Watching and waiting for the Millennials has kept lots of cultural observers busy for a long time.

Ever since the team of Howe and Strauss predicted back in 1991 that this generation would repeat the civic virtues of the GI ‘Greatest’ generation (see also their 2000 book Millennials Rising), endless forecasts about what drives this generation have been formulated. 

Now in their young adulthood, more and more data is accumulating about their behavior as well as their thinking, statistically speaking. Any member of a generation intuitively “knows” what it feels like to be a member, even if their own experiences couldn’t match those of all their peers. Call it a sensibility, or a vague temperament, or just a common sort of worldview—the general outlook of a person couldn’t be expected to imitate that of someone 20 years older, or 20 years younger. If the times help to shape a person’s development, then a person’s developed temperament will later shape the times. How will Millennials try to shape their own coming times?

Joel Stein’s recent article in Time magazine has sparked plenty of commentary, pro and con. Aimee Groth’s supportive commentary over at Business Insider helpfully centers around what can be seen in the Millennials’ values. I have no idea if the Millennials will save us all (sage wits have remarked that it may also require Generation Xers as well, to clean up messes the Elder Boomers leave behind), but it is crucial to think about what the Millennials themselves will reagrd as worth saving. Aimee offers five key points about the Millennials, worth remembering:

They believe they can change the world.

They don’t believe in hierarchy.

They’re resourceful and adaptable.

They want to have a sense of mission.

They think before they act.

Other commentators, too many to count, have further noted how the Millennials in general expect a higher comfort level with diversity and toleration, yet they also expect conformity to firm ethical principles about equality, community, and justice. Indeed, they are already proving to be the most civic-minded and pro-government generation since, well, you know who….

What does this all mean for any activist organization interested in staying relevant for more than the next five years? I have been commenting on the fine compatibility of Humanism with the values of Millennials. But make no mistake—the Millennials will make up their own minds about what still has Value and what doesn’t, and what needs to be done about the difference. 

PZ Myers just announced his divorce from the Skeptic Movement, based on manifestos by Jami Ian Swiss and others. Many have commented on this development. Daniel Loxton has supplied a lengthy defense of Skepticism’s “No Comment” attitude towards the heart of religiosity, carefully explaining why Skepticism must give an exemption to essential religious claims about supernatural and transcendent gods and the like.  

I can’t say who really “speaks” for the skeptic movement. I can observe that much of the current leadership of Skepticism (capitalized and organized) advocates only scientific skepticism. Scientific skepticism was not promoted by scientists centuries ago (few scientists could afford to even be openly agnostic). Nope, the biggest public advocates for scientific skepticism were modernizing theologians during the Enlightenment era and after.

Why does modern theology benefit from scientific skepticism? It’s a simple matter: so long as religion’s supernatural claims cannot be contradicted by anything science would ever say, then religion can continue to enjoy its own reasonable autonomy as a source of genuine knowledge about god. All scientific skepticism has to do is agree to this proposition: Where science can never disprove, science must fall silent. The Enlightenment bargain was struck: science is limited to knowledge about the natural world, and religion knows about the supernatural world. Not all of Christianity agreed to that bargain, of course—fundamentalists insisted on observable miracles, visible angels, hurtful demons, and the like—but much of Christianity has moderated to the point where plenty of good Christians don’t really believe much of that outdated claptrap anymore. Which was one of the goals of modernizing theology. 

Enlightenment theologians had to strike a bargain with scientific skepticism since they were terrified by a different, far older kind of skepticism: ancient Greek Skepticism. This rationalistic skepticism demanded high standards of provability before accepting anything as knowledge. The basic idea for a rationalist skeptic during the Enlightenment was something like this: Where reason and empirical inquiry cannot confirm, it must be disbelieved as unreasonable. For this rationalist skepticism, all the gods must go. The core of religion, and not just the claptrap, is entirely unreasonable and unbelievable, since no theological argument demonstrates a god’s existence and no empirical evidence is sufficient to support a god’s existence. Instead of saying “No Comment” to religion’s core claims, rationalist skepticism says “That’s unreasonable for anyone to accept.”

To this day, many skeptics rely on both scientific skepticism and rationalist skepticism. It’s all about the appropriate use of reason. That is why being a genuine skeptic means being a disbeliever and being open about disbelieving everything religions talk about. But joining up with this current Skeptic(TM) movement means never having to tell the faithful how their god isn’t real. Is that too big a price to pay, to get more science accommodated by society?

Religious philosopher David Baggett says that he is exasperated. 

I had the pleasure of engaging him recently, at an event at the University at Buffalo.  You can watch the video here.

Baggett kept asking whether a naturalist and humanist philosopher (like me) could take morality to be objective. I kept replying “Yes,” and I kept explaining how. He never took ‘Yes’ for an answer!

After the event, he wrote about how he has “found a recent trend” among naturalists trying to explain why humanity relies on morality—we are using evolution in explanations for human sociality and morality. A recent trend? Not yet looked into Darwin, perhaps? You can read his blog at First Things.  

Baggett accuses me (and others) of encouraging the notion that morality is entirely reducible to sexual advantage or that morality amounts to whims of instinct. My explanation for morality doesn’t reduce morality to either of those things, yet Baggett was so unprepared for a complex naturalistic answer that he kept replying to a strawman of his own imagination. Watch the whole dialogue for his tiresome repetitions - at one point, lacking any original thoughts to share with me, he opens up a handy book of Nietzsche to read an irrelevant passage to the audience!

Baggett kept returning to his basic problem, “what makes a moral judgment really true?” I kept pointing to the quite obvious features of a situation, such as an innocent child urgently needing care, which makes a judgment that care ought to be given quite objectively true. Nope, not good enough, Baggett declares—a god has to exist too, before a moral obligation gets serious. Really? That sounds like a horribly inhuman answer to me. According to Baggett, until I open my eyes to god’s existence, I can’t truly know right and wrong. According to me, because Baggett needs a god to guarantee what is truly right and wrong, then he’s the one blind to the reality right in front of his eyes.   

Baggett gives away what he is really looking for. He keeps demanding moral ‘authority’ behind any obligation. Unable to see anything in the human world that tells him where his real moral obligations lie—not in our humanity, and not even in the real suffering of a child—he needs a “Decider” just to be sure.

Sounds pretty inhuman to me. 

It is still said that America is a Christian nation. Really?

The Center for Inquiry is advancing the secular agenda on many fronts, as one can observe from posts here at Free Thinking blogs.

Our upcoming conference on “Why Tolerate Religion?” will be in Washington, DC on April 27, 2013. For attendees, and folks unable to join us in DC, here is a sample of recent writings about religious liberty by some panelists.

Brian Leiter’s book Why Tolerate Religion? is now out. From the publisher’s book description: “This provocative book addresses one of the most enduring puzzles in political philosophy and constitutional theory—why is religion singled out for preferential treatment in both law and public discourse? Brian Leiter argues that the reasons have nothing to do with religion, and that Western democracies are wrong to single out religious liberty for special legal protections. He offers new insights into what makes a claim of conscience distinctively ‘religious’, and draws on a wealth of examples from America, Europe, and elsewhere to highlight the important issues at stake. With philosophical acuity, legal insight, and wry humor, Leiter shows why our reasons for tolerating religion are not specific to religion but apply to all claims of conscience, and why a government committed to liberty of conscience is not required by the principle of toleration to grant exemptions to laws that promote the general welfare.”

Another speaker at the CFI conference is Georgetown University professor Jacques Berlinerblau, who blogs about secular and religious issues over at the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacques-berlinerblau/

We are also delighted to be joined by Wendy Kaminer, a lawyer and social critic, writes about law, liberty, feminism, religion, and popular culture. Many of her blogs are over at The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/wendy-kaminer/

This political and philosophical issue of religious liberty has been only growing in importance recently. Permit me to mention one additional scholar, who won’t be at the conference. The great theorist Ronald Dworkin, who recently died, has a book coming out on this matter, and among his last articles is a section of his book already published by the New York Review of Books. Dworkin has been lecturing on secularism for some time; a video of a 2006 lecture is available here: http://www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2006_spr/dworkin.htm. Besides his outstandingly clear prose, you have to listen just to hear how Dworkin’s voice and cadence reminds one of Garrison Keillor!

Well, not so fast. Are such studies geting confirmed? The journal Secularity and Nonreligion has published fresh research that can’t find a bias against nonbelievers.  

This new article, “Non-Theists Are No Less Moral Than Theists: Some Preliminary Results” by Justin Didyoung, Eric Charles, and Nicholas Rowland, has this abstract:

“The longstanding stereotype that non-theists are less moral than theists is not empirically supported. To test this commonplace assumption, 114 undergraduate participants were evaluated to draw comparisons about religious identity and altruism levels. Participants were placed into one of two groups, theists or non-theists. The theist group was then further divided: weakly religious, moderately religious, and highly religious. Non-theists and theists as a whole, as well as theist subgroup assessments, were compared. Data were collected through self-report surveys. Additionally, to test moral decision-making abilities, participants answered questions based on situational dilemmas. Using Kohlberg’s coding schema, scores were assigned for the participant’s global moral reasoning rather than for the content of their answers. Using independent groups t-test, ANOVA, and post-hoc tests,our findings suggest no support for the existence of the stereotype that non-theists are less moral than theists. Religious identity did not conclusively determine whether or not an individual was more moral or more altruistic.”

You can read the study online. What do you think? 

Goodbye, evil Pope.

At least this Pope admitted that the Catholic Church is unable to decide what is good and what is evil.

On December 20, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI described how the Catholic Church hasn’t had a consistent moral stand against the sexual abuse of children. As reported in the media (quotation from the Belfast Telegraph), he said: 

“In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” the Pope said. “It was maintained - even within the realm of Catholic theology - that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a ‘better than’ and a ‘worse than’. Nothing is good or bad in itself.”

Nothing like endorsing moral relativism when one needs to justify raping children. And in this speech he couldn’t even declare that the Catholic Church does now know that this crime is evil in itself.

Atheism doesn’t endorse sexual abuse in any form. Atheism doesn’t endorse a depraved moral relativism permitting just about any evil. Atheism won’t agree that morality is absolute because God says so, it is true. Yet if atheism leaves morality less objective than infallible certainty, it at least knows that having sex with minors is wrong, wrong, wrong. If atheism rests morality on what is best for people, at least it knows that harming innocent children is therefore bad in itself, because protecting children is always best for them. 

Let me ask a hypothetical question. Which is worse, doubting whether child rape is evil, or doubting whether God exists?  If you pick the second option, then you are as evil as this Catholic Church.  

Atheism has no doubt about the immorality of child abuse, but it does doubt the existence of God. Is that bad? Compared to this Catholic Church, atheism is looking pretty good.

Some notes while reading James Hannam, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (2011)....

Indeed early scientists in Europe were all Christians. They were reading as much from Greek and Roman thinkers as they could, during the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. (There wasn’t much, since most classical writings had been allowed to rot into oblivion under the Christian monopolization of learning.) These brilliant minds all had to ultimately work within some theological system or another about the Christian god. Early science had no choice but to think about the natural world with influential theological categories in mind, since there was no nonreligious alternative available. A few brave thinkers contemplated Democritus’s world of atoms or a purely naturalistic Aristotle, but those heretical worldviews couldn’t be openly endorsed.

On this matter, all historians must be agreed.

The deeper questions are whether science would have emerged without Christianity, and whether Christianity deserves praise for science’s dependency. Secular philosophy’s answers are, to the first question, that science would have emerged centuries earlier without Christianity’s domination, especially if Greek and Roman science had been more accessible; and to the second question, Christianity deserves very little credit at all.

Early science would have been vastly better off continuing to grow under the gentler worldviews of materialistic atomism, Stoicism, or naturalistic Aristotelianism than the heavy yoke of an anger-prone providential deity. To imagine that science was truly better off with Yahweh during the 14th century is to imagine that if science had to start over again today, the finest place would be some Taliban-controlled region of Afghanistan.

Further reading? Can’t do better than my favorite historian of science, Richard Carrier:  

http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2006/11/science-and-medieval-christianity.html 

Theologian William Lane Craig and philosopher Alex Rosenberg debated the question, “Is Faith in God Reasonable” at Purdue University on February 1. The video is below. Dr. Rosenberg’s latest book is The Atheist’s Guide to Reality. An interview with Rosenberg about his book is here. 

Dr. Rosenberg starts out his allotted time with unkind remarks about debating god, and throws in this line about debating Craig, “Is Dr. Craig infallible, or does he just not listen?” This debate settles into some predictable patterns, but it contains a very broad number of issues and Rosenberg’s points are worthy of attention. Here’s an example: at 1:18:30 into the video, Rosenberg refutes Craig’s suggestion that the applicability of mathematics to nature’s order is a coincidence requiring a Divine Creator. Also, the problem of evil and morality’s natural origins is pursued up and down over the debate. 

It’s only natural that a belief system like religion would judge rivals by its own criteria for success.