An essayist evangelizes for religious “truths”

 By Mathew Goldstein

Religion Unplugged published an article by Paul Prather who describes himself as a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky on October 23 titled An Essayist Evangelizes Readers For Atheism. His article was a response to an article by Kate Cohen published by the Washington Post on October 3 titled America doesn’t need more God. It needs more atheists. Paul Prather somewhat misrepresents her article’s content so you may want to read her article if you read his article. His argument will probably be persuasive to some of the people who read it, which is a reason why I decided to publish a response.

Paul Prather criticizes Kate Cohen’s argument because, he says, “among other things, it fails to understand how people of faith really function in the world.” He starts by claiming that “some myths” were not intended to be taken literally. He then cites the Genesis account of creation as an example. He is correct that myths are not found “in scientific textbooks”, which is a bigger concession to non-theism than he recognizes. He attempts to counter this concession by asserting that the metaphors of his religion are instead “spiritually true” and “eternal, cosmic truths”. The word “truths”,  asserted here with nothing of substance to support it, is carrying too much of his argument with too little justification to succeed.

Religious texts lack credibility for various reasons, including their reliance on stories (a.k.a. myths) that can be interpreted literally or metaphorically with no clear demarcation in the text itself regarding which interpretation is correct. Deities are either ontological facts or fictions. Metaphorical myths, a.k.a. spiritual  truths, are incapable of establishing ontological facts. Spiritual truths are subjective and as such cannot be equated with eternal, cosmic truths which are necessarily objective.

The fact versus fiction dichotomy matters, particularly when we are allegedly discussing eternal, cosmic truth. If the content of religious texts purporting to reveal the existence of deity are all metaphorical then religious texts are no different than poetry or fictional novels. Yet who worships poetry or novels? Poetry and novels can be alluring, if you enjoy poetry or novels then good for you, consider yourself to be lucky. People can participate in weekly poetry or novel readings and occasional seasonal poetry or novel festivals containing lots of metaphors revealing spiritual truths without any ontological baggage attached. Theistic religions are not like that because they are attached to eternal, cosmic truth claims anchored in ontological fact claims, one of which is the existence of deity.

Paul Prather says “doubt is part of any healthy faith“. Doubt should be proportional to evidence. The less evidence the more doubt and the more evidence the less doubt. Doubt should be diminished to the point of becoming insignificant when the evidence is strong. The word faith here is an admission that the evidence is insufficient to rationally compel belief and therefore doubt is rationally compelled, which significantly undermines the ambitious assertion that the same faith reveals eternal, cosmic truth.

Paul Prather then says “Well, on the days that I believe, here’s what I believe.” While our beliefs will change over time as we learn more, for ontological questions it is unlikely that our access to evidence is going to change on a daily basis to justify such daily alternations in our beliefs. When someone says their belief about how the universe operates alternates on an almost daily schedule it indicates that person is probably not anchoring their understanding of how the universe operates in evidence properly. This conclusion is bolstered by the final line in his article, a quote from the Gospels of someone appealing to Jesus for assistance: “I do believe. Help my unbelief!”. If that quote is supposed to qualify as evidence for theism then we disagree about what qualifies as evidence.

What does Hamas want?

By Mathew Goldstein

The mass media does an incredibly, astonishingly, poor (shitty is the word) job of explaining what Hamas wants (the quality of the coverage varies, but a persistently significant portion of news coverage is off-the-rails wrong). At least partly as a result, there is widespread misunderstanding on this subject, even though this is centrally relevant to the conflict and for understanding what is going on. So here is Ismail Haniyeh providing an explanation to an Arabic audience that their political principle is to rule over all of the land currently controlled by Israel with future warfare and they will not relinquish or compromise on that principle for anything less.

https://youtu.be/_r7jmHF3qvg

In Defense of Naturalism by Gregory Dawes

 By Mathew Goldstein

It is common for people to claim that science presupposes methodological naturalism. An overlapping claim that I sometimes encounter is that any how the universe works claim, even if that claim was previously widely deemed to be inherently supernatural, automatically necessarily becomes reclassified as being a natural phenomenon if, and when, it is verified to be true by virtue of its being true, thereby a-priori rendering supernatural ontology an impossibility. Several years ago Richard Carrier recommended an excellent article on this topic by philosopher Gregory Dawes. Carrier said “I recently found an article from 2011 making a point I’ve long made myself, that the entire notion of a “presumption of naturalism” being axiomatic to history and the sciences is both an error made by some historians and scientists and an apologetic bluff by Christian apologists—and that, instead, naturalism is an evidence-based conclusion in the sciences reached by long experience, and thus is theoretically revisable; it is also based on evidence, and therefore cannot be “swapped out” by simply changing one’s faith commitment or “preferring” a different axiom. I recommend the whole thing …”

The January 2020 article by Richard Carrier is “Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them”. The 2011 article by Gregory Dawes is “In Defense of Naturalism,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 70.1 (2011): 3-25. I think it is shame that this understanding that naturalism is a conclusion of the sciences is not more widely acknowledged, recognized, and accepted, even among scientists. Richard Carrier suggests a reason why this is the case: “Of course, admitting that would blow up the world. It would be declaring war on religion. And calling conservative Christians delusional. It’s a political conundrum. But intellectually, Dawes is right.”

Postmodern epistemological relativism found to be destructive

By Mathew Goldstein

A recently published pair of studies, one from Sweden (Study 1, N = 1005) and the other from the UK (Study 2, N = 417), focused on truth relativism [Julia Aspernäs, Arvid Erlandsson, Artur Nilsson, “Misperceptions in a post-truth world: Effects of subjectivism and cultural relativism on bullshit receptivity and conspiracist ideation”, Journal of Research in Personality, Volume 105, 2023, 104394,

ISSN 0092-6566, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2023.104394

(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656623000569)]. The study did not investigate causality (as is often the case with such studies since evaluating causality is more difficult than evaluating correlations). The researchers identified two types of truth relativism. One that consists of people who believe that truth depends on which culture or group you belong to, known as cultural relativism. The other consists of people who say they primarily rely on their own gut feeling to determine what is true and false. They are convinced that what they personally feel to be true is true, that is to say, that truth is subjective, henceforward referred to as subjectivism.

This study found that subjectivism was correlated with endorsing conspiracy theories, with holding on to beliefs even when faced with facts that contradict them, with claiming to find profound messages in nonsense sentences, and paradoxically, with rejecting the right of others’ to have their own beliefs. The study concluded that subjectivism remained an independent factor for these correlations after controlling for multiple plausible alternative factors, including analytical thinking ability, political orientation, age, gender, and educational level. These same correlations were not found among those who believe that truth is culture-bound. Cultural relativism was, however, positively correlated with “bullshit receptivity”.

"I think many people who emphasise a more relativistic view of what truth is mean well. They believe that it's important that everyone should be able to make their voice heard. But these results show that such a view can actually be quite dangerous," says PhD student Julia Aspernäs at the Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning in Linköping.

I have seen a video of a local church service where they sing in celebration of “faith facts”, undeterred by the self-contradiction. Our experiences can qualify as evidence provided they are experienced objectively from outside of oneself. Although the theologian advocates and non-theologian practitioners of Reformed epistemology characterize it as experiencing god, it is actually subjectivism in practice because what they characterize as “experiencing god” is more accurately described as some combination of feeling, imagining, overgeneralizing, over-interpreting, and the like, rendering it a subjective experience that resides primarily inside the head of the person with that experience.

The World Health Organization promotes quackery yet again

 Mathew Goldstein

David Gorski, a veteran commenter on the Science Based Medicine web site, has published criticism of one of the bigger purveyors of homeopathy and other crank products and treatments for illness, the World Health Organization. Faculty from the University of Maryland, ‘an institution that has featured in this blog many times before since very early on for the uncritical promotion of “integrating” quackery into science-based medicine by its Integrative Medicine program’, participated in that travesty. I recommend his article The World Health Organization promotes quackery yet again. 

This long-standing problem appears to draw too little attention and criticism. Among the few others criticizing WHO for their brazen endorsement of bad healthcare practices is Jonathan Jarry, who has a Master’s degree in molecular biology, writing for McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, whose motto is “Separating Sense from Nonsense” in an article titled The  World Health Organization Has a Pseudoscience Problem, and a pair of right wing media publishers, the Spectator in the U.K. and Fox News in the U.S.

Medicine is licensed, insured, and regulated while the supplements business is weakly regulated. If you opt for trying to improve your health with natural substances then you may want to consider subscribing to Consumer Labs. They report on what evidence there is regarding various plant, vitamin, and mineral based approaches for addressing various health concerns and which supplement products actually deliver what they claim to provide (for example, they have an article “Do any supplements help prevent or improve cataracts?”). 

There is biology based evidence that high doses of some anti-oxidants via supplements increase the risk for some cancers by stimulating the growth of new blood vessels that feed the cancer cells. Studies show that high levels of vitamin A, C, and E as supplements increases cases of gastrointestinal cancers (stomach, colon, and/or esophageal) in some people, and beta-carotene (a vitamin A precursor) supplementation is similarly positively correlated with lung cancer. Other cancers rely on the same underlying mechanism to form blood vessels, including kidney, skin, and breast cancers.

Physics has ruled out free will

 By Mathew Goldstein

There are very smart people who claim we have free will (or who claim there is a need to claim that we have free will). They cite unpredictability of outcomes, emergent properties from large quantities, human psychological dependency on ideological pre-commitments, and the always available option of changing the definition of the concept so that it becomes impervious to criticism. In this ten minutes video, Has Physics Ruled Out Free Will, Sabine Hossenfelder does a good job of explaining why the conclusion that there is no free will has the most integrity. A modern understanding of how the universe operates rules out life after death, talking serpents and donkeys, an Eve created from the rib of an Adam, a flying winged horse, etc., and free will (contra-causal, libertarian free will because these traits are generally considered central to the free will concept). 

Having said that, I need to back peddle some and concede that it is possible to get free-will within the constraints set by physics via strong emergence. However, most physicists reject strong emergence. Sabine Hossenfelder defines strong emergence as “the hypothetical possibility that a system with many constituents displays novel behavior which cannot be derived from the properties and interactions of the constituents.” She states that although this is logically possible, there is not a single known example for this in the real world. She also states that strong emergence is “incompatible with what we already know about the laws of nature” and that strong emergence is “in conflict with the standard model in particle physics.”

One of the biggest problems humanity has are the myriad problems we ourselves create by our tendency to selectively toss out facts about how the universe works when we consider those facts to be inconvenient. We desire to achieve particular outcomes, or avoid particular outcomes, and there are other people who can interfere with realizing that goal. Our desired goal may be idealistically motivated. For what may be good reasons, including this tendency for people to disregard, or deny, inconvenient facts, we distrust others to share our goal or we are cynical about the willingness or ability of others to adjust their attitudes and behaviors so as to realize the preferred goal. We place ourselves in the role of manipulator, saying and doing whatever we think is most likely to achieve our goals (“motivated reasoning”). Argument is not for the sake of respecting and recognizing what the relevant facts are. Argument is instead for the purpose of convincing others to believe what we want them to believe for the sake of achieving or avoiding some particular outcomes (“confirmation bias”). We are competing to have power, because either power is ours and we win, or it is someone else’s and we lose. We then see how dysfunctional this is and become more cynical and distrustful. This takes us in an authoritarian, ideology over facts, power over truth, downhill spiral. 

The way out of that spiral is for humanity to favor a facts first orientation that is rooted in a competent, empiricist epistemology. To favor a commitment to undertaking the effort needed to suss out, and reject, non-factual ideology. To favor objectivity more than doxastically closed faith, cynical manipulation, or partisan advantage. With this context it becomes more honorable to accept compromise in the face of sincere disagreement whenever the result moves us forward overall, without holding out for nothing less than unachievable victory now. That is a practical way towards an uphill spiral of more mutual understanding, trust, and progress. 

“A lot of people seem to think it is merely a philosophical stance that the behavior of a composite object (for example, you) is determined by the behavior of its constituents—that is, subatomic particles. They call it reductionism or materialism or, sometimes, physicalism, as if giving it a name that ends in-ism will somehow make it disappear. But reductionism—according to which the behavior of an object can be deduced from (“ reduced to,” as the philosophers would say) the properties, behavior, and interactions of the object’s constituents—is not a philosophy. It’s one of the best established facts of nature.”

— Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions by Sabine Hossenfelder

AA report on Maryland laws commentary

 By Mathew Goldstein

American Atheist’s report on Maryland state laws covers the state government issues of concern across the nation. American Atheists did a good job overall. They grouped the laws into subcategories under four major categories, and I will attempt to retain that organization. The focus here is to identify some Maryland state law issues that are not mentioned in the American Atheists report. Maybe some of these additional issues will be added to their future reports. See Secular Maryland issue statements https://secularmaryland.dorik.io/Issues. Register to join the Secular Maryland email list from https://secularmaryland.dorik.io/.

But first, some general comments. The laws of concern are categorized by AA as negative, anti-secular laws, we oppose and positive, pro-secular laws, we support. Some of those issues are correlated with our two party duopoly partisan divide. Because Maryland has a Democratic Party majority in both the House and Senate, negative law bills that correlate with a Republican agenda are either not submitted, or when submitted repeatedly fail to reach, let alone pass, a floor vote. Nevertheless, Maryland has negative laws that are supported, or at least not challenged, by lawmakers, and is lacking various positive laws. To some extent both parties exhibit a pro-religion bias (many lawmakers are religious clerics), and to some extent a secularist perspective is not on the Maryland General Assembly agenda because as a community we do not prioritize lobbying Maryland state government. 

Having said that, Secular Maryland was joined by all of the national secularist organizations, and the ACLU, in submitted testimony this year on behalf of the bills proposing amending the state constitution to remove the unenforceable, offensive, and archaic provisions excluding ontological naturalists (a.k.a. non-theists) from holding government office, being jurors, or testifying in court. The Attorney General’s Office submitted testimony favoring the bills. For the first time this bill was submitted twice, once in each chamber (HB0872 and SB0932 “Declaration of Rights - Religious Freedom, Religious Tests, and Oaths and Affirmations”). The first time Senate sponsor, Senator Muse, is a Pentecostal Bishop, the repeat Delegate sponsor is Delegate Hill. Neither copy of the bill was reported out, favorably or unfavorably, by the assigned committees.

Our agenda should not be limited to what is popular, what is high priority or most important, or what is most likely to be accepted and implemented. Nor are laws the only issues of concern. Sometimes the issue is government actions, or non-actions. The AA report does not cover government sponsored religious displays. Maryland continues to display the Bladensburg Peace Cross. That the Supreme Court endorsed government sponsorship of this religious display does not obligate Maryland to continue to sponsor it. Maryland government would be more inclusive, not less inclusive, without this, or any other, government sponsored crucifixion cross.  

Under the subcategory religious exemptions to enforcement, AA says we lack negative laws for each of four subcategories. The report does not mention that there are religion based exemptions from insurance regulations, health care sharing ministries, and contraceptive insurance coverage. There are also exemptions from cemetery laws. 

The AA report does not mention religious holiday observance as a subcategory. Here we have commercial activity restrictions (Blue laws), Sunday recreational activity restrictions, and government closure laws (Christmas and Friday before, and Monday after, Easter). Omitted from the report is the theistic pledge of allegiance mandate (for public schools, with no opt out for teachers and with self-contradictory language regarding student participation). There is government sponsored prayer during government meetings. When the public is invited to give invocations we (probably?) can volunteer to give an explicitly ontologically naturalist invocation. At the same time we should not shy away from asking that prayer not be on the agenda of government meetings even if people respond with frowns, eye rolls, and falsely accuse us of being “angry” or “militant”. Again, just because the Supreme Court says prayer can be on the agenda of government meetings does not obligate government meetings to do that. Government meetings would be more inclusive, not less inclusive, without prayer on the meeting agenda.

The AA report lists four denial of care laws. Maryland fails on two of them - it has negative refusal laws for abortion and sterilization. Omitted from the report are negative religion based exemption laws for Syphilis screening, vision and hearing screening, and congenital heart disease screening, all of which are tangibly harmful to innocent children.

An important issue that is missing from the AA report is medical treatment refusal right to know laws. I know AA supports such right to know laws so maybe this issue will eventually be added to their report. Maryland lacks such a law (as do the other states). A national lobby is needed for this, similar to the national lobbying groups for state end of life laws. Ideally, medical facilities would be required to provide the full range of medical treatments that they are qualified to provide. Given the absence of this mandate we are entitled to know which particular treatments are not being provided by those medical facilities that refuse to provide them, invariably because of non-medical, religion based, edicts.

I think secularists should actively oppose laws supporting so-called “alternative medicine”. Maryland licenses practitioners of naturopathy who are allowed to sell so-called “treatments” such as homeopathy. The Center for Inquiry has been actively opposing bogus medical treatments. There is a lawsuit against CVS, Walmart, and Amazon for selling junk homeopathic  “medicine”. They should win. However, when a religious institution claims that their freedom to exercise their religious beliefs is being infringed we cannot rely on our federal government to consistently uphold common sense, particularly now that Supreme Court has abandoned the wrongly disparaged Lemon Test (which should be reinstated).

One more comment. Some of the issues surrounding transgender issues regarding sports participation and medical treatment are multi-faceted. The Freedom from Religion Foundation, the ACLU, and American Atheists, among others, tend to address transgender issues from the point of view of supporting “affirmative” medical treatment and participation in sports aligned with gender orientation without restrictions. I confess that I am more cautious here. Skepticism is an important component of proper medical treatment, there is some evidence that younger people in particular who seek medical transition are likely to have subsequent regrets, and puberty results in physical changes that impact sports performance (for many sports) and persists. These are real complications that should not be disregarded. Facts are neither left wing nor right wing. An eagerness for equity and diversity, should not override a commitment to policies that balance all of the relevant, available, evidence derived, facts.  To understand this issue properly I recommend Sabine Hoffensteder’s recent commentary Is being trans a social fad among teenagers? This General Assembly session passed an affirmative transgender care bill.

Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers

 By Mathew Goldstein

This recent article in Tablet Magazine, Atheists in Foxholes, discusses the military chaplaincy which, in practice, exhibits a bias against non-Christians, especially non-theists, and favors evangelical Protestantism. The Religion Support Office refuses to provide its services to soldiers who reject worship. There is a sizable contingent of elected lawmakers in Congress who openly pressure federal institutions to discriminate against non-theists. If you are not doing so yet, you may want to consider adopting a secular spiritual ritual of donating to MAAF.