The atheist bus

There's an advertising campaign going on in the UK at the moment involving buses with signs that say:

There's probably no God.

Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

I love this slogan. It makes the point well - it expresses the position of religious sceptics since the time of Epicurus, one of my philosophical heroes. Epicurus didn't deny the existence of beings whom he identified with the Greek gods, but he saw them as ultimately being material creatures, though much more powerful and fortunate than we are. To Epicurus, the gods are serene, beyond emotions such as jealousy, and uninterested in creatures like us. They do not lower themselves to intervene in human affairs (contrast the jealous deity of the Old Testament). For all practical purposes, Epicureanism was an atheistic philosophy. The Epicureans' slogan would have been: "There's no heaven or hell, so stop worrying and enjoy the life you have." Of course, their idea of how to enjoy your life was surprisingly ascetic - cultivate your garden, relish the company of friends, and treat yourself to simple pleasures.

The atheist bus message is in response to religious messages on buses that ask us to worry about whether we're "saved" or not, and about what's going to happen to us after death. It's a nice, gentle riposte. I love it, and I think Ariane Sherine, who came up with the whole atheist bus campaign, deserves huge congratulations.

Of course, a message like this breaks a powerful taboo. Generally speaking, there's a taboo in our society against criticising religion, let alone taking out commercial advertisements with an anti-religious slogan, however moderately phrased. Well, let's break this taboo by all means. The coverage that the campaign has been receiving, with headlines all over the world, shows just how unexpected and dramatic such a mild message in support of atheism can be. Imagine if they had dropped out the word "probably"! This was actually imposed on them in the approval process, but it improves the message, I think, by giving it a kind of laid-back, matter-of-fact tone.

Among the many issues that have come up is that a bus driver objected to driving one of the buses. So what do you do in such a situation? I'm not going to suggest that bus drivers should have a right of conscientious objection to driving buses with advertisements for products that they dislike or perhaps even consider morally abhorrent. Where does it end if you go down that path? Some will object to advertisements for various meat products, some to advertisements for sexy clothes, some to ... well, God knows what (as it were).

Can Muslim taxi drivers refuse to drive you home from the airport if you're carrying your quota of duty free alcohol? Can Catholic doctors refuse to perform abortions, even if it's necessary to save a woman's life? The possibilities go on and on, and we shouldn't be too quick to give everyone who claims to have a moral or religious scruple the right to decide what work they will or will not do. In some cases, their employer has every right to demand that they carry out the requirements of the job. In other cases, it goes beyond that: there's a strong public policy necessity to avoid people picking and choosing. E.g. a pregnant woman is in a vulnerable situation; she needs to be confident that hospital staff will not even contemplate putting her life at risk if something goes wrong. If an emergency abortion is needed, the doctors and nurses mustn't hesitate to act.

But what about this incident under discussion, the one about the atheist bus? Here, an employee has been caught up in an unusual, unexpected, and newsworthy situation. As a Christian, this particular driver has become upset because he was directed to drive one of the buses with the atheist message. Should a manager simply dismiss him from employment for refusing to carry out a lawful and reasonable direction? How reasonable would it really be to insist on the direction without looking at alternatives (such as allocating another driver to drive this particular bus)?

Having worked in managerial jobs in my time, not to mention spending quite a few years of my life doing quasi-legal industrial relations work (acting as an advocate in industrial tribunals) then having worked for awhile as a lawyer in a major firm, mainly doing employee and labour relations law, maybe I look at this a bit differently from the way some people seem to. From an employee relations, union relations, and public relations perspective, I think that a manager who dug in and insisted, then summarily dismissed the employee if he didn't drive the bus, would be crazy.

Given the unusual circumstances, such an insistence on managerial prerogative would be widely seen as unreasonable (perhaps not by the "some people" I referred to, but certainly by a lot of folks out there in the media-devouring public). It would be a PR disaster for the bus company and the campaign ... and, depending on the law in the jurisdiction concerned, the company would very likely find itself on the back foot in attempting to defend an unfair dismissal claim.

As it happens, the company acted quite moderately and leniently. In my view, the relevant manager was smart about this one ... or took smart advice.

Over at Richard Dawkins' (very useful) site, however, the majority view is that the Christian bus driver should have been dealt with very harshly. Basically sacked on the spot. Perhaps I made a mistake in getting involved in an argument about this, because after awhile you can feel as if you're bashing your head against a brick wall.

My feeling is that my fellow atheists are often so exasperated by what they see (rightly, I think) as the continual solicitude given to religion that they can lose perspective and be tempted to some unwise actions. Or at least to sounding off on the internet in defence of those sorts of actions, which is a lot easier. The beauty of the internet is that everyone has a say but no one has the responsibility. Fortunately, the atheist bus campaign itself hasn't worked like that: its gentle, laid-back approach has been one of its great pluses. It's getting publicity without presenting a confrontational message.

Oh well, maybe I'm wrong after all ... since so many people disagree with me. Maybe I'm just feeling exasperated.

Or just maybe an employer or a campaign that has this sort of problem would be better off coming to me for advice on strategic issues than to some of the more gung-ho posters on Dawkins' site.

Reminder: blogging at Sentient Developments

This is your reminder of the day that I'll be guest blogging for a week at George Dvorksy's wonderful high-traffic blog, Sentient Developments, starting Monday. In parallel with my announcement here, George has made an announcement over there (thanks, mate).

Come on over and have a look. We can make some good things happen. And check out Sentient Developments, anyway: it's one of the best blogs around.

Freedom of religion and belief

I did a twelve-hour shift yesterday to finish my submission to the Australian Human Rights Commission project on freedom of religion and belief. Honestly, I did intend to stop at some point but there was one more task to do, and then another, and another one. You know how it is. So thanks to Jenny for being understanding that I was in the zone yesterday ... and for bringing me the glasses of water and the macaroni, while I forgot about things like eating and drinking (but how am I going to return the favour when she gets into the more intense sequences of the fantasy novel she's working on)?

I'm surprised to see that I managed to write a fairly tightly-worded submission of nearly 24,000 words in three days. Admittedly, I had a lot of words lying around already in quite good shape that I was able to paste in. Anyway, at least I hope it's tightly worded: I may have been losing my judgment by last night after I spent yesterday writing a lot of them, revising the whole thing twice, re-reading Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration, and reading the second half of the Commission's 1998 report on the same subject. I'll read what I've written again today, or tomorrow, and see if it makes sense.

What struck me during this exercise is how much our religious friends want to distort what is essentially a negative right against the state - the right that the state will not try to suppress your beliefs or impose someone else's beliefs on you - into a positive right that everyone else will go out of their way to nurture your religion of choice. This seems to mean that we are not even supposed to criticise your beliefs, must "respect" them (however silly they sound), somehow provide the resources to guarantee their survival, and be upset if some beliefs die out. Worse, all of this seems to creeping into international law and into much popular and academic thinking on the subject. Sorry, but I'm not buying it.

There are good reasons why people should have religious freedom in the sense that the state shouldn't tell you what religious beliefs to have or not have. We don't want to bring back the days when supposed heretics were burned at the stake (when Locke talks about fire and sword being brought against people, he is, of course, speaking quite literally; that's how they did things in those days). But - I'm sorry - that doesn't mean I have to like your religion, or hope that it will persist, or think that it does good on balance, or even that its doctrines deserve any respect. I won't vote for a government that will burn you at the stake (or lock you up behind iron bars, as we prefer to do to people in these more civilised times). I'll probably even be polite to you about your religious beliefs, because I'm not the sort of person who's out to upset the folks he deals with face to face. But if you imagine that your prophet of choice went up to heaven in a flaming chariot or rode around on a flying horse, or you think that the evil in the world was caused by the (literally) fiendish plot of a talking snake that danced about on its tail in the original Edenic paradise, or you've convinced yourself that a wafer of bread is simultaneously the flesh and blood of your demi-god or quasi-god ... well, great. I won't go out of my way to upset you, but I won't take your ideas very seriously, and I won't think it sad if a time ever comes when no one believes in such stories anymore.

If you start trying to suppress criticism and satire, or if you vote for a government that wants to impose your moral code on me with fire and sword (sorry, I mean iron bars and guns), then I'm not going to fuss about how nice and quaint your ideas are. You have your freedom; I have mine. I want to keep it that way.

Guest blogging at Sentient Developments

Next week I'll be doing five days of guest blogging at George Dvorsky's wonderful blog, Sentient Developments. For those who don't know, Sentient Developments is a much more ambitious and popular blog than this one, with 15,000 page hits per month. It presents itself as: "Transhumanist perspectives on science, philosophy, ethics and the future of intelligent life." Go and check it out - George has a very classy blog over there, and it's going to be difficult to reach anything like his standard of posting. Still, I'll put my thinking cap on and do my best ... and we'll have to see what happens. In fact, you could do worse than bookmark Sentient Developments, as long as you don't become so caught up in following it that you forget to follow me here.

Another submission to write

If you are an Australian, secular in orientation, and opposed to the use of state power to enforce religious morality, please consider making a submission over here: http://www.humanrights.gov.au/frb/frb_2008.pdf.

You'll have to be quick because the deadline is 31 January. Go and write!

Homeowners no more!

Jenny and I are no longer homeowners - as of today, we are tenants, a situation we haven't been in for many, many years.

Yes, today (well, actually yesterday since it's now after midnight) was the settlement day on the sale of our house. We now have a lot more money in the bank, and we are renting back this place for the next 11 months ... so there's no immediate impact on our day-to-day lives. It feels just a bit funny, though, and we've loved this house. It will be really strange when we finally leave it after 20 years.

Now we need to plan the next move. As the year goes on, we'll be looking for cheaper real estate interstate, among all our other plans for the year. Onward!

This postmillennialism nonsense

Wikipedia succinctly defines postmillennialism as "an interpretation of chapter 20 of the Book of Revelation which sees Christ's second coming as occurring after (Latin post-) the 'Millennium', a Golden Age or era of Christian prosperity and dominance."

Many of us who have encountered evangelical Christianity are more familiar with premillennialism: the idea that Christ's second coming will predate the eventual establishment of the Millennium. In this kind of thought, Christ is typically imagined as appearing during a time of great tribulations (as every historical era, including our own, imagines itself to be) and rapturing the faithful up into heaven - leaving behind the unbelievers. However, there are many variations on the theme: some premillennialists imagine a time of even worse tribulation after the second coming; different thinkers draw on different theological traditions dating back to ancient times; and so on.

There's a huge body of best-selling Christian literature that explains or exploits premillennialist ideas, most famously the novel Left Behind and its sequels. When I was young, Hal Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth was a popular premillennialist text. I was taught in Sunday school that the second coming was likely to be in the 1980s, a "generation" after the recreation of Israel. Pity it didn't work out like that.

Postmillennialists see a duty to reform society along Christian lines to build the utopian age that is, as they understand it, prophesied in the Bible - particularly the Book of Revelation. Since they want to usher in this utopian age by human efforts, theirs is an eschatology of works and progress. It's easy to see that Nazism and Marxism contained concepts of history closely analogous to this - but it is too clever by half to say that these belief systems just are postmillennialist. They are not, because they don't have anything to say about the the second coming of Christ at the end of the millennium. Though they envisage apocalyptic events, posit quasi-religious views of the unfolding of history, and are clearly influenced by Christian thought, they are not themselves Christian sects.

It is even more strained when any system of thought at all that envisages progressive improvement in the human situation is labeled postmillennialist, as if any such ideas make sense only in the context of Christian religious doctrine. Though Christian views of history may have made it easier to imagine a direction to history, we have another very good reason to do so: the observable facts of scientific and technological change, with their implications for society. Whatever else we might think about progress, science really does gain greater insight into the nature of our world and technology really does become more powerful. Somebody who thinks that we can use the increasingly powerful science and technology at our disposal to improve the human condition does not need to be motivated by religion. Nor does the plausibility of her position stand or fall with the plausibility of religion itself.

That's an important point to make, because critics of technological meliorism (in its various guises) often adopt a kind of world-weary cynicism, in which technological meliorism is dismissed as just another kind of religion, and just as likely to be wrong as the supernaturalist doctrines of real religions. That's clearly a mistake.

These people could make a much weaker claim: one that is far less ambitious but more likely to be correct. This is the point that, after two thousand years of Christianity, we have become primed to see history as having a direction, and some folks may have become over-optimistic (both about what will happen and about their capacity to predict it). Perhaps this is right, but the fact remains that we have a perfectly rational, independent basis to expect further improvements in science and technology and to be able to use them to produce improvements to, say, human health and comfort and the human life span.

Transhumanist thinking is particularly vulnerable to the suggestion that it is something like apocalyptic Christianity - and therefore just as likely to be false. But that argument is just wrong. The most that can be said is that the apocalyptic aspect of the most extreme kinds of transhumanism may have a psychological appeal - for some people - that is out of proportion to the strength of its actual arguments. I don't doubt that there's some truth in that claim, and that it provides a reason to examine transhumanist arguments of an extreme kind (such as those predicting a near-future technological Singularity) with a degree of scepticism. Nonetheless, the arguments ultimately stand or fall on their own merits, not on the merits of Christian doctrine.

It's particularly annoying when Michael Ruse (in The Evolution-Creation Struggle)wants to brand any progressive element in the thinking of modern scientists as postmillennialist. No! No, Professor Ruse, postmillennialism is a doctrine (with a number of variants) taught by some Christians. But you don't need to be a Christian of any sort to believe that science and technology are becoming more powerful, or to plan ways of using them in an attempt to improve the human condition. There are non-religious reasons to be impressed by the advance of science and technology. Accordingly, the postmillennialist/premillennialist contrast that Ruse relies on in examining the clash between evolution and creationism is unnecessary and misleading.

I am actually a sceptic about the supposedly coming technological Singularity, an idea that Ruse doesn't get around to discussing. It looks just as likely to me that we are somewhere on the steeper part of a technological sigmoid curve - but who knows? My point is that you can't shoot down arguments, such as those of transhumanists, by drawing an analogy with a quite different set of ideas that is based on a quite different set of arguments ... arguments that you believe to be bad.

More generally, you can't do the following. You can't take a way of thinking, X, that bears some superficial resemblance to another way of thinking, Y, which is grounded in a quite different set of arguments ... then observe that way of thinking Y is religious (and is grounded in whatever arguments support the religion), and conclude that way of thinking X is religious (implying that it stands or falls with the general plausibility of religion). I see far too much of this kind of fallacious reasoning, and it's starting to get annoying.

Ruse gets it wrong

I'm something of a fan of the philosopher Michael Ruse, whose work over the years in defending reputable science against creationist pseudo-science has been immensely valuable. I've also been impressed by Ruse's analysis of ethical theory in the context of what we know about the natural world, and I admire the clear way in which he explains complex philosophical ideas. Ruse is one of the good guys.

But I'm just finishing his 2005 book The Creation-Evolution Struggle. More on this tomorrow, perhaps, but what I find bizarre is the author's insistence on structuring the debate as one between two "religious" viewpoints, one based in biblical literalism and often a premillennialist apocalyptic vision, the other based in a kind of postmillennialist progressivism. We have, he says, "no simple clash between science and religion but rather between two religions."

The arguments for this are very unconvincing, even though Ruse offers quite a lot of detail about the historical context in which Darwinian evolutionary theory arose and the twists and turns in how it was received. While that's all interesting, he wants to define "religion" as if it means no more than a worldview that involves moral ideas or has social implications. His understanding of the nature of religion is so broad that it makes no distinction between (on the one hand) philosophical systems and (on the other) traditional bodies of belief that are associated with certain cultures and handed down from one generation to the next. According to this, Epicureanism, for example, was also a religion. It's difficult to know what worked-out philosophical system would not be religious. But the whole point of these systems is that they are alternatives to religion as it is normally understood; they are attempts to understand the world on the basis of rational inquiry rather than traditional teachings, faith, or mystical experience.

Yet Ruse makes no distinction between a coherent worldview based on reason and one based on faith in the truth of a holy book or the wisdom of a tradition of teaching such as that of the Catholic Church. Nor does he distinguish between a worldview based on empirical investigation of the world that presents itself to us - and which posits no supernatural beings, entities, or forces - and one that is based on belief in (or visions of) gods, ghosts, and demons.

It is, of course, sometimes difficult to distinguish exactly what is and is not a religion. Is Scientology a genuine religion? How was Nazism, with its apocalyptic vision of a thousand-year Reich, its mysticism, its commitment to irrational ideas of blood and race, its rituals and symbolism, its infallible leader (with a kind of holy book in Mein Kampf), and its comprehensive understanding of the world and attempt to control people's lives not a religion?

What about Marxism and its historical variants (think of Mao or Pol Pot)? These look very much as if they are at least analogous to religion, with their visions of an inevitable path for history, their eschatology of future struggles and triumphs leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and eventually to the withering away of the state, and so on. They even had their holy books - Das Kapital and others.

Again, are the many currents of Hinduism really the same kind of thing as Christianity? Was the pagan syncretism of ancient Rome, a tolerant set of state practices and popular superstitions with no official theology, at all analogous to Abrahamic monotheism?

It's not clear that we have a good, clear concept of what we really mean by religion.

But I can be confident of one thing. The worldview of someone like Richard Dawkins is not a religion by any plausible measure. There are no supernatural forces or beings here. Nor is there a comprehensive account of the world, or an account of how we should all live our lives. There are moral implications but nothing like the elaborate Jewish law or the Hindu notion of dharma. There is no socially-binding body of organised beliefs and rituals and symbols, no priestly hierarchy, no holy text that is believed true for all time. The works of Darwin are admired for their insights and historical importance, but are not imagined to be cutting-edge knowledge of the world. There is really no point in talking about such a worldview as a "religious" one.

If we start to do so, then we are committed to calling any recognisable worldview at all "a religion", and we still need some new distinction between (1) those "religions" that involve the supernatural, faith in traditional teachings and holy books, priesthoods, comprehensive moral codes, restricted prescriptions for life that are binding on believers, etc., and (2) those "religions" that don't have these things. But Ruse is insistent on seeing the views of Dawkins as religious, in their way, apparently because Dawkins draws certain moral and social implications from his understanding of the natural world, and because of an element of awe at the universe that he often expresses. That's a very thin understanding of what religion is like.

At times, particularly towards the end, Ruse's book almost reads as if it were written primarily with the aim of annoying Dawkins, who is not only seen as promoting a kind of religion but is also portrayed in a way that makes him sound far more extreme and far less reasonable than he actually is. Anything snarky that Dawkins has since said about Ruse pales in comparison to this 2005 book.

My verdict: clearly written, with some good information, but overall quite a disappointment. Michael Ruse can do a lot better than this.

Rights and freedoms in Australia

There's still a lot of time for you to make a submission to the National Human Rights Consultation Committee about rights and freedoms in Australia. The last date for submissions is not until 29 May 2009. All the same, I plan to submit my submission far earlier than that.

I now have a pretty good first draft - still a bit messy on the screen, but basically there. This version weighs in at 47,000 words. I want to do a bit more research around the edges, which will maybe take me a couple of weeks, but it probably won't lead to huge changes, so I'm guessing the final version will be 50,000 words long.

How much notice will be taken of my views? Who knows? I'm not all that optimistic, but am using the exercise partly as a way to straighten out a lot of my thinking on these issues, and to get it all in one place ... irrespective of what effect it will have on the Committee's deliberations. Still, if I were on such a body I would be taking notice of any detailed submission that is thoroughly backed up with case citations, bibliography, etc., as well as addressing many controversial issues, from the treatment of David Hicks to the treatment of Bill Henson. I also have some positive recommendations to make, although (let's face it) these obviously won't carry the same sort of weight as recommendations from, say, the Attorney-General's Department or from major lobby groups.

Still, this is a chance for all of us to have our say on what rights and freedoms matter to us, and on how they might be protected. As I see it, no thinking Australian should pass up the opportunity to say at least something about these important issues - whether or not you happen to agree with my (arguably eccentric) views.

If you are sufficiently interested, and if I know you well enough, I can send you a copy of my developing draft. That would give you something to work with, even if you totally disagree with me on every issue! I am arguing throughout for a Millian liberal position, as you might expect; I think that the state should expand our area of freedom essentially by getting out of a lot of areas where it enacts penal legislation. However, there's a lot more than that to what I want to say.

Much of my argument is about the real dangers of populist politics: why governments find it all too tempting to demonise individuals or groups who are out of the mainstream, whether we're talking about asylum seekers or individuals such as Henson who are privileged in many ways but easy to denounce as "pseuds" (or worse). Democratic elections provide some check on the draconian use of government power, but not so much if the government is pandering to mainstream fears and prejudices.

In those circumstances, there's often bipartisan support for illiberal policies and dangerous laws. Differences among the major parties are then likely to be matters of detail and emphasis. But the question is, "What can be done about it?"

Bad anniversary

It's now one year to the day since my mother died - a bad anniversary. I'll be taking things very easy today.