#24024: Ken Cope — 05/05  at  11:05 AM
"So, you [Evans] are an atheist supporting religion?"

#24025: Heliologue — 05/05  at  11:08 AM
If you want to listen to the clip, but you don't want to download RealPlayer, get Real Alternative, which basically justs installs the codecs.

#24027: — 05/05  at  11:12 AM
Ooh, think your link might've downed their service.

"I'm a major fan of Wolpert (I use his developmental biology text in my classes), but this is the first I'd learned that he was also an atheist. A strongly vehement atheist, I might add…and now I like him even more."

I would've thought the default position was to assume any scientist is an atheist (certainly in the UK), unless shown to be otherwise (or a biochemist, I'm never sure about them, it sometimes seems like biochem is where the christians go to minimise their exposure to evolution, but that might just be my experience, obviously engineers don't count). I'm always surprised when I discover scientists of my acquaintance are religious.

#24028: — 05/05  at  11:21 AM
Link worked now, must've been temporary.

What a dick. Anyway, even if you regard religion as metaphorical and beautiful, I still can't see in what way it provides meaning?

And the suggestion that atheists should try and imagine where religious believers are coming from! Like we don't have some inkling given the thousands of years of history, contemporary social place of religion, in many cases religious upbringing and even previous belief, and presence of a fair few religious people in the world willing to tell us about it.

#24031: — 05/05  at  11:26 AM
I'd say PZ's latest is right on the mark. While I think that there is value in religion and its perspectives, the fact is that aesthetics and whatever we might call "spirituality" should be hindered as little as possible by tradition and accidents of culture. One of the things I had to learn after a religious upbringing was how to look at art and culture without the constraints of religious blinders. Fortunately I was out of religion fairly early.

If someone wishes to learn the religious perspective to understand religious art better, they may do so. But human creations don't belong inherently to one perspective, or even to one set of perspectives, so that even religious art needn't be seen in context. Of course one should learn some of the iconography of religious art if one wishes a deeper understanding, yet this isn't even close to suggesting that one should even suspend disbelief for a moment to, say, revel in Hieronymous Bosch's orgies of pleasure and of pain.

Evans appears to be stuck in (or passing through) a certain historical/personal stage in which aestheticism is the channel of wonder, imagination, and beauty. Nothing really wrong with that, however he seems overly blind to the possibilities for "satisfying the soul" that are possible from science, the exquisite power and elegance of theoretical studies, and the extremes of form and function to be found in the accident and selection of evolutionary structures. That is to say, he needs to get out more.

#24032: Ken Cope — 05/05  at  11:26 AM
Suspension of disbelief is insufficient. One can't appreciate fairy tales without the credulity of a three year old.

And if I'd had a lobotomy, I'd really appreciate Evans.

#24034: — 05/05  at  11:30 AM
Wolpert's book The Unnatural Nature of Science (1992) is just as good a read today as when I bought it at the Science Museum of Minnesota twelve years ago.

#24036: — 05/05  at  12:00 PM
Glen writes:

One of the things I had to learn after a religious upbringing was how to look at art and culture without the constraints of religious blinders. Fortunately I was out of religion fairly early.

You probably have to be out of it pretty early, or never have been exposed in the first place, in order to be able to look at them without the constraints--this was brought home the other day by reactions to a symposium poster at a faculty-student meeting in our department. The poster is at:

http://www.gs.washington.edu/news/symposium05/

We all agreed that it was an attractive, clever, and effective poster. Then I observed that they probably couldn't have pushed the creationists' buttons any harder if they had tried. At first, none of the other 5 people saw what I meant, but then when they thought about it, they got it (and thought it was even a better poster for all that, because taken that way, it implies there is no knowledge without some kind of risk). But the stark difference between my seeing it through the raised-in-Alabama filter, and the others without that filter not seeing it until it was pointed out, was quite striking.

#24037: — 05/05  at  12:04 PM
I don't think I have to adopt the viewpoint of the Nazi Party to better appreciate the artistry of Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will.

#24038: PZ Myers — 05/05  at  12:06 PM
Ooooo. That's a nice poster, and a nice symposium. I wish I had an excuse to be in Seattle in two weeks.

#24042: — 05/05  at  12:27 PM
Wolpert's opening was hilarious.

As for Evan's, I don't really get what he's saying. I can appreciate religious art, and I don't think I need to adopt a "religious perspective" to do so. I can appreciate religion as art in a certain sense. Some apologetics are quite compelling as intellectual autobiography. Some theology is quite compelling as philosophy. But how do you appreciate religion as art in a general sense? The leap of logic involved is like jumping from an appreciation of great literature, or even crappy literature, to a declaration that life in general is art.

Or is he trying to suggest that religious people appreciate their doctrine as art and we should respect that? That's a big claim for someone with no evidence. Or that they should appreciate their doctrine as art and we should respect them for what they should do? (Which is what he seemed to be saying in his article.) I'm confused.

#24043: — 05/05  at  12:32 PM
Here are the responses from The Guardian's letters pages over the past couple of days. Johnathan Miller is one of them (famous UK atheist - dunno if he's registered on your side of the pond):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,1475105,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,1476538,00.html

Now I'm off to vote. For those Americans who may be interested in getting a taste of what out elections are like (and I've lived in the US through one of yours - never again) the following by Simon Schama may be of interest. I discusses (amongst other things) the complete absence of God in our campaigns:

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/election/story/0,15803,1476621,00.html

#24044: — 05/05  at  12:38 PM
I'll have to side with Evans. I really enjoyed the Harry Potter books. Of course while reading them, you have to go along with the idea that there are wizards living in a secret castle who practise magic. When I shut the book I have no delusions that Hogwarts actually exists, and when at King's Cross station I've never tried to find platform 9 3/4. It's a fairy tale. But you can't really enjoy the fairy tale if on every page you're yelling, "come on! an invisibility cloak!?! What sort of simple minded fools do they take us for?!"

#24046: — 05/05  at  12:44 PM
I wonder what Wolpert would have said about religious music? I have loved liturgical music for just as long as I've been an atheist, but I don't dismiss it as propaganda (Wolpert) or find myself having to look at things from a religious point of view (Evans). To me, its beauty is entirely separate from its religious message, or the religious views of the composer.

#24047: Ken Cope — 05/05  at  12:58 PM
bunny,

Simple suspension of disbelief does not demand credulity on your part, but skill on the part of the storyteller.

Aristotle wrote in The Poetics,

The element of the wonderful is required in Tragedy. The irrational, on which the wonderful depends for its chief effects, has wider scope in Epic poetry, because there the person acting is not seen. Thus, the pursuit of Hector would be ludicrous if placed upon the stage- the Greeks standing still and not joining in the pursuit, and Achilles waving them back.

But in the Epic poem the absurdity passes unnoticed. Now the wonderful is pleasing, as may be inferred from the fact that every one tells a story with some addition of his knowing that his hearers like it. It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully. The secret of it lies in a fallacy. For, assuming that if one thing is or becomes, a second is or becomes, men imagine that, if the second is, the first likewise is or becomes. But this is a false inference. Hence, where the first thing is untrue, it is quite unnecessary, provided the second be true, to add that the first is or has become. For the mind, knowing the second to be true, falsely infers the truth of the first.

There is an example of this in the Bath Scene of the Odyssey. Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities. The tragic plot must not be composed of irrational parts. Everything irrational should, if possible, be excluded; or, at all events, it should lie outside the action of the play

Walt Disney described the art of animation as the art of making the impossible probable. The sense of wonder is in knowing something is impossible and yet having accepted it by superior story telling or animation.

Religion goes a step too far, in demanding its adherents accept the impossible as fact.

#24049: Ken Cope — 05/05  at  01:13 PM
Evans appears to be accusing atheists of being like the interviewer who argued with Joseph Campbell that a myth is a lie; Campbell calls myth a metaphor. Atheists (and many religious people) by and large know that myth is metaphor, but Evans claims we're being adolescent if we refuse to adopt the view of the religious that their myths are factual.

#24051: — 05/05  at  01:22 PM
Here's the link to the original article that sparked the whole debate:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1474570,00.html

#24054: — 05/05  at  01:26 PM
Ken,
Yes, religon does take it a step too far by demanding that you continue to believe in invisibility cloaks and attend the weekly meeting at platform 9 3/4, even after you close the book. Know when to close the book, but don't be afraid of getting wrapped up in the story while you read it.

Evans never says you have to actually buy the whole package. My reading of Evans is that noody with any sense actully believes in religon, but suspension of disbelief (not negation, merely suspension) is neccesary to appreciate the beauty of religon.

When Evans says

The only mature attitude to religion is to see it for what it is - a kind of art, which only a child could mistake for reality, and which only a child would reject for being false.

I find it hard to believe that anybody would think he was pro-religon. We don't yell for Rowling's head because she wrote something false.

As for how Pat Robertson et al act, well, who the fuck cares? We know they're idiots. To change literary references for a mooment, the people who can't suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy a religous work remind me of people who hate Shakespeare after being forced to read him in school. Often years later they'll be able to pick up a book and read a good yarn without worry about what the teacher will think. Don't let Pat Roberston be the English lit teacher who spoils Shakespeare. Don't let the English lit teacher get away with writing the school's dress code, but don't write off great art.

#24055: PZ Myers — 05/05  at  01:32 PM
Right, Andy, I think Wolpert made a tactical error there. I can see great religious music as just plain good music, simply ignoring the propaganda in it while not having to temporarily adopt the degree of derangement required to believe in gods.

#24057: Ken Cope — 05/05  at  01:35 PM
After reading his Guardian article (where his makes his point, such as it is, more clearly than in his debate with Wolpert), Evans is merely swatting at a grotesque parody of atheism.

#24059: — 05/05  at  01:57 PM
"Evans is merely swatting at a grotesque parody of atheism."

He's being much cleverer than that. He is creating an artificial division in order to place himself in the sensible middle ground. And he is doing that in order to further his wannabe media personality/science commentator ambitions.

There is a very easy way to see why Evans is wrong, has Dawkins ever attacked Ancient Greek or Roman or Viking religion? No? Why? Because he isn't hostile to religion as quaint storytelling and metaphor, he is hostile to it as actually extant deluded factual claim.

#24060: Blogtopus — 05/05  at  02:03 PM
Don't forget: Today, May 5th in 1925, John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution.

#24062: UrsulaV — 05/05  at  02:43 PM
Hmm. I'm an artist. I paint lots of weird fantasy stuff.

And I think that the key to painting--oh, fairies, let's say--is that I don't believe in them. If I believed I was painting something real--the way I do when I paint, say, one of the Carolina wrens bouncing around my backyard--I would have to paint a real thing, which would mean that I'd be sitting with my nose an inch away from my photos, going "feather here, feather here, wing bars here, crap, the eye's too far forward...man, is this right?" There's a reason so many wildlife artists use opaque projectors, and I can't fault 'em.

But fairies aren't real, so I can draw a fairy and think "Okay, how do I make this look more convincing?" and tweak the wing attachments and the limbs and whatnot and drag out my human anatomy books and distort 'em all to hell, because, since I don't believe in fairies, nothing's RIGHT, it's all just "What will look good?" It's like--oh, being a professional magician, I guess. They don't believe what they're doing is magic, they know how the tricks are done, they're trying to manipulate the audience into believing what they see is real. Same thing. If I believed in fairies, I'd be stuck with 'em the way I'm stuck with the anatomy of wrens, but since I don't, I can do whatever I think will be most effective aesthetically. The fact I don't believe in fairies allows me to make them look a lot more convincing--because I know what people find visually convincing, and I can remember a lot of the visual tricks. (You do this in wildlife art, too, for that matter--reality falls down on the job a lot, and you gotta fudge. You're just a little more tightly bound.) I can tell reasonably charming visual lies, but the plain truth tends to lack the same spark.

That's sort of incoherent, I realize, and I wouldn't dare speak for all artists, but I suppose it could be summed up that even if I believed in a religion, I'd have to be an aetheist as long as I had a paintbrush in my hand.

#24066: — 05/05  at  03:12 PM
What's this about religious art? You mean like a painting of a martyr being disemboweled?
http://www.katolsk.no/biografi/erasmus.htm

It does have nice color. Lots of red, for some reason.

#24068: — 05/05  at  03:44 PM
I don't know. Gospel music really hits me. They're singing, "Come on children, shake the devil out your soul," and I'm right there with them. I've got metaphorical devils -- stress, anger, depression, etc -- that need 'shaking out' so the song works for me. I'm not thinking, "I believe I have a literal soul which the objectively real devil has taken hold it," but nor am I thinking, "this song is propagandizing for myth and while I can appreciate it's aesthetic qualities, it has no meaning for me." I'm relating to the words on a non-rational level, and the fact that I can rationally explain it in terms of metaphor and psychology is nice, but it's not necessary for my appreciation of them.

I believe in the Creation story of Genesis. I believe that humanity was once like animals, not knowing good and evil, and that it was a sort of paradise compared to all the questioning and self-doubt we deal with now. We nibbled at that fruit of the tree of knowledge, until we became truly self-aware and could see our own nakedness and no longer belonged in Eden. It is the same process every child goes through, from innocence to self-awareness to maturity which forces us to leave the protection of our no longer perfect parents and make our own way in the world. Should I ignore the beauty of this story or the truth contained in it, just because some idiots are too blind to see that it's not physical history?

I wonder if some atheists don't fear religion the way some believers fear science, seeing it as a threat to their world view, afraid to get to close lest they become corrupted by it. Do we really have to reject a paean to God as religious propaganda? Is a believer's joy and wonder at God's creation really any different from a scientist's joy and wonder at the elegance and complexity of the natural world?