In Ratione Speramus

PZ Myers wrote a post today about the recent attac...

2010-05-12T01:02:27.713-04:00

PZ Myers wrote a post today about the recent attack of a cartoonist. Lars Vilks drew Mohammed as a dog. In response he was attacked during a talk about free speech at Uppsala University. The post contains video of the assault and Muslims in the audience shouting "allahu akbar."

2010-03-12T06:57:40.970-05:00

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2010-01-27T10:42:21.909-05:00

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Wow, that project is exactly the kind of work I po...

2009-12-02T00:02:57.145-05:00

Wow, that project is exactly the kind of work I posted about wanting to see (and on a broad scale) - that's exciting.

I unfortunately do not have data for my claim. The...

2009-12-01T20:17:17.858-05:00

I unfortunately do not have data for my claim. The studies that I have seen on labels used by rationalists have not include the term bright. I am only able to use my own observations of the rationalist community. And as far as I can tell, bright is not catching on. I suspect that most people in the rationalist would agree with being called a bright, but do not regularly use that term. The study that is the blog post I linked to above deals with the use of these labels and which ones people prefer for their primary label. Unfortunately, the study does not include some terms I would like to have seen, such as bright.

A reply to David Regarding your statement "M...

2009-12-01T17:42:35.303-05:00

A reply to David

Regarding your statement "My main reason is that that the bright movement doesn't seem to be going anywhere. It is dead in the water."

I am not sure where you get your data to make this claim. The Brights' Net continues to grow with over 500 registrations per month. It will shortly celebrate (2 months) the 50,000 registration representing Brights in over 185 nations.

In addition there are numerous Brights groups in places like Facebook and Meetup, and with links from hundreds of websites pointing to Brights Central.

As for projects I would like to point to the Morality Project which has just completed the first two phases:

The Brights' Net "Reality about Morality" Project: Status Report, November 2009
by Ruban Bala, Project Director

Persons who have a naturalistic worldview are perpetually "up against" the false but widely held cultural presumption that they, because of their worldview, lack certain requisites to be moral persons. In other words, many societies hold the incorrect belief that people cannot be moral without God. Many fellow citizens count as "fact" that morality is something presented to humanity by a deity through scripture (or similar assertions).

The overall objective of the "Reality about Morality" Project is to develop educational and media strategies to build a broader understanding of morality amongst the Brights constituency and the general public. So far, this has involved obtaining strong, scientifically-defensible evidence that human morality is grounded in biology and modified by experience, rather than revealed by supernatural agents (or similar assertions).

Our multidisciplinary Scientific Panel of Reviewers comes from a wide variety of backgrounds and expertise and includes some of the most respected and well-known scientists in the world:

Oliver Curry, Ph.D.
Researcher in Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology
The University of Oxford

Herbert Gintis, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of Economics
The University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Joshua D. Greene, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Harvard University

Marc Hauser, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology and Biological Anthropology
Harvard University

Debra Lieberman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychology
The University of Miami

Jessica Pierce, Ph.D.
Associate Faculty, The Center for Bioethics and Humanities
The University of Colorado

Peter Singer
Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics
Princeton University

Action Plan and Next Steps:

This phase of the Morality Project brings Project Areas A and B to a close. We have articulated and defended a naturalistic basis of morality, so now we can proceed to Project Areas C and D. These phases will involve setting forth goals for educational action. We will be developing clear and soundly based messages (in terms that can be readily understood by lay persons and especially transmitted via media). We will be building on the Web a useful resource "tool box" for Brights to use when discussing the source of human morality.

Project Area C entails planning for the design and development of presentation and instructional materials for varied target audiences (through illustration and examples as necessary) on the final declaration statements.

Project Area D involves the development of volunteer mentors, individuals schooled in the declaration statements and how to present and explain them to others.

As we proceed with the project, we will be seeking another set of volunteers from the constituency. There will be a separate announcement to that effect (soliciting involvement in upcoming phases).
------------
Paul Geisert, Associate Director of Constituency Services

I do consider myself a bright, but for me it is on...

2009-12-01T00:27:35.822-05:00

I do consider myself a bright, but for me it is one of many secondary terms that describe my beliefs. I never volunteer it when describing myself, but if asked I'll say that I am one. My main reason is that that the bright movement doesn't seem to be going anywhere. It is dead in the water. The term is not known in the general public, so it isn't very useful. Despite bad connotations for many, atheist is clear and concise. And the rationalist movement has decided to get the term atheism more accepted, rather than try to introduce a new term.

The out campaign is a good example of how we are not going to abandon atheism in favor of a term that has better connotations in most minds. I agree with this strategy more than that of the brights. Using the term bright essentially obscures one's identity, which is the main reason with having a term. It isn't about PR, it is about making one's beliefs clear. We also want atheism to be more accepted for what it is, not for superficial reasons. If bright is the analogue of gay, then I think that atheism is the analogue of queer.

I think one thing that humanists should point out ...

2009-11-30T10:26:01.979-05:00

I think one thing that humanists should point out to the general public is that not only is secular ethics possible, but it is overwhelmingly more satisfying than religiously motivated ethics. Secular ethical thought is in the practice of giving reasons for its claims, and appealing to one's deeply held intuitions about the good and the right. By contrast, religious ethical thought is essentially an appeal to authority. Moreover, insofar as the authority derives from the stories in the Bible, it has an unsettling contingency around it--if God hadn't commanded this or if Eve hadn't eaten that, would morality really be different?

So, if we are going to prosthelytize, I think this is a good place to start--by giving people a taste of secular moral reasoning and hoping they acquire the taste.

Thank you for linking to the humanist manifestos. ...

2009-11-30T00:50:32.310-05:00

Thank you for linking to the humanist manifestos. Suffice it to say that I agree with your idea that examining the principles upon which we base our views should be of the utmost importance. To do any less would be to swallow a little halfbaked dogma.

— Michael

Brilliant!

2009-11-24T02:43:26.731-05:00

Brilliant!

I disagree that the signs are designed to recruit ...

2009-11-17T17:41:36.568-05:00

I disagree that the signs are designed to recruit people, but I'll save my remarks for a blog post.

I've been waiting for this, so good.

2009-11-16T14:07:35.735-05:00

I've been waiting for this, so good.

Ha! True. The concept of supernatural is tangled c...

2009-11-01T20:08:48.282-05:00

Ha! True. The concept of supernatural is tangled confusion, like 'God'. Without a proper definition, borrowing the term only validates it.

But how can one make one's ideas precise witho...

2009-11-01T18:23:49.981-05:00

But how can one make one's ideas precise without doing a bit of reasoning?

I tend to think that the colloquial usage of "proof" does correspond to deductive validity. Of course, we can use words however we like. If you think that to "prove" means to "establish beyond a reasonable doubt" then atheists ought to be in the business of "proving" the non-existence of God--i.e., establishing that belief in God is unreasonable.

I'm of the opinion that supernatural isn't...

2009-10-28T22:52:04.409-04:00

I'm of the opinion that supernatural isn't a real distinction: supernatural is just a term we use to describe certain things that don't exist. If they did exist, we would call them natural. As a result of this the claim that they cannot submit to scientific investigation is flawed. I plan on writing a post on this topic at some point, which will better state my ideas on the matter.

If the idea isn't distinct, which I interpret ...

2009-10-25T17:43:40.676-04:00

If the idea isn't distinct, which I interpret to mean clear, precise, &c., then you have nothing to base your reasoning on. Both you and the other parties need to understand what you are discussing before the discussion can be useful.

I agree that the term "proof" can be somewhat problematic. As a physicist and not a mathematician or philosopher I don't use proof just to mean a deductive argument. All I need to say something has been proven true or false is to have it shown beyond a reasonable doubt—scientific proof. Of course, this does muddle the language, but I don't know of a concise way to say this other than the colloquial version of the term "proof".

You endorse Jefferson's claim that "Ideas...

2009-10-25T16:43:36.537-04:00

You endorse Jefferson's claim that "Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them…."

You get the same principle from Plato in the Meno. But it's not obviously true:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_equilibrium

Also, as a matter of PR if nothing else, atheists should avoid the word "proof" with relation to the existence of God. They don't need a deductively valid argument for the conclusion that God does not exist (although perhaps there are such argument). All they need are arguments to the effect that we ought not to believe in God.

If I were a Martian scientist who had never dealt ...

2009-10-25T13:37:35.576-04:00

If I were a Martian scientist who had never dealt with questions of religion then I could certainly be quite in tune with Zev here, but I think Dave is importantly right. Maybe a lot of the properties people are predicating on "God" (various forms of perfection, unlimited causal powers, etc) might not be coherently statable, but people generally have in mind that there exists some sort of being, a concretely real entity/person, with psychological states and an active interest in human doings. They often believe that there are perceptions of him and that his particular conception of good human life is mediated to the realm of public knowledge through religious institutions, holy texts, and maybe direct revelation.

Theological noncognitivism places the burden of proof only on theists claiming to have a fully developed, a priori account of the concept of God. I don't even have a fully developed a posteriori description of anybody and doubt I ever will. They can still point and say: "but look at this, that guy, that thing, that effect, that is what I *mean*." And then we'd have to show they are not referring to any particular agent but only, in all likelihood, a small cross-section of the dance of physically determinate world events.

I think you know exactly what it would entail.

2009-10-25T13:27:14.502-04:00

I think you know exactly what it would entail.

I disagree with the theological noncognitivists. I...

2009-10-24T01:03:35.096-04:00

I disagree with the theological noncognitivists. I don't know much about them, so I could be misinterpreting their position. They focus too much on the concept of "God". They should be focusing on the various gods that people actually do believe in. The use of "God" is just a problem of the language, not the substance. I don't know if they address whether talk of gods is valid or not.

Ignore the term "God" for the time being, it's just a term and doesn't matter. You can give good definitions of specific gods. Maybe you can't give a good definition of what makes something a god, there might not be a clear demarcation point between me and gods. But you can say, I'm going to have some entity that is in {gods}, which created the universe within this range of time and then left us alone (a type of deistic god). You still might have to flush out some things, but I don't see how that is inherently different from defining an every day object. Therefore, I don't see how the use of specific gods is problematic.

The concept "God" might be meaningless if you don't interpret the sayer to mean something more specific, which I think he or she does indeed mean. The exact concept that the person is using might not be well thought out but it isn't really the concept "God" it is some more specified set of gods. So I agree with the theological noncognitivists that "God" is a useless term, but that doesn't solve the problem—people talking about "God" are still talking about something meaningful even if the language is incorrect. Getting rid of "God" just makes dealing with this problem easier.

Very much agreed! One possible approach from here ...

2009-10-23T22:05:15.520-04:00

Very much agreed! One possible approach from here is theological noncognitivism, which is the position that no definition of the word "God" will ever be rigorous enough to critically discuss, and hence claims of "God"'s existence or non-existence are inherently meaningless. I'm personally still debating whether that's really the case, but it certainly does provide a powerful, easy-to-use argument-stopper for the nontheist.