People Have Rights Ideas Do Not

“Why won’t you die?”

“Beneath this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea...and ideas are bulletproof.” – V in V for Vendetta

I’ve been coming across a recurring theme when perusing the social media of New Atheist who are desperately trying to seem compassionate while dismissing the foolhardy beliefs of theists; the theme that people deserve rights or respect but that their beliefs or ideas do not. I seem to keep hearing, “People have rights. Ideas do not.”

My first question is this: How do you divorce beliefs or ideas from the people that hold them particularly when beliefs or ideas make up the core of a person’s identity? Many people identify themselves along the lines of their beliefs, such as being Christian, Jew or Muslim but also along national, ethnic or social lines. If you give no rights to ideas or have no respect for the ideas a person holds, exactly who or what are you extending rights or respect to? Should we have extended rights or respect to Adolph Hitler the being as divorced from his genocidal tendencies? ‘Cause that’s where the argument winds up going.

The problem is this: Once you try to divorce people from their beliefs and ideas, the rights and respect left to bestow are upon the shell of a human being. As long as more than one person is around, there exists a social construct from which people set themselves apart from the other person (that is, identity). If that ability to form an identity is removed, all that is left is a biological human being who for all intents and purposes might as well be an empty shell. In trying to deny identity – or at least an identity New Atheists do not like – is to deny an aspect of humanity that people often use to position themselves in a special place within the animal kingdom. I find it peculiar that (liberal) New Atheists want to bestow rights and grant respect to the biological entities that people are while at the same time denying that a fetus is a person or that it is okay to terminate a brain-dead patient. What is a person? we are inclined to ask New Atheists. There appears to be an inconsistency in the New Atheist line of reasoning regarding rights and respect (at least when the reasoning is taken to its fullest extent).

I contend that beliefs and ideas are equally important if not more important than the people who hold them.* First, because as I’ve implied, people are their beliefs and ideas so long as there are social interactions. Moreover, when people put their beliefs and ideas into action, beliefs and ideas exit the realm of abstraction and into the realm of recorded history. We also tend to remember people for their beliefs and their ideas instead of the people as mere biological entities.

[*But not by necessity since people are not important by necessity. Refer to my blog Why I Am Not A Humanist for clarification.]

Second, I have to wonder, where would the world be without beliefs and ideas? The answer to that question is a double-edged sword, of course, as without beliefs or ideas, human beings would have never invented the wheel or religion. In the case of religion, look at what happens when some people, such as ISIS, with particular beliefs or ideas do not afford any rights or respect to the beliefs of others; personhood is withheld from a victim and a beheading or sexual slavery is the consequence. It is easy for New Atheists to say that they don’t have to grant rights to or respect theistic beliefs and ideas, but granting a person rights and respect is surely a difficult thing to do when the theist’s beliefs and ideas are dismissed. Kindly reference pretty much all of recorded history if you don’t believe me.

Granted, it seems obvious that some beliefs or ideas are more valid than others but how do we choose which are important and which are not? We can easily say that freedom is a good idea that should be granted some rights or respect, but most of us are saying that from the position of relatively free people with no one to club us for agreeing. Naturally, we also have to ask exactly how free we are supposed to be to retain any hope that freedom is indeed a good idea. But, you never see New Atheists – or anyone else for that matter – getting down to these kinds of nitty-gritty details. If there are any difficulties in the New Atheist assertion that beliefs and ideas should be formed only when there is suitable evidence for them, they are such that beliefs must always be open to revision (easier said than done) to say nothing of the difficulties in trying to determine exactly when an inference based upon evidence is deemed justifiable. I would also challenge any New Atheist to prove that all the beliefs they hold are warranted by evidence. To this New Atheists will likely reply that most of the beliefs or ideas people hold are harmless until certain – particularly theistic – beliefs or ideas are put into action. But as I’ve said many times before, there is no historical evidence that indicates a global community of atheists would be any better than the world such as it is now. So why is this belief being held onto to fiercely by New Atheists? But I digress.

I’m not saying rights or respect should be granted to ideas out of hand; certainly ideas – all ideas – should be open to examination and criticism. But New Atheists need to concede that when they criticize ideas, they are criticizing a person. That person may become offended, which is fine since there is no legislation or unwritten societal rule that prohibits all offensive criticism. People don’t have a right to not be offended.* Oh, so I guess sometimes people don’t have rights. Hmph!

[*At least not in the U.S.; the EU is working on it, though.]

“People have rights. Ideas do not,” is in itself an idea which in no way need be granted any rights or respect. It’s one of quips that looks cute at first glance but loses meaning if you think about it for more than a second. There certainly isn’t any evidence for what New Atheists are trying to assert here. Better luck next time, gang.

Atheism Fails Fail

There’s a certain comfort in knowing that when I get back from a two week long vacation that is mostly devoid of the internet and news, the world will still be as crazy as when I left it. I submit as evidence this gem found on Facebook in which a theist attempts to use philosophy to argue for the First Cause Argument as evidence for a creator. Here is the text in its entirety:

"But who created God?" is an invalid and tedious argument. It is logically impossible for the "cause" of time to be dependent upon time. Thus, the primary "cause" was "always there" (or it "never was"). Due to the level of fine tuning of the universe, which is orders of magnitude greater than any human engineering achievement, the "cause" of the universe must be an agent which is not restricted by the laws of nature (the "cause" is above nature) and it is indirectly responsible for the applications of science and logic. Due to the algorithmic complexity present within every single cell of every living system (and due to the fact that the digital information therein is not reducible to nature), it can be inferred that the primary "cause" is a personal being which is potentially unbounded in power. When the atheist\naturalist appeals to science or logic (formal disciples which are indirectly the result of the Creator and only possible due the uniformity in nature - evidently the Creator upholds the universe in a consistent manner) in an attempt to refute the existence of the Creator (or assumes that natural processes can explain the origin of natural processes), they demonstrate short-sighted irrational behavior which is not consistent with logic or science. It is outside the realm of science to "disprove" the reality of a Creator and it certainly isn't based on logic. Thus, atheism is merely a metaphysical naturalist philosophy.

So let’s break this down.

"But who created God?" is an invalid and tedious argument. It is logically impossible for the "cause" of time to be dependent upon time. Thus, the primary "cause" was "always there" (or it "never was"). OBJECTION: There are several problems with this line of reasoning for if there was no cause, or, the cause was always there, the cause itself is unchanging and therefore can have no effect on temporal things such as the universe (supposing the universe did have a beginning); that which does not change cannot be a cause as causes are changes. Time may also have always been a dimension of what preceded the universe, if anything did. Though even scientists suspect that time began when the universe began, the reality is that they actually do not know for certain. Moreover, if God had no beginning, this tells us that we know at least one thing didn’t have a beginning. Problem is, for all we know, there may be other things without a beginning, such as the universe.

Due to the level of fine tuning of the universe, which is orders of magnitude greater than any human engineering achievement, the "cause" of the universe must be an agent which is not restricted by the laws of nature (the "cause" is above nature) and it is indirectly responsible for the applications of science and logic. OBJECTION: Again, several problems. This line implies human beings are already at the pinnacle of their knowledge with no chance of going any further. The author is in effect attempted to argue that because human being haven’t perfected cosmological feats of engineering, this means God did it. But since no one knows what it takes to create a universe, doing so may be a simple matter of having the right knowledge or power or both. Certainly human beings do not know how to create a universe, but this doesn’t mean it will never happen. Nor is the universe fine-tuned for life as ‘tuning’ implies a conscious agent. The laws of the universe happen to be what they are and given this fact, there was a 100% chance that life would arise in the universe. (I don’t know why this is hard for people to wrap their heads around, but it is only proper to speak in terms of chance when we don’t know what is going to happen next.) Sure, if the laws of the universe were off just a little tiny bit, life – as we know it – wouldn’t exist. This doesn’t mean life can’t exist in a universe with different laws. (Granted, a definition of ‘life’ would be useful here.)

Due to the algorithmic complexity present within every single cell of every living system (and due to the fact that the digital information therein is not reducible to nature), it can be inferred that the primary "cause" is a personal being which is potentially unbounded in power. OBJECTION: Fancifully worded reasoning does not lend the reasoning itself any credence. The appearance of complexity in any system is simply a matter of degree to which one understands the system. A mechanic or engineer that has worked on or built one type of car for 50 years will find that car less complex than a modern electrical motorcycle that actually has less parts. Just because our DNA looks complex does not mean it is; to a suitably knowledgeable alien, our DNA may appear like child’s play. Even if we grant that there was a cause to this complexity within us, this tells us nothing about the creator. If we know anything about the way in which most things are built, we should suspect that the universe was built by multiple creators. When’s the last time a single person built a skyscraper by themselves? This question alone deflates the insistence of a lone creator seeing how much more ‘complex’ the universe is than a skyscraper. Finally, there is no digital information in our cells; the information may be construed as digital information, but it is not in actuality ‘digital’ information.

It is outside the realm of science to "disprove" the reality of a Creator and it certainly isn't based on logic. Thus, atheism is merely a metaphysical naturalist philosophy. OBJECTION: Oddly enough, the author is trying to use logic to make a case for a creator (based on the First Cause Argument) and then says right here logic can’t be used to deny God’s existence…in other words, you can use logic to prove God but you can’t use logic to deny God’s existence. That’s like saying you can use logic to prove 1+1=2 but you cannot use logic to prove otherwise (even though you can). Moreover, look at all the things science has explained that used to be in the realm of religious explanations but are no longer because those explanations were false, e.g. thunder, disease, the Geocentric model, etc. If scientific explanation are better than religious ones and we continually find this to be the case, we can safely infer that God doesn’t exist. Therefore, theism is merely metaphysical wishful thinking.