Morality Behind the Wheel

I was behind the wheel again one recent morning and travelling along a section of dual carriageway near to home when two birds flew directly towards me at about grill height.

As far as I know, I hit the birds at around 100km/hr, killing them instantly.

This little event reminded me of a couple of things, the injured parrot that my father brought home one day (a sweet but otherwise irrelevant memory) and the first time I hit something substantial with a car – a kangaroo.

Hitting the kangaroo was pretty devastating, not only because the car was important to me at the time but also because rather than killing the kangaroo outright, the collision merely shattered both its legs.  After some initial flustering, I dispatched the kangaroo with a handy stick, bemoaned the damage that it did and got on my way.  Since then, I’ve hit another kangaroo, plenty of rabbits, a bluetongue or two, a deer, quite a few birds and about a bazillion insects.  And a taxi (I didn’t kill the taxi).

The thing that struck me as I pondered striking the birds was that of all the things I had struck, that first kangaroo affected me the most.  The remainder were little more than inconveniences.

But even when I think about my unfortunate interaction with that first kangaroo, my primary concern was ending its suffering – the fact that I had caused its death was a very minor concern.  The stupid thing did jump right out in front of me and I did try to avoid it to the best of my ability.  Note that I distinguish between being a party to causing its death, which I did when I hit it with my car, and killing it, which I did when I broke its neck with a stick.  I intentionally killed the kangaroo in order to prevent a lingering death that I had unintentionally caused.  It wasn’t the death that affected me so much as the suffering, which I brought to an end as quickly as I could.

Nowadays, whenever I see a dead kangaroo on the side of the road, if I think about it at all my thought will likely be something along the lines of “Oh, a dead kangaroo, better not drive over that”.

When I see a dead cat or dog beside the road, my reaction is quite different.

As an atheist, this may appear somewhat strange.  A dead animal is a dead animal, the species shouldn’t make much of a difference, but of course it does.

Part of the reason why I react differently is that I have pets myself, and so when I see a dead pet by the road, I can imagine one of my pets there and thus feel a vicarious sense of loss.  Plus, I have had pets die so the sight triggers memories of past losses.

This potential for emotion is amplified immensely if one considers what it would be like to hit a child.

To be honest, during my pondering, I indulged my rather black sense of humour with an attempt to come up with a joke along the lines of:

The first time I ran over a child, it was devastating … Active Suspension now comes standard with the 2013 Chevrolet Suburban – ‘No More Bumps in the Road’

or:

Friend – “It must be devastating to run over a child”

Me – “Yep, it’s pretty bad the first couple of times”

The point of this black humour, of course, is that for any normal person it would be absolutely devastating to hit a child and, at least when one tries to predict the experience, running over a child would be devastating every single time.  The nonchalance that one gains with respect to running over random wildlife, or even pets for the more hardhearted among us, doesn’t seem to apply to running over children.

Those who think humans are something totally separate from the animals might not be happy about it, but I think that this inability to normalise the death of children is related to our tendency to mourn the loss of someone else’s pet, even if we know neither the animal nor their owner.

The scale of the emotional power associated with the death of a child derives from the huge personal (and genetic) investment that K-selecting humans have in their children together with the fact that the vast majority of us ourselves have been children at some stage.  In the awful circumstances of seeing child killed, we can conceptually put ourselves in the position of the parents (modern day Western parents are, on average, likely to have slightly less than two children and a lot less likely to have witnessed infant mortality than in the past).  But not only that, we can also put ourselves in the position of the child.  The death of another, be it a child or any other human, is an uncomfortable reminder of our own mortality.  Death by some other means is also horrible, but a random death such as in a car accident is disturbingly democratic – it could happen to any one of us.

Despite the attempts of people like D’Souza to claim otherwise, uttering “Dead kid, well it’s not my kid, so why should I care?” is not the normal reaction of an atheist, irrespective of how devoted she is to the idea that we evolved rather than being created.  It’s the reaction of a psychopath.

---------------------------------

I have witnessed the catastrophe of infant mortality from a closer vantage point than is comfortable.  I can tell you that there are few things more heart-breaking than watching grieving parents bear an infant’s coffin towards a grave.

I should also point out that in this article my focus was intended to be more on inadvertently causing death, not on causing suffering.  I do understand that when we strike an animal with our cars, it is entirely likely that the death we cause will not be instantaneous.  We can also imagine a moment of terror that comes with some level of realisation that death is looming in the form of a metallic box on wheels.

When discussing death, we sometimes reassure ourselves with the idea that death came quickly: “At least she didn’t suffer”.

It seems that, in a sense, we generally consider the causing of suffering to be a greater wrong than the causing of death.  Again, the idea that an atheist may be oblivious to the suffering of another animal, be it human or other, a pet or a wild animal, is nonsense.

Atheists are Evil

I wrote the first draft of this article the day before the news that D’Souza was having an affair broke.  It’s a pity, because D’Souza says so many stupid things and he was shaping up as good material.  As a leading apologist though, his days may now be numbered.  Now back to your regular service …

------------------------

There are two fundamental reasons why atheists are evil.  First, because of what they think.  Second, because of what they are.

This might sound like a controversial claim, but it’s not an uncommon claim, although the vast majority of people making the claim don’t state it quite so baldly.

------------------------

Let’s look at the intellectual evil of atheists first, and then we can look at their ontological evil.

For the committed theist, the existence of god is self-evident.  You can see evidence of this in some of their statements and their questions.  There’s an example in the Q&A portion of a debate between Dinesh D’Souza and Peter Singer:

It seems like that when all of the evidence points logically to the conclusion of a God that you tend to come up with a different hypothesis.  So what’s confusing to me, as watching you being the atheist viewpoint, is it seems like, rather than look at the evidence and just see where it leads, you start with the position that God doesn’t exist and see if the evidence can get you there, and when it doesn’t you come up with a different hypothesis and my question is simply is that true what I feel like, you know, or am I wrong?

Peter Singer quite happily told the questioner that he was wrong and that he (Peter Singer) didn’t see any of that “evidence” that apparently points logically to a god but rather a wealth of evidence against the Christian conception of god, focussing particularly on suffering.

Then Dinesh D’Souza had the opportunity for a brief response (I’ve taken his stuttering out):

Look, ultimately here … let’s take one more look at this issue of suffering because in a sense it’s demounted as Job did as a complaint against God and the argument would go something like this: “God, why don’t I have both my hands?”

Now the question you have to ask is, if it is the case that there is a God and if it is the case that He created us, all living creatures have been given something to which they are not entitled in any way, namely life itself.

Even the person who has little, or is suffering, is often clinging to life, which is to say life is valuable to us.  We’re still in the plus column because we want to keep living, and so what I am getting at is do we really have a legitimate complaint against God by saying, in a sense, “I’ve only got one hand, that guy has two. Why did you make me a one-hander?  Why did you give me cancer so I only have 47 years of life when I could have had 70?”

It seems to me that these complaints ring hollow when you consider that our entire life and everything we have is in fact a gift from God so, on the premise that God exists, which was his (Singer’s) premise, it looks to me that He has not done anything to any of us that has put us in the negative column.  We’re still in a sense on the positive side of the ledger because we still have something to which we have no claim and have no right against Him, namely the gift of life itself.

Note carefully what D’Souza is implying here.  Singer has argued throughout the debate that the Christian conception of god is inconsistent with the evidence and presents as his primary case the argument that suffering of non-human animals due to non-human causes is inconsistent with a benevolent god.  He follows a chain something like this:

If your god is omni-omni (my term, not Singer’s meaning omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent), why is there suffering?

-       Response, free will is so brilliant that all the suffering in this world is worth the cost, it’s just not possible to implement free will without suffering as a side-effect and, in any case, the longer term goal of salvation makes the suffering inconsequential.

Ok assuming that your arguments are valid; why, if your god is omni-omni, do animals suffer when they don’t have salvation as a pay-off?

-       Singer’s conclusion is that, if he exists, then god is either incompetent or evil, which is not part of the Christian conception of god, therefore god as the Christians conceive him does not exist (another option is that god simply doesn’t care, but that brings god into line with Darwinian evolution – the Christian god apparently does care)

Singer is arguing that the inconsistency in the Christian conception on god is evidence that that particular god does not exist.  Singer is not having a hissy-fit, pouting his little lips and declaring that he’s angry at god because there’s some suffering in the world.  D’Souza however seems to think that if (in Singer’s estimation) God were a bit better at preventing suffering, then Singer would begrudgingly acknowledge Him but until then, Singer’s going to be an atheist just to spite God.

Some theists seem to be unable to get their heads around the idea that atheists simply don’t believe in a god.

My theory is that this is related to the phenomenon by which some theists are locked into their faith, that is by means of a form of wishful thinking – they simply would not wish to live in a universe in which there is no god looking after them.  There’s a beautiful Swedish song, Du Måste Finnas, or “You Must Exist” in which the singer pretty much begs god to exist (this is my translation, not that on the video):

You drove me out, God,

I was ripped from my homeland,

I am refugee and a stranger here

And I find myself in the wilderness*

But you took my child

And now you take me from my husband

I can no longer see a meaning to it all

What is it that you want?

What should I believe …?

My thoughts are dizzying

Before me there is an abyss

I am in turmoil and want to say “no”

[But] the question has been raised.

And now my soul shakes in anticipation of the answer

That you don’t exist

Even though I believed in you.

Who will help me survive this life?

Who will give me the strength that I need?

Who will comfort me, so insignificant in this world?

If you don’t exist,

Yes, then what should I do?

No, you must exist,

You must,

I live my life through you. 

Without you I am no more than a ripple in a stormy sea. 

You must exist,

You must. 

How can you forsake me? 

I would be nothing,

I would be nothing if you didn’t exist.

Never before have I had it in word or thought,

The little word that scares and plagues me so,

The word is “if”, if I prayed all my prayers in vain

If you don’t exist,

Then what should I do?

Who would sense my repentence and later forgive?

Peace in my soul, yes, who would grant me that?

Who would receive me after death?

If you didn’t exist

Then what should I do?

No, you must exist,

You must,

I live my life through you. 

Without you I am no more than a ripple in a stormy sea. 

You must exist,

You must. 

How can you forsake me? 

I would be nothing,

I would be nothing if you didn’t exist.

* Note: there’s a play on words here, “ödet” which I’ve translated into “the wilderness” while strictly meaning “desolation” also means “fate”, “the wilderness” works on both a literal and a figurative level, since she’s in pioneer era Minnesota, a long way from home, and she’s also metaphysically adrift as the following verses indicate

Note that the character is rather conflicted.  In part, she is angry at the god she believed in (for forcing her from Sweden, killing her child, putting her in the wilderness and so on).  But she expresses something which I think a lot of recovering theists probably feel at some time or another – a notion that a universe without god, even a god that one is angry with, is undesirable.  Julia Sweeny vividly describes a form of vertigo experienced while she was losing her religion in “Letting Go of God” (or the TED version).

This believing because not believing would be so terrible is a mirror image of what I think D’Souza and people like him believe is going on with atheists.  D’Souza assumes that there are people who, because of ignorant pride or inappropriate priorities, decide that an existent god is not doing a good enough job and who, as a consequence, decide quite irrationally that the universe would be better without god.  These people, according to D’Souza, therefore adopt the intellectual stance of believing in the non-existence of something that obviously exists – thus becoming atheists.

If this were the case, it would be a type of evil.  If god, being the omnipotent and omniscient creator of everything and the source of all good, were to exist (and that existence were self-evident) but insignificant vermin such as humans took it upon themselves to judge god and turn away from god, that would indeed be an evil act on their part.  No questions about that.

(This might be part of the reason that apostates are looked upon so unkindly, although a better explanation is that the policy of treating apostates poorly – up to and including torturing them to death – makes apostasy a somewhat less attractive option for others, which in turn makes it easy to lock people into your in-group.)

However, as far as I know, this isn’t how the vast majority of atheists see things.  Some atheists are particularly disenchanted with the religious, and they do mock theists by saying that even if god did exist (which, they make clear, he doesn’t) then he’d not be worth worshipping because of all the suffering, or because of how much of a megalomaniac butcher he was in the Old Testament, or because gay people are people too, or whatever.

But … a person who is seriously pissed-off with God for His mismanagement is a pissed-off theist, not a pissed-off atheist.

So, that’s the intellectually evil atheist, or rather the straw-man of the intellectually evil atheist.

-------------------------

But atheists are not just evil because of what they think, they also evil because of what they are.  The nature of an atheist is inherently evil.  Fortunately, this inherent evil is not unique to atheists.

I wrote before about a miracle testimonial event that I attended at the urging of a Christian friend.  I was sorely disappointed that I didn’t hear about people being miraculously cured of amputations, or third degree burns, or even cancer.

 (I guess remissions don’t always last – it’s somewhat dark humour, but I have in my head the voice of my friend telling me that I should have come last year, because there was this great speaker, a young woman, who had talked about how she had been miraculously cured of terminal cancer, and that I would have enjoyed that.  Oh, yes, I ask, what happened to her?  The cancer came back and she died, my friend tells me – oblivious to the fact that he is telling me that the miracle that I would have liked to listen to was not, in fact, a miracle at all.)

All the “miracles” that evening were mundane stories about how people in the congregation had been nice to each other.  Now I am all for that, I like people being nice to each other and I really like it when people are nice to me, but that’s far from miraculous … unless you have a rather twisted view of humanity.

In the debate between D’Souza and Singer, D’Souza tries to argue that the Ten Commandments are not made up.  I’ve heard him make the same argument elsewhere, but in this particular instance, he makes a comment to the effect that if he were to be a member of the committee responsible for making up the Ten Commandments, he’d toss three of them away for a start (I don’t know how many he’d finally end up ditching) – because D’Souza doesn’t like to be told not do things.  I don’t know which version of the Bible he’s talking about, but it sounds to me that he’s talking about tossing three of the commandments that appear after honouring your father and mother (in the context of the debate, I can’t imagine that he meant that he’d toss out the first three “I am god” commandments or that he has a burning desire to dishonour his parents).  That leaves him with:

Thou shalt not kill

Thou shalt not commit adultery

Thou shalt not steal

Thou shalt not lie

Thou shalt not covet houses

Thou shalt not covet wives, manservants, maidservants, oxen, asses, etc

To be kind, we could assume that D’Souza is very much into coveting.  He enjoys a good covet.  So, that’s two of his three and he’s got one more commandment to discard.  If he’s got any sense at all, he’d go for “Thou shalt not lie”.  Now that lying is ok, along with the coveting, he can happily lie about all that killing, adultery and stealing he does.

(News reports out today, the day of my editing of what I wrote yesterday, indicate that D’Souza could have wanted to ditch “Thou shalt not commit adultery” and “Thou shalt not lie”, I guess that leaves him scope to take out “Thou shalt not covet wives, manservants, maidservants, oxen, asses, etc” – I’m not currently aware of the marital status of D’Souza’s squeeze.)

The point is that D’Souza was basically implying that he would keep the commandments, as silly as half of them are and as bleeding obvious as the other half are, because he’s Christian and he believes that god wants him to obey them.  Without them, he would be like the caricature of an atheist that he depicts: uncaring, totally amoral and intensely covetous.  (Edit – actually, even with them he’s a bit like that.)

It seems to me that people like D’Souza should be theists and even atheists should want people like D’Souza to be theists, because they are psychopaths who are only kept in line (edit – to a certain extent) by a comforting fairy tale.

This viewpoint, that without theism, humans are like wild beasts, is a recurring theme.  D’Souza even went as far to claim that, before the advent of Christianity, there was no compassion.  So, what he’s specifically claiming is that if you are not a Christian, you are highly likely to be an uncaring, dishonest, vicious, baby-discarding, cannibalistic, light-fingered, indiscriminately copulating and covetous beast.

I bet they don’t put that in the travel brochures.

-------------------------

Please note, I am not really saying that atheists are evil.  Other than Ayn Rand, of course.

-------------------------

D’Souza really made a mess of the last section of this – it seems that even if you are a Christian you can still be a bit of a beast.  It just means that you are a hypocritical beast.

D'Souza and the Village of Bill

Dinesh D’Souza introduced the village of Bill while participating in The Great Debate together with Ian Hutchinson arguing against the proposal that science has refuted religion, which was defended by Sean Carroll and Michael Shermer.

During the “cross-examination phase”, D’Souza raises the mystery of Bill.  He describes visiting a village (which seems based on figures from a Pew Forum Report) in which there are a hundred people, of whom 95 say they know someone called Bill, three of them say they don’t know the guy and two say that Bill does not exist.  D’Souza then rhetorically asks who you are going to believe.

This is a brilliant argument, but not for D’Souza.

If you had two disbelieving people in a village of 100 who are indistinguishable from any other villager (apart from their position on the existence of Bill) then you could easily check their rationality by asking any of the 95 who say that Bill exists to introduce you to Bill.

Say that you approach each of the 95 and ask them about Bill and their responses are something like:

·         Oh Bill’s not physically here, he built the village, created the villagers from dust and left

·         Bill is sort of here, was sort of here in the form of Young Billy and has always been here, and in fact everywhere

·         You can’t see Bill, he’s an immaterial, transcendent, timeless, personal sort of bloke

·         If you just open your eyes and your heart, you can welcome Bill into your life, but until you truly believe in him, you won’t see him or feel his presence

·         When Bill calls you, you will know him

·         You can’t see Bill with earthly senses, you just have to have faith

·         We will meet up with Bill once we die, he’s creating this place where we can be with him and praise him forever

·         To be honest I sometimes doubt that Bill exists too, but then I talk to an officially sanctioned proponent of the existence of Bill and she reassures me

·         I don’t know much about Bill, but everyone else seems to know him and that’s good enough for me

·         Young Billy did some miracles and stuff and was way cool and the people who first believed that Young Billy was the Son of Bill and stuff all agreed that Young Billy was the Son of Bill and some other stuff, not that I’ve actually read what they wrote because it’s all in this like old language and stuff, so of course there is a Bill, ooh, look, a butterfly

·         We’ll forgive you this once, being an outsider, but if you question the existence of Bill one more time, we will smite you

·         Bill must exist, because if he didn’t, there would be no basis for our morality

·         Young Billy died for our sins

·         Bill loves us so much that he sent Young Billy or himself or both or a third or perhaps two thirds of himself to Earth to have a really bad weekend for us so that he can forgive us for the fact that he, Bill, made us fitted for (but not with) the ability to sin

·         You don’t believe in Bill?  Don’t you realise that sinners will bask in Hell for an eternity?  Stop denying Bill for the sake of your immortal soul!

·         Lots of smart people through the ages have believed in Bill, even some of your scienteristic types, are you trying to tell me that you are smarter than them?  Even Einstein said “Bill does not play Scrabble” and “The Bill I believe in is a type of Bill who isn’t really Bill as most Billeists think of Bill, but a Bill who interacts with the universe in a similar fashion to luminiferous ether, ie not at all”

·         Don’t you come around here asking about Bill, the onus is on you to prove that Bill doesn’t exist and you can’t

·         Look, it’s obvious that Bill exists, he made the village, and us, and you, just last week.  From nothing!  The evidence is all available to you, so long as you don’t let yourself be misled by standard scientific methodology

·         If you really want to know Bill, you should read this book or come to one of our weekly “Let’s Talk about Bill” sessions.  Oh and by the way, don’t read the book literally, you have interpret it.  Actually, now I think about it, don’t read the book, just let me tell you the central message of the book.  Bill exists!  Isn’t that great!

Also say that you notice that the 95 are grouped into quite distinct groups based on the specifics of Bill: what they think that Bill looks like, what and who Bill likes, what Bill’s intentions are, the approved way of holding “Let’s Talk about Bill” sessions, the correct day for holding “Let’s Talk about Bill” sessions and the response to questions (polite disdain, amazement, declaration of crusade/jihad and so on).

Finally, say that not a single one of the 95 is able to lead you to the house where Bill lives.  They can’t show you a photo of Bill.  A team of forensic scientists are called in and no trace of Bill can be found.  The claims made about Bill are investigated and every single phenomenon that is attributed to Bill can be explained by other means.

Who are you going to believe now?

Are you going to believe the 95, many of whom need weekly meetings to remind themselves of their commitment to believing that Bill exists and many of whom, when questioned, reveal that they don’t really know the officially sanctioned details of Bill but do like the general idea of Bill?  Or are you going to believe the two, whose position is entirely consistent with the facts available – or perhaps the three who remain steadfastly agnostic and supposedly will believe in the existence of Bill if and when he turns up?

What do scientists know?

Dinesh D’Souza participated in The Great Debate together with Ian Hutchinson arguing against the proposal that science has refuted religion, which was defended by Sean Carroll and Michael Shermer.

Dinesh speaks last of the four and after bit of introductory fluff which sounds like a complaint that the audience is biased he says, at 37’43”:

Here we are flung into the world and we are facing, if we are going to be thoughtful about it, some very key and fundamental questions that are very difficult to answer:

“Why is there a world, why is there a universe?”

“What are we doing here?” 

“Where are we going, what’s going to come after we die?”

“What’s the point of being here in the first place?”

I don’t think it’s possible to be an intelligent human being and not consider these questions to be important.  They have to do with what our life is all about and what this world is all about.

Now, for science to refute religion, it needs to consider the religious answers to these questions and provide a better answer.  But in fact the scientific answer to all the questions I’ve just mentioned is the following:

“Don’t have a clue”

“Don’t have a clue”

“Don’t have a clue” and

“Don’t have a clue”

Why is there a universe?  There’s no scientific answer to that question.

Why are we here?  There’s no answer to that question either.

What’s going to happen to us after we die?  Science has no clue.

This ends at about 38’54” into the video (I converted it to .mp3 so the timing might be slightly out).

Less than a minute later (about 39’30”), D’Souza says:

But science, if it claims to know what comes after death, is not only going beyond science but engaging in the most ignorant dogmatism that can be imagined, comparable to the foolishness of any mindless fundamentalist.

Science is claiming to know what it absolutely does not know.  This is the worst kind of dogmatism made even more culpable if it is engaged in by intelligent people who should know better.

Presumably there’s a group of people who say “We act on faith, we’re believers”.  Remember that those people don’t even claim to be knowers.  They’re believers.

But if you claim to be science guys, you claim to be guided by facts, by knowledge, by careful empiricism.  So don’t be led into pretending to have the answers that you manifestly don’t have.

This ends at about 40’25”.

So which do you want, D'Souza, to have your cake or to eat it?  Or is it a magic cake, that you can eat and still have it, like the Magic Pudding, or perhaps Magic chocolate.

In case the reader missed it, at one point D'Souza is saying that scientists happily admit to not having a clue as to what happens after we die, then a few minutes later, he's claiming that scientists claim to know, definitively what happens after we die.  And in each case D'Souza castigates the scientists - who are clearly damned if they do and damned if they don't.

I suspect that, if you were to ask the scientists, they'd have a pretty good idea precisely who it is who doesn't have clue.