Richard Dawkins Has God on the Ropes in Science verses Religion Debate - Final Round - FIGHT!

The New Atheists still hold onto the hope that God may be tapping out of the fight. In recent months, they have hit the campaign trail in a fury. Dawkins has shown up on O'Reilly and The Colbert Report, Sam Harris has covered cable talk shows and talk radio segments, and even the late great Carl Sagan is making a comeback post-mortem with a new release due out in the coming months with or without the help of George Noory. Despite all the valiant efforts, New Atheists still find themselves running into some marketing setbacks. For one, they never seem to propose realistic solutions to the damage religion can cause. Atheism and fatalism start to sound synanomous after awhile. New Atheism fancies itself a straightforward appeal to our intellect, no emotion involved. The problem is, this approach proves dangerous if the religious community comes back and supports their belief with (shock and awe) Reason.

If truth is merely an idea with no Figurehead, you’re going to have a hard time getting a movement off the ground, right? Maybe the movement needs an Ascension into Heaven. Perhaps look into making a god to follow out of someone with star power – a galvanizing character of their own to follow. Oprah and Keanu Reeves come to mind. Sam Harris might do, but no offense against Sam, they need a little more sex appeal, a haggard beard, the Hippie-look, someone like Jesus Christ. Someone that people see like they did back with the Guy from Galilee and say, now there’s a guy that has that Shepherd Smith swoon appeal. I’ll follow him to the ends of the earth. Where do I put my nets?

The Urgency Conundrum

In addition to the lack of a Mobilizing Force, New Atheism wrestles with what I call the Urgency Conundrum. Warren Allen Smith, author of the year 2000 encyclopedia “Who’s Who In Hell?”, spent six decades up to age 85 sending letters asking people if they believe in God. He is a committed atheist. He is currently working on his magnum opus: a Web site called Philosopedia. He’s working hard. Why the urgency, you ask? He fears he doesn’t have many years before the memory drain. And he worries about the threat of fundamentalism in the East AND the West. It's a bit paradoxical. Why be so worried about saving a world with no intrinsic value, anyway? We don’t bend over backwards to save a cockroach. All they do is freak out the kids. We kill it, then we flush it, and we still sleep well at night.

The March of Morality

Another big question the movement can't seem to market its way out of is the "Origins of Morality" quest. A recent U.S. News article finds Jay Tolson planting these questions in the scientific fields of Consciousness Research. French mathematician Rene' Descartes gave us Cartesian Dualism where bodily organs send perceptions and other information via the brain to the mind. The mind would ponder, then makes decisions and direct the bodies' responses in word and deed. Cognitive theorists, over time, scoffed at this as the “Ghost in the Machine” argument but it worked well for awhile.

Recently neuroscientists like Francis Crick have picked up the trail with works such as "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul". He argues that "You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett backs him up with his `Fame in the Brain' analogy. At any one moment there are many potential conscious states in the body, many contending neuronal "assemblies", vying for "celebrity", for their moment in the spotlight. But only one can win the competition and it all depends on who is the Alpha-Neuronal assembly.

This begs the question, Where do the rules come from for the game? The conscious mind comes up with orderly representations of meaning, but it doesn’t create meaning. Where do we get the meaning from? Why do we want to give something meaning? Why does a kiss mean more to us than just, “Hmm, my brain just registered pressure from an outside force against my face. (Maybe that’s why man invented the French Kiss, just to take the pressure off the situation, but I digress).

All of this brings up the question posed by Jay Tolson. Am I just a survival machine? Is "meaning" nothing more than the sum of appropriate responses to information in ultimate service to life. If this is true, then life purpose, freedom and individuality are just reassuring illusions of possible survival value. (And great fodder for making the NY Times Bestseller list for a lot of psychobabblers involved in Life Coaching). But if our personality and very beliefs are simply the end result of some physiological Great Race to the service of our ultimate survival, then why do we have heroes willing to die for others rather than survive? Somebody should tell firefighters that they’re really screwed up in the head!

As recent as this summer, Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, himself a professed convert to Christianity, faced off in a scientific smackdown on the invitation of Time Magazine. Evolution, the complexity of life, miracles, stem cell research, the problem of good and evil and other heady topics were discussed. My impression after reading the transcripts is what follows.

Every decade or so a new group of people rise up to take God to the mat over His existence. They do this because they are enlightened. They have seen ALL the variables and have measured God and found Him wanting. Their omniscience allows them to do this. They explain to us that our faith has held us back from exploring and they show us gently how we have explained God into existence. They can do this because they have explained Him out of existence. They pity us. We should pity ourselves. If we were only willing to try something new, we would discover things we would never have known otherwise. Think about it, someone had to be the first to look at a cow and say, "I think I'll squeeze these dangly things, here, and drink whatever comes out", right? If it wasn't for someone's faith...er...enlightenment, we'd still be eating our cereal dry. And if it wasn't for these enlightened individuals, we'd all still be running around amazed by the size of the universe and acting like we don't yet understand its farthest reaches. When all is said and done, I say, thank GOD for atheists!

Richard Dawkins Has God on the Ropes in Science verses Religion Debate - Round 1 - FIGHT!

Friedrich Nietzche is getting new support from Big Wig Atheists in the `God Is Dead Campaign’. Fortunately God is being leant support from morticians in the `Nietzsche Is Dead Campaign’”. According to a recent study, 85% of America has a faith in God ("What We Believe" Time Magazine, Oct 30th, 2006). However, we part ways into one of several categories when we drill down to Who or What God actually is. Undeterred by our obstinance, the New Atheists of the world hold onto their faith (no, that's not a Freudian Slip though maybe it should be) that God may yet be on the verge of tapping out of the ring. A slew of recent works have flown off the shelves by the likes of Oxford University prof Richard Dawkins, neuroscience Know-it-All Sam Harris, and Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett. We now have the Multiverse Hypothesis in cosmology saying we may have upwards of 300 billion universes, and if we’re one in a billion, why not spring up accidentally without divine intervention? Annoyingly enough, that also increases the chances that nature is even more outside the scope of our understanding, but, I digress.

Logic Attacks Religion

Dawkins sees it as a closet movement “I believe we’re in the same position the gay movement was in a few decades ago. There was a need for people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people had the courage to come out. I think that’s the case with atheists.” He goes on to goad in a November Wired Magazine article that “Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists. Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist. Either they’re stupid, or they’re lying. And have they got a motive for lying?…Everybody knows that an atheist can’t get elected.”

Yeah, and your point? Most people, on occasion, grant legislators both stupidity and dishonesty. But what do you do with the other 85% of "stupid" God-fearing Americans when you figure that many of them are doctors, lawyers, and the like. New Atheist Glen Slade, the organizer of the monthly atheists “Brights” group in London offers more hope that the War on Terror is setting the stage for a No-Faith Takeover by raising awareness about the existence of more than one world religion. Well, so do specials on The History Channel but no matter how high-priced basic cable gets, it’s still cheaper than a war on terror – I think we had knowledge of multiple world religions before the war stepped in. Glen Slade continues, "A lot of moderates give a power base to extremists. A lot of Catholics use condoms and get divorced and even listen to punk rock like Bad Religion (Greg Graffin’s an atheist). They still stay Catholic. But when the Pope speaks, he still gets credit for speaking for a billion people." Hmm, I actually like Slade. He’s more religious than most religious people I know. He wants to call BS on religious apathy. It's all or nothing, baby! Dawkins, however, gives a tired argument. "As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers.” Sure it is, if you believe that all religions are fundamentally the same.

So if logic can't win the day for the New Atheist, you can always drag out the Apocalytic Threat.
Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation, believes we are going to kill ourselves off over religion. But he’s not worried that time won’t change us and we will eventually see the error of our ways. He points to slavery and rests his case. “At some point it is just going to be too embarrassing to believe in God." But won’t that only work for those people who succumb to the very thing you’re asking them to lay aside, namely, groupthink and a culture of religious belief? When asked about the look and feel of a world without God, Sam offers a Religion of Reason, the 21st Century equivalent of Robespierre's Culture of the Supreme Being. He offers the Atheist Prayer – “That our reason will subjugate our superstition, that our intelligence will check our illusions, that we will be able to hold at bay the evil temptation of faith.”

All of this double-speak makes my head hurt. It works on the tired premise that religion is not rational. Well, riddle me this, Batman? Where does your motivation for disproving faith come from? A desire to have cognitive resonance? Where is your dissonance coming from? These incovenient questions pose a marketing hurdle for the New Atheist movement. (That and the supremely depressing end result of their logical arguments). As it turns out, so does new scientific discovery in the field of consciousness research. And that is where we will turn in Round 2...

The American Theatre of the Absurd Marches On While 9 out of 10 Terrorists Vote Democrat

When in doubt, look at Hollywood. Why have cinema ticket sales been on a downturn overall for some years now? Because they have a new competitor in the entertainment media..."hard news" media! MSNBC's Brian Williams spouted off earlier this week, lamenting the increasingly held public perception of his friend and comedic pundit John Stewart on Comedy Central's The Daily Show as a hard news source. Former CNN Headline News Anchor David Goodnow calls much of it a "theatre of the absurd" in an interview on The Hub Radio Show this week. Can you blame him? In the scope of three weeks the world has wrestled with the "Pocket Commie" in North Korea and his nuclear tests, the terrorist vote has come in with resounding and giddy support for Democrats on November 7th (www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52747), and Iran's Devolutionary Guards are busy firing off test missiles in Tehran. All the while what are we being peppered with at home? Tales of a Mark "Foley-Artist" and his online chit chats with of-age Pages, calls for the House Speaker to bow out in shame and incessant bloviating over a has-been wacko politician with no stake in the upcoming election other than as a galvanizing factor for the base and a reminder that his blood might as well be housed in a cryonics lab. Hello Alphabet-Soup-Media, we're sick of the politics for the sake of politics. We don't care about their egos! The theatre of the absurd only gets worse on the local level. (Investigative news teams are the creme' de la creme'). "Killer Gas Pumps" in Cleveland, Ohio and UFO sightings in Syracuse. Hell, re-runs of FRIENDS just trounced Katie Couric's CBS Nightly Skews in L.A.'s prestigious infotainment audience!

Gate-keeper news moguls are constantly asking themselves the question, How do we make news that's relevant and therefore, marketable and revenue generating? Here's an answer. How about focusing on the issues that matter! A National Retail Sales Tax Plan that overhauls a doomsday-date for Social Security, a support for our troops on the ground that doesn't put them at further risk due to a half-hearted commitment to their on-going efforts, and an Administration that acknowleges the similarities between "National Security" and "Border Security" without talking out of both sides of their mouth and giving us a "pass-off" bill.

On November 7th, vote and exercise your freedom of choice. But investigate for yourself and leave the sleight-of-hand media out of the process. Let THE issues be the issue, not their issues.