How Atheists Find Meaning

Read this excellent Buzzfeed article about how various atheists find meaning in their lives without a god.

Then read this this comment by Barry Arrington on the article. Arrington does nothing but sneer, saying the atheists in the article exhibit "gobsmacking stupidity", have a "lack of intellectual honesty" and "[spout] self-contradicting pseudo-profundities".

But he doesn't give a single example of what he thinks is wrong!

On a more personal note, who would you rather have lunch with? Arrington, or the genuine humans depicted in Buzzfeed, full of modesty, joy, sorrow, intellectual curiosity, and love?

Barry Arrington Channels Thomas Lanier Clingman

Thomas Lanier Clingman (1812-1897) was a Christian pro-slavery Senator from North Carolina who today is memorialized in the eponymous Clingman's Dome, the highest point on the Appalachian Trail.

Here are some excerpts from a speech Clingman made on the floor of the Senate, January 18 1860, as reported in the Wilmington Journal, February 2 1860, page 4:

"If the negro were in fact in all other respects like the white man, his blackness would have been of no more consequence than the difference between black and red hair or light and dark eyes. The feeling against him grows out of the fact that he is in all respects different from the white man and inferior...

"...Omnipotence has made a difference between the white man and the negro..."

"When, sir, some twelve years ago I, in discussion, threw out suggestions about the difference of the races, I was denounced as one who attributed injustice to Almighty God in alleging that He had made the negroes inferior..."

"For the inequality of the negro Providence is responsible, as He is for the entire creation which surrounds us. When human laws are in accordance with the system of nature they are wise; but if in oppositien [sic] to it they are productive only of mischief..."

"Hitherto they [the Abolitionists] have enlisted the sympathies and feelings of the North by falsely assuming that the negro and white man have in all respects the same nature. Let the inequality which the Creator has made be recognised, and their systems fall to the ground..."

"But we are asked how we will go about making a revolution or dissolving the Union ? ..."

You can read the whole thing yourself. To summarize: Clingman viewed the equality of black man and white man as absurd; that this inequality was ordained by his god and "the system of nature"; that only "mischief" could result from ignoring this; and that if the North persisted in its absurd views then revolution might be the consequence (although Clingman concluded that this would probably not happen).

Now go read Barry Arrington on gay marriage at the pro-intelligent-design blog. (What Barry's bigotry has to do with intelligent design is, as usual, unclear.) The similarity between Arrington's rhetoric and Clingman's is astonishing. (One difference is that Arrington misrepresents the truth, as when he states "Every time the people have voted on the “right” to same-sex marriage they have rejected it by fairly wide margins." Perhaps Arrington thinks the good inhabitants of Maine are not people. But why should a lawyer be aware of legislative history?)

Some people claim the debate between evolution and intelligent design is about science. It's not. All the science is on the evolution side. The debate arises almost entirely from a medieval, ignorant, and uninformed view of the world that has more in common with 1860's North Carolina than it does with a modern secular democracy.

You Can Lead a Creationist to Knowledge...

...but you can't make him think, as this post at Uncommon Descent makes clear.

It doesn't matter if bad creationist arguments are debunked, because they just keep bringing up the same bad arguments over and over again, as if no one ever explained why they are bad.

Here we have lawyer Barry Arrington (not a mathematician or biologist, as far as I can see) explaining Dembski's concept of design detection and making exactly the same bogus claims we debunked long ago.

Problem #1: the notion of "specification" is incoherent. Arrington says “ten straight flushes in a row" is a legitimate specification because "This pattern is not post hoc". OK, how about "100 straight flushes in a row, except one is not". Is that legit? Why or why not? How about "50 out of 100 deals are straight flushes"? Is that legit? Why or why not? How about "one straight flush, then a straight, then a flush, then 3 consecutive 4 of a kind, then two more straight flushes"? Why or why not? We explain the problem in detail in our paper.

Bottom line: there is a good way to decide about the reasonableness of a "specification" -- namely, Kolmogorov complexity -- but it is not anywhere near as simple as "valid" or "invalid" or "independent" or "not independent". When you use Kolmogorov complexity as your basis for deciding about specifications, then you get the theory of Kirchherr, Li and Vitanyi, not Dembski's theory.

Problem #2: Even if you can make the notion of "specification" reasonable, we showed that Dembski's claim about the "law of conservation of information" is bogus. The result is that his conclusions about design don't follow.

Problem #3: The proper way to do probability, the way that everyone else except creationists does it, is to pre-specify a region and then see if your observation matches that region. If you do so, and the probability of hitting the region out of the whole space is very very very small, then the proper conclusion is not "design"; it is simply that you estimated the probabilities wrong. It could well have occurred because a person arranged it that way, but it could also be because you didn't know about some non-human process that could result in the same observation. In our paper we illustrate this with some examples.

That's what makes creationism different from legit science: creationists just pretend that criticism doesn't exist and recycle the same bad arguments over and over.