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I often worry about attacking straw men. When positing my arguments against a position, I often wonder is this position I’m attacking really the best the other side has to offer? Surely there must be a more educated and reasonable version of this put forth by someone who’s actually an expert in the field. I am confronted with feelings of disappointment rather than vindication when it turns out the “less refined” argument I am debating against actually encapsulates everything their experts have to back them up.
This disappointment gripped me thoroughly as I read an article by columnist and best selling author, Reza Aslan. The article is posted here. In it, Aslan speaks out against “the new atheism” and its heroes, Harris, Hitchens, Denett, and Dawkins. One would hope that a distinguished writer like Aslan would be able to display the best that the religious and their apologists has to offer, especially as this is the exact topic with which Aslan has acquired his writing accolades. But where I hoped to find well thought out and more in depth reasoning, I found only the same weak arguments delivered with a slightly better vocabulary and smoother writing style than the unknowns I’d been debating with previously. But, as I do still want to avoid any chance of straw-manning, here is my reply to Reza Aslan, champion writer for the anti-secularists. Sit tight, its a doozy.
Aslan starts by talking about a bus-board that reads ‘THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE’ saying that he
laughed, amused that atheists in the UK were miming propaganda techniques perfected by evangelical groups.
My objection to this comparison is two-fold. First, he is making use of a type of ad hominem known as the ‘you too’ fallacy. Theists engage in this fallacy relentlessly as they seem quite happy to rebound any criticism of religion and use it on science. Atheists are just as stubborn in their beliefs as theists are. Science requires as much faith as religion does. Atheists use as much propaganda as evangelicals do. These ‘you too’ statements are fallacious because they depend on where the objection is coming from, not on what the objection is; even if theists were correct in saying that non-theists are guilty of the same logical flaws, it doesn’t mean that theists get a free pass to engage in those flaws.
Which leads me to my second objection, that non-theists are NOT valid objects of the ‘you too’ defense, even if it weren’t fallacious. Aslan figures that a bus ad is equivalent to evangelical propaganda? One: Bus ads are universally used by organizations of a multitude of platforms from cancer research foundations to community events to the sale of cookies. It isn’t fair to suddenly consider this medium a condemnation worthy strategy the moment a secularists to uses it.
Two: Even if bus ads are propaganda, theists employ much more dastardly methods. There are no atheist camps where children are scared/scarred with threats of eternal torture if they believe in a god. There are no weekly gatherings where atheists sing repetitive songs about the non-existence of gods and how the only reason that any good in the world exists is because of this deistic absence. There are no atheists on street corners or on tv crying that if one is a believer it is impossible for that person to act in a moral fashion and further, the believer is evil and deserves some cosmic punishment, if only such a thing existed.
If you engage in a ‘you too’ fallacy, but the subject on which you use it is not, in fact, also doing it, what you have done is admitted that what you are doing is wrong as well as shown that you are unable to accept responsibility for this wrong doing and must resort to some Fruedian projection in order to cover up your own shortcomings.
I have only covered the first two introductory paragraphs and there is more intellectual dishonesty, misrepresentation, and flat out wrongness than I would allow from even wayward trolls that happen to slime across my posts. Surely this poster boy for religious apologetics can do better than this. Surely that multitude of perverse sophistry was just a mis-step, the rest of the article will be full of good solid….ohhhh fiddlesticks… Read the rest of this entry »
We have to stop dancing with those who brung us and embrace thinking that will actually work, instead of the circles of futility much of the debate around GW and AGW has degenerated into.
I am going to use the discussion points found on RichardDawkins.net as the basis of this feature.
Calilasseia is the author of the post and deserves many rich accolades for assembling so much useful information in one spot. This constitutes an open thread of sorts, please leave your opinions and observations in the comment section.
Enjoy!
[9] The infamous “chance” and “random” canards (now with “nothing” side salad).
Few things are more calculated to result in the critical thinkers here regarding a poster as a zero-IQ tosspot with blancmange for brains, than the erection of the “chance” canard. Usually taking the form of “scientists think life arose by chance”, or variants thereof such as “you believe life was an accident”. This is, not to put too fine a point upon it, bullshit.
What scientists actually postulate, and they postulate this with respect to every observable phenomenon in the universe, is that well defined and testable mechanisms are responsible. Mechanisms that are amenable to empirical test and understanding, and in many cases, amenable to the development of a quantitative theory. Two such quantitative theories, namely general relativity and quantum electrodynamics, are in accord with observational reality to fifteen decimal places. As an aside, when someone can point to an instance of mythology producing something this useful, the critical thinkers will sit up and take notice, and not before.
Likewise, erecting statements such as “random mutation can’t produce X”, where X is some complex feature of multicellular eukaryote organisms, will also invite much scorn, derision and contempt. First of all, drop the specious apologetic bullshit that “random” means “without rhyme or reason”, because it doesn’t. In rigorous scientific parlance, “random”, with respect to mutations, means “we have insufficient information about the actual process that took place at the requisite time”. This is because scientists have known for decades, once again, that mutations arise from well defined natural processes, and indeed, any decent textbook on the subject should list several of these, given that the Wikipedia page on mutations covers the topic in considerable depth. Go here, scroll down to the text “Induced mutations on the molecular level can be caused by:”, and read on from that point. When you have done this, and you have learned that scientists have classified a number of well defined chemical reactions leading to mutations, you will be in a position to understand why the critical thinkers here regard the creationist use of “random” to mean “duh, it just happened” with particularly withering disdain. When scientists speak of “random” mutations, what they really mean is “one of these processes took place, but we don’t have the detailed observational data to determine which of these processes took place, when it took place, and at what point it took place, in this particular instance. Though of course, anyone with a decent background in research genetics can back-track to an ancestral state for the gene in question. Indeed, as several scientific papers in the literature testify eloquently, resurrecting ancient genes is now a routine part of genetics research.
Then, of course, we have that other brand of nonsense that creationists love to erect, which also fits into this section, namely the fatuous “you believe nothing created the universe” canard, and assorted corollary examples of palsied asininity based upon the same cretinous notion. Which is amply addressed by the above, namely that scientists postulate that well defined and testable natural mechanisms, operating upon the appropriate entities, were responsible for real world observational phenomena. In what fantasy parallel universe does “well defined and testable natural mechanisms, operating upon the appropriate entities” equal “nothing”? If you think that those two are synonyms, then again, you are in serious need of education, and you are in no position to lecture those of us who bothered to acquire one.
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