Contents
Editorial
Bill Cooke
A Moral Argument for Atheism
Raymond D Bradley
Sad End to the O'Hair Saga
Bill Cooke
Stranger Than Fiction
Elizabeth McKenzie
Humanist Manifesto 2000
A Planetary Bill of Rights and Responsibilities
A very, very poor result
Bill Cooke
Southern Lights
Russell Dear
Against the New Irrationalism
Anthony Flew
How I became a psychic
Nick Pullar
Current Comments
Adam's Rib
Anne Ferguson
Book Reviews
Letters to Editor
Oddities
"The business of scepticism is to be dangerous"
Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
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Editorial
Life with Dignity
In contrast to previous occasions, the visit early in June of Dr
Philip Nitschke, the Australian campaigner for voluntary
euthanasia, received relatively little public attention. The main
media interest was from a patient at the spinal clinic in
Christchurch who said on Holmes that he wanted the right to
have his life-support turned off, only to apparently change his
mind the next day. Doubtless the opponents of death with dignity
felt vindicated.
It was interesting to hear Dr Nitschke speak. To start with, he is
a very intelligent man indeed. His title of 'Dr' is not an honorific
as it is for most medical people; he has a PhD in laser physics as
well as his medical qualification. There must be many of his
medical colleagues who wish he had stayed with physics. One
of the many interesting points he raised ws the reasons behind
the opposition of the medical profession to changes in the law
on voluntary euthanasia. Poll after poll shows consistent and
significant support for voluntary euthanasia, regardless of age,
sex, or occupation. There is even a majority support for voluntary
euthanasia among most church groups, although the majority is
lower than among the general population. The only sector which
consistently shows a majority opposed to voluntary euthanasia
is the medical profession. And this, Dr Nitschke argued, is not
due to opposition to the principle of voluntary euthanasia so
much as the suspicion that it would take power out of their hands.
Significant numbers of doctors already assist patients with
terminal illnesses; their opposition is to altering the status quo
where the discretion to assist or not to assist lies in their hands.
It is for this reason that Dr Nitschke warned that any future
death with dignity legislation should not be 'over-medicalised',
by which he means subject to the stranglehold of a medical
profession committed to ensuring the process does not work. It
is important to note that he is not saying there is no room for the
medical profession; of course they have a role. He is making
the simpler point that their role should not be overwhelming.
While Dr Nitschke was critical of the role the medical profession
played in scuppering the voluntary euthanasia legislation in
Australia, he made it quite clear that the principal opponents
were the churches, particularly the Roman Catholic Church.
Despite consistent majorities in poll after poll, including their
own co-religionists, the churches, apparently, know better than
the rest of us.
Dr Nitschke also made reference to the excellent state of
palliative care for terminally ill people. Palliative care,
particularly in the Hospices, can effectively remove most of the
pain for terminally ill people. But it is an option with a cost.
Often the removal of pain means being given so much morphine
that the patient is permanently stupefied. Now for some people
that quite simply is not worth doing. And it is the opinion of Dr
Nitschke and the campaigners for voluntary euthanasia that
people should be able to make their own decisions about how
their death shall be managed. For some people, a drug-induced
stupor as the only alternative to unbearable pain is not a
worthwhile alternative.
The arguments of the other anti-choice campaigners were
similarly specious. One of the more strained objections to death
with dignity from religious intellectuals is that it is an example
of extreme individualism. Whatever plausibility this argument
may have hangs on ignoring the fact that terminally ill people
have families and want them, no less than themselves, to avoid
unnecessary and lengthy suffering. The decision to end one's
life can just as easily be made for altruistic reasons rather than
for individualist ones. More bizarre still is the scare tactic which
Bishop Dunn employed a few days before Dr Nitschke's visit
when he said on television, "I don't like to bring up the parallel
of the Nazis, but...". What sort of argument is that? Its only
hope of plausibility is by ignoring the fact that what is being
advocated is the right to voluntary euthanasia by people medical
professionals agree are terminally ill but of sound mind and who
are not depressed. As we all know (including, hopefully, Bishop
Dunn) the Nazi scheme bore no relation to this at all. It was a
programme of state-sanctioned murder of those people that Nazi
eugenics deemed unfit and a menace to the continued vitality of
the German race. To draw such a parallel as Bishop Dunn did is
not to present an argument but to throw up a caricature of an
argument.
Yet another interesting point Dr Nitschke raised was that voluntary
euthanasia is only likely to be an option taken by a very few people.
During the seven months when it was legal in the Northern Territory,
only four people ended their lives in this way. Far from the
apocalypse conjured up by the opponents, this is a reform which
relatively few terminally ill people are likely to avail themselves of,
once it becomes legal. And with the rigorous safeguards Dr Nitschke
sees as necessary, the case of the man who apparently changed his mind
is not an issue at all. The right to death with dignity is not about
encouraging lots of people to die. It is about the right of people
to manage their death in a humane and dignified way. The best
illustration of this is Dr Nitschke's observation that evidence is
accumulating about what people who have been empowered with
bringing about a dignified death actually do. He has found, and
this was also noticed by Jack Kervorkian in the United States
(before his imprisonment, of course), that many people, when
provided with the means by which they can end their life
painlessly, actually live longer. Having been given the means
by which they can end their suffering, many people choose not
to use them for a while. It is the simple knowledge of being in
control of one's own decline that is empowering. It is because
of this fact that supporters of death with dignity can claim that
voluntary euthanasia is actually about life as much as it is about
death.
Bill Cooke
Return to Contents
A Moral Argument for Atheism
From Phenomenology to Materialism
Raymond D. Bradley
Preamble for philosophers:
The argument I am about to advance is intended
mainly for a non-philosophical audience.
Nevertheless, I expect some professionally trained
philosophers to be present. And some of them may
wonder at the fact that I say little about the God of
philosophers and much about the God of pulpit and
pew.
For them I offer two brief explanations.
First: there is ample precedent for what I am doing.
Socrates, for example, examined the religious beliefs
of his contemporaries - especially the belief that we
ought to do what the gods command - and show them
to be both ill-founded and conceptually confused. I
wish to follow in his footsteps though not to share in
his fate. A glass of wine, not of poison, would my
preferred reward.
Thus, like Socrates, I take issue with the God of
popular belief, not the God of natural theology. And
since God, in the minds of most westerners, is
predominantly the God of the Jewish and Christian
scriptures,1
I have little option other than to quote from
the Bible freely so as to confront squarely the theistic
beliefs that are my target and pre-empt charges of
having misunderstood or misquoted my sources.
Second: the fact is that most of the big-name
philosophers of religion who publish in academic
journals such as Faith and Philosophy are themselves
believers in the God of the Bible, not just the God of
the philosophers. To do a little name-dropping, I have
in mind the likes of William Alston, William Craig,
Peter van Inwagen, and Alvin Plantinga. All of these
are, as Plantinga puts it, "people of the Word [who]
take Scripture to be a special revelation from God
himself"2.
None is averse to quoting chapter and verse
of the Holy Scriptures - the morally palatable ones,
anyway - in their publications as well as the pulpit.
Thus, if my philosophical audience still craves the
views of some well-regarded philosophers to keep in
mind as implicit targets of my criticisms, they could
do no better than to consider William Alston's claim
that "a large proportion of the scriptures consists of
records of divine-human communications", and that
God continues to reveal himself to "sincere
Christians" of today in ways ranging from answered
prayer to thoughts that just pop into one's
mind3; Peter
van Inwagen's statement, "I fully accept the teachings
of my denomination that 'the Holy Scriptures of the
Old and New Testaments are the revealed Word of
God'"4 or still
again, Alvin Plantinga's paper "When
Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and the Bible" in
which he claims "Scripture is inerrant: the Lord makes
no mistakes; what he proposes for our belief is what
we ought to believe."5
These views typify the kind of theism, viz., biblical
theism, that I have undertaken to refute.
Now to my argument for atheism.
Introduction:
"If there is no God, all things are permitted." So said
one of Dostoyevsky's characters in The Brothers
Karamazov. He was claiming that if God does not
exist, then moral values would be a purely subjective
matter to be determined by the whims of individuals
or by counting heads in the social groups to which
they belong; or perhaps even that moral values would
be totally illusory and moral nihilism would prevail.
In short - the argument goes - if there are objective
moral truths, then God must exist.
By way of contrast, I argue that if there are objective
moral truths, then God does not exist. I present a moral
argument for atheism.
A: Points of agreement with theists.
On four points, two terminological and two
substantive, I agree with my theist opponents.
First: I agree with them as to what we mean by the
term "God" when they assert, and I deny, that God
exists. We are not talking about just any old god. We
are not talking, for instance, about Baal (god of the
Canaanites), or Aton (god of the Egyptians), or Zeus
(god of the Greeks), or Brahman (god of the Hindus),
or Huitzilopochtli (god of the Aztecs). All of these,
along with another 200 or so, named in works on
comparative religion, were supreme deities. Each was
worshipped and obeyed by millions. Yet, as H. L.
Mencken put it in his 1922 essay "Memorial Service",
"all are dead".
Although the term "theism" is sometimes used so
broadly as to encompass belief in any sort of
supernatural god or gods who reveal themselves to
humans, I shall use it - as most philosophers and
theologians now do - in a somewhat narrower sense.
The theism I will be talking about isn't just the belief
in some god or other. It is belief in the god of the
orthodox Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions. It
is belief in a god who is distinguished from these
others in two main respects. First, he is holy (that is,
morally perfect). Second, he reveals himself to us in
Holy Scriptures. It is by virtue of his holiness that he
is deemed worthy of worship and obedience. And it
is by virtue of his having revealed himself to us in
Scriptures that we know about his nature and what he
would have us do or forbear from doing.
The God of theism, it should be noted, is a robust
supernatural being. He ought not to be identified,
therefore, with the metaphysically eviscerated God
of liberal theologians like Paul Tillich and Bishop
Robinson, for whom God is something like "our
deepest concern" and the Bible is only a man-made
fable, or at best a quasi-historical novel. Nor should
the God of theists be identified with the unknowable
God of deists like Voltaire and Thomas Paine for
whom God was a hypothetical entity invoked merely
to explain the origins and nature of the universe and
the Bible a moral and intellectual fraud foisted upon
the credulous by prophets, popes, priests, and
preachers. In the strict sense of the word, each of these
is an atheist. And, in the same sense, so am I. But I
see no need for a god of any kind. I see only semantic
obfuscation in the liberals' clothing of humanist
sentiments (which I applaud) with pietistic God-talk
(which I deplore). And I find only fallacious inference
in the supposition that we can explain why anything
at all exists the way it does by hypothesising that
something else exists the way it does; that supposition
starts one on the path of infinite regress.
Second: I think that theists would agree with me as to
what we mean when we talk of objective morality.
We mean a set of moral truths that would remain true
no matter what any individual or social group thought
or desired. The notion of objective morality is to be
contrasted with all forms of moral subjectivism. It
holds, first, that we have moral beliefs that are either
true or false; that they are not mere expressions of
emotion, akin to sighs of pleasure or pain. It holds,
secondly, that the truth or falsity of our moral
judgments is a function of whether or not the objects
of moral appraisal, agents and their actions, have the
moral properties that we ascribe to them; that their
truth or falsity is not merely a function of the thoughts,
feelings, or attitudes of individuals or the conventions
of society. And it holds, thirdly, that there may well
be moral truths still awaiting our discovery, through
revelation (on the theist's account) or through reason
and experience - together, perhaps, with our changing
biology - (on my account).
Third: I am going to agree with my theistic opponents
in holding that at least some moral principles are
objectively true. We would allow that disagreements
about moral matters - about the permissibility of
abortion or capital punishment, for example - often
generate strong emotions. But this doesn't mean that
such disagreements are nothing more than expressions
of emotion. For we take it to be a fact of moral
psychology that we have beliefs as well as emotions
about such issues. And since nothing counts as a belief
unless it is either true or false, we conclude that our
moral beliefs - like beliefs about the shape of the earth
and the age of the universe - are either true or false.
Nor, from the phenomenon of moral disagreement,
does it follow that the truth or falsity of moral
judgments is to be determined by each individual or
by counting heads. For we take it that the relativist
view of truth about moral matters is no more defensible
than is the relativist view of truth about factual matters.
Fourth: I would expect theists to agree with me when
I give some concrete examples of moral principles
that I take to be objectively true.
The requirement of objectivity is a strict one: it entails
that they should be universal in the sense of being
exceptionless - of holding, that is, for all persons,
places, and times. Thus, on my view, the principle
that it is morally forbidden to kill other persons is not
objectively true since - as almost everyone would
agree - it admits of exceptions such as killing a
would-be murderer in defense of oneself or one's
family. As it stands it is false. We may have a prima
facie obligation not to kill another person. But
sophisticated moral thinkers would allow that there
are situations in which this principle should be set
aside by virtue of countervailing moral considerations.
If we are to provide moral principles that stand in
need of no qualification, we need to formulate them
in such a way as to make due allowance for these
other considerations.
B: Examples of objective moral truths.
Here, now, are a few examples of moral principles
that I take to be paradigms of objective moral truths:
P1. It is morally wrong to deliberately and
mercilessly slaughter men, women, and children
who are innocent of any serious wrongdoing.
A particularly gross violation of this principle is to
be found in the genocidal policies of the Nazi SS who,
following the orders of Hitler, slaughtered 6 million
Jews, together with countless Gypsies, homosexuals,
and other so-called "undesirables". It is no excuse, as
I see it, that they believed themselves to be cutting
out a cancer from society, or that they were, as Hitler
explained in 1933, merely doing to the Jews what
Christians had been preaching for 2000 years.6
Another, more current, violation of this principle is
to be found in the genocidal practices of Milosevic
and his henchman for whom it is no excuse to say
that they are merely redressing past injustices or, by
ethnic cleansing, laying the foundations for a more
stable society.
P2. It is morally wrong to provide one's troops
with young women captives with the prospect
of their being used as sexslaves.
This principle, or something like it, lies behind our
moral revulsion at the policies of the German and
Japanese High Commands who selected sexually
attractive young women, especially virgins, to give
so-called "comfort" to their soldiers. It is irrelevant, I
want to say, that most societies, historically, have
regarded such comforts as among the accepted spoils
of war.
P3. It is morally wrong to make people
cannibalise their friends and family.
Perhaps we can imagine situations - such as the plane
crash in the Andes - in which cannibalistic acts might
be exonerated. But making people eat their own family
members -as many Polynesian tribes are reputed to
have done - in order to punish them, or to horrify and
strike fear into the hearts of their enemies, is
unconscionable.
P4. It is morally wrong to practise human
sacrifice, by burning or otherwise.
To be sure, human sacrifice was widely accepted by
the tribes against whom the children of Israel fought,
and - on the other side of the Atlantic - by the Aztecs
and Incas. But this - I hope you'll agree - doesn't
make the practice acceptable, even if it was done to
appease the gods in whom they believed.
P5. It is morally wrong to torture people
endlessly for their beliefs.
Perhaps we can think of situations in which it would
be permissible to torture someone who is himself a
torturer so as to obtain information as to the
whereabouts of prisoners who will otherwise die from
the injuries he has inflicted on them. But cases like
that of Pope Pius V who watched the Roman
Inquisition bum a nonconforming religious scholar
in about 1570, fall beyond the moral pale; he can't be
exonerated on the grounds that he thought he was
thereby saving the dissident's soul from the eternal
fires of Hell.
On all of these examples, I would like to think, theists
and other morally enlightened persons will agree with
me. And I would like to think, further, that theists
would agree with me in holding that anyone who
committed, caused, commanded, or condoned, acts
in violation of any of these principles - the five that I
will refer to hereafter as "our" principles - is not only
evil but should be regarded with abhorrence.
C: God's violations of our moral principles.
But now comes the linchpin of my moral argument
against theism. For, as I shall now show, the theist
God - as he supposedly reveals himself in the Jewish
and Christian Bibles - either himself commits,
commands others to commit, or condones acts which
violate every one of our five principles.
In violation of P1, for instance, God himself drowned
the whole human race except Noah and his family
[Gen. 7:23]; he punished King David for carrying out
a census that he himself had ordered and then
complied with David's request that others be punished
instead of him by sending a plague to kill 70,000
people [II Sam. 24:1-15]; and he commanded Joshua
to kill old and young, little children, maidens, and
women (the inhabitants of some 31 kingdoms) while
pursuing his genocidal practices of ethnic cleansing
in the lands that orthodox Jews still regard as part of
Greater Israel [see Josh., chapter 10 in particular].
These are just three out of hundreds of examples of
God's violations of P1.
In violation of P2, after commanding soldiers to
slaughter all the Midianite men, women, and young
boys without mercy, God permitted the soldiers to
use the 32,000 surviving virgins for themselves.
[Num. 31:17-18].
In violation of P3, God repeatedly says he has made,
or will make, people cannibalise their own children,
husbands, wives, parents, and friends because they
haven't obeyed him. [Lev. 26:29, Deut. 28:53-58, Jer.
19:9, Ezek. 5:10]
In violation of P4, God condoned Jephthah's act in
sacrificing his only child as a burnt offering to God
[Judg. 11:30-39].
Finally, in violation of P5, God's own sacrificial
"Lamb", Jesus, will watch as he tortures most
members of the human race for ever and ever, mainly
because they haven't believed in him. The book of
Revelation tells us that "everyone whose name has
not been written from the foundation of the world in
the book of life of the Lamb who has been slain" [Rev.
13:8] will go to Hell where they "will be tormented
with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy
angels and in the presence of the Lamb; and the smoke
of their torment goes up forever and ever: and they
have no rest day or night." [Rev. 14:10-11].
D: A logical quandary for theists: an inconsistent
tetrad.
These - and countless other - passages from the Bible
mean that theists are confronted with a logical
quandary which strikes at the very heart of their belief
the God of Scripture is holy. They cannot, without
contradiction, believe all four of the statements:
(1) Any act that God commits, causes, commands,
or condones is morally permissible.
(2) The Bible reveals to us many of the acts that
God commits, causes, commands, and condones.
(3) It is morally impermissible for anyone to
commit, cause, command, or condone, acts that
violate our moral principles.
(4) The Bible tells us that God does in fact commit,
cause, command, or condone, acts that violate our
moral principles.
The trouble is that these statements form an
inconsistent tetrad such that from any three one can
validly infer the falsity of the remaining one. Thus,
one can coherently assert (1), (2), and (3) only at the
cost of giving up (4); assert (2), (3), and (4) only at
the cost of giving up (1); and so on.
The problem for a theist is to decide which of these
four statements to give up in order to preserve the
minimal requirement of truth and rationality, viz.,
logical consistency. After all, if someone has
contradictory beliefs then their beliefs can't all be true.
And rational discussion with persons who contradict
themselves is impossible; if contradictions are allowed
then anything goes.
But which of the four statements will our theist deny?
To deny (1) would be to admit that God sometimes
commits, causes, commands, or condones, acts that
are morally impermissible. But that would mean that
God himself is immoral, or even, depending on the
enormity of his misdeeds, that he is evil. It would
entail denying that he is holy and worthy of worship;
and denying, further, that his holiness is the ground
of morality.
To deny (2), for the theist, would be to be to abandon
the chief foundation of religious and moral
epistemology (ways of obtaining religious and moral
knowledge). For if (2) were false, then the question
arises as to how we are supposed to know of God's
existence let alone look to him for moral guidance.
After all, it is a distinguishing feature of theism, as
opposed to deism, to hold that God reveals himself to
us and, from time to time, intervenes in human history.
And the Bible, according to theists, is the principal
record of his revelatory interventions. If the Bible,
with its stories of Moses and Jesus, is not his revealed
and presumptively true word, then how are we to know
of him? If God doesn't reveal himself through the Old
Testament Moses and the New Testament Jesus, then
through whom does he reveal himself? To be sure, a
theist could well claim that God also reveals himself
through other channels in addition to the Bible: reason,
tradition, and religious experience all being cases in
point. But to deny that the Bible is his main mode of
'communication would be to deny that the principal
figures in Judaism and Christianity can really be
known at all. Apart from the scriptural records, we
would know little, if anything, of Moses or Jesus, it
being doubtful that secular history has anything
reliable to say about either. Apart from the scriptural
records we would know nothing of the so-called Ten
Commandments that God supposedly delivered to
Moses, or of the ethical principles that Jesus
supposedly delivered in his sermons and parables.
To deny (3) would be to assert that it is morally
permissible to violate our five moral principles. It
would be to ally oneself with moral monsters like
Ghenghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. It would
be to abandon all pretence to a belief in objective moral
values. Indeed, if it is permissible to violate the above
principles, then it isn't easy to see what sorts of acts
would not be permissible. The denial of (3), then,
would be tantamount to an embrace of moral nihilism.
And no theist who believes in the Ten Commandments
or the Sermon on the Mount could assent to that.
That leaves only (4). But to deny (4) would be to fly
in the face of facts ascertainable by anyone who takes
the care to read: objective facts about what the Bible
actually says.
In what follows I will argue that both (3) and (4) are
true, thereby confronting theists with the necessity of
abandoning either (1) or (2) - the two principal
foundations of theistic belief. My arguments will show
that if God were to exist then either he isn't holy or
the Scriptures aren't his revealed word.
I shall, however, have to deal with the
counter-arguments of those who defend God and the
Scriptures against criticisms like mine. Theistic
apologists have two main strategies. One is to try to
show, contrary to (4), that the Bible either doesn't
really say what I claim it says or that it doesn't mean
what it says. This tactic involves putting some sort of
"spin" on the passages at issue so as to render them
morally innocuous. The other is to try to show,
contrary to (3), that our moral principles are either
inapplicable to the situations described in (4) or that
they admit of exceptions which would absolve God
of violating them.
I will deal with these two apologetic strategies as they
arise in connection with my defense of the truth of
(4) and (3), in that order.
E: A defense of (4): What the Bible in fact says
about God's violations of our moral principles.
P1 and the slaughter of innocents.
First: consider the story, in Genesis chapters 6 and 7,
of the Great Flood and Noah's Ark. It is sufficiently
well-known not to need retelling in detail. Suffice it
to say that because of the wickedness that God saw
on earth, he resolved - in his own words - to "blot out
man whom I have created from the face of the land,
from man to animals to creeping things and to birds
of the sky" (Gen. 6:7). The sole human exceptions
were Noah and his family.
Second: consider the strange story of God
commanding King David to take a census of his
people. It is strange for three reasons. As the story is
narrated in Second Samuel, chapter 24, we are told
that God issued David with the command "Go,
number Israel and Judah"; that after carrying out this
command, David comes to the strange conclusion that
he had thereby "sinned greatly"; that God then offered
David a choice of three punishments: seven years of
famine, three days plague, or three months of being
pursued by his enemies; that our noble king chose
famine or plague for others rather than peril for
himself; and that God complied: "the Lord sent a
pestilence upon Israel...; and seventy thousand men
of the people from Dan to Beersheba died." It is
puzzling that a just God would want to punish David
for obeying his commands. It is more puzzling that a
holy God would vent his wrath on others by killing
seventy thousand men (and unspecified numbers of
women and children). It is even more puzzling that
when the story is retold in First Chronicles, chapter
21, we find that it was Satan, not the Lord, who
"incited" David to take the census. The inconsistency
is bad enough since at least one of these stories must
be false. It is worse that, on both accounts, it is the
Lord - not Satan - who kills those who had nothing to
do with David's apparent sin.
Third, consider the case in which God commands
Joshua to slaughter virtually every inhabitant of the
land of Canaan. The story commences in chapter 6 of
the book of Joshua, telling how the hero and his army
conquer the ancient city of Jericho where they "utterly
destroyed everything in the city, both man and woman,
young and old." Then, in chapters 7 through 12, it
treats us to a chilling chronicle of the 31 kingdoms,
and all the cities therein, that fell victim to Joshua's,
and God's, genocidal policies. Time and again we read
the phrases "he utterly destroyed every person who
was in it", "he left no survivor", and "there was no
one left who breathed." And by way of explanation
of why only one of the indigenous peoples made peace
with the invaders, we are told "For it was of the Lord
to harden their hearts, to meet Israel in battle that he
might utterly destroy them, that they might receive
no mercy,..." [Josh. 11:20]. The occasion for killing
was contrived by God himself.
What is morally troubling about each of these three
cases is that God apparently has no compunction about
commanding the slaughter of persons who, in any
ordinary sense of the words, are "innocent of serious
wrong-doing". After all, it is a matter of
straightforward empirical fact that newly born
children, let alone those as yet unborn, don't have the
capacity to do the kinds of things that warrant
punishments such as drowning, being put to the sword,
ripped from their mothers' wombs7,
or of dying from a God-sent plague. Yet the Bible
unabashedly reports that they, too, were among
the countless victims of God's acts or commands.
P2 and giving captive virgins to the troops.
The book of Numbers, chapter 31, commences with
the Lord telling Moses, "take full vengeance for the
sons of Israel on the Midianites", then tells how - in
obedience to God's order - twelve thousand warriors
first "killed every male" [verse 7], and "captured all
the women of Midian and their little ones." [verse 9].
But, we read, "Moses was angry with the officers of
the army ... and said unto them, Have you spared all
the women?... Now therefore, kill every male among
the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known
man intimately. But all the girls who have not known
man intimately, spare for yourselves." [verses 15-18].
Now it must be admitted that nowhere in this story of
mayhem and slave-taking are we told explicitly that
the troops in the Lord's armies used the captured
virgins for their own sexual pleasure. So it is not
surprising that some apologists seize upon this
omission in order to argue that P2 wasn't violated
after all. One such apologist confidently claims that
the soldiers took them only as "wives or servants".
After all, he reassures us, "the law of God was that
anyone who had sexual relations outside of
heterosexual marriage was put to death" and that "any
man who committed fornication . . . was forced to
marry the woman and never divorce her."8
But this won't wash. The Bible recounts numerous
instances of so-called "men of God" who bedded the
unwedded - and sometimes the already wedded - with
impunity from man and God alike. Examples include
Abraham's sexual encounters with his Egyptian
slave-girl, Hagar; King David's adulterous liaison with
Bathsheba; and King Solomon, product of that liaison,
and his 300 concubines.
One would have to be extraordinarily naive to suppose
that, of the twelve thousand soldiers, there weren't
any who took sexual advantage of the thirty two
thousand virgins - more than two a piece - God gave
them to use for themselves.
P3 and causing people to
cannibalise their relatives.
There are at least five passages in which God tells his
people that if they don't obey him they will be
punished by being reduced to such straits that they
will cannibalise each other sons, daughters, husbands,
wives, fathers, mothers, and brothers, to say nothing
of mere friends.9
The book of Jeremiah is especially
telling. There, in chapter 19, verse 9, the Lord himself
claims direct responsibility for these horrors when
he says: "And I will make them eat the flesh of their
sons and the flesh of their daughters . . ."
For these passages apologists have two main
rationalisations to offer. One is that God is merely
threatening his chosen people with the fate that will
befall them if they don't obey his commandments. A
second is that he is merely predicting the fates that
will befall them in forthcoming sieges by their
enemies. The problem with the threat-hypothesis is
that, in each instance, the Children of Israel did not
in fact obey his commandments despite the threats.
So, if God did not do what he threatened to do, his
threats were empty and he repeatedly failed to keep
his word. And the problem with the
prediction-hypothesis, is that if things hadn't turned
out as he predicted, then what he said would have
been false. But in any case neither explanation would
help with the Jeremiah passage, in which God isn't
merely predicting what the Israelite's enemies will
cause them to do, but is saying what he himself will
cause them to do. There is no gainsaying the fact that
if God's word is true, then he causes others to violate
P3.
P4 and condoning child sacrifice.
In the book of Judges, chapter 11, we are treated to a
cautionary tale about a rash vow and its consequences.
Jephthah, we are told, was a mighty man who was
used by God to carry on in Joshua's tradition by
cleansing the land of another ethnically different
people, the sons of Ammon. We read that Jephthah
"made a vow to the Lord, and said, If thou wilt indeed
give the sons of Ammon into my hand, then it shall
be that whatever comes out of the doors of my house
to meet me when I return in peace from the sons of
Ammon, it shall be the Lord's, and I will offer it up
as a burnt offering." (verses 31-32).
The Lord, it seems, found this perfectly acceptable.
He kept his part of the bargain by delivering the
Ammonites and their twenty cities "with a very great
slaughter" into Jephthah's hands. Then came
Jephthah's turn to keep his part of the bargain. But
sadly it was his daughter who came out of the house
to greet him. Jephthah realised that he nevertheless
had to keep faith with God. Thus we read: "And it
came to pass at the end of two months that she returned
unto her father, who did to her according to the vow
which he had made . . ." In other words, Jephthah
kept his vow by offering up his beloved daughter as a
burnt sacrifice to his unrelenting Lord. Thus did
Jephthah earn himself an honourable mention in the
Epistle to the Hebrews10
where he is listed along with
fifteen or so other men of "great faith" such as Noah,
Abraham, Moses, Samson, David, and Samuel.
The best spin that can be put on this horrifying story
is that it is a sort of Aesop's fable, a man-made tale
told with a view to teaching us a lesson about the
need for forethought before undertaking commitments
to others, especially to a deity. Such a gloss, however,
can hardly be acceptable to a Bible-believing theist.
But in any case, we shouldn't really be surprised at
the Lord's acceptance of Jephthah's sacrifice. After
all, God himself - Christian theists believe - offered
his own son Jesus as a blood-sacrifice for the mistakes
of mankind.
P5 and the eternal torture
God has in store for those who don't believe that
Jesus is Lord and Savior.
The fate of Jephthah's daughter pales into
insignificance when compared with that which the
Christian God has in store for sincere atheists like
me; and not only for atheists, but for all those who
fail to accept Jesus Christ as their saviour. Jesus, who
has the dubious distinction of having invented the
doctrine of hellfire and damnation, describes their fate
vividly. In the Gospel of Matthew alone he
characterises it in terms which evangelists adore:
"unquenchable fire", "fiery hell" (twice), "torment",
"burned with fire", "furnace of fire" (twice), "weeping
and gnashing of teeth" (five times), "eternal fire", and
"eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil
and his angels".
Assuming that Jesus knew how to say what he meant,
the fate of unbelievers is clear. It isn't a clean dispatch
into oblivion. It isn't merely the anguish of a soul
who is separated from God. It is the torment and agony
of a resurrected body, torture differing from that
experienced by victims of the Inquisition only in the
fact that it lasts not just for minutes but for all eternity.
Unlike Auschwitz, Hell offers no finality to those of
us who are to fill its ovens. No one will escape its
horrors, and its tortures - to be performed before divine
spectators - will continue without end11
Were this fiery fate to be reserved for unrepentant
mass murderers and the other perpetrators of evil who
have blighted human history, such a violation of PS
would be bad enough. But Revelation 13:8 predicts
this fate will befall "everyone whose name has not
been written from the foundation of the world in the
book of life of the Lamb . . .". And Revelation 20:15
confirms the prediction when it tells us that "if
anyone's name was not found written in the book of
life, he was thrown into the lake of fire."
Who are they who have not thus been preordained to
eternal life? They are all those who - as evangelicals
like to put it - aren't "born again" Christians.
According to Luke, the reputed author of The Acts,
"there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other
name under heaven that has been given among men,
by which we must be saved." (Acts 4:12). And St.
Paul makes it clearer still when he tells us that "the
Lord Jesus Christ shall be revealed from heaven with
his mighty angels in flaming fire, dealing out
retribution to those who do not know God [my
emphasis] and to those who do not obey the Gospel
of our Lord Jesus Christ. And these will pay the
penalty of eternal destruction." (II Thess. 1:7--9).
At this point, it may occur to some of us that since it
is a necessary condition of believing in the name of
Jesus that you've both heard the name and understood
its significance, no-one can be saved from hell if they
haven't heard the gospel. Therein, of course, lies the
motivation of missionaries. But what of those who
have lived in times or places in which the name of
Jesus is unknown? Are all those who lived prior to
the time of Christ already condemned? How about
those who have lived, or still live, in ignorance of the
Christian story? Are they - the majority of the human
race - condemned for a lack of belief which, for
historical or geographical reasons, they are debarred
from having?
This harsh conclusion is what the Bible implies.
Certainly, Jesus himself seems to have accepted it with
equanimity: "The gate [to salvation]", he said, "is
narrow and the way is hard . . . and those who find it
are few." (Matt. 7:13-14). The exclusion of most
human beings - no matter how saintly their lives - for
the sole reason that they don't believe in Jesus as
Savior, is a consequence of the fact that most of the
people who have populated the earth down to the
present haven't even heard of him. If we are to take
Jesus himself seriously, little comfort can be found
in a suggestion by St. Paul that some might find
salvation as a result of so-called general revelation.
As one of the ablest Christian apologists, William L.
Craig, acknowledges, such exceptions to the rule of
"salvation through no other name" can at best be rare.
This is why Craig makes no pretence of the fact that
on his, and Jesus's, view even the sincerest believers
of other world religions are "lost and dying without
Christ".12
However, all this talk of the numbers of persons who
will be tortured in hell is beside the point. So is the
question whether hell's torments are finite or infinite
in duration. If there is even one person who suffers
the tortures of the damned, then the moral principle
we have enshrined as P5 is thereby violated by God
himself.
And by virtue of God's violating it - along with our
other moral principles - his supposed holiness is
clearly compromised. Just as it would be incoherent
to say that Hitler was morally perfect despite the fact
that he sent people to the gas chambers for the "sin"
of lacking the right parentage, so it would be
incoherent to suppose that God is morally perfect
despite the fact that he will send people to roast in
hell for the "sin" of lacking the right beliefs. On the
contrary, anyone who is guilty of such atrocities is,
not to mince words, simply evil. Little wonder, then,
that God says of himself not only "I make peace" but
also "I create evil" (Is. 45:7).13
It is worth noting that, compared with God, Satan is
depicted throughout the Bible as a relative paragon
of virtue. Satan is guilty of just three main
misdemeanours.
First, according to a passage which sets the moral
tone of the Bible, Satan - in the guise of a serpent -
tempts Eve with the forbidden fruit of moral
enlightenment, fruit from what is described as "the
tree of knowledge of good and evil"14.
One might have thought it a good thing for Satan thus to start
her on the path to moral education. But God didn't
want her eyes to be "opened", as Genesis 3:5 puts it;
he wanted blind obedience. And so God responds in
typical fashion. Not only does he punish Eve, for an
act that she didn't know was wrong until after she'd
performed it. He also punishes Adam, and all their
descendants, including you and me. He imposes on
us all the burden of what theologians call Original
Sin: he sees to it that none of us can start life with a
clean slate.
Satan appears next in First Chronicles where he plays
the very same role that was assigned to God in Second
Samuel. So wherein lies his wrong this time? If it is
good enough for God to order David's census-taking,
can it be evil for Satan to do so?
Satan's third appearance is in the book of Job where
he makes life difficult for God's protege. But that, it
should be noted, is only because God had issued him
a challenge to do so.
Thereafter, Satan does almost nothing of a dubious
nature except for tempting God himself, in the person
of Jesus, during his forty days in the desert - an
exercise doomed to futility.
What is remarkable, in light of the bad press Satan
has subsequently suffered, is that Satan, unlike God,
doesn't violate a single one of the important moral
principles PI through P5.
F: A defense of (3): The impermissibility of God's
violations of our principles.
The second apologetic strategy is to argue that our
principles admit of exceptions which, when they are
taken into account, absolve God of guilt.
Chief among the apologetic ploys in this category is
what I shall call the Sovereignty Exception. In the
words of one apologist, it holds that "God is sovereign
over life" and he can therefore do with us as he likes
"according to his will".15
But this argument contains
a fatal equivocation on the word "can". It is trivially
true that if God is - as theists believe -sovereignly
omnipotent, then he "can" do whatever he wants in
the sense of having the power or might to do so. But
might, we reflect, doesn't confer right. It certainly
doesn't follow that God "can" violate moral principles
in the sense of its being morally right for him to do
so. If it did, the moral monsters of human history who
reigned sovereignly over their empires, would equally
be innocent of wrongdoing.
A second tactic is to argue that God is exempt from
the prohibitions of our principles. It might be said
that although these are binding on humans, they are
not binding on God. But that would be to introduce a
double standard and so compromise the universality
of moral principles. It would relativise morality to
individuals or times and deprive them of the absolute
and objective validity that theists are committed to.
Worse still, for the theist's case, it would call into
question God's holiness. For holy is as holy does. That
is to say, if anyone at all is properly to be described
as morally perfect, then their acts of commission, of
command, and of permission, must also be morally
perfect. To say that God is holy despite the evil nature
of what he does would be to play with words: it would
be to deprive the word "holy" of its ordinary meaning
and make it a synonym for "evil".
A third ploy is to argue that in all the cases we have
considered God is acting in accordance with what
some hold to be the overriding moral principle that
sin must be punished. For from this, together with
the theological doctrine of Original Sin - the doctrine
that every human being, even the newly conceived
fetus in its mother's womb, inherits sin or at least the
disposition to sin from Eve - it follows that God has
the right, not just the might, to punish us as he sees
fit. As one apologist put it: "Since the wages of sin is
death, God has the right to give and take life."16
Leave aside the questionable presuppositions of this
doctrine: that sin is inherited through our genes or
via our supposed souls; and that we can justly be held
responsible for inherited or unactualised dispositions
to sin. There is a more important objection to this
whole apologetic claim. For suppose we grant the
implausible claim that it is by virtue of a universal
lack of human innocence that God is to be excused
for his genocidal practices. Then we shall have to say
that there are no circumstances whatever, not even
innocence of the victims, in which it is morally wrong
to slaughter men, women, and children. We would
have to abandon PI as an objective moral truth since
it would be totally vacuous, lacking any application
whatever. And that would give us, like God, a license
to mercilessly slaughter anyone we liked. All we need
to do is to invoke the Punishment for Original Sin
Exception. After all, unless we are to adopt the
relativism of a double standard, if it is good enough
for God it must be good enough for us.
If even one of the above exceptions to our principles
were sound, those principles would not be moral truths
but a moral falsehoods. At best, they would merely
state prima facie moral prohibitions, prohibitions
which would - in order to make them objectively
binding - have to be qualified in ways that would give
a license to some of the most morally abhorrent
behaviour of which any person could be guilty. In
short, if reformulated to accommodate God, they
would accommodate the Devil and other
personifications of evil as well.
G: Consequences for theism: the falsity of at least
one of theism's cornerstones, (1) or (2).
At this point let us return to the inconsistent tetrad
which I said posed such problems for theistic belief.
I have demonstrated, first, that (4) is true, i.e., that
the Bible does indeed tell us that God violates our
moral principles; and second, that (3) is true, i.e., that
it is morally impermissible for anyone - including God
- to violate these principles. But if I am right, then
theists have no way out of their logical quandary that
doesn't destroy the very core of theistic belief.
They have a choice. They must, on pain of
contradiction, abandon at least one, if not both, of
(1), the belief that all of God's acts are morally
permissible, or (2), the belief that the Bible reveals to
us what many of these acts are. Yet, as we have seen,
if they abandon (1), they therewith abandon the belief
in God's holiness; while if they abandon (2), they
therewith abandon the belief in the Bible as his
revelation.
Here I rest my case against theism: my moral
argument for atheism.
H: A corollary of my argument: the falsity of the
theistic theory of ethics.
Before finishing, however, I want to draw attention
to a corollary of my argument. Consider, once more,
the inconsistent tetrad by which the whole edifice of
theism is brought to ruin. But this time replace
statements (1), (2), (3), and (4) of the original
inconsistent tetrad with their respective corollaries:
(1)* Any act that God commands us to perform is
morally permissible.
(2)* The Bible reveals to us many of the acts that
God commands us to perform.
(3)* It is morally impermissible for anyone to
commit acts that violate principle PI.
(4)* The Bible tells us that God commands us to
perform acts that violate moral principle P1.
Then a parallel logical quandary arises for the theist's
belief that God, as revealed in the Bible, is the source
of objective morality or, at the very least, is a reliable
guide to what we should and should not do.
Rather than run the argument through again, I will
present this additional indictment of theistic belief
by first quoting the Bible and then addressing a series
of questions to those who, like philosopher Alvin
Plantinga, claim that "what [the Lord] proposes for
our belief is what we ought to believe." For it should
be evident that, if Plantinga and other biblical theists
are right, then since the beliefs that the Lord proposes
include ones about what we ought to do, if the Lord
proposes that we should do so and so, then so and so
is what we ought to do.
Consider First Samuel 15:3 in which the Lord
commands his people:
Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all
that he has, and do not spare him: but put to death
both man and woman, child and infant. . .
Now ask yourself three questions:
(i) Was "put to death both man and woman, child
and infant" the very word of the Lord whom you
worship?
(ii) Is it conceivable that your Lord could again
issue the same command in our time?
(iii) If you did believe you were so commanded
by your Lord, could you and would you obey?
If you answer "No" to question (i), you deny the
authority of God's so-called word, the Bible. If you
answer "No" to question (ii) - perhaps because you
think your Lord might have mended his ways - you
deny that God's commands have the kind of universal
applicability which is a necessary condition of their
being in accord with, let alone the source of, moral
truths. If you answer "No" to question (iii), you must
think that it is sometimes right, or even obligatory, to
disobey God. You thereby admit that moral truths are
independent of, and may even conflict with, God's
dictates. You admit that ethics is, as most philosophers
have long insisted, autonomous; and that we must,
therefore, do our moral thinking for ourselves.
But if you answer "Yes" to each question, then I
submit that your belief in the God of biblical theism
is not just mistaken but morally abhorrent. For, in the
words of my friend, John Patrick, who resigned from
the Presbyterian ministry here in New Zealand after
he discovered how many of his parishioners also
answered "Yes" to all three questions: "a doctrine of
the Scriptures as containing the Word of God, the
supreme ruler of faith and duty, has the power to turn
otherwise gentle, thoughtful, and basically loving
people into a group prepared to sanction genocide in
the name of the Lord they worship."17
• Presented at the University of Western Washington,
May 27, 1999, and - in a revised form - at the
University of Auckland, September 29, 1999.
Professor Raymond Bradley is a New Zealander who has been
for many years a philosopher at Simon Fraser University in British
Columbia. He became an Honorary Associate of the NZARH in
June 2000.
Endnotes
1 For present purposes I say nothing about the God of the Koran.
It suffices to say that my argument, if sound, also counts against
Islamic theism.
2 Alvin Plantinga, "When Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and
the Bible", Christian Scholar's Review, Vol. XXI, No. 1, (September,
1991), p.8.
3 William Alston, "Divine-Human Dialogue and the Nature of
God", Faith and Philosophy, (January 1985, p.6).
4 Peter van Inwagen, "Genesis and Evolution", in Reasoned Faith,
ed. Eleonore Stump, Cornell University Press, 1993, p.97.
5 Alvin Plantinga, p.l2.
6 Rod Evans and Irwin Berent, Fundamentalism: Hazards and
Heartbreaks, Open Court, La Salle, Illinois, 1988, pp. 120-1. Also
James A. Haught, Holy Horrors: an Illustrated History of Religious
Murder and Madness, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, New York, 1990,
p. 163.
7 See Hosea 13:16: "Samaria will be held guilty, for she has
rebelled against her God. They will fall by the sword, Their little
ones will be dashed in pieces, And their pregnant women will be
ripped open."
8 Brad Warner, "God, Evil, and Professor Bradley" (manuscript
circulated privately in response to my debate with Campus Crusade
for Christ representative, Dr. Chamberlain, on the topic "Can there
be an objective morality without God?"). The debate took place at
Simon Fraser University on January 25, 1996.
9 In Leviticus, chapter 26, verse 29, we read: "You shall eat the
flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters you shall eat." In
Deuteronomy, chapter 28, after the Lord lists the dozens of evils
that will befall his people if they don't observe all his commandments
and statutes, he says (in verses 53-58): "Then you shall eat the
offspring of own body, the flesh of your sons and your daughters ...
The man who is refined and very delicate among you shall be hostile
toward his brother and toward the wife he cherishes, and toward the
rest of his children who remain, so that he will not give even one of
them any of the flesh of his children which he shall eat". And refined
and delicate women, we are further told, will do the same. In
Jeremiah, chapter 19, verse 9, the horror-show continues when the
Lord says: "And I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the
flesh of their daughters . . ." Finally in Ezekiel, chapter 5, verse 10,
the divine diet is extended to fathers when God says: "Therefore,
fathers will eat their sons among you, and sons will eat their fathers."
10 Of unknown authorship though erroneously attributed to St. Paul.
11 [Revelation 14:10-11] To be sure, the verse continues by
identifying those who suffer this fate with "those who worship the
beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name."
But they have already been identified, in the preceding chapter 13,
verses 8-18, as those who weren't preordained for salvation.
12 William L. Craig, "No Other Name: A Middle Knowledge
Perspective on the Exclusivity of Salvation through Christ", Faith
and Philosophy, April 1989, p. 187. In his view, God is justified in
sending both witting and unwitting nonbelievers to Hell because he
knew - before he created them - that they wouldn't have believed in
Jesus as Savior even if they had heard about him.
13 The Hebrew word that is here translated as "evil" is "rah". The
New American Standard translators, however, prefer to render it as
"calamity" in passage from Isaiah and as "ill" in the passage from
Lamentations. But such sanitisation of the original doesn't really
help. It affords the believer little comfort to be told that God is the
source of calamity. And "ill" - we learn from Webster's New
Collegiate Dictionary- is just a synonym for "evil".
14 Genesis 2:9.
15 Brad Warner, p. 15.
16 Brad Warner, p. 14.
17 John Patrick, "By What Authority?", published September,
1984 in a newsletter to fellow clergymen in the New Zealand
Presbyterian Church explaining why he was resigning. My three
questions are derived from ones he had put to his parishioners.
© Raymond Bradley
Return to Contents
Sad End to the O'Hair Saga
Bill Cooke
The May-June 2000 American Atheist Newsletter gave
a thorough report on the current situation with the O'Hairs,
who disappeared in September 1995. Many will recall
that there was speculation that the three well-known
atheists (Madalyn Murray O'Hair, her son Jon Garth
Murray and granddaughter Robin Murray-O'Hair) were
in New Zealand. This has never been the case, although
they did have US$600,000 in a bank account in this
country and had occasionally spoken half-heartedly about
coming here and/or bringing their extensive library of
freethought works to New Zealand.
The truth, sadly, is a lot less romantic. It appears that the
three are dead, although who actually murdered them
remains unknown. Two men, both with chilling criminal
records, were involved. One man, David Waters, was on
bail on charges of stealing equipment and large sums of
money from American Atheists at the time the O'Hairs
went missing. Waters was abused in an American Atheists
Newsletter and dreamed revenge. He then teamed up with
two other criminals, Gary Karr and Danny Fry and, it is
presumed, agreed to a plan to extort money from, and
murder, the O'Hairs. Government investigators believe
they were killed and dismembered on a farm in Texas.
Before their death, it would appear that the O'Hairs
withdrew the money from New Zealand (which Waters
knew about, having worked for the organisation) and gave
it to the extortionists. Gary Karr was later found in
possession of their Rolex watches. At some point, Karr
and/or Waters murdered Danny Fry, who was thought
unreliable to keep his mouth shut about the whereabouts
of the bodies.
Karr has been found guilty of extortion and money
laundering related to the O'Hairs. Waters is in jail for 60
years on unrelated weapons offenses. But nobody has been
charged with the murder of the O'Hairs. Government
investigators suspect that Waters is responsible, and Karr
has been keen to point the finger in his direction, but we'll
probably have to wait until the bodies are found or a
confession is made.
It is a tribute to the American Atheists that they have
survived this harrowing ordeal. The death of the O'Hairs
presents American Atheists with an opportunity to rebuild
from the foundations a new atheist organisation, one which
hopefully will be free from the weaknesses it suffered
from before 1995. The NZ Association of Rationalists &
Humanists wishes them well.
Return to Contents
Stranger than Fiction
Blind Watchmakers and Deaf Creationists
Elizabeth McKenzie
For our new breed of postmodern creationists, the current
buzzword is 'Irreducible Complexity'. This is simply
translated as 'too complicated for me to understand,
therefore evidence for the existence of God'. Or, in the
case of Michael Behe, it can be translated as 'I have ignored
the scientific explanation for this complex structure and
instead prefer to proclaim the irreducible
interconnectedness of the phenomena'. To give an
example: Behe points out that bacteria with flagella
(movable tails) are too complex to have evolved. If he
bothered to read about discoveries made in the 1980s by
microbiologist Lynn Margulis, he would have found out
that we already have a very good explanation for the origin
of the flagella - and he would have discovered what
'evolution by symbiosis' meant.
Often 'wonder' is invoked as an argument for a designer.
Once one actually gets past the warm fuzzies and
investigates, things are a lot more interesting that they
seem. Seagulls often have lesbian relationships. Many
birds cheat on their mates. Rabbits eat their faeces. Spiders
eat their mates. Sharks eat their young. Lemmings commit
suicide. Plants have casual sex with unrelated species.
Snails are hermaphrodites. Pukekos are bisexual. Indeed,
what sort of creator would create more than five levels of
obligate parasites inside one organism, none of which
could survive without causing harm to their host? What
do these things tell us about the designer?
William Paley's classic argument from design (the watch
must have a watchmaker) seems a powerful argument at
first glance, however it has several flaws. If you examine
the workings of a watch, you will observe that each of its
components fulfils a particular function. However, with a
real, living organism, some parts have a specific function
(eagle wings), other parts function reasonably well for a
range of purposes (human feet), and some parts do not
have a function (male nipples, kiwi wings, whale feet). A
creator would not create non-functioning, relict features
to fool us into thinking evolution might be responsible for
those features. At this point, the creationist could say that
we do not know why God made features with no use, that
God's motives for doing this are incomprehensible to
humans and could serve some greater purpose. For
creationists it must be considered wise to worship a thing
whose motives you cannot comprehend.
True design by a designer involves discarding the original
bodyplan in favour of a new radical form. For example, if
evolution were responsible for designing Paley's watch,
we would have a derivative of the pendulum hanging off
our wrist. An all-powerful creative designer could not be
constrained by what has gone before. If they were, they
would not be all-powerful, and some other force would
be constraining their power. Why would you worship
something that was partially powerful?
The biggest thorn in the side of "intelligent design" is that
of extinction. The fact that 99% of all known species are
extinct tends to hint at a certain wastefulness on the part
of the creator. The fact of extinction reveals a lack of
foresight or foreknowledge.
One of the problems creationists have with evolution is
that its portrayal as a growing tree implies a sense of
direction, and thus, a sense of purpose. Evolution flows
along the paths available, which are constrained by climate
and may be blocked by chance. Evolution is like pouring
a viscous liquid into the channels of a pinball machine.
Neil Broom, one of the theists who debated the NZARH
on design last year, asks why do organisms want to live?
It's very obvious: creatures who do not act in their own
self interests become extinct! So the life-loving survivors
are our ancestors. The reason no one has ever bothered to
rebut this question 'why does life want to live?' is because
it is a truism, tautological, self-evident.
I would like to caution Robert Mann, Broom's theistic
colleague, about confusing the words 'intelligible' and
'comprehensible' with 'orderliness'. It is possible to
interpret our surroundings and find patterns that make it
easier for us to understand and make abstractions about
nature, however, sometimes orderliness is artificial and
imposed by our brains. You can see patterns and purpose
in everything if you are superstitious enough to believe
they have significance. The Jehovah's Witnesses believe
that the purpose of the Dinosaurs was to flatten the earth's
surface for us to walk on. If you believe in a purposeful
God, then you need to make up a just-so-story for every
natural phenomenon, nothing can be left to chance.
Books to read on this topic:
Broom, Neil. How Blind is the Watchmaker? Theism or
Atheism: Should Science Decide? (Avebury Series in
Philosophy, Ashgate Pub, England 1998)
Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the
Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design.
(Norton, New York 1996)
Return to Contents
Humanist Manifesto 2000
A Planetary Bill of Rights and Responsibilities
To fulfill our commitment to Planetary Humanism,
we propose A Planetary Bill of Rights and
Responsibilities, the embodiment of our planetary
commitment to the well-being of humanity as a
whole. It incorporates the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, but goes beyond it by offering some
new provisions. Many independent countries have
sought to implement these provisions within their own
national borders. But there is a growing need for an
explicit Planetary Bill of Rights and Responsibilities
that applies to all members of the human species. Its
implementation will not be easy. It is contingent, of
course, on there being sufficient resources. Although
the free market is a dynamic engine of economic
growth and development, it is not infallible, and it
may need to be supplemented by public policies
concerned with the broader social good. The means
adopted to achieve the Bill's principles will most
likely draw primarily upon the private sector, but the
public sector has a role to play as well. There will no
doubt be tremendous political opposition to these
proposals, but we should at least set long-range goals,
even though they may be presently difficult to achieve
in certain parts of the world.
- First, we should strive to end poverty and
malnutrition and to provide adequate health care
and shelter for people everywhere on the planet.
This means that nobody should be denied
adequate food and clean water and we should try
our best to eradicate infectious diseases, ensure
proper sanitation, and guarantee a minimum
standard of housing for everyone. This is quite a
task; yet on moral grounds it is imperative that
we begin to undertake this work.
- Second, we should strive to provide economic
security and adequate income for everyone. This
means giving people a fair chance for
employment, unemployment insurance, and
social security for retirement. There should be
special programmes to educate the handicapped
in skills for which they are capable and to help
them find employment.
- Third, every person should be protected from
unwarranted and unnecessary injury, danger, and
death. Every member of the human species should
be secure from physical violence, theft of personal
property, and fear due to intimidation (whether
by private persons or social or political
institutions). They should be protected from
sexual abuse, harassment, and rape. Sexual
conduct should be based on the principle of
consent. Sex with or marriage to children should
not be permitted under any circumstances. Capital
punishment is an inadmissible form of retribution.
It should be replaced by other deterrents.
- Fourth, individuals should have the right to live
in a family unit or household of their choice,
consonant with their income, and should have the
right to bear or not to bear children. Every
individual should have the right to freely choose
life partners, if any, and the number and spacing
of their children. Persons should have the right to
raise their biological or adopted children, or not
to have families.
Those who elect to raise children have certain
requirements incumbent upon them: parents
should provide a secure and loving environment
for their children. Children should not be abused
by parents. Young children and adolescents should
not be compelled into adult labour or excessive
drudgery. Parents should not neglect their children
or deny them proper nutrition, sanitation, shelter,
medical care, and safety.
Parents should not deny their children access to
education, cultural enrichment, and intellectual
stimulation. Although parental moral guidance is
vital, parents should not simply impose their own
religious outlook or moral values on their children
or indoctrinate them. Children, adolescents, and
young adults should have exposure to different
viewpoints and enjoy encouragement to think for
themselves. The views of even young children
should be respected.
- Fifth, the opportunity for education and cultural
enrichment should be universal. Every person
should have the opportunity to expand his or her
knowledge. As a minimum, schooling should be
made available for every child from the earliest
years through adolescence. But the opportunity
for education should be made available to all age
groups, including continuing education for adults.
There are minimum standards that every person
should attain: the basic skills of reading, writing,
mathematics. Higher levels of attainment relate
to talent and capacity. Admission to schools of
higher education should be based on merit; where
possible, scholarships should be granted so that
no qualified student must forsake educational
opportunity because of financial straits.
All children should be taught some basic
marketable skills, to ensure them the possibility
of gainful employment. This should include some
form of computer literacy, cultural edification, and
the ability to function in the world of commerce.
The curriculum should promote an understanding
of scientific methods of inquiry and critical
thinking. No limits should be placed on free
inquiry. Education should include an appreciation
of the natural, biological, and social sciences. The
theory of evolution and the standards of ecology
should also be studied.
- Sixth, individuals should not be discriminated
against because of race, ethnic origin, nationality,
culture, caste, class, creed, gender or sexual
orientation. We need to develop a new human
identity - membership in the planetary
community. This identity must have priority over
all others and can serve as the basis for eradicating
discrimination.
- Seventh, the principles of equality should be
respected by civilised communities, and in four
major senses:
- Equality before the law: Every person should
be afforded due process and equal protection of
the laws. The same laws must apply to
government officials as well as to ordinary
citizens. No one should be above the law. Laws
should be blind to race, colour, ethnicity, creed,
sex, and wealth.
- Equality of consideration: Every person has
equal dignity and value and shall not be denied
benefits and rights accorded all others. This does
not deny society the right to restrain, punish, or
incarcerate individuals who break the law, use
violence, or commit crimes against others.
- Satisfaction of basic needs: Individuals may lack
resources and through no fault of their own be
unable to satisfy their minimal needs for food,
shelter, safety, health care, cultural enrichment and
education. In such cases, if society has the means,
then it has an obligation to help satisfy as many
of these basic needs as possible. This welfare
concern is related to the ability to work. Society
should not encourage a culture of dependency.
- Equality of opportunity: In free societies there
should be a level playing field. In an open society,
adults and children should be afforded the
opportunities to fulfill their interests and
aspirations, and to express their unique talents.
- Eighth, it is the right of every person to be able
to live a good life, pursue happiness, achieve
creative satisfaction and leisure in his or her own
terms, so long as he or she does not harm others.
The core principle is that each person should be
afforded the opportunity to realise his or her own
personal fulfillment, concomitant with social
resources, but this actual realisation depends on
the individual and not on society. Happiness,
however, is dependent upon a person's own
income, resources, and attitudes, and individuals
should not expect society to provide the means
of satisfaction for a wide range of idiosyncratic
tastes and pursuits.
- Ninth, individuals should have the opportunity to
appreciate and participate in the arts - including
literature, poetry, drama, sculpture, dance, music,
and song. Aesthetic imagination and creative
activities can contribute immeasurably to the
enrichment of life, self-realisation, and human
happiness. Society should encourage and support
the arts and their wide cultural dissemination to
all sectors of the community.
- Tenth, individuals should not be unduly
restrained, restricted, or prohibited from
exercising a wide range of personal choices. This
includes freedom of thought and conscience - the
unqualified right to believe, or not to believe,
freedom of speech and freedoms to pursue one
own lifestyle, so long as one does not prevent
others from exercising their rights.
Return to Contents
'A very, very poor result'
Christian parties crash in 1999 election
Bill Cooke
There was no hiding it. The Christian Heritage Party
and Future New Zealand, the warmed-over Christian
Democrats, did abysmally at the. 1999 general
election. Graeme Lee, the former Christian Democrat
leader, described the returns as a 'very, very poor
result.' (Challenge Weekly, 7.12.99, p 3) But Anthony
Walton, Lee's successor claimed to be 'very pleased'
because of the good base his party had created. So,
1.1% has become a 'good solid base'. My description
would be a good solid thrashing.
Christian Heritage Party leader Graham Capill was
more sulky and a lot keener to blame others. In
particular, church leaders came in for criticism, being
described as 'grossly irresponsible' for not
commanding their congregations to vote Christian
Heritage. 'A lot of these church leaders grizzle and
grumble about the government for three years,' Capill
moaned, 'and then don't do anything about it when
they've got an opportunity. I think it's time that there
was a bit more open leadership to make sure that there
is a Christian voice in Parliament.' The fact is that
even church leaders can see that Capill's Christian
Heritage Party is a menace to civil liberties. Readers
may recall the poll conducted by the NZARH just
before the 1996 election. Only 35.7% of respondents
felt completely or mostly comfortable with the
Christian Coalition's conception of Christianity. A
similar percentage (38.1 %) agreed or strongly agreed
that the Coalition's policies were genuinely Christian.
And this from a poll taken exclusively from ministers
of religion! For every minister who agreed, there was
another one who resented the Coalition's usurpation
of the word 'Christian' for its brand of hillbilly bigotry.
More recently, even Anthony Walton has seen fit to
describe Christian Heritage as 'bigoted and
condescending'.
Things went wrong for the Christian parties pretty
soon after the 1996 election when the Christian
Coalition showed ominous signs of tension. Lee's
Christian Democrats wanted to take the political
ground to the right of the National Party on moral
and social issues, and was prepared to accept non-
Christians into their party on that basis. Capill's
Christian Heritage, by contrast, was adamant that the
Coalition was to be first and foremost a Christian
party. The CHP was looking to the same political
ground as the CD's, but saw that ground as the
exclusive preserve of a Christian party. As the larger
of the two parties in the Coalition, the CHP was keen
on a complete amalgamation under one leader. Lee's
CD's, with a smaller party base, but more big name
political insiders within its ranks, was not prepared
to endorse Capill's extremist vision. Within months
of the 1996 election the Christian Coalition had split,
and relations between them have been poor ever since.
In fact, the spats between the two parties of Christian
love and forgiveness were among the most lively in
an otherwise quiet 1999 election campaign.
Days before the election Christian Heritage tried to
take the moral high ground as principal anti-abortion
party. Using its strong contacts in SPUC, the Society
for the Protection of the Unborn Child, a series of
superficially independent advertisements was
published endorsing CHP's abortion line and
criticising Future New Zealand's as insufficiently
reactionary. The FNZ leadership came out all guns
blazing. David Brown, FNZ's president, insisted that
'We can't distance ourselves far enough from them.
We made a terrible mistake getting into coalition with
them. The senior membership are religious bigots.'
(NZ Herald, 12.11.99) Meanwhile, Capill was
intoning darkly about the 'great loss for New Zealand
to see Future New Zealand acting as a spoiler to
having a Christian voice in Parliament.'
Not surprisingly, the people of New Zealand were
seriously underwhelmed by the appeal of voting for
the Christian parties. The two parties failed to
persuade even a third of the church-going public to
vote for them. On the election night, CHP gained only
49,154 party votes, or 2.38% and 44,885, or 2.19%
electorate votes. Future New Zealand, meanwhile,
could only gather 23,033 party votes (1.12%) and
19,289 electorate votes, a mere 0.94%. Truly a
miserable result. Their combined party vote amounted
to 3.5%.
What must be even more galling for the Christian
parties is that the only measurable effect their votes
have had was to assist Labour's victory, especially in
some electorates. The most significant single case is
not a Labour seat at all, but Coromandel, Graeme
Lee's old seat. The majority for the Greens there is a
slender 250. But the Christian Heritage Party got 760
votes. Now it is difficult to imagine CHP voters
otherwise voting Labour, Alliance, or Green. Surely,
those votes were votes that National lost. As it happens
the Greens scraped across the 5% threshold as well
(by 0.16%), but the National Party must be ruing those
lost Christian votes. The situation in Tauranga is also
interesting. Winston Peters' majority is a paltry 63,
or 0.19% of the vote. But in New Zealand's version
of the Bible belt, the two Christian parties polled 2194
votes, or 6.49%. While it is less clear that those voters
would have overwhelmingly backed National, the
odds remain that, in the absence of Christian parties,
most of them would probably have backed National.
And that would have been the end of Winston Peters
and therefore New Zealand First. And in Waimakariri
and Northcote, the Christian vote is appreciably higher
than the majority for the Labour MP.
In the wake of this dismal result, it seems amazing is
that there haven't been demands from disappointed
Heritageites for Capill's resignation. After all, on May
9 1998, the NZ Herald reported Capill saying he was
'confident that with prayer and hard work the
Christian Heritage Party will pass the 5% threshold
next year.' Well, they haven't, and this can only mean
either that their leader has not worked hard enough
or has not prayed hard enough. Neither option is a
happy one for Rev. Capill.
And in a new release from the web-based media outlet
Scoop we read that Graham Capill claims to welcome
the first Colmar-Brunton poll following the election.
That poll showed the Christian Heritage Party on 2.1 %
and future New Zealand on 1.1%. Well, it's good to
be easily pleased I suppose. The Colmar-Brunton poll
would be pleasing compared to the NZ Herald poll
on the 100 days milestone, which showed Christian
Heritage on 0.6% and Future New Zealand on 0.5%!
(NZ Herald 18-9. March). Capill tells whoever is
listening that his party 'has consolidated since the
election and now has a strong team committed to
crossing the 5% threshold in 2002. We expect this
poll with be the first in a number of positive
developments.' Right. I must check my dictionary on
the word 'consolidate'. Here was me thinking it meant
'strengthen' rather than 'retire in disarray'. And one
can't help noticing that he has left God out of the
equation this time. That's probably sensible.
Dr Bill Cooke is a lecturer in the School of Visual Arts, Manukau
Institute of Technology and editor of the NZ Rationalist & Humanist.
Return to Contents
Southern Lights
Apathy Rules
Russell Dear
Imagine, you've just answered the insistent knocking
on your front door and find it's the Jehovah's
Witnesses. As usual, they look rather scruffy and have
a child in tow. One of them has a magazine which
she thrusts towards you. They have a defeated look
in their eyes and they seem ready to be sent packing
even before you've said a word. Or it might be the
Mormons, looking smart in their newly-pressed suits.
Smug smiles lighting their faces as they eagerly wait
to share the good news....
Do they have the right, you might ask, to interrupt
your busy days, or your reveries for that matter, with
their nonsense? I guess we're all entitled to our own
fantasies but is it OK to push them on others? Some
may argue that it is, after all, if our personal beliefs
are important to us then they are certainly substantial
enough to argue about. It's quite natural for people to
want to share their views even though we all probably
realise that argument seldom persuades others to
change a strongly-held stance.
We don't, however, really want people to proselytize
their strongly-held beliefs. Apathy really does rule, it
has to. Can you imagine what life would be like if
everyone went around parading their weirdities or
thrusting them upon others all the time? Social
niceities are designed, sorry, have evolved, to preclude
this. When one has to work through various social
mores before one can get to the nitty gritty of what
one holds dear then confrontation is avoided or, at
least, delayed. As it is, people can hold other peoples'
beliefs in contempt yet get on with them in other
respects, on a day-to-day basis. It can demand a lot
of people but most of us manage it. A great deal of
what we do is routine management stuff and not
directly affected by any spiritual or political views
we might hold. A Muslim accountant can work quite
happily alongside a Christian without animosity.
When you think about it, humans are amazing. A
hundred people can hold a hundred different views
on the meaning of life yet get along, most of the time.
That's all credit to apathy and tolerance. Few of us
feel very strongly about anything. It's only when some
power-monger stirs us all up, one group against
another, that trouble, some would say progress,
occurs.
Disagreement itself is not a problem but it can give
rise to resentment and ill-feeling which can be
exploited by others - the politics of power... nasty. In
my experience, people who hold rather different views
on politics or religion would rather not bring them up
in casual conversation, to avoid the possibility of
conflict. In fact, people prefer to stay off such subjects
altogether even before they know they might have
differing opinions.
OK then, given that we want to indulge in discussion
and maybe persuade someone to our point of view,
what subjects are acceptable?
There are other important topics surely, on which we
can openly state our views. Of course there are.
There's the evils of alcohol abuse, ditto for gambling,
joyriding in cars and so on. But we tend not to parade
our views on these, do we? Possibly because we all
have our frailties, none of us is a total innocent, we
let organisations with whom we are not usually
directly connected, like the Alcohol Advisory
Committee or the police, speak on our behalf. That
way we can be seen to be tacitly supporting a proper
view without being personally involved.
So what's left to talk about? Who knows? Maybe
you've got your own opinions or favourite topics.
What's the footy score anyway?
Return to Contents
Against the New Irrationalism
Antony Flew
Recently a writer in The Skeptical Inquirer, the journal
of CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific
Investigation of the Paranormal, reflected sadly that 'As
the clock ticks ever closer to the millennium, there
seems to be no end to the torrent of nonsense which
threatens to engulf us.' What that writer had in mind
was in the main what appeared to him to be the ever
increasing popularity of beliefs in the actual occurrence
of such alleged phenomena as extrasensory perception,
psychokinesis, communication with the supposedly
surviving spirits of deceased persons, and veridical
prediction based upon astrological assumptions.
All of these beliefs have been held by many people in
previous centuries, if not millennia. But the same writer
was, like CSICOP, also concerned about another such
irrational belief - the belief that the Planet Earth, and
mainly if not exclusively the territories of the USA, is
today subject to frequent visits by spaceships from some
other inhabited world or worlds light years away. The
occupants of these spaceships regularly on landing seize
someone for close examination returning him or her
before taking off for the journey home. There are
apparently about a quarter of a million US citizens who
claims to have been entertained in this way.
All these and many other similar beliefs must be
accounted irrational. For those who hold them could
not have wither based them upon or ever reviewed them
in the light of what is known or at any rate believed to
be known about the relevant probabilities and
improbabilities, possibilities and impossibilities. Yet one
of the defining characteristics of a rational person -
indeed a large part of what it means to say that we are
rational people - is that our beliefs about what the
philosopher-historian David Hume distinguished as
'matters of fact and real existence' are so based and,
where necessary, so reviewed.
I want here to distinguish all the sorts of beliefs so far
mentioned, both the relatively antique and fairly new
as expressions of the Old Irrationalism. The difference
between that and the New Irrationalism, against which
I am speaking today, is best explained by reference to
the ideas and ideals of the eighteenth century
Enlightenment. For whereas the Old is a matter of failing
to live up to those ideals the New constitutes, and by
many of its eager spokespersons is both seen and
welcomed as, a direct challenge to the very possibility
of attaining these ideals. The relevance of this to us her
now is that these challenged Enlightenment ideals are
precisely those of our Association.
The Enlightenment - the period can conveniently be
dated to the century between 1687, when Sir Isaac
Newton published his Principia, and 1787, when the
US constitution was devised - launched the modem era
and created Western civilisation. In an explosion of
enterprise, discovery and invention Europeans in Europe
and Europeans in North America forged not only the
modem scientific method but also modernist thinking
about metaphysics, morality, government and society.
A few simple but sweeping propositions became widely
accepted. That the universe is governed by fixed,
objective, and impersonal laws, in principle
discoverable by the exercise of human reason,
experience and observation. That traditions, customs,
and claims of revelation cannot expect to be
permanently insulated from such rational scrutiny, and
that, while no part of humanity's complex inheritance
should lightly be discarded, beliefs and practices that
prove squarely inconsistent with reason and experience
ought eventually to yield ground.
Those whom I want to characterise as the New
Irrationalists describe themselves in many different
ways. They are, they claim, postmodernists,
poststructuralists, or multiculturalists. Sometimes they
offer a description peculiar to the field in which they
are operating, such as 'Afrocentrist' or 'critical; [ie.
Marxising] sociologist of knowledge. The best
description for what these people have in common is
perhaps subjective relativism.
The subjective relativist holds that every assertion is
merely and nothing but an expression of the asserter's
individual point of view. As such it therefore has no
claim to truth or any other kind of correctness. This
disastrous doctrine is today so widely accepted that
claims that something is, without relativistic
qualification, true or false, right or wrong, good or bad,
risk being derided as unacceptably naive, parochial and
simplistic. Such claims are today not derided as a
preliminary to showing that they are mistaken, whereas
some alternative contention is correct. They are derided
because it is simply assumed that nothing can be known
to be, without subjective relativist qualification, true or
false, right or wrong. Instead we are all always
expressing nothing but our own individual or cultural
points of view.
Of course, and of course revealingly, even the most
enthusiastic subjective relativists never even attempt to
apply their general teaching to their own particular,
everyday affairs. When they are seeking answers to
questions about the state of their bank accounts, the
scheduled departure and arrival times of planes, trains
or buses, or the effectiveness and possible side-effects
of medical treatments, they take it absolutely for granted
that there can be answers which can be known to be
true.
The fundamental, decisive objection to subjective
relativism is that it is self-refuting. For persons
maintaining that subjective relativism is universally true
are thereby by implication maintaining that the asserting
of this very proposition by themselves is merely and
nothing but an expression of their own individual or
cultural point of view. Since subjectivist relativism is
thus radically incoherent we should not be surprised to
find that it is supported and sustained by invalid
arguments and the collapsing of crucial distinctions.
One favourite form of invalid argument here is that in
which from the premise that 'this is that' it is invalidly
inferred that 'this is merely and nothing but that.' Thus,
long before the rise of the New Irrationalism, C S Lewis
in his works of Christian apologetic used to argue that
if it were to be possible to develop a comprehensive
scientific account of how human organisms manage to
produce the utterances and writings which express their
beliefs about matters of fact and real existence, and their
evidencing reasons for holding those beliefs, then it
would follow that they could not ever have and know
that they had sufficient evidencing reasons to warrant
the assertion that any of their beliefs constituted an item
of knowledge. The concealed nerve of this somewhat
complicated argument is that a physiological account
of the production of certain uninterrupted sounds and
symbols is and must be merely that and nothing but
that.
Another simpler example of an argument of the same
fallacious form comes from the same earlier period and
was provided by a leading Freudian psychoanalyst:
To achieve success the analyst must above all be
an analyst. That is to say he must know positively
that all human emotional reactions, all human
judgments, even reason itself, are but the tools
of the unconscious, that such seemingly acute
convictions which an intelligent person like this
possesses are but the inevitable effect of causes
which lie buried in the unconscious level of his
psyche.
So must that not be true also of this and other judgments
of the analysts themselves?
A second favourite form of invalid argument here is
that in which from the premise 'That we can know
things only under certain conditions' it is invalidly
inferred that 'We cannot know things as they are in
themselves.' Various conditions are specified, such as
'they are related to us' and 'under our forms of
perception and understanding' and 'in so far as they
fall under our conceptual schemes.'
This is a most remarkable argument. For it contrives to
mistake conditions needed to make knowledge possible
for conditions making it impossible. It is perhaps even
more remarkable in as much as it happens to have
seduced Immanuel Kant, a man whom no one would
ever think to accuse of nominalism.
There is a third form of invalid argument which despite
its surely quite obvious invalidity is nevertheless
commonly found among those claiming to be
postmodernists, poststructuralists, multiculturalists and
the like. This is the argument which from the premise
that 'Some or many so and sos are such and such'
proceeds immediately to infer that 'All so and sos are
such and such.' Thus, in such circles it is argued that,
because what is accepted as, or passes for, a known
fact is later discovered not to have been, therefore there
is no such thing as knowledge and are no such things as
facts. When this 'passes for' argument is clearly stated
its fallaciousness is, or ought to be, obvious.
Usually, however, as shorthand for 'what is accepted
as knowledge' and 'what passes for truth' the New
Irrationalists write 'knowledge' or 'truth', putting these
key words in sneer quotes. They thus neutralise the
implications of epistemic success ordinarily carried by
these words. For knowledge must be of what is true,
but 'knowledge' (knowledge between sneer quotes)
need not be. Facts must be facts, but 'facts' (facts
between sneer quotes) need not be. As the sneer quotes
become ubiquitous the crucial difference between truth
and knowledge and so-called truth (truth between sneer
quotes) and so-called knowledge (knowledge between
sneer quotes) is forgotten. So the passes for fallacy starts
to sound like a valid argument instead of the self-
refuting non sequitur which it really is.
Earlier I insisted that a large part of what it means to
say that people are rational is that their beliefs about
what David Hume distinguished as 'matters of fact and
real existence' are based upon and when necessary
reviewed in the light of what they know or at any rate
believe that they know about the relevant probabilities
and improbabilities, possibilities and impossibilities.
But though one vital part, that is not the whole of it.
The other part concerns what Hume distinguished as
'the relations of ideas'. In this area we are accounted
rational only in so far as we are logical, drawing only
formally valid inferences and always eschewing formal
contradictions. Hume himself, at least when he was on
what he considered to be his philosophical best
behaviour, regarded rationality (reason with a capital R
as it were) as being something confined to this area.
Nevertheless Hume in his own dealings with 'matters
of fact and real existence' both in his everyday life and
in his writings of history was as near as is humanly
possible a perfectly rational man.
Unfortunately Hume's account of how - as we might
put it — each of us can and does learn from our own and
other people's experience is fundamentally defective.
Since Hume could find no warrant for the ideas of
physical as opposed to logical necessity and physical
as opposed to logical impossibility he could not admit
that causes produce their effects by making the
occurrence of those effects physically necessary and
their non-occurrence physically impossible. He
therefore concluded that the nerve of all argument from
experience must be a move from 'All so far known so
and sos have been and are such and such' to 'All so and
sos have been, are and will be such and such.' This
inference must remain grossly fallacious until and unless
it becomes possible - as Hume was convinced that it
was not - to find some true and legitimating second
premise. Successors have described the search for that
second premise as The Problem of Induction, although
the word 'induction' was never employed by Hume
himself.
In his classic work of which the English title is The
Logic of Scientific Discovery the late Sir Karl Popper
began by tacitly accepting Hume's representation of the
nature of argument from experience as correct,
describing it as inductive, and then insisting, very
reasonably, that the manifest fallaciousness of such
argument constituted a decisive discrediting of the
rationality of induction (scilicet, argument from
experience). Popper then proceeded to expound and
advocate his own preferred method of conjectures and
refutations.
Because Popper himself was so sincerely and so
profoundly a man of the Enlightenment it is difficult
for rationalists to recognise, and to realise that Popper
himself recognised, the irrationalist implications of his
refutation of induction. This difficulty is increased by
the fact that he frequently employed such success words
as 'discovery' and 'knowledge' without embracing them
with the sneer quotes which on his views were required.
For discoveries surely have to be of truths which are
consequently known? And knowledge certainly is
(evidentially) justified true belief.
If there has been a great increase of knowledge in recent
centuries - and it is difficult to see how the author of
books entitled The Logic of Scientific Discovery and
Objective Knowledge could bring himself to deny this
- then there must sometimes be good evidencing reasons
to believe some scientific theory. Yet Popper said
expressly, repeatedly and emphatically, that there are
not and cannot be such things. This thesis is so
startlingly irrationalist that, as popper himself tells us,
other philosophers sometimes 'cannot quite bring
themselves to believe this is my opinion.' But it was:
'There are no such things as good positive reasons' to
believe any scientific theory, 'Positive reasons are
neither necessary nor possible.'
Because Popper was himself so obviously a man of the
Enlightenment, and because he continued to talk and
to write in ways inconsistent with his own irrationalist
conclusions, those irrationalist conclusions influenced
immediately only those already strongly inclined to
welcome them. The first and by far the most important
of these was Thomas Kuhn. Indeed his enormously
influential work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
is apparently the most frequently cited single book in
any subject in the present century. This was followed
in an apostolic succession of irrationalism, by Proofs
and Refutations, a work by Imre Lakatos, who
succeeded Popper in the Chair of Philosophy and
Scientific Method at the London School of Economics,
and Against Method, by Lakatos' friend Paul
Feyerabend. About Kuhn and Lakatos I can here do no
more than recommend David Stove Popper and After:
Four Modem Irrationalists (Oxford and New York:
Pergamon, 1982).
But I cannot conclude without samples of
Feyerabendian irrationalism. He compares science with
astrology and voodoo, and claims that there is no general
criterion which gives scientific 'knowledge' priority
over them. Hence, he argues, it is wrong to teach science
to schoolchildren as if it had a monopoly of wisdom.
The grip that the ideology of science has on government
policy deserves to be broken in the same way that
secular educationalists last century broke the nexus
between church and state. This would clear the way for
other approaches, such as magic, to be taught instead
of science, 'Thus, while an American can now choose
the religion he likes, he is still not permitted to demand
that his children learn magic rather than science at
school. There is a separation between state and church,
there is no separation between state and science.'
Consistent with this, Feyerabend defends Christian
fundamentalists who want biblical version of creation
taught in American schools alongside Darwin's theory
of evolution. He is not only aware of the logical
implications of his case but, borrowing a line from Cole
Porter, he jauntily recommended them: 'Anything goes'.
Antony Flew is one of the most prominent atheist philosophers
in the world. He is an Honorary Associate of the NZARH. This
article was originally an address at the Rationalist Press
Association's Centennial Conference in Birmingham in June 1999.
The NZ Rationalist & Humanist thanks the New Humanist for
permission to reprint this article.
Return to Contents
How I became a psychic
Nick Pullar
That's not the sort of thing that you'd expect a
Rationalist to say, but it's true. I am gifted with
exceptional psychic powers. Well, more gifted
than New Zealand's 0900 psychic "hotline"
staffers.
I wondered what would happen if I tested those
answering calls on a range of NZ's 0900 psychic
services. The problem is, if I'm testing
someone's ability to predict the future, I need
to ask a question about the future, so how do I
know what the outcome is? In addition, I need
the question to be specific enough so that the
operator won't be able to give vague general
woolly answers. I needed a yes or no answer,
to a question about the future to which I already
knew the outcome.
The question (and I used this exact wording on
each occasion) was this:
"I'm travelling to England later on in the year,
and the last time I spoke to my Nana, she wasn't
very well, so I wondered if I'm going to get to
see her when I get to England."
The kicker, of course, is that my grandmother died 2
years ago.
Before I get to my finding, I'll make the same
prediction that I made before I did the test. I predict
that the 'psychics' who answer these phone calls will
be unable to tell me that my grandmother is dead. I
predict that they will say that she'll be right, and I'll
meet with her.
The findings
Amazingly enough, my prediction was born out by
reality. I phoned a total of eight psychics, all of whom
gave me a positive answer. Here is a table of who
they are, and what they said:
| Name of Service |
Phone Number |
Name of Staffer |
Type of Psychic Ability |
Prediction |
| Solomon Psychic Serv. |
0900-54 121 |
Solomon |
Declined to answer |
"Yes, absolutely categorically yes" |
| Amahl Clairvoyance |
0900-55 504 |
Amahl |
"Carefully developed psychic ability, astrologer & clairvoyant" |
"Yes, definitely yes" |
| Grace's Psychic Circle |
0900-77 924 |
Dorithia |
"Ordinary everyday psychic". What ever that is |
"[She will] make some recuperation,
Yes, I think you will be able to [see her]" |
| Inspirational Insights Ltd |
0900-55 559 |
John |
Clairvoyant (bit of everything) |
"You will see her, she's a tough old bird.
She'll still be around when everyone else is gone" |
| Ask a psychic |
0900-80 080 |
Michael |
"Light psychic" - he couldn't tell me
what this was, other than he "goes into the light and gets answers" |
"She will last the test of time,
you will see her, and it'll be powerful experience" |
| Vibrant Star Psychic Line |
0900-53 839 |
Astrid |
Tarot/Clairvoyant |
"I don't find any ... No death, I don't see any death" |
| Psychic Solutions |
0900-55 511 |
Victoria |
"I pick up things around you" |
"I heard yes ... I feel she's hanging on" |
| Marilyn's Line |
0900-54 300 |
Marilyn |
"Medium. I've done lots of police work and I'm very successful".
Claimed to have worked on the Gavin Dash disappearance and the Ben and Olivia murder |
"Very definitely yes" |
|
As can be seen from the table, not a single 'psychic'
came even close to the truth. When I thanked them
for their prediction, and explained that my
Grandmother was in fact dead, there were a surprising
variety of responses.
Some operators admitted that they'd made a mistake.
One, John, from Inspiration Insights Limited confessed
that this was his first ever mistake. Well, it was the
first time that he'd been proven to be wrong. Some
were highly apologetic, and were sorry that they'd
made the mistake.
But mostly (for five of the eight) they claimed that
they did not make an error at all! I was amazed by
this. I had asked for a specific prediction: Would I see
my Grandmother? Since she's been dead and cremated
for two years, any reasonable person would see that it
is impossible for me to see my Grandmother. None
the less, the operators gave the following explanations
as to why they were not mistaken.
- I would see my Grandmother in a dream or vision.
- My Grandmother was in the spirit world, and I
would see her there (maybe even after I myself died).
- I would visit my Grandmother's grave (I
explained that she'd been cremated) and he said
that I'd visit where the ashes were scattered.
- My Grandmother has been reincarnated into the
family. (This was a particularly fantastic idea. I
explained that the most recent birth in our family
occurred in 1981, some seventeen years before
my grandmother's death. Undeterred, the valiant
hopeful Michael from Ask A Psychic claimed
that someone I knew had had a baby, and that
was my Grandmother. He was quite safe now,
since it is almost certain that I have known
someone in the last two years to have a baby,
and he could provide no means of telling if the
infant was in fact my Grandmother.)
The most interesting response came from a woman
who claimed that I had set out to trick her, and that I
had asked an unfair question. I explained that I didn't
agree. She had her magical powers to help her (she
was the medium who helped the police) and since she
was a medium, my Gran should have been tapping
her on the shoulder and yelling "I'm already here!"
While the question was designed to test the 'psychics'
there was no intent for trickery. I merely asked a
question, which, if they had the special knowledge
which they claim, would have been as easy to answer
as a question about their own family. In addition, I
truthfully answered any question asked of me. For
instance my name, or my date of birth.
I challenge these operators, and the people who run
those lines . . . you charge people good money to
listen to what you say. You advertise that you have
special powers (the very words psychic and
clairvoyance mean that in my view). You should be
tested, and you shouldn't be afraid of the test, since
you do have the powers, don't you? Incidentally, when
you pass a test, James Randi will give you
US$1,000,000. Don't tell me you don't want or need
the money. If that were true, why are you charging up
to $4.95 plus GST! for what you do?
Nick Pullar is an Auckland businessman and longstanding
member of the NZARH.
Return to Contents
Current Comments
Australis2000
This November we have a real opportunity to be
among some of the most influential Rationalists and
Humanists in the world at the Australis2000 Asian
and Pacific Rim Humanist Congress, to be held in
Sydney. The NZARH is one of the three principal
sponsors of this prestigious congress, along with the
Council of Secular Humanism and the Humanist
Society of Queensland.
Among the speakers are Levi Fragell, president of
the International Humanist and Ethical Union
(IHEU), Paul Kurtz, drafter of the Humanist
Manifesto 2000, Babu Gogineni, executive officer
of the IHEU. Other speakers include a range of
Australian academics, writers and activists. Among
the topics to be discussed include the caste system
in India, gay and lesbian rights, secular celebrants,
prison reform, gender issues and environmentalism.
Sydney is not far away. This may be the last chance
for a long while to participate in such an important
Rationalist and Humanist event. Registration is
incredibly cheap and accommodation in Sydney after
the Olympic Games shouldn't be a problem. For any
further information about the congress, check the
advertisement on page 26 [Missing from Web Version] or contact Rationalist
House or visit the Australis2000 website, which is
http://home.dialix.com/~u2877/a2k/
Apologetic Catholics
So the Roman Catholic Church has apologised for
another raft of what was once considered clear
evidence of Rome's special divine sanction. The
Crusades, the Inquisition, although not, as we
mentioned in the last issue, the murder of Giordano
Bruno.
So presumably this means that the papacy is also
prepared to acknowledge that one of their hitherto
most idolised popes was wrong, very wrong. Pope
Gregory VII (1073-1085), the notorious Hildebrand,
who enforced clerical celibacy on the Church,
insisted that 'The Roman church has never erred; and
according to the testimony of Scripture it never will
err.' So, this must mean that either Gregory VII erred
or John Paul II has. Not a good look when you're the
vicar of Christ.
Incidentally, I quote this from an interesting book
called Rome Has Spoken: A Guide to Forgotten Papal
Statements, and How They Have Changed Through
the Centuries. This interesting work has been
compiled by two American Catholics, whose motive,
as I understand it, is to cleanse their church of its
tendencies to dogmatism and authoritarianism. Good
luck to them.
Christians and morals
Hansie Cronje: fundamentalist Christian and man
who has admitted that greed got the better of him in
accepting large sums of money to help fix the results
of international cricket test matches. What surprised
everyone about this case was that Cronje was widely
perceived as a man of exceptionally high moral
standards.
Robert James Campbell Stewart, 61: pillar of
Gisbome society, Salvation Army stalwart and player
of the band's euphonium. And man accused of
trafficking large quantities of cocaine out of Peru. It
puts an altogether new light on the advertising jingle,
"Thank God for the Sallies."
Wellington-based evangelical pastor and his wife:
between them they admitted 22 cases of assaults
using brooms, vacuum cleaner pipes, high-heeled
shoes and belts on their eight foster children. The
pair narrowly avoided charges of slavery. When not
beating them senseless, the children were neglected
and allowed to go hungry and unwashed.
Euan Blair: 16 year-old kid found hopelessly drunk
and vomiting in Leicester Square, and son of the god-
bothering British Prime Minister. And Dover
Samuels, the former Minister of Maori Affairs, was
one of only two people who took his office with an
oath on the Bible.
Sadly, all these cases all go to demonstrate, if further
demonstration is needed, that there is no necessary
connection between religious faith and moral
behaviour. This really is one of the most important
points we need to keep on reinforcing. Only when
this perception is widely acknowledged can the more
constructive debate about values in a pluralistic
society can proceed.
Return to Contents
Adam's Rib
Paws in Paradise
Anne Ferguson
"What use is a cat?" This question was posed by one of
my husband's colleagues one smoko. Pets had been the
topic of conversation. My husband's rapid riposte was
"What use is a human being?"
What use indeed? This all too successful species of
animal has over-populated the planet, polluting and
plundering it to the point of extinction, taking all other
living creatures with it. Evolution is a long history of
trial and error. Any too successful creature sowed the
seeds of its own destruction but at least it didn't take all
other creatures with it. Unlike other creatures, at the
mercy of environmental factors not of their own creation,
mankind alone has a brain sufficiently well evolved to
see the error of its ways and take remedial action yet
shows a strange reluctance to do so. On the assumption
that the well-being of the planet is, in any objective way
important, humankind is an utter menace.
The notion that a person should be of use is a product of
this same evolved brain. The religionist, of course, will
have it that we were put one earth for a purpose - to
serve God and our fellow men. If we do it well we shall
get our reward in Heaven. If that isn't bribery and
corruption, I don't know what is. No wonder the world
is so full of it. The Lord has set such a fine example.
At 2.00 in the morning, some ten years ago, I was
awakened from my slumbers by a pat on the shoulder
and a plaintive voice saying "Anne, I don't feel very
well." My husband was having a heart attack. When I
opened the door to let in the ambulance men our cat,
Flop, took advantage of the opportunity to sidle in and
near tripped me up as I showed the ambulance men the
way to the bedroom. Again, Flop had to be shooed out of
the way as they went out again, carrying their burden.
Did Flop care that his Best Biped was having a brush
with death? Did he heck. The only message he received
from all this bipedal activity was the possibility that food
might be in the offing.
He was disappointed just then but once Second Best
Biped had satisfied herself that Best Biped was safely
hooked up to screens, quietly bleeping the rhythms of
slumber, she returned home from hospital, fed puss and
herself and both retired to bed, she to fret 'til daybreak,
he to curl up in the crook of her knees as usual to sleep.
If the Buddhists have it right and living the good life
qualifies a person to be re-bom to a higher plane, I feel
sure Flop in his previous life must have been a very fine
human being. True, his earlier years may have been
misspent, for which he had to atone. As a kitten Flop
was taken into the household of the folk next door. One
of the inmates was a small boy who clearly gave Flop a
hard time, cutting off his whiskers and throwing him
out of the window. Small wonder Flop decided ours was
a much more cushy billet and moved in.
The family were Seventh Day Adventists. One Sunday
morning while I was out gardening the lad - now nine -
engaged me in conversation:
"We didn't go to church today 'cos Dad was working last night."
"I don't suppose that will do you any harm." I replied.
"I want to go to church." He said.
"Oh, why's that?"
"Cos I don't want to go to hell."
Whereupon I felt compelled to explain to him that there
was no such thing as hell, it was just something people
had made up to frighten other people into behaving well.
The family left town not long after. Was it something I
said?
But I digress. Flop has been living with us for ten years
- petted, pampered. Though he neither knows nor cares,
when he gets too old or sick, he will quickly and
painlessly be put out of his misery. Would we could all
look forward to such assurance. What a charmed life
Flop lives.
The life of a feral cat may not be so charmed but so long
as there are adequate supplies of small birds and rodents
- 'endangered species' is, to puss, a meaningless concept
- and so long as there are warm, dry holes in which he
may sleep, he is content. Puss feels no need to build
bigger and better holes. To any place he can't get on his
own four paws, he doesn't go. Not for him stockpiling
mice so he may feel good and boast to other cats how
clever he is. While a female cat may care for her kittens,
that's as far as feline 'good works' go. Unlike its human
counterpart a puss feels no need to justify its existence.
Only a small bundle of chromosomes differentiates us
from our feline cousins. A small bundle of chromosomes
which dictates we should remember and question, should
leam by experience and constantly strive to improve our
lot but which will not give us leave to be content just to
be. Perhaps it is our tragedy.
Return to Contents
Book Reviews
Origins of the Christian Faith
by Steve Cooper (Auckland, 2000)
ISBN 0-473-06736-6
When he published To Hell with God? nine years ago,
Steve Cooper was a worried man. He had just written
one the best general expositions of humanism written
by a New Zealander, but Steve was concerned that the
title may discourage genuine inquiries from Christians.
Maybe it was too aggressive?
The Origins of the Christian Faith is Steve Cooper's
attempt to write an unaggressive survey of
contemporary knowledge about the Bible and Christian
origins. His particular target audience is the inquiring
Christian. People, in other words, like Steve Cooper
during his days as a believer. As with his other books,
Origins of the Christian Faith is plainly written, with
no pretensions. One doesn't need to be a well-read
academic to appreciate and learn from this book. All
one needs is an open mind and a willingness to think.
Any reader with these qualities will benefit from this
book. It is relatively short (118 pages), the chapters are
easily manageable, and it is entirely jargon-free. Better
still, Steve Cooper is widely read in the subject and is
able to impart his learning in palatable doses.
With his target audience in mind, Steve Cooper devotes
virtually the entire book to the New Testament. Part
One surveys the scholarly consensus on the gospels,
views about Jesus, the message, his alleged divinity,
the virgin birth, and so on. In Part Two St Paul gets a
pretty hard time. What gets emphasised is how different
Paul's message and personality was from Jesus - much
to Paul's discredit. The book finishes off with a short
section which asks whether we need a religion at all
and gives a gentle exposition of humanism, without
being in any way tub-thumping. There's even an index,
but, sadly, no bibliography.
Origins of the Christian Faith is exactly the right book
to give that Christian friend or relative. There can be
no excuse for not finishing so clearly-written a book,
no possibility of taking offence. Origins of the Christian
Faith is a civil and earnest study of the heart of
Christianity from someone who has spent half his life
practising the religion. It was written in the fervent hope
that others may see that a life without religion is in no
way something to dread, but on the contrary, is an
opportunity and an adventure.
Bill Cooke
Origins of the Christian Faith is available from
Rationalist House at $16.95.
New Book by Finngeir Hiorth:
Big Bang or No Bang? Science, Religion and Philosophy
(Human-Etisk Forbund, Oslo, 2000) 142 pp.
ISBN 82-90425-95-3
This book offers a philosophical analysis and critique
of some cosmological problems. 'Cosmology' can be
defined as a discipline dealing with the origin, evolution,
and large-scale structure of the universe. The present
book mainly deals with big bang cosmology and
alternatives, and the origin and possible creation of the
universe. It does so by presenting and analysing a
number of publications written by contemporary
cosmologists.
Works consulted include those written by Hannes
Alfven, Halton C Arp, Roberta Brawer, Geoffrey
Burbidge, Stuart dark, Anthony Fairall, Alan Guth,
Stephen Hawking, Craig J Hogan, Fred Hoyle,
Christopher R Kitchin, Marc Lachieze-Rey, Alan
Lightman, Jayant V Narlikar, Felix Pirani, Matts Roos,
Michael Rowan-Robinson, Joseph Silk and Steven
Weinberg. These authors mostly present the main results
and ideas of contemporary cosmology, while others
discuss problems of religion and philosophy.
Big Bang or No Bang? gives a thorough introduction
to some aspects of contemporary cosmology from a
philosophical point of view. The author has been a
lecturer of philosophy at the University of Oslo. He is a
convinced atheist and has published books dealing with
the German philosopher Leibniz, the Scottish
philosopher David Hume, the linguist Noam Chomsky,
and with topics such as atheism, ethics, humanism,
materialism, metaphysics and values. His last book was
Studying Religion, also published by Human-Etisk
Forbund in 2000.
For further information, please contact the publisher
(Human-Etisk Forbund, St Olavsgt 27 N-0166 Oslo,
Norway) or the author (Finngeir Hiorth,
Kirkehaugsveien 3, N-0283, Oslo, Norway)
Return to Contents
Letters to the Editor
Dear Bill
Hayden Wood's recent letter stating that Nazism and
Communism and Socialism are identical is ridiculous.
Nazism is racist, anti-Jewish, white supremacist, etc,
while the Communist Soviet Union, consisting of
fourteen nations had a multi-racial background of
friendly togetherness. Nazism is ultra-capitalism,
using slave labour, anti trade-unions •and supporting
big business.
Hitler, in his book Mein Kampf, vilified the Soviet
Union as his main target and received some support
from big business in various countries, some from
royalty and Japan, and Fascism in Spain and Italy.
During the Second World War Hitler attacked the
Soviet Union, knowing that because of anti-
communism he would be mainly left alone to defeat
her. However, when the Russian troops were defeating
Hitler and got half way across Germany, the Allies
got the breeze up and started the second front. The
Soviet Union suffered more than any other country
from the war and had a tough time rehabilitating. She
also gave a lot of help to various organisations
throughout the world.
In 1985 I spent a month in the Soviet Union and I
found a well organised country with concern for trade
unions, workers' rights, cheap housing, efficient
transport, especially rapid rail underground.
Under Hitler's Nazism, Spain and Italy's Fascism,
religion, especially Catholicism, did not get affected
and seemed to carry on in the normal way.
Unfortunately, religion in Russia is being reestablished,
and there are civil wars, crime, and
corruption is rife.
In Communist China religion and cults | |