Atheist seeks Enlightenment

April 17th, 2006 Fred McVittie

I seem to have been hearing quite a bit about ‘enlightenment’ over the last few days, which is a little alien to me since I am a confirmed atheist. The difficulty I am having is that without a religious framework to my understanding I don’t really know what the term means. The only context I have for understanding it as an idea is theological, and as an atheist I can’t buy into that at all.

The nearest I can get, in terms of an analogy at least, it BBC2. That TV channel was launched in Britain in 1964, but my family didn’t own a TV set capable of receiving BBC2 until some time in 1972, so for those 8 years I only knew about its programming through rumour and cultural osmosis; The Goodies, Playschool, Match of the Day (first broadcast game, Liverpool v. Arsenal. Liverpool won 3:2 at home). All the time though, I knew it was there, that there was this other channel, its signals beaming through my front room and passing unheeded through the television. Is this what enlightenment is like? Am I just not receiving it? (Answer: No)

An interesting footnote to the BBC2 launch that I found is that there was a massive power outage on the opening night, and most of the programming was scrapped. An iconic image for this event is a picture of a darkened TV studio with the only illumination being a single candle.

Anyway, I am going to avoid papers that concern themselves with BBC2 type material for a few days.

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Soul of an Atheist

June 8th, 2006 Fred McVittie

There are two important things to keep in mind when you are an atheist (like me).

1. The only difference between you and all those religious nuts out there is usually just One God. Most people of faith only believe in their own God and have a complete and total lack of belief in all the thousands of other Gods believed in by other people. In this they are just like you, except you believe in one less God than they do.
2. The second thing to keep in mind is that, apart from this one moment of sanity with regard to the non-existence of a God, atheists believe all kinds of crap. The evidence for the existence of the self, of superstrings, of Higgs bosons, of black holes, and of the genetic inevitability of sexual orientation is every bit as absent as the evidence for God, but most atheists, including myself, will express a belief in at least one of these.

We all live in a highly spurious, highly partial world, most of which is probably fictional. But who gives a fuck. Try this. Listen to James Brown. Listen to Otis Redding. Try a little tenderness. Pretend you have a soul. (But don’t go to church).

Posted in Atheism, Belief, God, Soul | No Comments »

Even Atheists are scared of God

August 4th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Many optical illusions work by encouraging the visual system to make assumptions about what it is looking at which are incorrect. So the Muller-Lyer illusion, even though it consists only of abstract 2-dimensional geometrical shapes, tricks the visual system into behaving as if it is looking at a 3-dimensional scene. The brain then makes assumptions about the relative size of the objects in the scene which assumption includes a correction for distance. So some lines which are the same length appear to be of different lengths. Similarly, the geometry of the Ponzo illusion (above) bears enough similarity to the perspectival shortening of, for example, railway tracks, that our brains make the correction and produce an apparent size difference in shapes which are actually the same.

There are two interesting aspects to this illusion making process:

• Firstly, the construction of a non-existent perspective is entirely unconscious. When we look at an optical illusion we rarely notice the resemblance between the abstract shape and the perspectival convergence of railway lines for example, or the similarity in geometry to the interior or exterior corners of rooms (Muller-Lyer).
• Secondly, these illusions are unusually persistant, and cannot be willed away by the acquisition of conscious rational knowledge. We can measure lines that appear to be of different lengths, confirm to ourselves that they are, in fact, the same, but they still retain their appearance of difference.

This clearly demonstrates that our conscious and non-conscious experience of the world sometimes operate on different registers, and that rational conscious knowledge does not necessarily displace that acquired and through non-conscious means. Also, given that much of our behaviour, emotional response, conceptualisations etc are produced non-consciously it is likely that in situations where conscious knowledge is in conflict with non-conscious knowledge, even when that non-conscious knowledge is known to be the product of an illusion, it is the non-conscious knowledge which will guide the response.

Many of the illusions can be found on Richard Gregory’s home page at http://richardgregory.org/papers/brainmodels/illusions-and-brain-models_p1.htm

Posted in Atheism, Consciousness, Illusion, Seeing, Unconscious | No Comments »

Atheist Awe

August 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Who among us has stood on a beach beside a vast raging ocean and not been affected by the sheer power and majesty of the sight. Or scooping up a handful of sand grains, a tiny sample of an incomprehensibly large quantity, has not been at least a little devastated by the numbers involved. Look up and see the stars and then tell me how big you are. These are just some of the times and places when our experience takes us beyond our selves and puts us in a place where medium sized creatures like us can only stand gobsmacked before the ineffable. Most of us regard these moments as interesting but ultimately insignificant diversions, and have no cause to integrate such feelings into the fabric of ones life. Such experiences that we might call ’sublime’ and the feelings they engender that we might call ‘awe’ or describe as ‘oceanic’, when they are associated with religious practices are embedded into the lives of those practitioners in a way that they are not with the casual, recreational seeker of the sublime. All faiths stress the importance of these feelings as marking knowledge (or the path to knowledge) of the relationship with the divine and this articulated, integrated set of emotional and cognitive responses is firmly ensconced within the writing, cultural practices, and relations of believers. For the atheists among us this is potentially a huge loss. We are as capable of grand emotional intelligence as the most fervent fundamentalist, yet it is hard to find a place within the life of an unbeliever in which such experiences, and the feelings they engender, might function, or indeed what this function might be.

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The God Paradigm

October 17th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The ‘God Hypothesis’ which Dawkins puts forward in ‘The God Delusion’ is not, strictly speaking, a hypothesis at all. A hypothesis is a statement from which experiments might be directly derived, the results of which support or nullify that hypothesis. No such experiment can be produced from the general concept of a God. God could, however, be considered a paradigm from which other, more functional hypotheses can be derived. In this, the God Paradigm would be essentially no different from the Big Bang paradigm: both have a certain explanatory power but neither can be tested directly. A significant difference of course, is that the Big Bang paradigm can be used to generate hypotheses which are in turn fully testable and falsifiable. The results of such experiments can never prove or disprove the reality of the paradigm, but they can lend support to its validity as an explanatory structure. The search for the existence of background microwave radiation (COBE) was one such hypothesis which, when found to be valid, supported the Big Bang paradigm. A theist who argued that the presence of such radiation does not prove that the Big Bang happened is completely correct, as paradigms can only be supported, not proven. However, as such supporting evidence increases, as it has in the case of evolutionary theory, then the onus is on the dissenter to provide a better paradigm supported by better, properly supporting hypotheses. The God paradigm does not have a good record in generating functional hypotheses, and to the extent that it has, these have tended to be null and therefore fail to support the overall paradigm of a divine entity.

There are two hallmarks of a really good paradigm particularly a large-scale ‘cosmological’ paradigm that explains pretty much everything. Firstly, it has to provide a satisfying, easily grasped ‘big picture’. Secondly, it should be capable of generating many statements or hypotheses that can be tested. The God Paradigm, depending on which version you look to, has a record of being excellent at fulfulling the first requirement, as evidenced by the millions of people worldwide who not only grasp it but hold onto it in the teeth of quite amazing adversity. The second requirement, that it offers testable hypotheses, is less well covered, and to the extent that it is, has not performed well. The deist God, who lit the blue touch paper of the Cosmos and then stood well back, is completely inaccessible, and makes no moves, mysterious or otherwise, that might leave tracks in the experimental record. (This is the God for cop-outs in my opinion). Some other Gods, that of Roman Catholicism for example, are much more amenable to hypothesising, since He does intervene in the ways of the world. Miracles and intercessionary prayer are perfectly testable hypotheses which, if demonstrated as valid, would lend support to the God Paradigm. Such support would not constitute proof, of course, for the same reason that the results of COBE don’t prove the Big Bang paradigm. You could demonstrate the existence of miraculous cures and crying statues from now until Doomsday, and that would still not prove the existence of God, but would only lend support to the God Paradigm, an explanatory structure that, however well supported, would always be tentative, always open to doubt, always ready to be swallowed up by the next, even more encompassing big picture. The fact that these hypotheses have not been validated means that they do not provide such support, and the GP, for many of us, is just too weak to take seriously. However, lack of support does not mean disproof, and the God Paradigm, whilst it remains devastatingly unsupported, to the point that it is probably a hazard to passers-by, is as valid as it ever was. It just seems such a shame that so many people invest in this catastrophically weak idea of a divine being, an entity incapable of pulling of the simplest testable miracle, when there are so many other paradigms around which have awe-inspiring explanatory power and in their complexity and elegance make Chartes and Canterbury look like Birmingham Bullring (on a bad day).

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We Are All Scientists

October 23rd, 2007 Fred McVittie

T.H. Huxley, (Darwin’s Bulldog), in an article published in 1863, famously claimed that ‘We are all Scientists’ (1). In it he points out that the normal rational thinking which we use all the time is very similar to the organised processes of rational thought that we associate with professional scientists. In other words, that there is a case to be made that being a scientist is not a job description reserved for those with PhDs, but is anyone who uses rational deduction to make decisions. In a sense the term scientist is a much better description for a person who values modern, humanist, conscious thought over metaphysics or religion than the current term ‘atheist’ which only serves to describe what such persons do not believe. This latter strategy, definition of ‘atheists’ by negative attribute, is the equivalent of replying to the question ‘do you have any hobbies’ with ‘I am a non-stamp collector’. In other words, whilst true, it is almost completely valueless.

1. available at http://www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/a&s/allsci.htm.

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Soul of an Atheist - Past of the Self

November 11th, 2007 Fred McVittie

When we are invited to look into the past, to consider who we are in relation to who we were, in which direction do we look? When we usually look back in time we look… back. We tend to consider time as a kind of river that is bearing us forward, or as a road that we have traveled, with the events of the past littering that road like the cast-off skins of a snake, or like flotsam bobbing in a boat’s wake and receding behind us as we proceed toward the distant shores of the future. There is the school we went to, and there are our parents. And the further back in time we look the more distant are the objects and events we look to. Last year is close on our heels, our memory of reading that newspaper item about a bombing and the death of some people we will never know, or the article about that celebrity coming our of rehab. Beyond these recent landmarks, and perhaps diminished by distance, we might see that same celebrity going into rehab, and the atrocity which provoked the planting of that bomb. These remote incidents may be harder to make out, blurring into the haze of hundreds of others, or they may be occluded by those events which followed them, and which now follow us. Here is the past as a journey that we are taking, and a country that we are constantly emigrating from..

Thinking about the past of our own self, our own most personal sense of being, is somewhat different however. Whilst the events, places, and people of the past are left behind in our life journey, our past self is not so easily abandoned by the roadside. Think back to your tenth birthday, maybe you had a party, maybe someone gave you a microscope, or a Hot Wheels set, or a book about trains. Or maybe your party was cancelled because you had a fever and had to spend the day in bed. Maybe you remember that day very well or maybe you hardly recall it at all. If you can revisit that day you may find yourself looking out briefly through the eyes of your newly ten-year-old self and maybe even feeling the stirrings of those smaller bones and muscles within your own. You may find yourself drawn to stand how you stood when you took the present from your Mother’s arms, or hold your hands in the way you held them as you adjusted the focus on that microscope for the first time, squinting down through the eyepiece at the gigantic wing of a housefly.

Here the past is not behind you, lost along the road or adrift in ancient seas, the past of your self is lurking inside, just beneath the skin of the present. The skin of this snake is not sloughed off, abandoned, and left for dead, but is grown over with its circulation and its senses intact. Your ten-year-old self is not doomed to wander lost through 1970’s supermarkets or wait to be picked up by school gates that no longer exist, its home is secured in the body of the here and now.

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Soul of an Atheist - Past of the Self 2

November 13th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The past of our self is not behind us and we seem not to be able to put the history of our being down and walk away from it. Even when we look back and feel ourselves in those alien situations, doing things we could not dream of doing now, and which are out of what we now think of as our character, we cannot completely divorce our now selves from our then selves, our new selves from our old selves. The circumstances may have altered, everyone we ever knew and every place we ever went may have disappeared, every priority in our lives may have changed, every cell in our body may have changed, we may have ‘moved on’, but that person we were is not some distant memory occluded by more recent and proximal images of bombings and celebrities, but is alive and awake within our bodies and minds, nestling like a Russian Matryoshka doll.

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Practical and Factual Reality

December 8th, 2007 Fred McVittie

In Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society biologist and anthropologist David Sloan Wilson makes a case for the persistence of religious behaviour in post-enlightenment cultures. Framed within a larger theoretical framework which argues for the existence and power of group selection, Sloane-Wilson makes the claim that, in evolutionarily adaptive terms, the ability of humans to construct rational, evidence-based models of reality does not necessarily confer any survival advantage. He makes the distinction between two types of ‘realism’, factual realism which is a product of rational (scientific) enquiry, and practical realism which is a ‘good enough’ interpretation of experience, providing heuristics for behaviour and belief without recourse to evidence or analysis. Citing this distinction in relation to the likely relative survival of groups of organisms, particularly humans, he claims that:

If there is a trade-off between the two forms of realism, such that our
beliefs can become more adaptive only by becoming factually less true, then
factual realism will be the loser every time. … Factual realists detached
from practical reality were not among our ancestors. It is the person who
elevates factual truth above practical truth who must be accused of mental
weakness from an evolutionary perspective. (Wilson 2003, p.228)

This is evidenced in relation to religious belief which, he says, provides examples of just such practical realities. In terms of the survival of a group it may be beneficial if most or all members of that group have, for example, a belief in an afterlife. Such a belief would allow individuals to martyr themselves, confident that their life would not simply end on the battlefield. An army of soldiers imbued with this belief, if faced with an army of atheists who have the rational belief that death marks the absolute end of individual existence, are far more likely to fight to the death, and therefore to enhance the survival potential of their group. Over the eons of human evolution, such selective processes would tend to favour the maintenance of belief in practical reality even when such a reality is found to have no basis in fact.

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