PZ Watch 3.18.10

In a continuation of his ongoing conversation about how good Atheists are, PZ becomes incensed at an Anglican and makes this observation:

”I'm not nice. I'm not Christian. And I tell Stephen Ames that no matter how charitable he thinks he is, he comes across as a condescending prat, and he can get stuffed.

Those virtues are human values, they don't belong to Christianity, and I'm so tired of Christians acting as if they are. Hands off.’

PZ doesn’t elaborate on how humans got to be virtuous simply by being human. Nor does he tell us what standard he uses to declare “virtue”. So he demonstrates by claiming not to be nice (that’s obvious), and by telling the Anglican to “get stuffed”.

That sort of PZ logic is old hat, though. More interesting is this:

”We also know that reason is a virtue grafted onto a religion that is primarily concerned with irrational faith, and is entirely evidence-free.”

I have never seen PZ define “reason”, nor spell out what counts as valid evidence in PZ land. But I suspect that “reason” within PZ's world means pure, uncut Philosophical Materialism. And that "evidence" is meant to mean “empirical” , experimentally verifiable material evidence.

But these things also go only so far in PZ land. Because PZ also believes unconditionally in evolution, which is dependent upon abiogenesis, as a replacement for a creating deity, which he consistently ridicules. Now empirical, experimental evidence for both evolution and abiogenesis is not just sparse, it is non-existent. So these things are rationalized from the existence of fossils and minor variation within a gene pool – let’s repeat – the existence of fossils and minor variation within a gene pool. It is not the existence of empirical evolutionary observation, data, experimental replicable validation that serves as satisfactory evidence: it is the existence of fossils and variation within a gene pool, from which the premise is rationalized: they evolved.

[The complete statement would be: evolution therefore fossils. This is usually stated backwards: fossils therefore evolution].

But PZ is rarely concerned with his own contact with rationality. He is more interested in trying to find new epithets with which to denigrate his opposition. It is a successful tactic for him. He has a huge following that cheers for that sort of logic.

But it is an interesting question: Can a religion be rational?

First there is the issue of defining rationality. I suggest the common attribute of coherence: is there a defining basis that is consistent with our observations of the universe, of human behavior, of what we know of ourselves? We don’t have to know all the details of the why and how, we just need to know what is, and if what is, is consistent with the metaphysics of a given belief system.

Second, we need to know how internally self-consistent a given belief system is within itself. This is where Atheists spend a lot of capital, dredging up what they feel are fatal inconsistencies, specifically in Christianity, usually in the human ecclesiastic community, and occasionally in the bible, which they insist on taking literally since some Christians do.

I have never found an Atheist argument against the internal coherence of biblical understandings of Christ which could stand up to independent thought and scrutiny applied with rigorous, objective logical analysis. Like learning to be objectively rational, pursuing the internal coherence arguments against any religion is personal; it is rational but not empirical.

Certainly PZ does not even attempt such scrutiny, at least not out where it is visible. If he did it would likely leave his huge fan base scratching their heads, wondering what happened. What PZ shows us is that Atheists might clang on about rationality (*), but they are really about rejection: rejection of any deity, rejection of ecclesiasticism, rejection of non-Atheists, rejection of religious morality, just pure rejection over and over. To them, that is rationality in action.

* And now they clang on about how virtuous they are, even while rejecting morality, if the morality is absolute or comes via religion.