Machines Like Us – Science News

By Mano Singham

Religion has always had its own defenders, called religious apologists, who have tried to find ways to make religious beliefs intellectually respectable and at least somewhat consistent with advances in knowledge in science and other areas. In response to the recent onslaughts on their faith by the new atheists, there has arisen in response what one might call the 'new apologetics', attempts to combat the arguments of the new atheists. But in examining these arguments one is startled to discover that there is really nothing new.

A letter being auctioned in London this week adds more fuel to the long-simmering debate about the Nobel Prize-winning physicist's religious views. In the note, written the year before his death, Einstein dismissed the idea of God as the product of human weakness and the Bible as "pretty childish."

By Mano Singham

In the previous post, we saw how religious believer try to absolve god for his failure to stop wars and genocide by arguing that god gives us free will and that it is therefore our fault when things like that happens. This is a weak argument at best but it does not address another problem of theodicy: how to explain away the massive suffering caused by natural disasters and disease, where no human agency is involved.

By Mano Singham

In response to the powerful new evidence and arguments against the existence of god brought forward by the new atheists, the defenders of religion have had to regroup and respond. The next series of posts will look at some of these developments on the pro-religion side.

By Mano Singham

The previous post in this series raised the question of, given a conviction that religion is a negative influence in almost every area of life, what is the best strategy to persuade people to abandon their religious beliefs? Should we suggest that their religious beliefs are reasonable but that atheism is better (the honey approach)? Or should we come right out and say that religious beliefs are irrational and even pernicious and should be abandoned by any thinking person (the vinegar approach of the new atheists)? Or should we just do nothing at all and let events take their natural course?

By Mano Singham

An argument that is often made against the new atheists is that their strong rhetoric (such as labeling god a delusion) can alienate people and not win them over to the atheist side. Thus one finds even those who concede that the new atheists are right and that they have all the science and evidence and logic and rationality on their side, still suggesting that the atheists may be losing the bigger public relations war even as they win individual battles. Such people, retrieving the old saying that one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar, suggest that a softer approach may yield better results.

Believing the Unbelievable: The Clash Between Faith and Reason in the Modern World with Sam Harris speaking at the 2007 Aspen Ideas Festival.

By Mano Singham

When all else fails, religious people sometimes resort to utilitarian arguments in favor of god, such as that some people would act worse if they did not believe in a god who would punish them for doing bad things. Other alleged benefits of 'good' religion are that it helps people cope with the stresses of life and deal with the fear of death, that it encourages people to do good acts, and to summon up courage in the face of adversity.

By Mano Singham

One major problem with religion is that it tends to dull the moral sensibilities of otherwise decent people, causing them to justify acts by 'their' people that they would unhesitatingly condemn if done by anyone else.

By Mano Singham

The most basic problem with almost any religion is the fact that they raise 'faith', which is the irrational acceptance of things in the absence of, or even counter to, credible evidence and reason, to the level of a virtue. This is simply asking for trouble.

By Mano Singham

Perhaps the biggest storm raised by the new atheists, and which has even caused a split within the atheist community about strategy, is that they have decided to ignore the polite fiction that there is 'good' religion and there is 'bad' religion. Supporters of this split (which includes even many non-religious people) believe that what should be done is to support the good religionists by aligning with them to combat the bad.

By Mano Singham

While developments in science have provided the most powerful arguments against the existence of god in any form, it is not only science that has led to the undermining of traditional religious beliefs. As far as Christianity and Judaism are concerned, other areas of scholarly work, such as modern textual scholarship in the form of the so-called 'higher criticism', coupled with careful archeological studies, have shown that the Bible is very much a human-created document and that there is little or no evidence for the validity of any of the knowledge contained in it.

By Mano Singham

With the arrival of Darwin's theory, it was possible to understand how life systems could evolve from simple forms to more complex forms under the dynamic of natural laws. This dealt a serious blow to the Ultimate Creator God.

By Mano Singham

In the previous post, I discussed the three theories of god: Personal God, God of the Gaps, and Ultimate Creator God. Here the discussion continues.

By Mano Singham

God is still dead. More than a hundred years after the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put those famous words "God is dead" into the mouth of one of his characters, implying that the Christian concept of god had become untenable, this statement has become even more true, the point driven home with new evidence from science and relentless logic by the advocates of the so-called 'new atheism'.