Atheist Advertising

A couple of atheist ad campaigns have made it into the news recently. The most famous is a campaign in Washington DC with ads appearing on buses saying "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake".

And my sister just sent me a link to this story about a similar campaign in Denver, featuring billboards that read "Don't believe in God? You're not alone."

Now, both of these seem like decent campaigns to me. The spokesperson for the group that sponsored the first ad says the motivation is to increase awareness for non-religious people in the community that they are not alone, and secondarily to try to help dispel the mistaken notion that morality is necessarily tied to supernatural beliefs. The second campaign very obviously shares the first reason as well, to indicate to the non-religious that even though their views may be in the minority, they are not alone.

Obviously, not everyone thinks its a great idea. From the Fox story:

The humanists' entry into the marketplace of ideas did not impress AFA president Tim Wildmon.

"It's a stupid ad," he said. "How do we define 'good' if we don't believe in God? God in his word, the Bible, tells us what's good and bad and right and wrong. If we are each ourselves defining what's good, it's going to be a crazy world."

Well, Tim, we don't individually decide what's good. We can still collectively reach consensus on how we want to treat each other. That's called a society, with laws and mores. As I've pointed out before, many of the rights put forth in the US Constitution are not dictated by god, but are secular ideals. The very first amendment insures freedom of religion, the personal right to worship whatever you want. In contrast, the first commandment of the Old Testament strictly forbids worshipping anything but the Old Testament deity. One is a secular value, the other is a religious one, handed down from on high. How did we get the idea that religious pluralism is good? The founding fathers used their brains.

There are some gems in the Denver story as well:

Pastor Willard Johnson of Denver's Macedonia Baptist Church called the billboards a desperate effort to discredit Christianity.

"The Bible is being fulfilled. It says that in latter days, you have all these kinds of things coming up, trying to disrupt the validity of Christianity," Johnson said. "If they don't believe in God, how do they believe they came about? We denounce what they are doing. But we do it with love, with gentleness, with decency and with compassion."

Glad the atheists could help fulfill prophecy. Now think for a moment about inventing your own religion. What would be a good feature to implement that would be self-reinforcing against any kind of criticism? How about adding something about how there will be people who will try to tear down your beliefs and discredit them? That might be a good psychological mechanism from keeping your followers from ever actually listening to criticisms of their religious beliefs.

And I very much like the idea that you can denounce something gently.

Also from the same story:

Bob Enyart, a Christian radio host and spokesman for American Right to Life, said it's hard to ignore the evidence.

"The Bible says that faith is the evidence of things not seen. Evidence. If we ignore the evidence for gravity or the Creator, that's really dangerous," said Enyart. "Income tax doesn't not exist because somebody doesn't believe in it. And the same is true with our Creator."

Holy crap...I can't argue with that logic, mostly because there is no logic there. Whew.

Anyway, I applaud the efforts of the non-religious to increase awareness of our presence in society and make an effort to communicate to like-minded others that they are not alone. It's a small step toward community building, although as I've argued in the past, ultimately such a community will need to be build on a foundation of positive principles, things we do believe in such as human rights and scientific inquiry, rather than simply the absence of belief in the supernatural.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Religion and Science

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. In 2005 he wrote an excellent essay entitled "The Perimeter of Ignorance" in which he talks about how historically, many famous scientists invoked god when they reach the limits of their own understanding. He begins:

Writing in centuries past, many scientists felt compelled to wax poetic about cosmic mysteries and God's handiwork. Perhaps one should not be surprised at this: most scientists back then, as well as many scientists today, identify themselves as spiritually devout.

But a careful reading of older texts, particularly those concerned with the universe itself, shows that the authors invoke divinity only when they reach the boundaries of their understanding. They appeal to a higher power only when staring into the ocean of their own ignorance. They call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.

However, he recounts the anecdote of when Laplace presented his work to Napoleon that explained aspects of the movement of bodies in the solar system that Newton's work had not sufficiently explained:

According to an oft-repeated but probably embellished account, when Laplace gave a copy [of his manuscript] to his physics-literate friend Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon asked him what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens. "Sire," Laplace replied, "I have no need of that hypothesis."

Tyson gives other examples of this phenomenon, and then talks about it in its extreme, virulent forms, such as the organized efforts of Intelligent Design.

Another practice that isn't science is embracing ignorance. Yet it's fundamental to the philosophy of intelligent design: I don't know what this is. I don't know how it works. It's too complicated for me to figure out. It's too complicated for any human being to figure out. So it must be the product of a higher intelligence.

What do you do with that line of reasoning? Do you just cede the solving of problems to someone smarter than you, someone who's not even human? Do you tell students to pursue only questions with easy answers?

There may be a limit to what the human mind can figure out about our universe. But how presumptuous it would be for me to claim that if I can't solve a problem, neither can any other person who has ever lived or who will ever be born. Suppose Galileo and Laplace had felt that way? Better yet, what if Newton had not? He might then have solved Laplace's problem a century earlier, making it possible for Laplace to cross the next frontier of ignorance.

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem.

Here's a video of Tyson talking about these topics at Beyond Belief:



I plan on reading Tyson's Death by Black Hole soon. I'll post review(s) as I do.

Atheist Soldier Sues the Army for Discrimination

This story is getting more mainstream coverage now.

Army Spc. Jeremy Hall was raised Baptist.

Like many Christians, he said grace before dinner and read the Bible before bed. Four years ago when he was deployed to Iraq, he packed his Bible so he would feel closer to God.

He served two tours of duty in Iraq and has a near perfect record. But somewhere between the tours, something changed. Hall, now 23, said he no longer believes in God, fate, luck or anything supernatural.

Hall said he met some atheists who suggested he read the Bible again. After doing so, he said he had so many unanswered questions that he decided to become an atheist.

His sudden lack of faith, he said, cost him his military career and put his life at risk. Hall said his life was threatened by other troops and the military assigned a full-time bodyguard to protect him out of fear for his safety.

In March, Hall filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others. In the suit, Hall claims his rights to religious freedom under the First Amendment were violated and suggests that the United States military has become a Christian organization.

The CNN story mentions two instances, one where he was told to leave the table at Thanksgiving after not joining in prayer. The other was when a fellow soldier yelled "Do you believe in Jesus now?" after he was nearly killed in an attack. But they don't mention the incident that Hall says actually sparked the lawsuit, which he describes in this interview:



Hall tried to organize an atheist meeting, and his commanding officer showed up. After the short meeting, the officer berated Hall and told him he was in violation of several codes of conduct. That seems like a pretty clear violation of the First Amendment.

Now I know that the military isn't like civilian life, and you obviously don't enjoy the full spectrum of freedoms that people outside the military do. But is does a soldier forfeit his freedom of religion when he puts on a uniform?

I also understand about unit cohesion, at least in philosophy. The idea is that soldiers who have more in common will act more effectively than a hodge-podge group who have a lot of differences. This was an argument in favor of keeping homosexuals out of the military (or at least not asking them if they were homosexual). I haven't seen actual studies on this, but I don't find it hard to believe that uniformity among soldiers in a unit actually makes them more effective in many ways.

This raises several questions. Is effectiveness more important than principles? America generally acknowledges diversity as a strength. Should diversity be reflected in the military as well?

I can also understand the conceptual overlap between Christianity and the military. They are both top-down ideologies. Do what you're told, and you're not given a lot of latitude in which to interpret the commands from above. I can see that a Christian military commander might not fully trust an atheist with little respect for divine authority (he might just decide he doesn't have respect for earthly authority either!).

Actually, if the military decided that being an atheist made you unfit to serve in combat, most atheists (except those yearning for military action) would probably be fine with it. That would mean that all the gung-ho believers could line up for the hail of bullets and bombs.

But in the end I don't think we'd want to live in a country with a military that supports that kind of discrimination. The military has learned to incorporate minorities and women into their ranks. They can deal with a few infidels too.

Teach the Controversy

Links to these t-shirts have been making the rounds for a while, but they are cool.


























































Yeah, I want one. My favorite is the devil burying dinosaur bones.