At Home with John and Debbie

Last night I watched Channel 4’s “The Trouble with Atheism”:

“Rod Liddle argues against those who turn to atheism for a rational and moderate approach to today’s problems, and says that atheism has high priests and dogmatic beliefs, just like fundamentalist religion.”

(Repeated 2:20am next Friday morning)

As I watched it my blood gently worked up to boiling point, as Liddle piled on logical fallacies and strawman arguments.

It was tempting to watch it again with the pause button at the ready, in order to respond to each section one by one, but I can think of better ways of using my time (for example, sitting back with a bottle of wine and the season finale of Survivor) so I’ll just pick one some issues that stuck in my mind and continue to irk me the morning after.

Foremost, I think, is the assumption throughout that anyone who does not believe in God must provide an alternative explanation for life, the universe and everything. That’s nonsense: I’m happy to state that I don’t know how the universe was created, I’m pretty sure that if anyone did know, I wouldn’t understand their explanation of it.

Mind you, if Liddle was aware that the question itself might even be invalid, he didn’t show it. Interviewing an eminent particle physicist at Fermilab (whom he characterised as a “high priest” at a “temple to science”), he grasped at the fact that they were simulating conditions in the fraction of a millisecond after the Big Bang — that their theories and experiments don’t cover the moments before the Big Bang. My understanding (if you can call it that) is that time itself was created in the Big Bang - there are no moments before it.

Liddle wasn’t quite daring enough to deny evolution — although at one point he used an interview with a geneticist with new theories about the sudden emergence of adaptations (a subtle fine-tuning consistent with Darwin) and triumphantly claimed that this meant Darwin’s theories might cease to become accepted scientific fact any time now. More tellingly, he indirectly pooh-poohed evolution by his discussion of memes.

First, he willfully misunderstood how memes (and by extension, genes) work. Leaping straight in at the deep end, he took the meme of religion as an example, and explained that it would pass between generations “because it has the useful property of providing comfort”. Then, a snippet of interview with another geneticist (where he seemed to be saying — correctly — that memes weren’t exactly like a virus) was used to imply that the validity of the theory of memes was in doubt.

Memes do not survive because they are “useful”. They survive because they are good at surviving. We could argue about whether a joke about the Ipswitch serial killings are “useful” (sick and unproductive, or a valuable pressure release for society?) but whether it is or not is irrelevant: each joke is a meme which we can watch spread or die, purely based on whether enough people who hear it feel compelled to pass it on. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to identify well known memes which most people would consider dangerous and harmful (and very real) — although the next topic might provide some clues.

Although there’s much more to pick holes in, the final topic I want to talk about is Liddle’s examples of atheist regimes doing terrible things: Hitler (wasn’t he Catholic?), Stalin’s Russia etc.

The argument seemed to be:

• Atheists claim that terrible atrocities are commited in the name of religion
• But here are some examples of terrible atrocities being committed in the name of some set of ideals held by an atheist state (South Park was able to make this point much more tersely than Liddle)
• The first point is disproved by the second

OK, one can massage the argument until it makes more sense: you could say that history shows us that Man will find an excuse to mistreat his fellow man with or without religion; or rather — if there’s no religion to use as an excuse for atrocity, we’ll find some other excuse.

I have two reactions.

The first, is to ask why it’s relevant to the question of whether God exists? Whether or not religion causes wars has no bearing on whether it’s true or not. While some prominent atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, have promoted a view that a world without religion would be better, that view is not part of their atheism, it is tangential. Atheism is “I have no belief in a God”. “I think other people’s belief in God is harmful to society” is a completely separate belief (in fact, you could conceivably beleive in God while also believing that society would benefit from widespread atheism).

The second reaction is to recognise that religion is not the only cause of strife, yet it is a cause of strife. Why not chip away at them one by one?

Taking Liddle’s example of Stalin’s Russia, while his atrocities were not committed in the name of a supernatural creator, they were committed in the name of a dogmatic and inflexible world view — a religion in all but that small detail of not having a deity.

I promised that was the last topic, which is lucky, because I could have got quite cross about his dropping eugenics into the argument.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 12:36 and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.