The eternal battle between banality and excellence

Recently, the Christian conservative writer and speaker Dinesh D'Souza debated with the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett over the case for the existence of God at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Hoping to hear something fresh and original from the religious side, those hopes were dashed when I realised it was just another species of "atheists are dogmatic and hate God" whining. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who feels compelled to invoke Pascal's Wager has already lost the debate (on logical grounds, anyway). And it wasn't just Pascal's Wager, it was the reliance on the same old arguments, albeit recycled to sound a bit more contemporary and scientifically respectable. Many will be caught out by the many false analogies, inconsistencies, cheap caricatures, subtle confusions and outright distortions woven into D'Souza's defence of God, but if you're familiar with the nature of religious obfuscation, you'll definitely smell something fishy under the slick surface. Churning out bad but clever-sounding arguments on an industrial scale seems to be this man's forte. His blustering, populist style also stood in stark contrast to Dennett's calm and conciliatory demeanour, though I could detect a hint of that conciliation reaching its limits, with some irritation showing itself during some of the more contemptible rants. I don't think that too many in the audience could have found D'Souza's arguments very compelling, but many watching the exchange via the Internet almost certainly will, because of the swaggering confidence with which they were delivered. Have a look for yourself and come to your own conclusions. For me personally, though, I was thinking "I'll never get those 2 hours of my life back."

Here were some of D'Souza's most audacious claims:

- Probably the worst was one of his (many) analogies, the one he drew between cavemen and their limited worldview, and people who subscribe to philosophical materialism and what he sees as their limited worldview. He invites us to imagine how primitive humans must have perceived their world, how they were devoid of an
understanding of things beyond their immediate surroundings and line of sight. They would have been intellectually impervious to the processes that produced them, for example, of the nature of photosynthesis and a whole plethora of details that we now know of. D'Souza uses this to symbolise what atheists are supposedly doing: namely, not accepting God because he is beyond their comprehension. Cavemen couldn't posit the existence of things outside their vicinity; atheists are likewise limiting the scope of possibilities by confining their outlook to the natural world. But the analogy is a bad one: we didn't get from the Stone Age to where we are now, in terms of science and technology, by appealing to prayer or by talking to an invisible friend. We tested our ideas about the world, and to the extent that the two agreed, those ideas tended to be maintained because they yielded some result that corroborated their claim to accurately conveying some aspect of the word. These ideas were later refined, tested again, and so on. This process is cumulative, and it involved rejecting a host of bad ideas along the way (judged by their failure to correspond to reality). This, roughly, is the scientific method. It give us actual reasons to accept propositions about reality. Those propositions might later turn out to be false, or in need of refinement, but the method that yielded them is alone in being able to consistently - rather than sporadically - hit upon explanations with a good fit to the phenomena they are attempting to account for.

The two methods (if religion can be called a method) have almost nothing in common with each other. How are we to corroborate religious claims? Their track record in terms of agreeing with what science tells has been abysmal (unless one retrospectively "reinterprets" holy texts), so we have only subjective experience to fall back on. D'Souza's analogy in no way gives us good reasons to suppose that religious claims are compelling, let alone that we should be rationally obliged to accept them.

- D'Souza reckons that, given what science has shown us about the cosmos, it is more reasonable to suppose that a supernatural being created the universe because of the fine-tuning of the laws of nature that allow for the existence of life than it is to suppose that the universe arose spontaneously with no input from an outside
intelligence. He takes issue with the "highly speculative" hypotheses of such cosmologists as Lee Smolin and ends up mistaking God for a simple explanation! (It's hard to think of anything more extravagant than an omniscient, omnipotent being who is endowed with the capacity for emotion, who administers intervention and guidance to his followers, who wreaks miracles by suspending the laws of nature, and who designs universes). To this end, he compares the universe to a car: both have "parts" working in highly organised ways. From this we are to suppose that the universe was made for us, in the same way that a car is designed and built for its own specific purpose. Just as it would be lunacy to view the car as something that just spontaneously arose without the guiding hand of a designer/builder, so it would be lunacy - can't you see? - to view the universe as just spontaneously arising for no conscious reason, with all its laws finely-tuned to allow evolution and the eventual emergence of humanity. But the car analogy utterly fails, because whether the universe has a purpose - whether it is the type of entity that can be said to embody one - is the very question we're trying to address in the first place, and to do that we need to see whether there could be other explanations that could plausibly account for the universe as we find it, and whether they could do this more economically than invoking a divine creator. D'Souza makes the presupposition that a universe has component parts in much the same way that a car has component parts. This is erroneous, because we know from the outset that a car has a designer, and that the invocation of an intelligent designer is a more reasonable supposition to make than pure chance when accounting for a car's existence. We know that a car has a designer because we designed it. If D'Souza just assumes that one is like the other in some profound sense ("isn't it obvious?" might be the flavour of the incredulous defence), then he can't help being right because he has framed the problem in a way that it is guaranteed to yield the resolution he wants. Now, of course, multiverses and universes coming out of black holes in other universes are indeed highly speculative constructs; any or all of these may well end up being disqualified by evidence that comes to hand. Or they may be unfalsifiable. The virtue of the naturalistic hypotheses, though, is that they are simple; they posit, to be sure, a large number of universes, but each one of these universes could be exceedingly simple in its most basic constitution. There is nothing to rule out the multiverse hypothesis in modern cosmology and physics, and it would resolve the fine-tuning argument with trivial ease. Yet D'Souza seems to think that an even more speculative hypothesis - that there exists a being who can consciously design universes, including the setting of the highly improbable constants, and who has our interests at heart - counts as a simpler explanation and that we should be more wary of the multiverse scenario because it has no direct evidence to bolster it (!). The irony meter just blew up. On what grounds should God - the more extravagant possibility - automatically become the default position? Naturalistic possibilities are to be disfavoured because they're wildly speculative? He really does seem to believe that the fine-tuning of the universe is evidence for God, but he seems incapable of conceiving of how it could, with more economy, serve as a reason to suppose that we happen to live in a universe in which conditions happened to be right for our existence.

He makes another blunder along these lines: when he talks about how it's alright to invoke a complex explanation for something less complex, since we can legitimately invoke intelligence to explain the existence of mechanical tools, for instance. But what's at issue isn't whether we can invoke complex explanations at all - no one denies that we can, for the very reason that it would be crazy to deny the agency of a car maker if one were to stumble upon an automobile in the middle of the desert - but whether we can invoke them as ultimate explanations. Complex, smart things are statistically unlikely in the sense that they are highly unlikely to have come about purely by chance. The only process we know of that can build up such complexity is the slow, gradual process of evolution. D'Souza seems to think that, in the same way that it's alright to imagine a human being as the cause of a tool, so one can also imagine God being the cause of the universe. And what of that God? Why does that God gain exemption from having to explain his own existence - even though he is an entity embodying the most monstrous complexity possible? Admittedly D'Souza didn't get much of a chance to answer that because of time restrictions, but I can get a sense for the type of explanation he would likely invoke to side-step this little difficulty: he would probably waffle on about how since God is "beyond" nature, a principle like evolution wouldn't apply to him; it is something confined to the physical universe. If so, then gee: I wonder if that's not speculative? It doesn't get any more speculative than that, and yet he wants to pretend that the multiverse hypothesis is - his implication was clear - rubbish, on the grounds that it's speculative! It must be so nice to engage in magical thinking; that way, you can simply invent something to get you out of any pickle you find yourself in, and then pretend that it counts as "reasonable", because, hey, God is beyond our comprehension. And if you deny His obvious existence, you're just a dogmatic atheist who hasn't accepted Him into your life.

- One of the favourite themes that conservative monotheistic commentators like to trot out as an antidote to any mention of the religiously inspired mass murders and wars that have plagued human history is the "atheist mass murders of the 20th century". D'Souza doesn't go so far as to say that atheism actually causes mass murder (though the smarmy implication is crystal clear), but he does claim that atheists who point to the crimes of religiously inspired leaders and movements are being hypocritical if they don't also call call atheism to task for the crimes of leaders and movements that were nominally atheistic. If it makes sense to apportion some blame to Christianity for the Inquisition, surely it is disingenuous to let atheism off the hook for the crimes of Stalin and Mao? These leaders, apparently, committed their crimes in the name of atheism, just as the Church committed its crimes in the name of Christianity. Except, of course, that it isn't true. The communist movement had the trappings of religious fervour and symbolism; cults of personality were established in which a select few were elevated to the status of virtual messiahs who were indispensable to the social program being put forward; metaphysical principles were proclaimed and those that objected to them were persecuted or sidelined. The official ideology was institutionalised, and evidence that went against the dictates of the status quo was ignored or suppressed. People were driven to do horrible things in the furtherance of the prescribed ideology, and counter-claims and objections were seen as the work of the enemy. How does any of this logically flow from a non-belief in Yawheh? They didn't do what they did because atheism told them to; they did what they did because of what their ideology compelled them to do. The same mentality of assigning infallibility to a leader was in place as that deployed by the Church in the furtherance of a cult centred around Christ and the glory of God. And the Church was compelled - by its ideology, Christianity, at least as it was interpreted by the Church - to do what it did. A lack of belief in something won't tell you to commit an act; you act upon things you DO believe in, not in what you don't believe in. D'Souza dismisses all this by effectively conflating Stalinism and Maoism with atheism (with a bit of Nietzsche thrown in for good measure, in case we didn't get the point that atheism leads to the wholesale extermination of human beings) on the grounds that Stalin did what he did in the name of atheism; in effect, because of atheism. Whatever. What he and many like him can't seem to understand is that atheism isn't a belief system per se; it's a metaphysical position that is a consequence of considerations about the world and the universe, leading one to reject archaic beliefs about that world and universe.

- A particularly gratuitous point he made was one about the issue of ethics. He harbours the delusion - common among Christians - that morality as we now enjoy it in the West was somehow invented by Christian precepts, and that secularists and atheists henceforth have built their morality upon the "foundation" of Christianity; really, that no other foundation can be found to take its place (belied, of course, by the fact that some of the most irreligious countries in the world also tend to be the least dysfunctional). He forgets to mention one little thing: most people, at the time when this foundation was being constructed, were religious anyway (just as, later on, most scientists were religious like everyone else. Should we likewise also suppose that religion serves as the "foundation" for science? It might have at one point, but it most certainly doesn't anymore), so it was statistically overwhelmingly likely that the people formulating social ethics were going to be religious themselves; in no way does it follow that, in order to be consistent, one must accept Christian doctrines if one accepts moral precepts that were handed down by people who happened to be
Christians. It doesn't even follow that one is obliged to accept Christian morals if those precepts were handed down by people because they were Christians. Any rational person can see that some of the Ten Commandments would be useful contributions to the functioning of a civil society, and that the human sentiments involved and the overarching view that to have rules and regulations in place are by no means the exclusive preserve of Christianity; most societies have had prohibitions on murder and theft, even well before the advent of Christianity, and it doesn’t take religious conviction to see the merits of abiding by them. Evidently, though, if you don't accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour but you also don't murder or steal, then you're a hypocrite rather than just a decent human being who uses his or her rational agency.

So there you have it. There were other arguments on offer, but they were mainly pretty bad as well. If you've "heard it all before", you won't be missing much by giving this debate the flick. Poor old Daniel; he must feel both sadness and anger that there is so much disingenuous nonsense masquerading as rational discourse. It is nothing of the sort.

Revolting and stupid

From The Independent, 29 November 2007.

Source: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article3204058.ece

In the name of God: the Saudi rape victim's tale

A young woman has been sentenced to 200 lashes after being gang-raped. The Western world has expressed outrage – which has, in turn, provoked anger among the Saudi establishment. Now, for the first time, the woman tells her story. By Daniel Howden

Inside Saudi Arabia she has come to be known simply as the "Qatif girl", a teenager who was gang-raped then humiliated by first the police, then the judicial authorities. Her case has propelled her into the international headlines and made her an acute embarrassment for the House of Saud. To the Saudi Justice Ministry, she is an adulteress whose case is being used by critics of the Kingdom. To much of the rest of the world, she is a symbol of all that's wrong with Saudi Arabia.

Today she lives under effective house arrest. She is forbidden to speak and may be taken into custody at any time. Her family's movements are monitored by the religious police and their telephones are tapped.

Her lawyer, Saudi Arabia's foremost human rights advocate, Abd al-Rahman al-Lahem, has been suspended. He has had his passport confiscated and faces a hearing next week in which he may be disbarred. The crime of "Qatif girl", it seems, has been to refuse to be silent about what has happened to her. The 19-year-old first sought to bring to justice the seven men who raped her, then complained in public when the courts saw fit to sentence her to 90 lashes for "mingling", the crime of being out in public with a male who was not her relative prior to the attack.

Coverage of the case this month in the usually tightly censored Saudi media infuriated the authorities. They increased her sentence to 200 lashes and six months in prison. Her sentence still hangs over her.

The girl's fate has become an issue in the US presidential election where the candidates have lined up to denounce her treatment as "barbaric", and Prince Saud al-Faisal was forced, much to his annoyance, to answer hostile questions about her case at the Middle East peace talks in Annapolis this week. "What is outraging about this case is that it is being used against the Saudi government and people," he told reporters.

The Saudi Justice Ministry has launched a deliberate "campaign of defamation" against the girl, said Farida Deif, a Middle East expert with Human Rights Watch, who is among the few independent observers to have met the girl. "They are saying she is not really a victim," Ms Deif said. "They are implying she was an adulteress. They are saying she was undressed before the attackers entered her car."

The Independent has obtained testimony in which the girl describes her attack, the struggle to get the police to take action and the harrowing court appearances that followed.

Her ordeal began with a telephone call: "I had a relationship with someone on the phone," she recounted to Human Rights Watch. "We were both 16. I had never seen him before. I just knew his voice. He started to threaten me, and I got afraid. He threatened to tell my family about the relationship. Because of the threats and fear, I agreed to give him a photo of myself."

A few months later, she said, after she had been married to another man, she became concerned that the photograph might be misused and asked the boy to return it. He accepted on the condition that she would meet him and go for a drive with him. She agreed, reluctantly, to meet the boy at a nearby market. They were driving towards her home when a second car stopped in front of them, she said. "I told the individual with me not to open the door, but he did. He let them come in. I screamed."

She and her companion were taken to a secluded spot where they were both raped, many times. "They forced me out of the car," the girl said. "They pushed me really hard. I yelled out, 'Where are you taking me? I'm like your sister.' They took me to a dark place. Then two men came in. The first man with the knife raped me. I was destroyed. If I tried to escape, I don't even know where I would go. I tried to force them off but I couldn't. In my heart, I didn't even feel anything after that. I spent two hours begging them to take me home."

The second man then raped her, then a third. "There was a lot of violence," she said. In the hours that followed her attackers told the girl they knew she was married. She was raped by a fourth man and then a fifth. "The fifth one took a photo of me like this. I tried to cover my face but they didn't let me."

Despite the prosecution's requests for the maximum penalty for the rapists, the Qatif court sentenced four of them to between one and five years in prison and between 80 and 1,000 lashes. They were convicted of kidnapping, apparently because prosecutors could not prove rape. The images recorded on the mobile phone were presented in court, according to her lawyer, but the judges ignored them.

Her ordeal continued after the fifth rape. Two more men, one with his face covered entered the room and raped her. She repeatedly asked what time it was and was told 1am. Afterwards all seven men came back and the girl was raped again.

"Then they took me home. They drove me in their car. They took my mobile and said that if I wanted it back, I would have to call them. They saw my husband's photo in my wallet when they were searching through my things. When I got out of the car, I couldn't even walk. I rang the doorbell and my mother opened the door. She said, 'You look tired'. She thought I was with my husband. I didn't eat for one week after that. Just water. I didn't tell anyone. I can't sleep without pills. I used to see their faces in my sleep."

Under Saudi Arabia's strict interpretation of sharia law, women are not allowed in public in the company of men other than their male relatives. Also, women in Saudi Arabia are often sentenced to flogging and even death for adultery and other perceived crimes.

In addition to these intimidating barriers facing the victim in a country with possibly the worst women's rights record in the world, the girl was also a member of the persecuted Shia minority and her attackers were Sunni. This sectarian divide would be crucial to what happened next.

"The criminals started talking about it [the rape] in my neighbourhood. They thought my husband would divorce me. They wanted to ruin my reputation. I was trying to fix something by getting the photo back and something worse happened."

Irfan Al-Alawi, a Saudi academic and expert on religious persecution in the Kingdom, said that the sectarian background was crucial to understanding the crime.

"Qatif is a centre of the large Shia minority in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. The so-called religious police or mutawiyin, who are brutal in any case, were also acting here in support of Sunni domination over the Shia in Qatif."

Against her attackers' expectations, the girl's husband did not divorce her when news of the attack reached him; instead he sought justice through the courts.

Her husband recalls the frustration of seeing his wife's attackers walking free. "Two of the criminals were walking around in our neighbourhood right in front of me. They attended funerals and weddings. They [the police] should have arrested them out of respect for us. I called the police and told them, 'Find me a solution. The criminals are out on the street. What if they try to kidnap her again?' The police officer said, 'You go find them and investigate'."

He did just that and telephoned the police on four occasions before action was eventually taken. But when the case did come to court the girl's ordeal continued.

She said: "They [the judges] said to me, 'What kind of relationship did you have with this individual? Why did you leave the house? Do you know these men?' They used to yell at me. They were insulting. The judge refused to allow my husband in the room with me. One judge told me I was a liar because I didn't remember the dates well. They kept saying, 'Why did you leave the house? Why didn't you tell your husband?'

"At the second session, they called me in from the waiting room. I went in with my husband. They sentenced some of them to five years, others to three. I thought these people shouldn't even live. I thought they would get a minimum of 20 years. I prayed that they wouldn't even live. Then he said, '[name withheld], you get 90 lashes. You should thank God that you're not in prison'. I asked why and he said, 'You know why. Because it's khilwa hair sharan [mingling begets evil]'. Everyone looks at me as if I'm wrong. I couldn't even continue my studies. I wanted to die."

The ordeal is still not over. The Qatif girl and her husband face an intensely uncertain future. She has been attacked by her brother, who reportedly tried to kill her. Her lawyer, Al-Lahem, believes she may now be pursued by Sunni extremists through the sharia courts.

Her appalling treatment was summed up in one exchange between her husband and the judges at the first sentencing. "It was like she was the criminal," he remembered. "When the judges passed down the sentence, I asked them, 'Don't you have any dignity?'"

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As another atheist blogger has said, this depraved incident will be seen by many Muslims as a further excuse to keep the sexes separate, rather than to acknowledge (let alone do anything about) the real problem, which is the disgusting attitude engendered into men that women are temptresses if they show an inch of their skin. This is cuntery at its very finest. Fuck the Saudi government and their whole screwed up system, and fuck you too, dear reader, if you find anything to applaud in it. If you had to make an assessment of who deserves all the petroleum in the Kingdom - the monarchy or me - you would have to, if they were honest and not in possession of a starving tomcat up your anus - have to concede that I deserve it; and I'm pretty far from deserving such wealth. But at least I know I don't deserve it; these boof-heads drive around in their Bentleys and consume other wonders of Western technology while enforcing a system that shouldn't have made it past the bone-wielding hominid in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

On a somewhat different note, but still keeping with the general topic of pious cuntery, I had a weird dream the other night. I was in a "Muslim country" (that is, a country where most people happen to adhere to Islam) and I was to give a presentation about science to see if I could get it taught at some institution or other. This dude - a clerical hotshot - kept hitting me on the head with a blunt object, chiding me for not accepting the Prophet, and that I was a blasphemer (I should have taken it as a compliment, and asked him if he wanted to keep his hand unbroken). And the weird thing is, I was being apologetic. I acquiesced to his feelings of offence and apparent outrage. After I was expelled from the room and told to get lost, amid much fanfare and noise, I approached one of the members of the group to whom I had tried to win favour and, with my tail between my legs, I told her that I was sorry for the way things had turned out, and that I didn't mean any offence (despite not having done anything, apart from existing). Now that I think of it, I'm ashamed. Why did I give in so easily to those with ancient beliefs? Why was I so eager to avoid doing anything that might upset their delicate sensibilities? I guess it's because, in the back of my mind, there's this fear of upsetting people by criticising, however gently, their "deeply held convictions" - namely, religious ones. We can criticise everything else, but not religion. It's "insensitive" and even "hateful" to say that God is a fictitious construct, or that religion is a species of psychological pathogen, but it's not considered hate speech when the religious tell me that I'm going to hell to be roasted for all eternity, that I must follow the Lord Jesus Christ or else I have "no basis" for my ethics, or any of a number of other inanities, all of which I'm somehow obliged to "respect" (newsflash: I don't). Well, to this I say, I'm "offended" whenever someone says these things. I'm "offended" whenever someone shows a brazen contempt for science and rationality and chooses to adhere to a world view that places "honour" above human rights and has a morbid obsession over what females do with their bodies. So why shouldn't it be the religious who are automatically cast with a contemptuous eye when they prefer Scripture to evolution or homophobia to basic human decency, or when they presume that their beliefs should be no-man's land for critical analysis just because of their label of "sacred"? Provide actual REASONS for your beliefs if they're so damn good. Which they aren't, by the way. And shutting down critical minds won't make them so.