administration has shown itself to be on a virtual rampage against the Bill of Rights and other principles of freedom that have protected us for 200 years. They have argued that the President has the right to engage in searches and seizures without a warrant, to arrest an individual without an indictment from a grand jury, to hold him without trial, to deprive people of life, liberty, and property without due process, to engage in cruel and unusual punishment, to throw out the doctrine of checks and balances by giving the Executive Branch the power to make law (through the use of signing statements) and to bypass judicial review.

Yet, those who have argued that gun control must be prohibited because it is necessary to protect the people from an abusive government are among the biggest defenders of this administration. In fact, if we look at history, this is no surprise. Throughout history, tyrants have been greeted with cheers. Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler were not only autocratic dictators, they were also exceptionally popular.

A well armed population may be a poor defense against tyranny, particularly when those with the arms are those who are most likely to use them in defense of an administration that advocates tyranny.

The case of Europe and Japan also provide counter-arguments against the “preservation of liberty” option. Both regions have extensive gun control, and both regions seem to be under no threat of a tyrannical leader coming to power and depriving them of their freedoms. In fact, that threat seems far more real in the United States under the Bush Administration in a country without gun control, than in Europe and Japan.

So, again, the argument that a “right to bear arms” is necessary to the defense of liberty from tyranny appears to be weak. The evidence seems to suggest that if the people love liberty than they do not need to keep and arms to defend it from their own government, and if they do not love liberty, then having a right to keep and bear arms will do little good.

Conclusion

In this blog entry, I have given some considerations to be applied to the issue of gun control. That is, after all, what Thomas asked for – to hear how I would approach the topic.

These are the types of issues that I would address. However, I do not have the time to become a sufficiently qualified expert in this field to say that I know what the right answer is. Instead, on this issue, I would like to trust to the judgment of a qualified expert.

Personally, the approach that I would take would be the same approach that I took regarding the Iraq War strategy. I stated repeatedly that I do not have sufficient evidence to pass judgment, and that I would trust to experts to make that decision. When I read that the Join Chiefs of Staff and the Iraq Study Group both recommended withdraw, then I put my vote on the side of withdraw - and argued that Bush is an arrogant fool for putting his own judgment against the judgment of experts.

If there were a body who looked at the issue of gun control that I could trust to be experts and to be specifically concerned with doing the right thing, who studied the issue in detail, I would trust to their judgment.

Discussion: Public Relations

This is the sixth post on the presentations made at Beyond Belief 2006.

After Neil Tyson’s presentation, the moderator, Roger Bingham, had the first five presenters (Steven Weinberg, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, and Neil deGrasse Tyson), at the head table and opened the room to discussion.

The first question came from Mazarin Banaji, Department of Psychology at Harvard. She asked,

Is there something about the scientific agenda that sort of handicaps us in a particular way. In other words, if the Warren Buffett, Bill Gates foundation were to give you the $30 billion that is now only half of their endowment, what would you want to do with it to bring about change in the manner to which you see it appropriate.

After a couple of panelists gave responses, Patricia Churchland (Chair, Philosophy Department, University of California at San Diego) rose from the audience and said,

[Mazarin’s] suggestion is not that you get the scientists to do this PR campaign but that you hire a PR firm and you say, ‘Look, what we want to do is make available to the public the type of story that Neil told, and do it in a way that is persuasive – you guys are the ones who are supposed to be in the business of persuading people, get the sound bites right, get the timing right, hit the right television shows . . . let’s go. . . . Give the job to people who know how to do it. Give it to professionals.

Indeed, this makes sense. If you want a medical breakthrough, you give the job to a skilled medical researcher. If you want to sell a product, you give the job to professional marketers and public relations experts.

However, Banaji asked if there was anything that is handicapping scientists in doing this, and I think the answer is, “Yes.”

That handicap is actually quite easy to express.

No public relations campaign will ever pass muster to be included in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and no peer-reviewed scientific paper will ever pass muster as a public relations campaign.

The public relations experts come to this science board and they present their campaign. Let us say that they have decided to advance the slogan, “Science saves lives.” They then present a storyboard for a 30-second commercial that looks at a few instances where science has saved lives. Let us say that they involve a child whose life was saved by some medical procedure, the scientific prediction of a hurricane’s path, and the engineering that went into a building capable of withstanding an earthquake.

Scientists, insofar as they are scientists, will immediately start to object to the campaign. First, no scientist will ever accept the idea of supporting a conclusion based on a single incident. One child’s life was saved by a medical advance. How do you know? You at least need a control group before you can make a claim like that, and enough individuals in each group to justify any generalization. You don’t look at a specific incidence and draw a general conclusion. That’s bad science. The head of the science PR committee is soon pounding his fist on the table shouting in anger, “We are supposed to be promoting science, and you stand there and give us a paradigm example of bad science!”

Public relations campaigns are, inherently, bad science. It is simply not possible to show enough evidence to scientifically support a conclusion in a sound bite.

Let me give you an example of how public relations works.

Recently, I was watching Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” with a friend. In that movie, Gore has a graph of changes in CO2 concentrations over the past 650,000 years, showing its relationship to temperature over that time and identifying the seven most recent ice ages.

Then, he showed the change to the current levels of CO2 concentrations.

One person that I was with then gasped, “It’s doubled!”

In fact, CO2 concentrations have not doubled – it has gone from a global average of about 280 parts per million (ppm) to 360 ppm, an increase of less than 30 percent. However, Gore decided to use a graph that would give an individual the impression that the increase in CO2 levels have doubled. This happened because the bottom of Gore’s graph did not start at 0 ppm, it started at 200 ppm. There was an 80 ppm difference between the bottom of the graph and the historic global average, and another 80 ppm between the global average and the current concentrations, giving the appearance that CO2 levels had doubled.

Perhaps this was an accident. However, it is quite likely that this chart was presented in this way precisely because it would then have an enhanced psychological effect on the viewer – because it will cause this sudden burst of anxiety that would cause somebody not accustomed to dealing with graphs (and ways of deceiving people through graphs) to gasp and immediately adopt a false belief about CO2 concentrations. “It’s doubled” is a false belief.

Another example of public relations versus science can be found in the testimony of four climate change scientists to the House Science and Technology Committee on February 8, 2007. In this testimony, Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA, 48th District) asked the scientists, “What percentage of greenhouse gasses are created by nature, compared to what percent by human kind?”

This precipitated a tense exchange between Rohrabacher and one of the witnesses, IPCC scientist Susan Solomon, who insisted on answering with the fact that humans are responsible for 90 percent of the change in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

Of course, if you want to answer the question of who is responsible for the change in global temperatures, we want to know what is responsible for the change in CO2 levels.

Yet, Rohrabacher insisted on getting an answer to the original question. Why?

A reasonable theory is that Rohrabacher was attempting to engineer a false belief that humans are responsible for only a small change in global warming. Many people, when they hear that humans are responsible for, say, 25% of greenhouse gas concentrations would immediately adopt the false belief that we are responsible for 25% of the global warming. By engineering this false belief, one would be able to cause people to act in ways that harmed themselves, but provided a significant benefit to companies and individuals who contribute heavily to the Republican Party. Of course, that profit would enable those individuals to contribute even more to his political party, while those afflicted with this false belief would become even more impoverished by it.

Part of the evidence for this theory is that, earlier, Rohrabacher attempted to equate the temperature of Europe during the little ice age to the temperature of the whole planet that global warming scientists measure – as if a cold Europe implies a cold planet. This is another example of engineering a false belief. Any criminal investigator will agree that establishing a pattern of behavior is relevant to demonstrating guilt.

I would argue that attempting to engineer a false belief is the moral equivalent of lying. In fact, I would argue that lying is wrong because attempting to engineer a false belief is wrong, and lying is an attempt to engineer a false belief. If it were not wrong to engineer false beliefs, then lying would be permissible.

Yet, public relations firms seem to be professionals mostly in the art of engineering false beliefs. To hire an engineering firm is to hire a professional engineer of false (but useful, to the person with money) beliefs.

Of course, just as it is possible to engineer false beliefs, it is also possible to engineer true beliefs. However, even here, there is a conflict between science and public relations. Even the engineer of true beliefs has to engineer that belief in 30 seconds or less. There is no sound scientific argument that can be given in 30 seconds or less. Whatever ‘argument’ the public relations firm can fit into a 30 second commercial is one that no scientist would accept as one that ought to convince somebody to accept the conclusion.

Science depends on proving a proposition, not on engineering acceptance of it.

There is a reason why the leading public educator on the subject of global warming is not a scientist, but a politician. It is because scientists simply are not in the business of engineering beliefs.

Patricia Churchland gave the correct answer regarding what should be done to promote science. One needs to collect a lot of money and hand it to a public relations firm that will come up with the sound bits and commercials that will sway the public mind.

The problem, however, is coming up with sound bites and commercials that a scientist of good moral character could endorse, and that will still be effective in persuading a public that is substantially ignorant of the field one is discussing.

So, how would I answer this question?

I think that the answer has a moral component. Rather than join the ranks of those who are in the business of engineering false beliefs, or manipulating faulty reasoning, what we need to do is to make it a moral embarrassment to attempt to engineer false beliefs. Gore’s graph should be seen as an embarrassment, because it engineers a false belief about changes in CO2 concentration. Rohrabacher’s antics in attempting to engineer a false belief should be viewed as morally on par with soliciting sex from an underage congressional page. It certainly threatens the welfare of far more people, many of them far younger than the pages that serve on Capital Hill.

This is not a matter of engineering beliefs. This is a matter of engineering desires – of promoting desires that tend to fulfill other desires. In this case, it involves engineering an aversion to engineering false beliefs sufficiently strong to require Gore to use a more honest graph, and to keep a man like Rohrabacher out of Congress.

I think that I can make an argument that hiring a public relations firm for that purpose – for the purpose of engineering good desires – would be a perfectly legitimate activity, and one that is far overdue in fact.

Since I do not have enough money to hire a PR firm, I will do what I can in this blog, and encourage you to do the same.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Intelligent Design

This is the fifth in a series of posts that I am writing about the presentations given at Beyond Belief 2006.

The fifth presenter at that conference (and the first presenter in Session 2) was Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The lesson that I would like to draw from Tyson’s speech is that we need to teach intelligent design. It would be nice to have students learn about intelligent design in school. However, this is not likely to happen. There are too many people arguing for keeping intelligent design out of our schools. However, in teaching intelligent design, they really should teach the truth about intelligent design. That is what schools are supposed to do, right? This means teaching the problems with intelligent design. Because our school system requires this forced ignorance of the problems with intelligent design, our population remains vulnerable to those who continue to take advantage of the public ignorance (or who fall victims to that ignorance).

This ignorance inflicts a heavy cost on our society.

Tyson began his presentation by focusing on the fact that some of the brightest people today and in the past have accepted some form of intelligent design. If some of the best and brightest in the history of science can be taken in by such a theory, then perhaps it is somewhat over demanding to expect a lay person to do any better.

I want to put on the table the fact that that you have school systems wanting to put intelligent design in the classroom, but you also have the most brilliant people who have ever walked this earth doing the same thing.

Tyson’s claim that many of the best and brightest scientists continue to believe in God starts with the same surveys that atheists often cite that show that the vast majority of top scientists do not believe in or doubt the existence of God. A survey that shows that 93 percent of the nation’s top scientists are atheist or agnostic also shows that 7 percent are theists. (Note: Tyson asserted that 15% were theists, but this is not the number reported in the polls.)

This shows that it is possible to be fully educated in the marvels of science and even be an active participant in scientific progress and still hold a belief in God.

From this, Tyson concluded that it is simply false to think that all you need to do is to educate a person in science and you can eliminate his believe in God.

He also went through history to show that many of the greatest scientists in history accepted some form of intelligent design.

Ptolomy, writing at the boundary between what is known and unknown, wrote,

I know that I am mortal by nature and ephemeral. But when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch the earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus myself and drink my fill of ambrosia.

Newton’s theory of gravity handled the attraction between two bodies, but could not account for the long-term stability of the system. At this point – the boundary between what is known and unknown, Newton wrote:

The six primary planets are revolved about the sun in circles concentric with the sun and with motions directed towards the same parts and along the same plane, but is it not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the council and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.

Christian Huygens nowhere writes about God until he gets to the boundary between what is known and unknown.

I suppose nobody would deny but that there is somewhat more of contrivance, somewhat more of miracle, in the production and growth of plants and animals than in lifeless heaps of inanimate bodies, for the finger of God and the wisdom of divine providence is in them much more clearly manifested than in the other.

Importantly, these people did not invoke God for the purpose of trying to smuggle religion into science class. They were not trying to advance some hidden agenda. They said these things – the best and the brightest in science – because they believed these things.

This sounds like a defense of intelligent design. One could go on from this to argue that if the best and the brightest minds in science, past and present, hold that there is room for divine influence in nature, then it may be argued that there is no good reason to leave it out of the science classroom.

However, Tyson offers a different conclusion. He argues that the acceptance of intelligent design, even among scientists, even among the best and brightest minds in science, is a problem. The problem is that where scientists (and others) evoke intelligent design, they quit studying, and they quit learning. They draw a line in the sand and refuse to venture past it.

Here, Tyson referred back to Newton.

Or, more precisely, to an 18th century scientists Pierre-Simon Laplace who took the full power of calculus and applied to the motions of the planets and showed that the planetary orbits are stable over time. To do this, he perfected a type of mathematical modeling called perturbation theory. In doing this, he answered a question that Newton did not answer, and where Newton evoked intelligent design.

I deliberate said that Newton ‘did not answer’ this question, not that Newton ‘could not answer’ this question, because Tyson later argues that Newton could have answered this question.

The lesson, then, is not that we need intelligent design in the classroom. The lesson, according to Tyson, is:

Even if you are as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God, and then your discovery stops. It just stops. Your kinda no good any more for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who does not have God on the brain, and who says, ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ They come in and solve it.

But look at the time delay. This was a hundred year time delay.

And the math that is in perturbation theory is like crumbs for Newton. He could have come up with that. The guy invented calculus just on a dare practically. When somebody asked him, ‘Ike, how come planets orbit in ellipses and not in some other shape?’ and he couldn’t answer that, he goes home for two months, comes back, out comes integral differential calculus because he needed that to answer that question. So, this is the kind of mind we are dealing with Newton. He could have gone there, but he didn’t.

He didn’t. His religiosity stopped him.

So, we have religiosity to blame for the fact that an important advance in science was discovered a century after it could have been discovered. Intelligent design, at least according to Tyson’s argument, delays advances in science because it tells people to quit looking.

To be honest, Tyson's assertion here is scientifically weak. A lot more needs to be done if one is going to demonstrate that the proposition, "intelligent design causes delays in scientific advancement" is true. There is little evidence here to back up such a claim. It is, at best, intuitively plausible, and we all know how dangerous intuitive plausibility is.

However, in spite of that problem, Tyson's conclusion still has merit - that there are reasons to teach intelligent design. He says that it should be taught because it is a real phenomena in the history of science and of how the brain works at the boundary of knowledge. He also suggests that this is a problem in that it stops scientific advances. People should be taught that intelligent design makes even the most brilliant mind, “. . . kinda no good any more for advancing that frontier.”

However, all of this means teaching the problems with intelligent design. Whenever people tend to speak about teaching intelligent design, they talk about presenting it as a viable option to scientific theory. Yet, if we were to teach intelligent design honestly, the lesson would actually be one of explaining why intelligent design fails to stand as a viable alternative to any scientific theory.

One legitimate response to those who insist on including lessons on intelligent design would be to say, "Sure. I think it is a great idea. Students really should know about all of the philosophical, historical, and cultural problems with intelligent design so that they would know why so many thinking people reject it." Because, in fact, if we were to teach intelligent design in school, and teach it honestly, most of the intelligent minds in that school would learn why intelligent people tend to reject it.

In fact, if I were running a private school, I would have those students learn about intelligent design. When they graduated, they would know the problems with intelligent design and be able to explain those prolems to others. I have the philosophy that a good education is one that makes a student better able to contribute to the well-being of society, and that understanding the problems with intelligent design helps to improve society by making it less vulnerable to those mistakes. So, yes, a graduate should be able to contribute meaningfully to the social discussion on intelligent design.

Since the schools are not going to teach intelligent design (or will not teach the subject honestly) then there is a need to fill in the gaps on our children’s education. We must take the time to teach children about intelligent design theory, so that they can speak intelligently about it to other students, and so that they will be less vulnerable to the myths of intelligent design.

So, I must ask, because I do not know, where is there a good book on intelligent design for children? If nobody can find one, then maybe this is a project worth taking up.

Bigotry and the Ethics of Belief

In the discussion of the anti-atheist bigotry exhibited on Paula Zahn Now, Austin Cline, in the post “Karen Hunter Defends Anti-Atheist Bigotry and Comments”, looked at some claims that Karen Hunter later made in defense of her statements on that broadcast. presented an argument in response to a claim that Karen Hunter, one of the participants in Zahn’s show, made in defending what she said on the show.

I am interested in one argument that Cline made in that analysis, and in comments made to my post yesterday, “Ms. Hunter, I Will Not Shut Up.”

Those statements suggest that belief is like skin color in that they are not (in any morally relevant way) a matter of choice that would put them in the realm of moral judgment. The argument is that prejudice against people who hold a particular belief is no different than prejudice against somebody of a particular race.

I disagree.

In fact, it is quite possible and legitimate to hold individuals morally accountable for what they believe. At least in theory, it is possible that an atheist is guilty of moral wrongdoing.

Response to Hunter

I want to quickly address Ms. Hunter’s comments so that I can set them aside. She argued that it is permissible to denigrate atheists in a way that it is not permissible to denigrate blacks because being black is not a matter of choice. Atheism, on the other hand, is a matter of choice.

I responded that if being black were a matter of choice – if one could take a pill that changed one’s race – it would still be morally wrong to denigrate those blacks who choose not to take the pill and remain black.

I also argued that the argument assumes that the behavior we are talking about is one of denigrating a group of people. If the behavior was not denigrating, then choice would not be relevant. Choice is only relevant when somebody is denigrating the choices that another person has made.

The Problem of the Ethics of Belief

Cline offered another defense of the atheist position, that beliefs are not a matter of choice (in a way that makes moral judgment legitimate).

First, not believing in any gods is no more a "choice" than not believing that there are elephants in my kitchen — beliefs aren't acts of will, but simply conclusions we accept based on what we know and already believe.

However, if we accept this argument, we have to ask what to do about the person who believes that atheists lack the capacity to be moral because they do not believe in God, that blacks are fit only to serve as talking farm animals, that infidels and witches should be burned at the stake, that Ms. Smith is a witch, or that flying a plane into a sky scraper is doing the will of a benevolent God and will buy a ticket to heaven for oneself and all of one’s friends and family.

In fact, the entire discussion of Ms. Hunter’s claims on Paula Zahn Now was, in effect, an attack on her beliefs. It would seem that if the belief that no God exists is not a matter of choice and therefore not subject to moral criticism, then Hunter’s beliefs are not a matter of choice and therefore not subject to moral criticism.

Free Will

Part of the problem is going to center around the question of what it means to choose a belief. That, in turn, is going to take us to the question of free will and the nature of choice.

In moral philosophy, there is a dispute over what it means to say that a person 'should have done otherwise.'

One theory of ‘choice’ requires that a person must be capable of acting in a way overrides all causal factors. Those who believe that this type of choice is required come in two basic stripes. One stripe (libertarians – not to be confused with the political philosophy of the same name) holds that humans have this magical power to ignore the laws of nature and that moral judgment is based entirely on how we use that power. The other stripe (determinists) hold that we do not have this magical power to ignore the laws of nature, that moral judgment is based entirely on how we use this power, and that as a result moral judgments are nonsense.

The other theory of ‘choice’ (compatibilism) says that the type of choice that is subject to moral judgment fits within the causal laws of nature – that it refers to a subset of those causes. As such, we have no magical power to ignore the laws of nature, but moral judgments still make sense since they refer to choices made within the laws of nature.

I accept this second theory of ‘choice’. Moral judgments themselves are events that have causes and effects, that their effect is primarily to change the desires that people develop, and that those desires in turn effect the actions people perform. We are justified in making moral judgments whenever any action evidences desires that we have reason to promote or inhibit.

Applying Compatibilist Choice to Belief

Applying the compatibilist concept of choice to the question of belief, we come up with the moral question, “Can a belief provide evidence of a desire that we have reason to promote through praise or to inhibit through condemnation?”

The answer to this question is often, “Yes.”

It is not possible to make a moral judgment of a person when his belief is grounded on good evidence and sound reasoning. In this case, the existence of good evidence and sound reasoning justifies the belief. At worst, we can praise the person for his respect for the rules of good evidence and sound reasoning.

However, when a person makes a mistake, we then have reason to ask, “Of all of the mistakes that she could have possibly made, why is it that she made that mistake and not some other?”

We know that desires can influence what a person believes. Sometimes, the best explanation we have for why a person adopted a particular belief is because she wanted to believe it. A mother can refuse to accept the fact that her child is dead because she simply does not want to believe that her child is dead. A President can believe that the leader of another country is harboring weapons of mass destruction purely because he wants to believe that the leader of another country is harboring weapons of mass destruction.

Whenever this is the case, then a person’s beliefs give us a window on his or her desires. That window on a person’s desires tells us if that person is exhibiting desires that we have reason to promote through moral praise, or reason to inhibit through moral condemnation.

In other words, whenever the fact that a person has a particular belief can be traced back to what the person desires, then beliefs are an "act of will" in the morally relevant sense - as much an act of will as any (other) intentional action.

The Ability to Believe

These points tie into the claim that people sometimes make that, "I could not believe in God even if I wanted to."

Those who believe this, I assert, believe it only because they want it to be true. In fact, if a person wants to believe in God badly enough, he will believe in God. He would ignore the evidence that suggested conclusions he did not like, while accepting evidence that supported the conclusions he wanted to accept. We see it happen all the time. The person who claims, "I would be different. I would not follow these patterns of behavior" is somebody who wants to attribute to himself superhuman powers.

In short, he believes this because he wants to believe it. Not because there is any evidence for it in real world observations.

The Schlussel Example

Karen Hunter’s accomplice in the exhibition of anti-atheist bigotry on Paula Zahn Now was Debbie Schlussel. Schlussel also made comments in response to a flood of email that she received as a result of her hate speech. Austin Cline covers these as well in, “Debbie Schlussel Defends Anti-Atheist Bigotry and Comments”

Schlussel uses the examples of Adam Gadahn and John Walker Lindh as atheists who converted to Islam and became supporters of Al-Queida to argue that atheists are dangerous. Using these two as examples, she substantially equates “hate-filled atheists” with “future Muslim extremists (redundant)”.

If a person were to identify two Christians who converted to Islam and joined Al-Queida, and used it to condemned all of Christianity, it is reasonable to expect that Schlussel would instantly see the problem with that argument. In fact, she would find the problem with that argument so obvious that she would instantly subject anybody who made that argument to the worst form of condemnation. She would, in short, have no problem recognizing that a person who uses such an argument is worthy of harsh moral condemnation.

Yet, she uses the argument herself, and blinds herself to the moral condemnation that such a person deserves.

Why is it that she can see the problem in the one case, but cannot see it in the other?

We are talking about events in the real world, so they must have an explanation. There must be an answer to the question, “Why?”

I suggest that we can find the answer by looking at Schlussel’s desires – at what she wants to believe. Whenever an argument leads to a conclusion that Schlussel does not like, she has no problem identifying flaws in the argument that she can use to attack those who make such an argument. However, when an argument leads to a conclusion that she likes, she has no interest in questioning the argument behind that conclusion. She accepts the argument without question.

So, Schlussel wants to believe that atheists are proto Muslim terrorists. She wants to see them as people deserving of condemnation and denigration. If she did not want this, then she would have reason to look at the arguments more carefully and see the problems with them.

This “desire to see others as worthy of condemnation and harm regardless of the facts” is a desire that tends to thwart other desires, so it is a desire that morally concerned individuals have reason to condemn.

In other words, an examination of Schlussel’s beliefs shows us that she has desires that good people have reason to make an object of contempt and condemnation. She has desires that tend to thwart other desires; that is to say, she has desires that others have reason to inhibit through condemnation.

She is a bad person.

Let the condemnation fly.

However, one cannot condemn Schlussel for her beliefs without accepting the more general principle that people can be condemned for their beliefs. This, in turn, is inconsistent with the claim that beliefs are not objects that can be used in assigning moral condemnation. We can either hold that beliefs are outside of the realm of moral judgment, or we can condemn Hunter and Schlussel for their beliefs. We cannot do both.

Ms Hunter: I Will Not Shut Up

It appears as if the atheist community is getting uniformly angry. This reaction has been in a response to a segment of Paula Zahn Now on CNN. In this segment, Zahn started out with a report on an atheist family in Missouri who got run out of town for being an atheist. However, the moral outrage has been directed at Zahn and her guests, two of whom vented the same hatred that the atheist family in the report had experienced.

Austin Cline at About: Agnosticism/Atheism has covered this issue in a pair of posts Paula Zahn Now: Karen Hunter, Debbie Schlussel, Stephen A. Smith on Atheism and Atheists React to Anti-Atheist Bigotry on Paula Zahn Now.

Through Cline’s site you can find links to others showing the episode or linking to the transcript.

In looking at the reaction to this incident, which Cline also documents, I have to say:

It’s about time!

In the past, an incident such as this would only draw a small response from a small segment of the atheist community. A few atheists would respond to this outrage, and a few others to that outrage. The result is that it is seldom the case that people have protested loud enough or long enough to actually be heard. Typically, those against whom the protest has been directed has been able to ignore the pesky little noise that atheists make.

In order for alienation from a community to result in change, those affected need a symbol. Instead of picking small, scattered battles, they need to find one incident that symbolizes everything that is wrong in the millions of little examples that show up every day. Then, the community can focus its energy on that symbol and make enough news that they can no longer be ignored, and their message finally gets heard.

It can be a working woman who is just too tired at the end of the day to stand up and move to the back of the bus.

It can be a work of fiction such as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" that portrays all of the suffering and injustice in an institution that needs to be abolished.

It can be a tea party in Boston.

If we look at the Boston Tea Party, we see that the government of England was using it as its own symbol. It had removed the other taxes that the American colonies had been protesting, but left a tax on tea as a symbol of the crown’s right to tax the colonies. Americans did not dump in the tea because they were angry about a tax on tea. They attacked the tax as a statement against the crown’s symbol of taxation without representation. The Americans were able to focus its energy on this one tax, and in doing so speak with a loud and uniform voice.

If one can stand a military analogy (and I can seldom do so – except, it is apt in this case), the use of a symbol follows the principle of concentrating one’s forces to hit a crucial weak spot in the enemy line. Concentrating one’s effort on a crucial weakness and focusing energy on it, as a symbol of everything else that deserves fighting against, can hopefully generate a breakthrough that eventually brings down the entire defensive line.

I do not know what the atheist catalyst will be in this country. However, it will have the look and feel of this Paula Zahn incident. It will generate a wide and spontaneous protest from all corners of the atheist community, all focused on one event.

In looking at this incident, let's at least get the facts straight. I doubt that Paula Zahn set up an attack on atheists – at least not consciously. (A funny thing about prejudice is how it affects people subconsciously, and how it is possible to find bigotry in people who consciously would condemn it.)

Also, to say that Zahn should have had an atheist – or at least a competent defender of atheists – in her panel is not entirely consistent with the format for the show. The show involves bringing in panelists who will speak on all of the issues that will be discussed – from Senator Joseph Biden’s comment on Senator Barack Obama, to the weight of candidates, to the Super Bowl, to atheist discrimination. I believe that she was as surprised as anybody to discover that she did not have an articulate defender of the atheists in her panel.

We can see this if we look at the comments that Zahn herself made during the broadcast. Right away, when she saw what was going on, she asked, “Are any of you going to defend them here tonight?” She asserted the right to free speech, love thy neighbor, and challenged the claim that atheists were imposing their beliefs on other people.

However, she did not lead the discussion, nor did she do more than impose a few scattered comments and questions.

It is also important to note that the segment was broadcast under the banner, “Why do atheists inspire such hatred?” This question is as bigoted as asking, “What did blacks do to inspire the Europeans/Americans to enslave them?” or “Why did the Jews inspire the holocaust?” This is an inexcusable account of blaming the victim. It literally begs the panel to answer the question by pointing out what the atheists are doing that make them deserving of this type of treatment.

The situation on this episode is pretty much the same as one would expect if somebody had assembled three white men in 1920 and asked them to describe the plight of the blacks. Those comments would inevitably be racist, and yet nobody in the panel and most of the audience would be unable to recognize them as such.

For all of these reasons, Paula Zahn’s interview symbolizes what atheists have to put up with in America today, and it symbolizes what people of good moral character should find intolerable.

However, there is still one important thing missing from this symbol. It does not have (or it has not yet been identified with) a clearly defined objective.

Eliminating taxation without representation, abolishing slavery, and ending segregation were all clearly defined objectives – something that clearly defines what those who are involved in the protest are fighting for, and what those on the other side are fighting against.

The broadcast does define an objective. In the news portion that preceded the discussion, correspondent Gelia Gallagher interviewed Ryan Anderson with the religious journal “First Things”. He said, “Part of the public persona and the public image of atheism is what's presented by people suing to remove ‘In God We Trust’" from the coins or God phrase in the pledge of allegiance. And when that militant atheism becomes kind of like the public image of atheism, I think that gives rise to a lot of discontent with atheism.”

Hunter herself started her protest with, “I think this is such a ridiculous story. Are we not going to take ‘In God We Trust’ off of our dollars? Are we going to not say ‘one nation under God?’ When does it end? We took prayer out of schools. What more do they want?”

The correct answer is to say, “We are not.”

Zahn mentioned the survey that suggested that atheists are the least popular group in the country. She told her panelists, “What I find so interesting is when you look at the statistics, that they were the most hated of all the minorities.”

The one person defending atheists to this point disputed the statistics – which makes him ill qualified to be our defender in this forum. He does not even know what the facts are. Though, Zahn’s characterization is not entirely accurate either.

The poll actually rated atheists as lowest, not in terms of most hated, but in terms of sharing the poll taker’s vision of American society. That is to say, atheists, more than any other group, are considered outside of and even anti-American.

Where did they get this idea? Where would anybody ever hear somebody say that being an atheist is the same as being anti-American?

They get it from a Pledge of Allegiance that literally equates being “under God” with sharing American values and with refusing to be “under God” with having no allegiance to the United States or to the principles of liberty and justice for all.

They get it from a national motto that those who trust in God are “we” who are truly American, and by implication that those who do not trust in God are “they”.

Every day in schools across the country teachers get up in front of the class and not only tell their students that atheists are not loyal Americans and do not pledge themselves to liberty and justice for all, but they require that their students repeat these accusations every day. They get the message every time they look at a coin and read that “we” trust in God. So, who when asked who does not share their values as Americans, the only sensible answer is to say that it is “they” who do not trust in God who do not share their values as Americans.

Interestingly, Austin Cline presents us with a post titled, “Karen Hunter Defends Anti-Atheist Bigotry and Comments”. In it, he quotes Hunter as saying,

You choose to be an atheist. I didn't choose to be black. I have never seen a sign that read: Christians Only.

The claim that one chooses to be an atheist only makes sense if one admits that the treatment that atheists receive is denigrating and derogatory. This statement says, “It is okay to denigrate you because you choose to be who you are, but it is not okay to denigrate me because I did not choose to be who I am.” However, it is permissible to denigrate people whose first name begins with J because a person’s first name is a matter of choice?

And what would the moral case be if race became a matter of choice? What if a black person could take a pill and become white? Who would accept the argument that it is permissible to treat any black person who does not take the pill in a denigrating and derogatory matter because race, now, is a matter of choice?

Choice is irrelevant.

However, more importantly, I have, in fact, seen signs that read, “Christians Only.”

Putting “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance is no different than hanging a sign that says, “Those who are Under God Only”. A national motto of “In God We Trust” says, “Those who Trust In God Only.”

There is no moral difference between psychologically dividing this nation between those who are “Under God” or who trust in God and those who do not, and physically dividing a restaurant or a bus into a “white” section and a “colored” section. Every school child knows that students who sit out the Pledge of Allegiance are sitting in the psychological equivalent of the “colored” section of the classroom and of American culture.

There are those who protest the idea of making this an objective because it will make the “white” (“Under God”) people angry.

Of course they will be angry. They are being accused of injustice. They are being told to give up a position of power and authority over others – that they can no longer denigrate and belittle others. Of course they are going to be angry. That is how they maintain their power – by attacking (snarling, growling, and biting) at those who they sense as stepping out of bounds and challenging their position.

Imagine the Civil Rights leaders of the 1950s saying, “We know that the whites are never going to grant us equality, and demanding it only makes them mad. So, we should shut up about equality and accept whatever they seem happy to give to us.”

Those who defend the Pledge and the national motto defend religious segregation on the basis of religion. Those who refuse to oppose them refuse to oppose religious segregation. Those who fight for their removal fight against religious segregation.

When those who defend the Pledge and the Motto say that the opponents of religious segregation are anti-Christian, ask them whether they think that the protests against racial segregation were anti-White.

In the Paula Zahn piece on atheism, Hunter asserted that atheists “need to shut up.” Certainly, her life would be much easier and much more comfortable if atheists would quietly walk to the back of the cultural bus where they belong.

Sorry, but, no. I will not move to the back of the cultural bus.

And I will not shut up.