Atheism & Philosophy: Next

Thursday, February 16, 2012

We begin 50 Voices next time, and Jamie has agreed to kick off report presentations. He'll be the first of *seven. Presenters, please prepare a short list of your main points for me to follow during your presentation. Let us know if there's anything you'd suggest we read in advance of your presentation.

T 21 Blackford (Blackford, Downey, Everitt, Benson, Schellenberg). Additional text nominations

Let's stay on track with group-based posts & comments, please.

Let's also start discussing whether we want to select an additional required text (not necessarily in book form) to cover the three open slots in April. If we decide to do that, we can begin posting our nominations** prior to a vote on the exam date (Feb. 28).

Speaking of the exam: we should gather all the separately posted "factual questions" some of you have been proposing, and add to them. If someone wants to get that started under the title "Exam Questions," thanks in advance.

*Tentative presentation schedule:
T 21 - Jamie, The Golden Age of Islamic Atheism

Th 23 - Ben & Steven, Religion & Neuroscience; Daniel, Nietzsche & Morality

T 28 - Meghan, Parenting Beyond Belief; Matthew, tba

Th 1 - Jonathan, Is the New Testament Historically Reliable?; and someone whose handwriting I can't decipher, and whose title I don't understand - it seems to say "Defend the God: 6 EC." - ???

Here are those intending to submit blog posts for the midterm report (final posts to be up by the 1st... comments from the rest of us encouraged):

BJ, Common Sense/Everyday Morality
Patrick, Topics in practical "magick" through the lens of Wicca
Brian, tba
Erik, United Mind Theory
Dean, Morality Without God
David, Agnosticism vs. Atheism

Everybody else (I presume) is submitting an essay. They'll be due on the 1st.
==
**"Is Christianity Good for the World" & "Collision" nominated by David... Other suggestions for us all to read in April?

==
"Why I Am An Atheist" - Michael Shermer

The Singularity... (& see comments on Erik's posts)

6 comments:

Super DaveFebruary 16, 2012 at 5:47 PM
Sorry I wasn't in class today. I fear I have caught some bug, and I was in no shape to make the journey south.

I just wanted to mention that another interesting option might be "Is Christianity Good for the World," the debate between Hitch and Douglas Wilson. It was condensed into a small book (tiny, actually) and would make for a fun and quick read.

This same debate was also the subject of a very well done documentary, entitled "Collision" which I highly recommend. It's dramatically staged, much like a prize fight between two heavyweights.
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Jamie SuttonFebruary 16, 2012 at 11:17 PM
I doubt my doubt, doubt itself is unsure
I love, but for whom do I sigh?
Not Muslim, yet not heathen, who am I? - Farid Attar

Was reading today and re-discovered this old favorite of mine. A brief preview of my presentation. :)
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PhilFebruary 17, 2012 at 6:56 AM
Thanks for the "Collision" tip, David! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU0Ue-Ki-mU

If you doubt your doubt, is your identity any less secure than if you're "certain"? I doubt it. But I'll bet I'm missing your point, Jamie? All will become clear on Tuesday I'm sure.
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Jamie SuttonFebruary 18, 2012 at 7:44 AM
I don't really have an opinion on which books we slide into our free spots by the way. I'm not familiar enough with atheist literature to know what would be good, but I'm sure the class will come up with something. I've very much enjoyed everything we've read so far
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BenCFebruary 21, 2012 at 4:38 PM
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
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Kat KolbyFebruary 22, 2012 at 1:04 PM
I like the idea of some documentary action. Definitely going to watch Collision, and suggest Transcendent Man...As was mentioned in class (Thanks Prof. Oliver :D).

Pot Luck is my vote! Perhaps a few days of atheist/theist "show and tell" so to speak? I think we've all been doing that thoroughly this semester. To wrap everything up, it might be a nice sentiment to allow all of us to show everyone something that touched our minds/hearts/whathaveyou. Be it a theory, a specific book, a documentary...etc. ^-^
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Humanism

“We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.” Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who also said...

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile."

For more on humanism see Stephen Law's Very Short Introduction-

"humanists believe science, and reason more generally, are invaluable tools we can and should apply to all areas of life. No beliefs should be considered off-limits and protected from rational scrutiny..."

	Five Books (@five_books)
"Humanists believe that morality is something that’s in us, with a basis in biology and built on by culture." fivebooks.com/best-books/hum… pic.twitter.com/tzXAVSCbbx

Death is nothing

"There is nothing beyond the universe (for it has no outer boundary). The human soul, too, is made of atoms, fine atoms that resemble wind and heat. When we die, our souls immediately dissolve, as the body will in time. There is, therefore, no afterlife. This theory of matter is also allied to the larger aim of generating tranquility, since misunderstandings about the nature of death are the biggest cause of anxiety. Death is nothing to us, Epicurus wrote, for that which is dissolved has no feelings, and that which has no feelings is nothing to us. Death is not painful, for the dead cannot feel anything; it is simply the dissolution of one particular cluster of atoms." Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

Weird

According to a 2009 Harris poll the following percentages of Americans believe in some form of the afterlife and the soul:

Soul survival 71%
Heaven 75%
Hell 61%
Reincarnation 20%

Woody Allen said “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” I am often asked about the afterlife. My response: I’m for it! But the fact that I wish it were so does not make it so. And there is no scientific evidence that anything like a soul transcends the death of our physical bodies, or that there is life after life... Michael Shermer, "The Top Ten Weirdest Things People Believe"("Afterlife" is #2, just ahead of You-Know-Who)

Winterton C. Curtis

My first landlord was an old zoologist at the University of Missouri named Winterton Curtis (1875-1965). He was one of the scientific experts not allowed to testify at the Scopes Trial in Dayton TN in 1925. My parents (and I) rented rooms from him in his home on Westmount in Columbia Missouri while Dad attended Veterinary school at Mizzou in the early '60s, and later maintained a cordial friendship with him. He used to visit when I was a kid and pull dollar bills from my ears. Dad thought that must be why I was always so fascinated by the concept of evolution.

Dr. Curtis wrote, in 1921,

The humanistic philosophy of life, which flowered in Greece and which has blossomed again, is not the crude materialistic desire to eat, drink, and be merry. It is a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile. The otherworldliness of the Middle Ages does not satisfy the spiritual demands of modern times. Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology

Of the Scopes Trial itself, he wrote of the 1925 Dayton Tennessee spectacle:

The courtroom audience impressed me as honest country folk in jeans and calico. “Boobs" perhaps, as judged by Mencken, and holding all the prejudices of backwoods Christian orthodoxy, but nevertheless a significant section of the backbone of democracy in the U.S.A. They came to see their idol “the Great Commoner” and champion of the people meet the challenge to their faith. They left bewildered but with their beliefs unchanged despite the manhandling of their idol by the “Infidel” from Chicago.... A Defense Expert's Impressions of the Scopes Trial

Image result for evolutionary progress caricature

Requiescat in pace, Dr. C.

A selective evolutionary bibliography:

Michael Boulter, Darwin's Garden: Down House & the Origin of Species

Eugene Byrne and Simon Gurr, Darwin: A Graphic Biography

Matthew Chapman, Trials of the Monkey (Darwin's great-great...grandson comes to Dayton TN)

Winteron C. Curtis, "A Defense Expert's Impressions of the Scopes Trial" from D-Days at Dayton: Fundamentalism vs Evolution at Dayton, Tennessee (1956)

----"A damned-yankee professor in Little Dixie" (1957)

----Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology(1921)

Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist

----Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution

John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy

Randall Fuller, The Book That Changed America: How Darwin's Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation

Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

Jay Hosler, Sandwalk Adventures(a graphic novel)

Philip Kitcher, Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith

Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion

Loyal Rue, Everybody's Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution

Rebecca Stott, Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists

Hanne Strager, A Modest Genius: The story of Darwin's life and how his ideas changed everything

Emma Townshend, Darwin's Dogs: How Darwin's Pets Helped Form a World-Changing Theory of Evolution

And don't overlook the compendious website Darwin online.

Darwin discussion questions, quotes etc. here.

Russell reads Mill

I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day at the age of eighteen I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. Why I Am Not a Christian

Atheist or Agnostic?

I never know whether I should say "Agnostic" or whether I should say "Atheist"... I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God.

On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods... all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line.

-Bertrand Russell

Reasonable Atheism

We aim to show that religious believers who believe that atheists must be dishonest, irrational, amoral, untrustworthy, mean, deceitful, delusional, and unintelligent have false beliefs about atheists... Our argument is not that being an atheist makes one a splendid person, but that being an atheist does not make one a bad person. The difference between bad and good people does not turn on their religious beliefs or lack thereof.

-Scott Aikin & Robert Talisse, Reasonable Atheism: A Moral Case for Respectful Disbelief

The continuous human community

Atheist Spirit

Not believing in God does not prevent me from having a spirit.

The human spirit is far too important to be left to priests, mullahs or spiritualists. It is our noblest part, our highest function… Renouncing religion by no means implies renouncing spiritual life.

We are ephemeral beings who open onto eternity… This “openness” is the spirit itself. Metaphysics means thinking about these things; spirituality means experiencing them, exercising them, living them.

The universe is our home; the celestial vault is our horizon; eternity is here and now. This moves me far more than the Bible or the Koran. It astonishes me far more than miracles (if I believed in them). Compared to the universe, walking on water is a cinch!

Why would you need a God? The universe suffices. Why would you need a church? The world suffices. Why would you need faith? Experience suffices.

-Andre Comte-Sponville

Nature's God

“America’s mainstream religion is at bottom one form or another of popular deism, and popular deism is just atheism adapted to the limitations of the common understanding of things. To say that the United States is “one nation under God” is to conceal behind a euphemism the fact that it is and always has been one nation under nature. Whatever else we pretend to believe, we are in practice mostly atheists now--and for that we should be grateful.” p 426
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

Atheism & Philosophy

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Thursday, February 16, 2012

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