How to lie with statistics the CofE way.

Well I suppose a charitable interpretation would be that the Church of England doesn’t know a loaded question when it sees one or that it has a poor grasp of statistics, but at least someone in that vast Oxbridge educated hierarchy must have learnt something vaguely scientific in their lifetime. Which leads me to conclude that this headline claiming that 4 out of 5 people in Britain believe in the power of prayer is intended to be wilfully misleading.
The question asked by an ICM online poll was

image credit atasteofgarlic.com

""Irrespective of whether you currently pray or not, if you were to pray for something at the moment, what would it be for?”

Now had I been involved in the survey I would probably have answered that I wouldn’t pray for anything as it’s an observable empirical fact that it achieves nothing. However most people would respond to this in the same way as if they were asked what they would buy if they had just won the lottery i.e. suspend disbelief for the fun of it and answer the question as though it were meaningful.
Consequently…

Asked what it would be for if they were to pray, 31 per cent of respondents cited peace in the world, followed by an end to poverty in the world (27 per cent), a family member (26 per cent) and healing for another (22 per cent). While 5 per cent said they did not know what they would pray for, 14 per cent said they would never pray.

…which is no surprise really but anyone grounded in reality would have to point out that these people do not necessarily expect those prayers to be granted. Furthermore, if 80% of the country really would pray for these things in these proportions, how come there is still war and poverty? surely we have just proved the futility of prayer right there.Such empirical grounding is not evident for the Bishop of St Albans, the Rt Revd Dr Alan Smith, however who said:

"Prayer is one of the most natural and instinctive of human responses, so I am not surprised to see these findings. I come across people on an almost daily basis who want to talk about prayer and how to do it.”

This is equally unsurprising as he’s an Anglican Bishop who mostly meets with people as delusional as he is. If he spent time with others like me he’d be coming across people on a daily basis who wanted to know why he was talking to himself.
And speaking of self-selecting groups, who answers a poll like this anyway, or even knows of its existence? Christians, that’s who, but Christians are not representative of the nation at large.
I understand that the CofE is trying to prove its relevance to an increasingly secular country, but  relying on the general population’s ignorance of maths and stats to lie so egregiously is a poor way of doing it especially since the very people who would call them out on it publically are the very ones who do know enough statistics to notice. Richard Dawkins has already tweeted

“If I gave you a magic wand, what would you do?” I’d get rid of disease. “Aha!! Gotcha! You believe in magic wands.” — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 26, 2013

For those interested the full results of the survery are here

Catholic Archbishop says abusing Priests are not criminally responsible

The Catholic Archbishop of Durban, Wilfrid Fox Napier, has said in an interview that paedophilia is a psychological illness and not "a criminal condition". The claim was made on BBC Radio 5 Live where he went on to say…

"Don't tell me that those people are criminally responsible like somebody who chooses to do something like that. I don't think you can really take the position and say that person deserves to be punished when he was himself damaged."

…referring to Priests he was aware of that had themselves been abused as children.
Now, I’m going to choose my words carefully as any defense of paedophilia can be seen as abhorrent by some people but in a limited sense I agree with him. Paedophilia is a paraphilia which may have its roots in early childhood abuse or it may simply be part of a range of human sexuality that includes all sorts of deviation (not meant pejoratively) from the heterosexual, age appropriate norms of modern society. However paedophiles have, in common with compulsive rapists, an insurmountable problem when it comes to satisfying their sexuality in that they have no potential consensual partners.
Our society, for good reason, does not consider minors to be emotionally capable of consenting to sex, even with each other let alone with an adult so any paedophile who acts on their desires immediately becomes an abuser. This must be so and must carry the full weight of the law, because there is no way to know how many paedophiles are actually in the general population who need to be deterred from abusing.
Risking making an argument from personal incredulity, I cannot believe there are any paedophiles who do not understand the profound wrongness of grooming and enticing children into sex. Our culture is explicit about this and transgressors get high profile coverage and stiff sentences not to mention the disgust of the population at large. So whilst Cardinal Napier maybe correct that abusers need counseling and therapy or whatever, he is totally off the mark when he suggests it is inappropriate to punish as well.
On one hand the Cardinal is actually espousing a progressive and liberal view of a subset of people many of whom are undoubtedly living their lives in emotional turmoil. On the other hand he appears to be doing so in an effort to exculpate abusive Priests from their moral responsibility for their actions and excuse the Church for aiding and abetting them. This cannot be allowable, and in some respects is precisely the attitude that got the Church into this position in the first place. A celibate priesthood must seem like a godsend (pun intended) to someone whose sexuality will never be socially acceptable, but then he finds himself not only with unfettered access to young children but in an institution that will shield him from the worst consequences of his actions. To suggest that these priests are not morally and criminally responsible on the basis that they couldn’t help it is wrong and dangerous in the extreme.

Pssst! Frank, a word in your ear..

On the off chance that the new pontiff is in the habit of reading obscure atheist blogs I thought I’d take this opportunity early in his career as head of one of the worlds most damaged and damaging institutions to offer him a few words of considered godless opinion on the best way for him to fulfil his brief while doing as little as possible to exacerbate the social evils his Church is currently responsible for.
We already know that former Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio is a theologically conservative Catholic with all the inherent homophobia, misogyny and irrational opposition to reproductive rights that entails. Quotes already abound on the internet about his claims that adoption by homosexuals is a form of “discrimination against children” and that gay marriage is “an attempt to destroy God's plan”. So far, so conventionally Popish. But of course he doesn’t have to make those things a big issue. His views are known and if he has any sense whatsoever he will leave it at that.
Anecdotally the new Pope is a man with the common touch, a concern for the poor and a track record of working for economic equality. He even has a science education having studied chemistry before abandoning rationality and joining the priesthood. His best strategy therefore should be to confine his social advocacy to the things most of us can agree to (Ultra-right-wing sociopaths can stop reading at this point) such as alleviating poverty, providing medical services to the third world etc. He can still go on believing that condoms are the invention of the Devil or that abortion makes baby Jesus cry, he just doesn’t need to make a song and dance about it. If he really is in tune with his flock he will already know that most of them do not agree with the doctrine, so best let them get on with their lives their way.
In consequence he could then use the time he saves by not talking crap about other people’s sex lives to quietly root out the child molesters and their apologists that Ratzinger so singularly failed to do. He could work behind the scenes to clear the Vatican of its self-serving, money hoarding cabal of mafia priests and get the Church to behave as though it really believed half the cherry picked love thy neighbour religiosity it espouses.
As an atheist I don’t really care who the Pope is, or what he believes. But, I do care when a powerful institution tries to impose its twisted morality on people who do not suffer the same delusions. So if Bergoglio lays low and does no evil, that’s fine by me and we can happily ignore each other. The alternative is that we get more of the same crap Ratzinger dished out, in which case I predict the Catholic Church will continue to fade into irrelevance (at least in the west) as the inherent hypocrisy it entails drives what is left of the faithful away.

Giving God the credit

O.K! This is an unashamedly trivial post on a trivial point about the way many genuinely decent religious believers betray their (often unconscious) double standards when it comes to the influence of God in their lives.
I caught an episode of the I.T.V game show Tipping Point in which contestants win money by answering multiple choice questions for tokens which are then played in a giant “Penny Falls” machine. Each token that falls out of the machine being worth £50.
The game is played in two rounds; the first where contestants compete to gain the highest amount of money, and a second jackpot round where the winner plays for a £10,000 token. Overall the game is a good combination of skill, strategy, general knowledge and dumb luck.
On the show I watched one contestant was introduced as a lay preacher and he quite convincingly won the first round. The host congratulated him on getting through to the jackpot round to which the contestant responded that he must have benefited from some “divine intervention”, pointing heavenwards as he did so.
I thought at the time that he was holding something of a hostage to fortune as there was no guarantee that his luck would hold out for the rest of the show and I wondered how he would explain that if it happened, given that he had publicly credited God with his success so far. I must also confess to the rather uncharitable hope that his game would indeed fall apart so that my curiosity could be satisfied.
Well, as things turned out his jackpot round was disastrous; he failed to answer most of his questions (including one in the religion category, ironically) and the tokens he did win refused to fall in his favour in the machine so that although he came out of the game with a reasonable cash prize the £10,000 jackpot eluded him
So what was his reaction? It was priceless: “I guess my brain and luck deserted me,” he said. Well of course it had, but where was his divine intervention? Had God deserted him at the final moment, or decided he had won enough? Maybe Yahweh was narked at being casually associated with the earlier success or just possibly some other god’s noodly appendages were upon him. But that is not really the point of this.
You can of course do a lot of theological hand waving about what a putative god’s role in all this would be for a true believer participating in a game show, but the telling point is this lay preaching contestant’s response: God is credited a hand in his successes but failure is down to random forces and personal inadequacy, which is an all too typical example of the cognitive dissonance of theists generally.
I even doubt whether this was a conscious distinction on the contestant’s part and whether he even connected his two statements at the time (although if he watched the show back I would hope it would strike him the same way it did me) because to exercise rational thought about “divine intervention” exposes believers to awkward questions that sophisticated theologians have conspicuously failed to answer (to anyone’s satisfaction but their own) for millennia.

Conflict resolution: A difference between Science and Religion

I’m in the process of reading ‘Making Sense of Evolution: The Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Biology’ by Massimo Pigliucci and Jonathan Kaplan. This is not a book that I would recommend by the way unless you have at least a college level degree in genetics (I have) or are otherwise well read in the subject as it is very technical in places and assumes a lot of prior knowledge. I bring it up here however because a couple of the early chapters brought home to me clearly the very different ways that science and religion deal with conflicts of ‘doctrine’ between their respective practitioners.
There is near complete consensus amongst biologists that the modern synthesis account of the evolutionary process is a largely correct description of how Darwinian selection, Mendelian genetics and molecular biology combine to allow species to adapt and radiate (need I mention there is no scientific dispute as to whether evolution is actually true?). However, there are differences of opinion on important questions of detail, one of which is the level at which selection actually occurs.
The (probably) majority view is the one most famously articulated by Richard Dawkins that selection acts on genes and that evolution can be said to occur when a particular gene becomes more prevalent in a population over time as a result of selection pressure. Pigliucci and Kaplan, amongst others, point out that selection most obviously happens at the level of individual organisms (it is the trait that is selected for directly) and that the phenotype (the set of physical characteristics) does not always map easily onto a particular gene. Pigliucci is also sympathetic to group selection theories where selection acts upon the fitness of populations rather than individuals or genes.
There is a certain, if limited, parallel here with religion. Practitioners of a particular religion will agree on the main premises; name of deity, lives of prophets, holy scriptures etc. but frequently display disagreement on finer points of theology and practice. Take the early Catholic Church’s struggle with the Trinity, or even the modern Anglican Church’s dilemma over the role of women in the hierarchy, both examples of a heterodoxy of opinion beneath the surface of a common orthodoxy.
The parallel breaks down however in the different ways science and religion deal with the issues. In the case of the Catholic Church, after convening a council of Bishops and establishing the Nicean Creed the Church then went on a mission to brand dissenters as heretics and literally kill off the opposition. The result over centuries was entrenchment of dogma and multiple schisms with, ultimately, many different sects following their own interpretations and although I don’t see the C of  E branding anyone a heretic over women Bishops, I would not be surprised to see breakaway dioceses comprised of the disaffected.
Religion has no choice but to deal with dissent and disagreement in this way, either by enforcing a creed or disintegrating and factionalising. Why? Because there are no empirical facts to be discovered that can inform the arguments. Theological disputes have nothing to fall back on except their scriptures and their traditions both of which are open to interpretation without empirical data to support them
Science on the other hand does not have this problem. For sure, it develops its own orthodoxies and there are conservative elements that defend them and others that challenge them. True, arguments get heated and nasty and sometimes a faction forms and enmities emerge. But, ultimately all scientists know that at some point the argument will yield to hard facts and experimental data, knowledge and understanding will advance and paradigms may change
In the example about levels of selection above the ‘correct’ answer is not immediately clear. Evolution is a simple idea in principle but turns out to be very messy and difficult to quantify in practice, life being what it is and not easily reducible or predictable. My own intuition, for what it’s worth, is that no matter how complex the interaction between organisms and their environments proves to be the final answer will be found in the genome. Although this may be because I am a product of the W.D. Hamilton and Richard Dawkins generation of biologists who first expounded the gene-centric view of evolution. But Pigliucci, Kaplan and their ilk could easily be correct and as long as it isn’t completely intractable the truth will emerge in the observational and experimental data eventually.

Thoughts on my own moral philosophy.

Well I blame ‘D’ over at She Who Chatters. It’s been a long while since I tried to unravel my own position on moral philosophy, but good old ‘D’ had to open that convoluted can of worms with her latest post (go read it, and all her others too).
So! The first thing I can say with some degree of certainty is that I am a moral anti-realist. I know this for two reasons: 1, someone cleverer than me told me I was and 2, I read up on anti-realism and wiki-walked my way through a few related definitions and found it corresponds with my belief that there are no moral absolutes, no eternal moral truths we can pluck from the ether to be a yardstick (meterstick?) to measure our own morality by and definitely no god given rule book.
Having decided there is no Platonic perfect morality to draw on, another problem presents itself: Does any moral position have a basis in reality? This is essentially a choice between Cognitivism and Non-Cognitivism. Cognitivism holds that moral statements (propositions) can be demonstrably true or false, for example “stealing is wrong” carries the same veritas as “London buses are red”. At first glance this might look as though Cognitivism requires moral realism, but it would in fact be just as correct to say that “stealing is wrong” is a false statement. (The anti-realist position known as Error Theory states that all moral propositions are false). Nevertheless, my own position is that of Non-Cognitivism, which says that moral propositions are neither true nor false but are expressions of opinion (“stealing is wrong” is equivalent to “I believe stealing is wrong” or “Boo to stealing”).
However, many moral propositions while not what a proper philosopher would call ‘truth apt’ do have a high degree of ‘truthiness’ that endows them with a visceral certainty that makes them feel like the basis of an objective morality. This is particularly so of those moral positions that are often considered universals such as murder is wrong, stealing is wrong, cheating is wrong and the like. One would be hard pushed to find anyone in any society that would disagree with those statements (even if they do in fact kill, steal and cheat), possibly because either cultural or biological evolution has encouraged our internalisation of these ethics as a consequence of being a social species. But there is nothing obvious on deeper dispassionate reflection that makes any of these normative ethics intrinsically true. These same gut instincts also tend to inform (or misinform) our beliefs about more contentious moral statements such as; “homosexuality is wrong”, “sex outside of marriage is wrong”, or “recreational drugs are bad”. These are deontological ethics handed down to us by society or (more usually) religion that are even more transparently subjective when actually thought about although often presented as moral givens.
If all morals are subjective, as I believe them to be, we are then left with the thorny issue of moral relativism. I am not a moral relativist and to be honest I don’t think I have ever met anyone who is. It is one thing to acknowledge that different societies and different times hold differing moral standards (descriptive moral relativism) and entirely another to state that it is inappropriate or impossible to judge one against the other (meta-ethical moral relativism). If the latter were true we would not be in a position to agree that slavery, which used to be morally acceptable, is a moral evil and always has been. We don’t tend to say of slave owning cultures “oh, they were just the product of their time”; rather, we judge them as barbarous and backward. In the same way I am not prepared to defend female genital mutilation in Somalia just because it is a cultural norm there. But in my anti-realist, non-cognitive subjectively moral world what basis do I have to deem such practices as immoral?
My answer, for what it’s worth, is that although morals are not objective, outcomes of actions often are. I am a consequentialist and a utilitarian who believes that it is possible to apply reason to moral dilemmas and point to a rational system of ethics which in principle could be agreed on by everyone, ascertaining the costs and benefits of a particular action to the actors involved and devising a course that causes the least aggregate harm or even the most possible good (by harm and good I am limiting these to the measurable, economic and corporeal). However this becomes problematic if a society sanctifies cultural and religious norms to the extent that a critical examination of the assumptions behind them is impossible, requiring reconciling a putative infinite “spiritual” harm against a limited physical good, which is why such societies are able to justify honour killings and the mutilation of children. By rejecting deontological morality I believe I am justified in condemning such actions and rejecting cultural relativism on rational and scientific grounds.
There is not enough space here to explore all the ramifications of this, but Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism whose philosophy of universal utilitarianism can be read >here< and in his book has articulated similar ideas. Also Sam Harris’ book The Moral Landscape offers a scientific route to a moral society.
The links on this page all point to reliable sources of information about moral philosophy, so dive in if you dare…

Feminism and the new atheist schism

One of the problems with self-defining as an atheist is that it is at root a very narrow definition of what a person actually stands for. It really tells the world nothing about you other than you do not believe in the existence of any gods and leaves all the other cultural and political questions hanging.
As a contrast if somebody identifies themselves as an Evangelical Christian it is a fair to assume of them certain attitudes about e.g. abortion, LGBT rights, gender equality etc. and to have grounds to probe their assumptions about evolution, climate change and political allegiances frequently associated with that religion. In other words the kind of religion you follow come with an amount of stereotypical baggage that atheism lacks.
On the face of it that is a good thing. After all, atheists by rejecting all religions are rejecting all the associated dogmas and, in theory at least, building a worldview from first principles. But, since this does not happen in a cultural vacuum and everyone’s life experiences are different the spectrum of political beliefs found amongst atheists is extremely broad.
When I first went in search of an online atheist community some five years ago, the main topics of conversation were around debunking religious apologetics, along with science, cosmology, evolution and a-biogenesis as they cropped up in arguments with (mainly) Christians in the comment sections. These are all “safe spaces” for atheists that give everyone a chance to debate and bait the theists for sport, while generally getting on with each other. But inevitably as the community and the conversation matured the blog posts and discussions moved into more contentious areas, specifically the abortion debate, feminism, racism and other social justice issues which, given the diversity of opinion in atheism was bound to stretch the consensus more than somewhat.
It became clear to regular atheist bloggers, commenters and their readers that atheists are as able to be conservative, sexist, racist, and climate change denialist as they are liberal, inclusive and green and although the prevailing zeitgeist was the latter a sizeable and vocal minority were not
So what happens when the atheist movement starts to debate its own credentials as an inclusive, non-sexist, non-racist movement? How does it react to those of its own who either do not see social justice issues as pertinent to the atheist agenda or who are antagonistic to the assumptions behind those issues?
Ever since the Elevatorgate scandal hit the atheist community back in 2011 a number of prominent atheists have been calling for conferences and events to have a clear and enforceable anti-harassment policy in place so that women and minorities can feel safe and participate on an equal footing with the predominantly white male crowd that these events attract. Personally, I see this as uncontroversial but it has flushed out a number of people who believe that being asked to behave respectfully and reasonably to others in a public forum is some kind of infringement on their rights to free speech. Their response has been to abuse bloggers like Jen McCreight Rebecca Watson and Ophelia Benson among others and accuse them of poisoning atheism with feminism.
What seems to have outraged these people is the suggestion that they may be unaware of their own privilege and possibly be just a little bit sexist themselves. Well I have news for them, they are and probably, so am I. In the same way that everyone’s a little bit racist everyone can be a little bit sexist too and we shouldn’t feel affronted when someone on the receiving end points it out to us.
Anyway, as a consequence of all this it has become almost impossible for those atheists who want to discuss diversity and inclusivity in the movement to do so on open forums due to the constant trolling and ad hominem invective from a particularly loud and obnoxious cabal of commenters and so was founded Atheism+ a forum for atheists who want to align their activism with other causes and marginalized groups. This seems to me to be perfectly reasonable because it leaves the ‘big tent’ of atheism open to all those who would speak out for Church / State separation and the superiority of science, reason and evidence over religion, superstition and dogma, while creating a sub space for those also concerned about the religious attacks on women’s and LGBTQ equality. Anyone not aligned with that agenda need not apply, (which is not being exclusive nor is it an invitation to ‘groupthink’ as we can still find plenty to disagree on about how to meet the social justice goals we aspire to). Besides, those against atheism+ now have their own “Slymepit” to play in.
But does this really represent a schism in the new atheist movement? Actually probably not because unlike religions atheism has no dogmas, not even feminism or LGBTQ rights or racial equality, because none of those things are an aspect of atheism per se albeit they are prevalent attitudes among atheists generally. Social justice is a society wide and global issue and is being addressed by many liberal theists as well as by atheists and all the while the atheist/secular movement is successfully working to counter religious extremism and its influence in governments worldwide the social justice agenda will advance whether all of us agree on the necessity or not.