Evangelical Realism

One of the first lessons I learned in life is the importance of using the right tool for the right job. A razor has a sharp edge and a fine line, and is the tool you need for making careful, precise, well-defined cuts. A chainsaw, by contrast, is loud, smelly, and not well suited to making fine distinctions, preferring to chew its way through things and throwing the chips however they may fly. In the right hands, a chainsaw can be a powerful tool, and can even be used to make folksy carvings out of raw logs. In the hands of a klutz, however, it can be dangerous to both wielder and bystander alike.

We’re in Chapter 14 of TIA, watching Vox wield what he calls “Occam’s Chainsaw,” which he seems to prefer to the similarly-named Razor. It’s an apt distinction, as shown by his hack-and-slash approach to trying to craft a rebuttal to atheistic arguments. For example, see if you can figure out why he entitled the argument below, “The Argument from Temporal Advantage.”

One of the obvious weaknesses in the atheist concept of the conflict between science and religion is the fact that many, if not most, of the great scientists in history were religious men. Even the first great martyr of Science, Galileo Galilei, was not an atheist but a Christian. For every Watson and Einstein, there is a Newton, a Copernicus, a Kepler, and yes, a Galileo.

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We’ve made it to Chapter 14 of TIA (whew!), and that brings us to what Vox modestly labels “Occam’s Chainsaw,” a shotgun approach that attempts to address atheistic arguments against God by hurling a whole lot of crap against the wall in hopes that something sticks. Once again, Vox seems to be in a hurry to get through the material, devoting only a few sparse and poorly-reasoned paragraphs to each attempted argument. Let’s start with the first three.

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Vox Day has a very important question to ask us all.

Why should a belief in the non-existence of God cause one individual to kill another, much less make it possible to predict that it will cause political leaders to liquidate large numbers of their own citizenry? How was it that Bertrand Russell was able to foresee the inevitable bloodshed to come in 1920, two years before Stalin became General Secretary and four years before he consolidated his power by banishing Trotsky? And even more importantly, why did the atheist Russell believe that the civilized world not only would, but should, risk a descent into barbarism by following the awful Soviet example?

Gosh, it seems like it was just a few pages ago that Vox was assuring us that government was the source of all that is evil in the world, and now here he is blaming blaming atheism again. And not just a lack of belief in God (or Santa), but a positive, declaratory assurance that God does not exist, is what Vox appeals to as being an active motivation for mass murderous behavior. Given the number of gods which even Christians believe do not exist, the potential for mass destruction must be truly terrifying!

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Vox Day has an interesting strategy for dealing with hostile facts. Step one: make a pretense of agreeing with the truth, so as to give what follows an air of impartiality. Step two: introduce some kind of fallacious or erroneous quibble, so as to make it sound like you’re presenting the other side of the argument. And step three: pile on a huge stack of well-documented but irrelevant facts so as to make it sound like you’re proving your point. There’s no step four, because all that really matters is creating the impression that you’ve refuted step one, and if steps two and three  don’t do that for you, you’re probably dealing with someone who is unreasonably biased in favor of objective truth, and you shouldn’t waste your time trying to convince them.

We’re in the last section of Chapter 12 of TIA, in which Vox tries to deny the charge that Aztec human sacrifices is an example of religion leading to a needless loss of human life. Here he is giving us Step One of the three-step tactic.

If one looks at the history of the world, there are two facts which no reasonable man can deny: first, that people do bad things, and second, that religion has been central to people’s lives for as long as history has been recorded. The centrality of religion in past societies means that it has been a mechanism for an amount of these bad things people have done, which occasionally makes it appear that religion is the source of the evil behavior.

Despite the weasel-words (”occasionally makes it appear that religion is the source…”), this is a fair concession that religion and violence do go hand-in-hand at times, and that, far from being an irrelevant fantasy that has nothing to do with how people behave, religion is actually central to many people’s lives and how they live them. Halfway through the second sentence of this section, however, we’re already easing our way into Step Two.

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After the breathless and and almost hypoxic hysteria of Chapter 11, Chapter 12 of TIA comes as a welcome respite, a breath of sanity in the book thus far. Vox has a tremendous enthusiasm for history, and even a commendable command of the subject, so long as he is not trying to use it to score some partisan point or other. He brings this enthusiasm to his consideration of three historical topics that, in some sense, are related to the writings of the New Atheists, though as Vox points out, the New Atheists haven’t had a lot to say about them. It’s purely Vox’s own interest, plus a bit of a nod to typical atheist/believer dialogs, that leads him to spend time on the subject.

This is Vox Day we’re talking about, of course, so even this relatively mild discussion has its own special character. He manages to avoid blaming Hitler on the atheists, but he spends far more time trying to convince us that Hitler was a non-Christian than he spends acknowledging that Hitler was, indeed, a theist, albeit a neopagan one. And yes, the Spanish Inquisition did torture and kill people, but not nearly as many as you might suppose, and in fact was such a model of restraint and objectivity (for the time) that it almost seems that Vox wouldn’t mind seeing it revived again. There is no doubt that he thinks we need to revive the Crusades, since he comes right out and says it’s the West’s only real hope of resisting the Muslim onslaught.

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We’re up to Chapter 11 of TIA, which is going to go fairly quickly. If we limit ourselves to the essential substance of what Vox is saying in this chapter, we learn that

• Vox Day does not like Michel Onfray.
• Vox also does not like the French.
• He does like the Jews, and thinks that in general they are superior to virtually any other race or ethnic group, at least intellectually.
• He does not, however, like Michel Onfray.
• Hitler was an atheist no matter what he said about God, because he killed people and real theists don’t kill people.
• It’s not the Catholic’s fault that they didn’t do more to save the Jews, who after all were non-Catholics, and why should any Catholic care about the Holocaust?
• Vox is only too glad, however, to insinuate that guilt for various “atheist atrocities” ought to be associated with atheists in general and Michel Onfray in particular (whom Vox apparently doesn’t like).
• The Enlightenment was evil, and did only bad things, and is in some way Michel Onfray’s fault.
• Vox would like to blame the Enlightenment for sexual slavery, and thinks that Michel Onfray would enjoy forcing a woman to have sex with several men at the same time
• Michel Onfray wants to burn Western civilization to the ground and worship Satan.
• And oh yes, I almost forgot—Vox does not like Michel Onfray.

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There are many ways in which a career in video game programming fails to prepare you for the larger issues of real life, and Vox Day has a good example of one of them:

Theists have a perfectly logical and objective basis for the application of their god-based moralities that even the most die-hard rational atheist cannot reject, given the theistic postulate that God actually exists and created the universe. In short, God’s game, God’s rules. If you’re in the game, then the rules apply to you regardless of what you think of the game designer, your opinion about certain aspects of the rulebook, or the state of your relationship with the zebras.

Vox’s goal is to show that his idea of morality has a solid foundation, and Daniel Dennett’s doesn’t. But not only is Dennett’s system far stronger than Vox seems to realize, the “God’s Game, God’s Rules” morality he espouses has so many flaws that it’s hard to know where to start.

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Today’s taste of TIA offers just a bit of irony before diving into the morass of morality. Here’s the irony:

[W]hile Breaking the Spell is unquestionably superior in almost every way to the Unholy Trinity’s four books on religion, the scientific-sounding speculation that fills it is nothing more than that, speculation. The literary editor of The New Republic underlined this point in an utterly brutal review of the book which appeared in the New York Times, reminding the reader that at the end of the day, Breaking the Spell is not science, but a book of speculative philosophy written by a science-fetishist.

There is no scientific foundation for its scientistic narrative. Even Dennett admits as much: “I am not at all claiming that this is what science has established about religion. . . . We don’t yet know.” So all of Dennett’s splashy allegiance to evidence and experiment and “generating further testable hypotheses” notwithstanding, what he has written is just an extravagant speculation based upon his hope for what is the case, a pious account of his own atheistic longing.

So desperate is Vox to discredit Dennett’s questions about theology that he accuses them of being “just…speculation.” And yet, since God does not show up in real life, theologians have nothing to study but their own speculations, and the speculations of others, about the meaning of things that still other men have written, that have “no scientific foundation.” In fact, Vox could have condensed his argument a great deal by simply accusing Dennett’s book of being little more than abject theology. It wouldn’t have been entirely true, but at least this would have captured the essence of Vox’s rebuttal: it’s wrong because it’s too similar to what Vox thinks is right.

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One of the problems with trying to mingle church and state is that religion often depends on emphasizing belief over real-world consistency, and that can lead to policies that not only fail to address real-world issues effectively, but ultimately conflict with religion itself. For example, the Bush-appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services wants to make it a law that medical professionals cannot be compelled to provide services that they find morally objectionable.

I have on two previous occasions written in my blog about the principle of health care provider conscience. Federal law is explicit and unwavering in protecting federally funded medical practitioners from being coerced into providing treatments they find morally objectionable…Today, HHS will file a rule in the Federal Register aimed at increasing compliance with existing federal laws protecting provider conscience. The proposed rule clarifies that non-discrimination rules apply to institutional health care providers as well as to individual employees working for recipients of certain funds from HHS. It requires recipients of certain HHS funds to certify their compliance with laws protecting provider conscience rights. The HHS Office for Civil Rights is designated as the entity to receive complaints of discrimination addressed by the statute or the proposed regulation.

Now, this sounds good to the Religious Right. All the code words are there: this is supposed to be a law designed to allow doctors to deny medical care to women seeking abortions, to gays and lesbians, and to whoever else might be contrary to conservative Christian approval. The problem is, this proposal opens the door to all kinds of abuses that might not be what the Christian supremacists want.

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In reading Vox’s response to Daniel Dennett, in chapter 10 of TIA, it’s sometimes easy to jump to the conclusion that Vox doesn’t really understand the issues Dennett is talking about. For example:

[Dennett] raises [the] possibility that religion is merely a by-product of evolution, otherwise known as a spandrel. It’s here that the philosopher finds himself in logical trouble. Both of Dennett’s memetic proposalsand [sic] his subsequent argument against Starke and Finke’s economic case for the rational value of religion directly contradict his assertion of the way that evolution’s remarkable efficiency means that a persistent pattern amounts to proof—”we can be quite sure”—that the pattern is of benefit to something in the evolutionary currency of differential reproduction. How, one wonders, does Dennett fail to grasp that a creed which explicitly states “go forth and multiply” is likely to be inordinately successful in evolutionary terms, genetic or memetic?

Vox seems to like the argument that religious people are more likely to reproduce than non-religious people—as though nobody really cared much one way or another about sex until Moses came along and showed them in Genesis 1! This kind of silly, superficial thinking suggests that Vox hasn’t really put much effort into trying to understand how religion and evolution would interact in the real world. All he really seems to be interested in is mining the idea for talking points he can use to make religion sound better than atheism.

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