Greetings!

For up-front honesty, and time efficiency: This is a strongly atheistic blog-site.

It’s for people who are already fairly sure that organized religion’s influence is, on balance, negative; and so would like to reduce it. I think that I’ve offered, in my book length essay collection Leaving Truth, some interesting new insights on how we might do that. So I’d request that any who enjoy this blog will also visit my (& friends’) website – at poppersinversion.org – for more information about us and the book.

My intention for now is to post some brief, and hopefully provocative, statements of some of Leaving Truth’s main ideas. I will be trying in these to walk the tightrope between a curious and interested “How can he say that?”, and the dismissive “How can he possibly say that; it can’t be right”. I will refresh the entries here on a regular basis, and will also use this space – as time permits – for relevant book reviews and current events comments.

                                                Again, welcome to the site!

Leaving Truth distillations:

1.       I believe that my main essay finally boils our ancient science vs religion debate down to a simple case of ‘emperor’s clothes’. To clarify: That the theists’ continued ability to maintain an illusion of rational coherence for their proposals rests solely on our atheist & free-thought community’s unwillingness to call them on the process through which they have so far been able to justify those proposals as knowledge. We think – because we have been taught it from birth, and as an integral part of ‘the human condition’ – that we need the same process to justify our own proposals. We don’t. Karl Popper demonstrated this 75 years ago, but choose not to pursue the full implication of his demonstration. He was aware of it, but alarmed by it, and so stopped short. The sand is now running low in our hourglass, and I think that the stunning realization that Professor Popper drew back from could promote enormous positive change.

2.       “Religious fanaticism” and/or “religious fundamentalism” are merely our taking of religions seriously. Our assumption that their texts mean simply and honestly what they say they mean. Our continued propagation of knowledge systems for which we cannot safely make that assumption can be seen to be in deep opposition to any general improvement in the clarity of our thoughts. All such systems require – if we are to avoid fanaticism – that we learn as children to keep our thoughts vague and wooly. Specifically: not to give our words clear and stable meanings, and not to strive for overall coherence in our own growing edifice of knowledge. Most importantly, not to develop skill in the use of logic’s most basic axiom, the excluded middle principle. Our development of strong and mature reason is thereby compromised. We fail to achieve independent mental competence, and so must continue to defer to authority for most of our important answers. Authorities have not found this problematic, and it has been – in the short-term, and locally – highly adaptive. It has facilitated the social cohesion and militarily efficient hierarchal control through which we have been able to assemble into ever larger groups; which have been ever more effective in conquering their relatively smaller and weaker competitors.

So we have consistently been doing, and consistently been taught from birth that we must do as part of ‘the human condition’. And an important part of that teaching has been how to stare right at, and yet not see, the deeper level price that we’ve been paying for it. My main essay argues that – from the benefit of some fairly recent changes – we simply no longer need to do it. That we no longer need to maintain emotionally and politically seductive irrational systems; right down to and including their common sustaining root (our illusion of possession of the qualitatively better kind of knowledge [‘truth’] as which we have actually been able to propagate proposals like ‘walking on water’, water/wine conversion, and reanimation after three days of being dead down through our generations). I argue that this whole business has now ceased to be, on balance, adaptive. As part of that, I try to at least begin a demonstration of what ‘truth’ has really been costing us. Our religions are found to be merely the tip of a pretty substantial iceberg.

3.       Believing things because we’ve been taught them from birth as confirming examples of a special and better kind of knowledge (‘truth’) observably doesn’t work as well as believing things because we and others can on-demand-repeatably observe them. We can see that virtually all of the things that are now and still being believed by our species from the first basis are logically exclusive. If our world was created by Supernatural Being X (as delineated by his possession of characteristics Y) then it was not created by Supernatural Being W (who differs from X in possessing characteristics V). We can, of course, continue to fudge the whole business. We can say that the responsible supernatural being was ‘kinda sorta X’, but also kinda sorta W; or that he was/is X in this geographical area of our planet, while being at the same time W over there in that other area; or that ‘they’ were X two thousand years ago, while ‘he’ is W today. But has this ever really been okay? Can even the most emotionally and politically appealing proposals honestly be worth the mind damage of deliberate internal obfuscation; of maintaining knowledge that we can see to be antithetical to clear thought? And if we want to say that it is okay; how and where can we redraw the objective line? If we accept emotional appeal as our most powerful knowledge determinant at this level, then at what more superficial level will we be able to reject it? The strong and the weak have always and equally been able to cite emotional appeal for their proposals. So, and bottom line, what will continue to govern our world?

4.       We can see that the blind ratchet mechanism of evolution has not ‘designed’ human minds to unravel the deep mysteries of the universe, nor to enable us to live long and satisfying lives, nor even to be able to save ourselves from massive population crashes through irrational sabotage of our planetary lifeboat. We understand the mechanism well enough by now to know that it is too simple to seek such abstract goals. We can see that our brains – and thereby minds – have evolved only to competitively propagate the DNA molecules that code for their construction; with the implication that if we want anything beyond this (for example, not to eventually crash like a bacterial monoculture on sterilized agar) then we are going to have to rationally choose it, and rationally take the steps to achieve it. Neither the quaint little Gods of our species’ childhood dreamtime nor our continued unquestioning acceptance of  ‘Human Nature’ will save us. We will either ‘take the wheel’, in assuming a far more explicit and informed control of our destiny then we have been able to so far, or we will crash and burn.

Review of this year’s favorite book to date: Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. 
 

First, this is a very good book. It contains a number searingly perceptive and well-written paragraphs, each of which are individually worth its price.  It was recommended to me by a friend, based on his knowledge of my own rather jaundiced view of our species’ past several thousand years of moral and ethical progress. The book is written directly against that view. Dr. Pinker’s thesis is that we have been continually – albeit slowly and hesitantly – becoming more civilized. His main focus is on the statistical data relating to all of our myriad forms of violence. He pulls together, through some impressive research and scholarship, comparable historical data on our frequencies and relative severities of war, genocide, rape, torture, and general background violent crime. His case is based on downward trends for all of these activities when they are plotted, in apples to apples units, on a horizontal time axis. The power of this presentation is that, logically, one must either substantially controvert Dr. Pinker’s data – and, be warned, there’s a lot of it – or accept his thesis.

My initial comment to my friend who made the recommendation was that, if the thesis could be established at all, then it would be with a very marked acceleration of improvement starting from around 1650 and centered on Europe; and this did turn out to be the case. The data support a general and background level of improvement, but with the real excitement kicking in from the European Enlightenment and onward. To make this point a little more explicit, the data strongly suggest a positive correlation between our objective growth (in science and reason) and enabling help for our subjective ‘better angels’.

The book is long, at over 500 pages, and needs to be read at times when it can be given full attention. With its emphasis on statistics, and careful concise reasoning, some of the journey is – as Dr. Pinker ruefully acknowledges – a hard trudge. But to return to the matter of those gorgeous paragraphs, here are the last three:

“Though our escape from destructive contests is not a cosmic purpose, it is a human purpose. Defenders of religion have long claimed that in the absence of divine edicts, morality can never be grounded outside ourselves. People can pursue only selfish interests, perhaps tweaked by taste or fashion, and are sentenced to lives of relativism and nihilism. We can now appreciate why this line of argument is mistaken. Discovering earthly ways in which human beings can flourish, including stratagems to overcome the tragedy of the inherent appeal of aggression, should be purpose enough for anyone. It is a goal that is nobler than joining a celestial choir, melting into a cosmic spirit, or being reincarnated into a higher life-form, because the goal can be justified to any fellow thinker rather than being inculcated to arbitrary factions by charisma, tradition, or force. And the data we have seen in this book show that it is a goal on which progress can be made— progress that is halting and incomplete, but unmistakable nonetheless. 

A final reflection. In writing this book I have adopted a voice that is analytic, and at times irreverent, because I believe the topic has inspired too much piety and not enough understanding. But at no point have I been unaware of the reality behind the numbers. To review the history of violence is to be repeatedly astounded by the cruelty and waste of it all, and at times to be overcome with anger, disgust, and immeasurable sadness. I know that behind the graphs there is a young man who feels a stab of pain and watches the life drain slowly out of him, knowing he has been robbed of decades of existence. There is a victim of torture whose contents of consciousness have been replaced by unbearable agony, leaving room only for the desire that consciousness itself should cease. There is a woman who has learned that her husband, her father, and her brothers lie dead in a ditch, and who will soon “fall into the hand of hot and forcing violation.” It would be terrible enough if these ordeals befell one person, or ten, or a hundred. But the numbers are not in the hundreds, or the thousands, or even the millions, but in the hundreds of millions— an order of magnitude that the mind staggers to comprehend, with deepening horror as it comes to realize just how much suffering has been inflicted by the naked ape upon its own kind.

Yet while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, that species has also found ways to bring the numbers down, and allow a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes. For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.”   

Pinker, Steven (2011-10-04). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Kindle Locations 15522-15526). Penguin Books. Kindle Edition.

I can’t think of greater praise on which to end my review of Dr. Pinker’s book than to say that it compellingly makes the case that sets up these concluding paragraphs.