Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 3

Posted on Saturday 15 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

(Houghton Mifflin, Oct. 2006, 406pp, including 26pp of appendix, books cited, notes, and index)

(Post 1; Post 2)

One chapter for today. This is about where religion came from and what use it is.

*

Ch 5, The Roots of Religion, p161

There are various ideas about the usefulness of religion, but this chapter focuses on the Darwinian imperative—if something exists, it must be ‘good for something’. What is religion ‘good for’? It might be good directly; it might involve group selection; it might involve the ‘extended phenotype’ (e.g. a parasite directing an organism to do something); it might involve memes.

Australian aboriginals are presumably typical of our distant ancestors; their minds are full of specific useful knowledge about their environment, but also nonsense about witchcraft and female menstruation. And all cultures have had some version of time-consuming apparently ‘useless’ rituals and fantasies… Even when people give it up, religion is a default; like heterosexuality; that everyone recognizes.

P166, Direct advantages of Religion. Some evidence suggests that religious belief protects people against stress. Not that this has anything to do with the truth of religion’s claims. Still, like other placebos, it might have an effect. Yet if so, why would the mind evolve to benefit from false ideas? Note difference between proximate and ultimate explanations. (Ref Shermer How We Believe.) Some claims for religion are the former; we’re concerned with the latter.

P169, Group selection. (Ref Colin Renfrew and DS Wilson.) This idea suggests that a tribe with a militant god would defeat tribes with a peaceful god, for example. Author does not support group selection, though admits it can happen in principle. It has too many problems, e.g. subversion from within—even in a militant tribe, an *individual* who held back might survive to reproduce, letting others sacrifice for him. Even Darwin allowed that some form of tribal competition might have consequences, 171. [[ I’ll have comments about this at the end of the post. ]]

P172, Religion as a By-product of something else. This is the author’s own view. An example is why moths fly into candle flames. The instinct to navigate by light serves when the moon or sun is the only light; with artificial lighting, the same instinct results in a death-spiral. Asking why moths commit suicide is the wrong question.

What is religion’s something else? Author hypothesizes the misfiring of the how parents pass along experience to their children—how children reflexively believe what they’re told by their parents, as a mean of culturally transmitting information. Preachers tell stories; example from author’s childhood about soldiers marching on into an oncoming train. Such transmission carries everything, valid or not, like computers who execute valid programs and also viruses. The flip-side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. Religious leaders know the value of indoctrinating a child early, cf the Jesuit boast, and James Dobson. 177m. [[ It seems to me author doesn’t explain why the adult wouldn’t abandon obviously baseless beliefs—the same way adults no longer believe in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus ]]

Where *other* beliefs seem weird to us who didn’t grow up with them. Example of a Cambridge theologian wonders how primitive tribes can believe such nonsense, contrasted with the beliefs of a mainstream Christian, p178-9.

P179, Psychologically primed for religion. Evolutionary psychology suggests reasons why human nature would be susceptible. Children have a natural tendency toward a dualistic theory of mind—they attribute minds to everything, just as some people and stories assume minds and bodies are distinct (e.g. fantasies about minds exchanging bodies, example of an 1882 novel.).

People are also predisposed to be creationists—i.e., children assign purpose for everything. The purpose of clouds is to make rain. This is teleology.

Why would this be?

Dennett offers his idea of the ‘intentional stance’—the way we understand objects and animals and other entities. The physical stance, the design stance, the intentional stance. The last is a shortcut to presuming things about an animal that might eat you. Part of this is the assumption of ‘mind’ and purpose.

We do this when we attribute events to inanimate things.

A similar pattern might be seen in romantic love, in which love of a spouse is exclusive, unlike other kinds of love. It makes sense for the purpose of ensuring loyalty to a spouse, at least for as long as it takes to rear a child. There are even similarities between religious devotion and such love.

Lewis Wolpert (p186) suggests that strong conviction is a type of irrationality to guard against fickleness of mind. Robert Trivers offers a theory of self-deception—the better to deceive others.

Frazer’s Golden Bough showed the diversity, but also the similarities, of religious belief. Something like ‘genetic drift’ may apply, as it does to languages (p189). Yet at times religions exhibit intelligent design; leaders, like Martin Luther, who warn against reason as the enemy of religion (p190).

P191, Tread Softly, Because You Tread on My Memes. A meme can be any replicator that works analogous to a gene—something that makes copies of itself, along with occasional ‘mutations’. Objections to memes are exaggerated; e.g. an idea or practice doesn’t have to be passed along in literal detail, just through general principle, and the latter can be sufficiently binary for replication to operate according to natural selection. (e.g. the concepts of driving a nail into wood, or doing origami to make a particular form.) The game of ‘telephone’ would also demonstrate this—a short message might well be passed along without error, while a drawing couldn’t be replicated even from one step to the next. Digital vs analog.

Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine developed these ideas more extensively than anyone. Like genes, which work in ‘cartels’ of interrelated effects, memes operate in synch with one another—a ‘memeplex’. Thus some individual ideas survive because of compatibility with others, not on their own merits. E.g. a religion memeplex—life after death, martyrs, killing heretics, belief as a virtue, etc. (p199-200). Different ‘sets’ might work equally well; Islam as a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism as a herbivorous one. People guide religions but don’t design them—with the rare exception of Scientology, and to an extent, Mormonism.

P202 Cargo Cults. As in The Life of Brian, they exhibit the extreme rapidity with which religions can evolve. (Ref. David Attenborough Quest in Paradise.) Natives of south sea islands saw white men bring supplies, do mysterious things like shuffle papers and talk through boxes with glowing lights, and concluded the cargo was of supernatural origin. Similar cults arose in dozens of places. One on the island now known as Vanuatu includes a messianic figure named John Frum—cited only since 1940, but whose confirmed existence is still uncertain. Doctrines concerned his second coming, his kingship in America, etc., and when later visitors came the doctrines were shifted to fit available evidence. They demonstrate certain common features of religions—four lessons: the speed with which they spring up; the speed with which it covers its tracks; their similarity to each other; and fourth, to older religions.

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My comments: The skepticism about group selection seems to have faded. The problem of the free-loader has been solved, it seems, by the realization that morality itself evolved: ideas of shame and honor, emotions like embarrassment. It’s precisely the development of such reactions that have allowed group selection, and thus the cooperation of larger and larger groups in competition with each other. Thus, even if not everyone within each group marches in lockstep with all the others, we can still observe differences in the outcomes between groups with different forms of government, or different religions.

Posted in Atheism, Book Notes, Human Nature, Religion | Leave a comment

Conservative Principles vs. Reality

Posted on Friday 14 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman on the decline and fall of the conservative Heritage Foundation, and how it’s always been a fraud;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on how the ideology of MAGA is smashing against reality;
  • Short items about Republicans destroying the safety net, Trump dropping tariffs on countries who give him gifts, how religious groups are safe havens for sexual predators, and conservative predictions that Mamdani will starve NYC;
  • James Greenberg on Facebook expresses salient truths about how modern civilization knows about the ways it’s being undone, but denies them, i.e. about climate change denial.
– – –

How principled conservatism has morphed into “conspiracy-mongering and blatant bigotry.”

Paul Krugman, 14 Nov 2025: The Decline and Fall of the Heritage Foundation, subtitled “Its descent into conspiracy-mongering and blatant bigotry was utterly predictable”

There’s deep turmoil at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing “think tank” that calls itself “America’s most influential policy organization,” and is responsible for Project 2025. I’ll explain the scare quotes in a minute.

This is about the recent Tucker Carlson podcast interview with Nick Fuentes, “a white nationalist who espouses antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

This was shocking but not surprising: It has been obvious for a long time that virulent antisemitism was a growing force within the American right, especially among young people. Last month Politico reported on the contents of private chats between a number of Young Republican leaders that include declarations that “I love Hitler,” jokes about gas chambers, and more.

So should it come as a surprise that Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, put out a video defending Carlson and attributing the uproar to “the globalist class,” a turn of phrase routinely used to attack Jews?

(I’ve not realized until now that the idea of globalism, an inevitability not just because the population keeps expanding but because it’s necessary to solve global existential threats, is equated by conservatives with a Jewish conspiracy!)

Krugman thinks this isn’t a new development, but that Heritage has always been a fraud.

It has always been a propaganda mill cosplaying as a research institution – a scam that worked for a long time. Heritage’s problem now is that its original scam was designed for a different era — a Reaganesque era in which plutocrats could discreetly leverage bigotry and intolerance to elect Republicans, who then delivered deregulation and tax cuts. Heritage was an integral cog within this scheme, giving superficial respectability to policies that were in fact deeply regressive and discriminatory, and overwhelmingly to the benefit of the moneyed class.

The priorities of the Republican party have been obvious for decades. Krugman reviews more history of Heritage, including its accusation that he, Krugman, was a pedophile (“As they say, every accusation by the modern right is really a confession.”). And concludes,

Again, it’s important to get the story of Heritage correct, because it is also the story of the modern right as a whole. Heritage was never a respectable institution doing honest research. It was always in the business of telling lies on behalf of its wealthy supporters. But now it’s trying to turn itself into a MAGA/Groyper institution, less focused on telling economic lies and more focused on bigotry and conspiracy theories.

And if this shocks and surprises you, well, you just weren’t paying attention.

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How often have I said that conservatives are not reality-based?


Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American: November 13, 2025

We are watching the ideology of the far-right MAGAs smash against reality, with President Donald J. Trump and his cronies madly trying to convince voters to believe in their false world rather than the real one.

The economy, tariffs, price statistics from DoorDash, violence against purported immigrants, war with Venezuela, and on and on.

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Briefly noted.

  • Slate, Shirin Ali, 14 Nov 2025: Republicans Are Ripping a New Giant Hole in the Social Safety Net, subtitled “After punishing hungry people during the government shutdown, the GOP has a new plan to make life harder for the most vulnerable.” — — The cruelty is the point. Or: conservatives somehow believe that the poor deserve their fate.
  • Friendly Atheist, 14 Nov 2025: How the Assemblies of God became a safe haven for sexual predators, subtitled “A sweeping NBC investigation exposed decades of abuse, cover-ups, and indifference inside the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination” — — But hasn’t this kind of thing been obvious for decades, especially in the Catholic Church?
  • JMG, 14 Nov 2025, from Family Research Council: FRC: NYC Will Starve Under Mamdani’s “Police State” — — No, it won’t. More conservative paranoia and cynicism. They predict things like this over and over, and they never come to pass. Also, our rights *do* come, explicitly, from the government. What rights come from God, exactly, in the Bible? Free speech?

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I have no idea who this guy, James Greenberg, on Facebook is, except that he’s from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has 58K followers.

But his post from a couple days ago captures some salient truths.

Never before has a civilization known so much about the forces undoing it—or worked so hard to deny them. How is it that, despite all the scientific data and even the evidence of our own experience, so many people continue to believe that climate change is a hoax?

The simple answer is that fossil-fuel money turned denial into an industry. For decades, public-relations firms have flooded the media with carefully crafted doubt, transforming an empirical question into a cultural battle. Climate change has become less about carbon molecules than about identity, loyalty, and belonging.

And,

Yet the roots of denial run deeper than propaganda. They lie in how human beings construct meaning. We do not perceive the world as it is, but through the lenses of culture and language. Our understanding of reality—and even what we count as evidence—is shaped by cultural logics that organize experience, emotion, and belief. These logics give coherence to our lives, but they can also make us blind to facts that threaten them.

This isn’t quite how I would put it, but, yes. Then he describes an anthropological story. Then:

Every society faces uncertainty and risk. Cultures manage these by imposing order—by creating systems of knowledge, ritual, and morality that render the world predictable. Science and religion both perform this work, but through different logics. Science grounds knowledge in evidence and predictive power; religion anchors meaning in faith, ritual, and revelation.

Scientific knowledge is always provisional, open to revision. Religious belief, by contrast, rests on premises that cannot be proven or disproven: that God or the gods exist, that creation has purpose, that human rituals, prayers, and offerings are efficacious. Those premises give life moral coherence, but they also sanctify other ideas: that authority is divinely ordained, that power signifies virtue, that prosperity is a sign of favor. When belief fuses with identity, it becomes impermeable to evidence.

Climate change denial arises not from ignorance but from refusal—the insistence on preserving meaning against a truth that demands moral reckoning. Science challenges the old cosmology of human dominion over nature as a divine exemption from consequence. It reveals that nature operates under immutable laws, that our pretense of mastery has limits, that extraction carries costs, and that the planet itself can rebel. For those whose sense of order depends on human exceptionalism, that is not merely threatening—it is heresy.

And more. Very good.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Politics, Social Progress | Leave a comment

Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 2

Posted on Friday 14 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

(Houghton Mifflin, Oct. 2006, 406pp, including 26pp of appendix, books cited, notes, and index)

(Post 1)

Here are the first four chapters (out of ten), which deal with the arguments for and against the existence of God, summarized in 3700 words. Note that Dawkins refers to many other authors and their books, and frequently quotes. I’ll only allude them in passing.

*

1, A Deeply Religious Non-Believer, p9

Einstein quote.

Deserved Respect – author describes a boy (later the author’s chaplain) laying in a field, feeling a mystical response to nature. Isn’t this religion? No; it’s on par with the end of Darwin’s book, or Sagan in Pale Blue Dot, both quoted. How ironic that religion never acknowledges the wonders of the universe as revealed by science—preferring their own, smaller but personal god. Also quotes Weinberg.

We need to distinguish between Einsteinian religion and supernatural religion; the former is what Hawking used when referring to the ‘mind of God’. Awe at nature is about being a naturalist, as most scientists are; they aren’t religious in a supernatural sense. (Mentions the short Baggini book p13b and Martin Rees p14)

In fact when Einstein wrote a paper explicitly denying his belief in a personal god, it caused an uproar; he was denounced from the pulpit, people wrote letters telling him to go back where he came from. Samples p16-17.

A ‘theist’ believes in an active personal god; a ‘deist’ in a god who created the universe but has since left it alone; a ‘pantheist’ uses the word God as a synonym for nature…

Einstein used ‘god’ as a metaphor, and author wishes physicists would stop doing so; it creates needless confusion. To deliberately confuse the two is an act of intellectual high treason.

 P20: Undeserved Respect — So the title of the book refers to supernatural gods only. As a second matter to clear up, the issue of giving offense and respect. Author is amazed at the extent to which religion is deferred to in society, especially America. Long quote from Douglas Adams, 20b.  Thus to attain objector status from the draft, one merely needs to state that one’s a Quaker. Conversely, religious conflicts avoid using religious terms—Catholics vs Protestants, etc. p21.

In the Supreme Court, a religious argument trumps others (e.g. whether a ‘religion’ may use a psychotropic drug). Author signed support for Salman Rushdie. Now religious parents claim ‘freedom of religion’ as the basis for wearing t-shirts with offensive statements in school—the ‘right’ to be Christian.

The most absurd recent case was the ‘offense’ Muslims took to cartoons published in a Danish paper, which were deliberately spread with false information around the world in February ’06, causing riots and violence (ironically). While no one calls out the Muslims on the offense they give to Jews…

So author will not go out of his way to offend—but will speak plainly where necessary.

2, The God Hypothesis, p29

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction:  “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Only someone first encountering him as an adult can appreciate the horror. Example of Churchill’s son reading the Bible for the first time.

But it’s an easy target. By the ‘God Hypothesis’ in this book we mean not specifically the OT God, but the generic supernatural intelligence who designed the universe and everything in it. The alternate view of this book is that intelligence comes into being only as the product of gradual evolution… The god of the former hypothesis is a delusion.

P32 Polytheism. It’s assumed that polytheism is more primitive than monotheism, without explaining why. Some writers dismiss polytheism and atheism on apparently equal grounds. In fact society exhibits monotheistic chauvinism, with tax breaks, and so on. Yet the Roman Catholic church is virtually polytheistic, what with the trinity, and Mary, and thousands of saints, angels, etc., all shamelessly invented. Jefferson dismissed it as sophistry.

And there are many varieties of religion other than the three great monotheistic religions; but life is too short, and this book will refer to ‘God’ as representing those three. (Refs to Frazer, Boyer, Atran 36.3)

P37. Monotheism. A Gore Vidal quote dismisses the ‘sky-god’ as patriarchal and bringing much misery. The three major religions all derive from Judaism, the cult of a desert tribe obsessed with sexual restrictions, charred flesh, etc. Then Paul of Tarsus founded Christianity.  Islam added violent conquest, and so did Christianity in its crusades, witch hunts, etc. The Abrahamic God is presumed to be a personal one—one who answers prayers—unlike the 18th century god of the enlightenment, an altogether grander being. Thus the fate of Thomas Paine.

P38 Secularism, the founding fathers and the religion of America.  Were the founders deists? They were secularists, as many statements indicate. Barry Goldwater (quote) railed against churches trying to tell him how to vote. The treaty at Tripoli in 1796 explicitly denies that America was founded as a Christian nation.

Ironically, American has become much more religious, in contrast to England, with its state-run church. Why? Possibly because American let religion became a matter of free enterprise. Jefferson, however, stressed reason; he would be called an atheist today. Madison and Adams made similar remarks, p43. Now we have Bush Sr. denying the citizenship of atheists.

Atheists are more numerous than generally realized, but they are discriminated against. Story of a man protesting a faith healer—the police threatened *him* with violence. It’s impossible to be elected for anything as an atheist. The founders would be horrified.

P46, The Poverty of Agnosticism. Isn’t that a reasonable position? It’s ok for topics when there really is no evidence, such as the existence of extra-terrestrial life. (Don’t rely on ‘gut’ feelings.)

But there’s a difference between TAP, temporary agnosticism in practice, as being one of waiting for the evidence, and PAP, permanent agnosticism in principle, which means believing a subject can never be decided, that evidence cannot apply.

Author claims the existence of God *is* a scientific question. TH Huxley invented the word (agnostic), and he meant not a creed but a method—that of following reason. (Quotes p49)

We can certainly discuss the *probability* of the god hypothesis, and we can describe a spectrum of probabilities from 100% certain there is a god to 100% certain there isn’t. Not knowing doesn’t equate to 50% likelihood either way. Consider the spectrum of probabilities, p50, from 1, strong theist, to 7, strong atheist. [[ I would be a 6 on this scale. ]]

Compare Bertrand Russell’s ‘teapot’ hypothesis (quote), one in orbit of the sun but undetectable. Similarly we are all tooth fairy agnostics. Other examples. The Flying Spaghetti Monster might exist. But we can pretty sure such things don’t exist.

As always, the burden is on the believer. We’re all atheists about Zeus and Baal. What matters is whether the existence of God is probable.

P54 NOMA. Still, theists stress the unprovability of God’s nonexistence, as if that implies the opposite, or at least makes it equally likely. Some scientists bend over backwards to be nonthreatening to theists—Gould’s ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ or NOMA (in ROCK OF AGES). Compare Martin Rees (OUR COSMIC HABITAT) who seems sympathetic to NOMA. Science and religion don’t intersect.

But why then should theologians (does the topic exist?) have any authority about anything? As opposed to the gardener or cook? E.g, why should religion be allowed to say what’s good and bad? Which religion? How to choose from them all? Why not leave out the middle man and make moral choices ourselves? Some scientists bend over backwards to not offend religion.

If such a god exists who can suspend natural laws (to make ‘miracles’) it would be a quite different universe than one without.

Contrarily, if DNA were discovered to support Christ’s virgin birth, you can bet believers would *not* shrug and say science doesn’t apply—they would trumpet the evidence. NOMA is popular only because there *isn’t* evidence for any of these things.

Anyway evidence for miracles is required for sainthood; most people do believe their prayers are answered. They don’t believe in NOMA. They believe God helped them win, or saved them a parking space.

P61, The Great Prayer Experiment. It was double-blind, with 1802 patients, and results in April 2006 detected no difference in whether patients were prayed to or not. (Author offers mocking example of Bob Newhart sketch about this.) Theologians opposed the project—after the results were in, and offered rationalizations—prayers must be for a good reason, say. Oxford theologian Richard Swinburne actually defends suffering (even of Hiroshima!) in typical such reasoning, and suggested that ‘too much evidence’ of god’s existence would be a bad thing. Other theologians dismissed the study too; you can be sure they would not have had the results been positive.

P66, The Neville Chamberlain School of Evolutionists. A broader issue concerns attacks on science in general from certain political groups. Defenders stress NOMA. A sort of Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists. One of these is Michael Ruse, who criticized Dawkins for playing to the creationist base; Jerry Coyne properly replied that the real war is between rationalism and superstition. Creationists fight dirty, by conflating evolution with atheism. Examples with comments by Dennett and Myers.

P69 Little Green Men. Move from the teapot example to the existence of ET life—that we can make estimates about the likelihood of. The Drake equation. We have more evidence now, and we can certainly imagine what kind of evidence it would take to convince us of their existence. (Mentions of Hoyle, Sagan, Clarke, Galouye, 72-73.) In fact, ETs might well be godlike—but they wouldn’t be gods. It’s a matter of provenance. Gods are skyhooks, not cranes.

3, Arguments for God’s Existence, p75

Thomas Aquinas offered five, easily exposed as vacuous. The first three (The Unmoved Mover; The Uncaused Cause; The Cosomological Argument) involve infinite regress, with ‘God’ presuming to be the end of it; of course there’s no reason to imagine such a terminator to regress to have all the other qualities we ascribe to God, 77b. But not all things infinitely regress—one can subdivide an amount of gold only until reaching a single atom. The fourth argument, from degree, is hardly an argument. The fifth, from design (the teleological argument), is the one still taken seriously by some (but of course can be explained by natural selection).

P80, The ontological argument and other a priori arguments. The most famous is the notion that since a perfect thing is conceivable, and to be perfect it must exist, then this perfect thing, god, must exist. Author considers this argument ‘infantile’. But it gave even Bertrand Russell pause. But similar logic can prove the opposite. They didn’t understand Zeno’s paradox. Hume and Kant provided the definitive refutations of this argument. One can similarly argue that God does *not* exist, p83. Other examples, p84-5.

P86, The argument from beauty. How do you account for Beethoven? But, the logic is? Improbability of a genius? Jealousy that such an artist could exist unless created by god?

P87, The argument from personal ‘experience’. The most common. A man converts after hearing the devil during a camping trip in Scotland… which others would recognize as a devil bird. Many people hear things or see things; some are called mad; enough of them make a religion. (Quote from Sam Harris p88.)

The brain runs simulation software of the world, rather than perceiving the world directly. Thus optical illusions; thus a bias toward perceiving faces and hearing voices. Author recalls hearing a voice that turned out to be wind through a keyhole.

Explaining mass visions is harder—e.g. the 70,000 pilgrims in Fatima who saw the sun tear across the sky. But explaining how this could happen and the rest of the world not notice—let alone if the earth had actually torn apart—is even less likely. Cf Hume. [[ anyway how could anyone verify that 70,000 saw the same thing? ]]

P92, The argument from scripture. Some people believe because scripture says so. CS Lewis: Jesus claimed to be son of god, so he was right, or insane or a liar. (Or was honestly mistaken.)

People aren’t used to wondering who wrote something down, when and why, what their biases were, etc. [[ of course simply claiming it was inspired by god is the answer here. ]] In the case of the gospels, the issue of whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem was handled differently (p93); two of them assumed he must have been, because it was prophesied. Similarly there are many contradictions in the Christmas stories (cf Tom Flynn in Free Inquiry), and many elements of the myth were lifted from other religions of the time. But many unsophisticated people do take the bible literally… presumably without having read it closely. Generations from David to Joseph. As explained by Bart Ehrman in recent books.

And there were other gospels, 95b. With stories even more implausible than those in the four canonical ones. Footnote about mistranslations, from ‘carpenter’ to ‘virgin.’ 96b. So too is The Da Vince Code entirely fiction.

P97, The argument from admired religious scientists. (Note Bertrand Russell quote.) Yes Newton said he believed, as did Faraday and Kelvin, but up to the 19th century virtually everyone *said* they believed. These days it’s hard to find prominent scientists who claim to be believers—though he names three Brits (99.4), and Francis Collins, etc. Very few Nobelists, or Royal Society members. Studies by Shermer (How We Believe) and others show a negative correlation between education or IQ and belief.

P103, Pascal’s wager— But this isn’t about belief, but about feigning belief. Wouldn’t God know? Anyway, why is it so important to God to believe, moreso than being kind, generous, etc.? And what if, per the wager, one died and discovered that Baal was the real god who existed?

P105, Bayesian Arguments. A writer named Stephen Unwin published a book recently trying to use Bayesian arguments, a series of set theory estimates combining various factors… Unwin provided his own estimates of six facts (evil things happen, etc), ran the calculation and got something above 50%–then added a fudge factor of ‘faith’ to bring the result to 95% (!).

Unwin considers the existence of evil is a factor (against God, actually); but it’s not one that concerns author much. Religious people seldom distinguish between what they believe, and what they wish to be true. Another solution to the problem of evil might be that god is simply nasty—or he has better things to worry about, or that evil is a trial, etc. etc. All rationalizations that have been made.

The much more powerful argument, from improbability, is to simply wonder, who made God?

Ch 4, Why There Almost Certainly is No God, p111

P113, The Ultimate Boeing 747. This is a clincher for most people—that the world is so improbable, God must have done it – but author claims it’s a clincher in the opposite direction, but indicating why God almost certainly does not exist.

The reason is a variation of Fred Hoyle’s 747 argument—he said the probability of life originating on earth is as likely as finding a 747 blown together by a hurricane in a scrapyard. It’s the creationist’s favorite argument because they have no clue about how natural selection actually works, thinking it some theory of chance.

The reason is that God is the ultimate 747—if god created life and the universe, then God is himself even more unlikely, for what is to explain God? Actually, natural selection is the only answer.

P114, National selection is a consciousness raiser. Like maps with the south pole at the top. Just as feminists’ use of ‘herstory’ was for author. It makes one aware of possibilities one wouldn’t have considered. Douglas Adams read earlier Dawkins’ books and was converted to ‘radical atheism’. (See The Salmon of Doubt.) The principles of natural selection apply to other sciences; in a sense cosmology was born with Darwin and Wallace.

Theists who thinks evolution is god’s method of achieving creation—they don’t get it. With natural selection, there’s nothing for God to do.

P119, Irreducible Complexity. The favorite ploy of creationists is to cite ‘irreducible complexity’ – as in many examples of lifeforms in a Watchtower published booklet about how life got here – as the reason ‘chance’ can’t explain life, implying that therefore design (by God) is the only explanation. (They omit natural selection, because they don’t understand it or don’t want to, 120b.) But God just extends the problem. The real answer is a third alternative—natural selection, which has a cumulative power. Creationists take an all-or-nothing position, as if half an eye or wing is useless. In fact many intermediate forms exist in nature, and are useful. (Author cites own metaphor of ‘mount improbable’, with a cliff on one side, a gentle slope on the other.) Darwin anticipated these issues.

Creationists worship gaps—they seize upon them as evidence that their alternative explanation of design must be true. But it’s easy to imagine situation where part of an eye, or wing, is better than nothing. “The fact that so many people have been dead wrong over these obvious cases… “ 124.7.

P125, The Worship of Gaps. It is a faulty way of arguing—that if an apparent gap is found, God must be needed to fill it. Whereas scientists seize upon gaps as new opportunities for research. Example p126 about a frog’s elbow joint; ID is assumed as a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Gaps represent a failure of imagination; author has called this the argument from personal incredulity. But if you can’t figure out how Penn & Teller do a trick, that doesn’t mean the supernatural was involved.

An arch of stones and no mortar is irreducibly complex, but its construction can be easily imagined: by using a scaffolding subsequently removed.

Michael Behe is invented the term ‘irreducible complexity’ in 1996, using the flagellar motor of bacteria as a prime example. (Author cites Philip Pullman in a footnote here.) In the Pennsylvania 2005 court case Behe was presented with numerous cases to explain the immune system, and simply shrugged them off, as Judge Jones easily saw. (Note book by Kenneth Miller.) Examples. Another of Behe’s favorites, the immune system. Mention of Jerry Coyne. The explanation ‘God did it’ is simply giving up.

P134, The anthropic principle—planetary version. The origin of life itself is cited by theists as a ‘bigger’ gap, but it only had to happen once. The so-called anthropic principle explains why the origin itself can be extremely improbable—it only had to happen once. … Even if only one in a billion planets produced life, there are still billions in the universe that would have life. Theists assume that for Earth to be in a ‘Goldilocks orbit’, God must have done it. The anthropic principle says, since we’re here to ask the question, we must be one of the billion.

Oddly, religious apologists love the anthropic principle, thinking it an alternative to chance. It isn’t; it’s an alternative to design. Matt Ridley has suggested there may be other unlikely ‘gaps’—the origin of eukaryotic cells, consciousness—but the same principle applies.

P141, The Anthropic Principle: Cosmological Version. That we live in a friendly universe is perhaps a more difficult problem; Martin Rees cites six specific physical constants that if slightly different would result in a universe without life. What does this mean? Perhaps that God set all six numbers. That still doesn’t explain God. Yet many theists are satisfied by this answer, perhaps subject to the psychological bias of perceiving inanimate objects as agents, 143b. Another answer is for some reason the settings are necessary, or dependent on each other on some deep level.

Further ideas suggest cycles of big bangs, or many universes in a ‘multiverse’. Each universe might have slightly different physical laws. Smolin’s idea (in The Life of the Cosmos) of daughter universes, where each daughter might have different laws, in a sort of Darwinian inheritance.

Theists have odd responses to these ideas—Richard Swinburne admirably claims to prefer simple explanations, but then finds it amazing that every electron has the same properties, or that each particle retains its properties over time. Surely God is maintaining things? But then he says God by definition is a single, simple substance. Author is boggled—anything capable of maintaining such complexity (not to mention answering prayers etc) must be very complex. Others, Ward and Peacocke, have similar ideas.

P 151, An Interlude at Cambridge. Author was invited to conference sponsored by Templeton Foundation (which should have been a warning; they’d paid for the journalists who covered it) and found himself the token atheist, and dismayed by Freeman Dyson’s vague conciliatory responses in support of having won the Templeton Prize. In the discussions that followed, theologians response to Dawkins was to simply declare the subject to be outside science; to talk about ‘other ways of knowing’; to cite personal experience; to ask why there is something rather than nothing; or to dismiss Dawkins’ world-view as so 19th-century (i.e. discussing issues so bluntly is simply impolite). Which was the last time anyone could claim to believe in miracles and virgin births without sounding embarrassed.

Author summarizes the central argument of the book, pp157-8.

  1. Explaining the appearance of design in the universe has been a great challenge
  2. The temptation, as with man-made objects, is to attribute appearance of design to design
  3. That doesn’t work because it doesn’t explain the designer
  4. Only a ‘crane’ can explain how complexity arose out of simplicity; natural selection is the most powerful crane.
  5. The equivalent for physics isn’t as apparent, but may involve a multiverse theory of some sort
  6. A better crane in physics may arise, but what we have is better than the skyhook intelligent designer

This is the main conclusion of this book so far—that God does not exist. If we accept this, what good is religion? Why is it ubiquitous? Where does it comes from…?

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My general comment, derived from the “consciousness-raising aspiration” of science fiction, is that human religions are deeply parochial. They project human relationships and attitudes onto the entire universe. It’s just as likely that something entirely beyond the comprehension of human beings is responsible for the universe; or, even more likely, the universe just is, in some necessary way, without having been created.

 

Posted in Book Notes, Morality, Religion | Leave a comment

Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 1

Posted on Friday 14 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

(Houghton Mifflin, Oct. 2006, 406pp, including 26pp of appendix, books cited, notes, and index)

Of the four books published in the mid-2000s by the so-called “new atheists,” this one by Richard Dawkins was the most blunt and least conciliatory; it was frank, straightforward, and matter of fact. It covers all the basics, such as the arguments for God’s existence and why they are weak or implausible, and the reasons why it’s very unlikely that any god exists; then looks at the history of religion, the source of morality, how the moral zeitgeist has changed over the millennia, and the problems with religion and religious belief.

Dawkins was already a highly renowned evolutionary biologist at Oxford, famous for books including THE SELFISH GENE (which introduced the concept of “meme”), THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, CLIMBING MOUNT IMPROBABLE, and UNWEAVING THE RAINBOW.

I reread the book a couple years ago and took detailed notes. As with the Haidt book just summarized, I’ll reproduce those notes with some comments along the way, and at the end boil everything down to a one-page summary.

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Preface

Dawkins tells how his wife didn’t realize that, as a child, she could have complained about her unhappy school experience. Her parents learned later; why didn’t she tell them? She didn’t know she could.

[[ Here I’ll interject a comment right away, to note that most people grow up automatically assuming the characteristics of their family and community. They acquire a last name without question; similarly they acquire a religion without question, even though a religion presumes many things about the world that are not verifiably true. But as Dawkins implies, you don’t have to. ]]

RD hopes this book will raise the consciousness of those unhappy with religion who just don’t realize that they can aspire to be an atheist… This is the first of his consciousness-raising aspirations.

[[ “Aspire to be an atheist”? OK, I’ll note this Dawkins blind spot. He doesn’t realize that very few people aspire to be an atheist, at least not publicly — because most other people take that to mean that you reject the constraints of the local religion and therefore can’t be trusted. It’s a matter of spin: people should aspire to be free of the irrational constraints of the local religion, along with the unsupportable supernatural claims, and learn to understand the world as it actually is. ]]

Dawkins comments how he hosted a British TV show in January 2006 titled “Root of All Evil?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzZh2wstj88) Aside: John Lennon’s song “Imagine” has been altered by deleting the line about religion, or replacing it by “one religion too”.

Then he outlines the topics to be covered in the book, mentioning three other ‘consciousness-raising aspiration.’ The second is the power of cranes, such as natural selection, that aid in our understanding of the cosmos. The third is the issue of childhood indoctrination; RD objects to phrases such as ‘Catholic child’ and wants everyone to speak of ‘child of Catholic parents’ instead. The fourth is atheist pride; it’s not something to be apologetic about.

The religiosity of America is truly remarkable. The status of atheists is that of homosexuals 50 years ago. RD hopes this book will help them come out. Alas atheists are hard to organize, though they outnumber Jews…

RD defends the term ‘delusion’ and discusses how his quotes are often taken out of context.

It’s presumptuous, but RD hopes religious readers who pick up this book will be atheists when they put it down. And he comments:

Of course, dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods that took centuries to mature (whether by evolution or design). Among the more effective immunological devices is a dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this, which is surely a work of Satan. But I believe there are plenty of open-minded people out there: people whose childhood indoctrination was not too insidious, or for other reasons didn’t ‘take’, or who native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it. Such free spirits should need only a little encouragement to break free of the vice of religion altogether. At very least, I hope that nobody who reads this book will be able to say, ‘I didn’t know I could.’

Posted in Book Notes, Psychology, Religion | Leave a comment

Intentional Ignorance

Posted on Thursday 13 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman on Republican lies and misrepresentations about health care;
  • Short items about a drop in US religiosity; Trump lying about falling gas prices; David French on how Trump keeps pardoning criminals as long as they’re loyal to him.
– – –

Paul Krugman, 13 Nov 2025: The Republican Brain Doesn’t Want To Understand Health Care, subtitled “For 15 years we have heard the same lies and misrepresentations”

There are almost 150 million dwelling units in America. Most homes are covered by insurance, and most home insurance covers losses due to fire. Yet in a normal year there are fewer than 400,000 home fires. Even if we allow for the fact that some homeowners don’t have insurance and some policies don’t cover fire damage, the vast majority of homeowners are paying for fire coverage that they will never use.

Clearly, this is a massive waste of money, a huge giveaway to the insurance industry.

OK, presumably almost no one believes that. While it’s unlikely that your house will burn down, losing your house to fire would be a crushing financial blow if you are uninsured. So we all pay premiums to protect ourselves against disaster. All Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans require home insurance.

Health insurance operates on the same principle. Without health insurance, you are at risk of a catastrophic financial blow if you get sick and require hospitalization. Moreover, even if you don’t require hospitalization, you are more likely to avoid getting regular check-ups and preventative care, thereby making it more likely that you will indeed suffer a health crisis and, possibly, death.

Yet the shutdown drama made it clear, once again, that Republicans, from Donald Trump on down, refuse to understand this basic point.

…

But the fact that Republicans have been misrepresenting how health insurance works since Obamacare was first proposed in 2009 is a testament to their cruelty and intentional ignorance.

And he patiently goes on to explain how insurance works, and how Obamacare was meant to work, and how Republicans after 15 years have never come up with a better scheme. And a line that echoes my repeated observation:

Republicans have lost the ability to think about policies that solve actual problems. Now it’s all a display of fealty to Dear Leader.

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Short Items.

  • NY Times, David French, 13 Nov 2025: One of the Founders’ Worst Fears Has Been Realized [gift link] — — How Trump keeps issuing pardons, commutations, or clemency, to criminals who are “either allies of Trump and his associates or used connections to Trump or his family (or helped enrich Trump) to get relief from justice.”
Posted in conservatives, Human Nature, Religion | Leave a comment

Discipline, Lies, Ignorance, and Consensus Truth

Posted on Wednesday 12 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Robert Reich on undisciplined Democrats and regimented Republicans;
  • Squaring that with Mike Johnson’s comments a year and a half ago;
  • Paul Krugman on how Trump successively lies, over and over;
  • How Trump doesn’t understand mortgages or health insurance;
  • Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and the right-wing attacks on consensus truth.
– – –

More catching up, with some longer pieces worth quoting from.

Robert Reich, 12 Nov 2025: Why are Democrats so undisciplined and Republicans so regimented?, subtitled “The asymmetry explained”

Chuck Schumer couldn’t hold his senators together at a time when their unity and toughness were essential. Yet Trump cracks the whip and gets all Republicans to do his bidding.

Does this mean Schumer should go? Yes.

But the problem runs deeper — to a fundamental asymmetry at the heart of American politics: Democrats are undisciplined. Republicans are regimented.

For as long as I remember, Democrats have danced to their own separate music while Republicans march to a single drummer.

With examples about Bill Clinton and others…

There’s a psychological-structural difference between the two parties.

Democrats pride themselves on having a “big tent” holding all sorts of conflicting views. Republicans pride themselves on having strong leaders.

People who run for office as Democrats are, as a rule, more tolerant of dissent than are people who run for office as Republicans. Modern-day Democrats believe in diversity, E Pluribus. Republicans believe in unity, Unum.

Research by the linguist George Lakoff has shown that in our collective subconscious, Democrats reflect the nurturing mother: accepting, embracing, empathic. Republicans represent the strict father: controlling, disciplining, limiting.

And this:

As America has grown ever more unequal and contentious, people who identify as Democrats tend to place a high value on the tenets of democracy: equal political rights, equal opportunity, and rule of law. That’s a good thing.

People who identify as Trump Republicans tend to place a high value on the tenets of authoritarianism: order, control, and patriarchy. (In fact, Trump authoritarianism is the logical endpoint of modern Republicanism.)

A majority of the current Supreme Court, comprised of Republican appointees, is coming down on the side of order, control, and patriarchy — which they justify under the legal fiction of a “unified executive” — rather than equal political rights, equal opportunity, and the rule of law.

This is all familiar stuff. But wait — what about that piece from a few months ago, where Speaking Mike Johnson admitted that Republicans were individualists who can’t cooperate to get things done? Actually, it was from April 2024.

Johnson claimed that “Democrats Are ‘Collectivists And Socialists’ But Republicans Are ‘Principled Rugged Individualists'”. My response: nonsense. That item and today’s item are talking at cross purposes. To some extent Johnson was simply wrong; to the extent he had a point, he’s denying the authoritarian streak among conservatives by calling them “individualists.”

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Republicans are not individualists because they’ve all fallen into place to support their authoritarian leader. To the extent of believing things that are simply not true.

Paul Krugman, 12 Nov 2025: War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Grocery Prices Are Way Down., subtitled “Lying has worked for Trump in the past. Is this a lie too far?”

It is true that Biden officials liked to cite statistics that presented a favorable picture of the economy, but they were genuine statistics and did indeed seem to show an economy in pretty good shape.

Trump, by contrast, is engaged in what CNN calls a “lying spree” about inflation. We all know that many media organizations have long had a habit of “sanewashing” Trump, downplaying the craziness of his remarks. What we’re seeing now is “truthwashing,” pretending that there is some factual justification for bald-faced lies.

Let’s talk for a minute about what happened under Biden, then turn to Trump’s pants-on-fire claims about prices.

It goes on, with more charts. Krugman ends:

As that left-wing rag the Wall Street Journal points out, the only people who seem to be feeling good about the economy right now are those who own a lot of stock.

But I believe that the turn against Trump is also in large part a backlash against his attempts to gaslight the public about the true state of the economy. Once again, these attempts aren’t about putting a positive spin on the data. They’re just flat-out lies.

And Democrats should hammer those lies as proof not just that Trump is utterly dishonest, but that he’s completely out of touch with the reality of American life.

(He’s being sarcastic about the Wall Street Journal being a left-wing rag.)

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Trump doesn’t understand so many things.

The New Republic, 11 Nov 2025: Fox Host Corrects Trump on How Mortgages Work as He Touts 50-Year Plan, subtitled “Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand what the average mortgage looks like for Americans.”

President Donald Trump is so deeply out of touch on what life is like for everyday Americans that even Fox News host Laura Ingraham had no choice but to correct him on her show Monday.

Trump, who over the weekend debuted a widely derided 50-year mortgage plan on Truth Social (where he compared himself to FDR), sat with Ingraham to clear things up.

“Your housing director has proposed something that has enraged your MAGA friends, which is this 50-year mortgage idea,” said Ingraham. “So—significant MAGA backlash, calling it a giveaway to the banks, and simply prolonging the time it would take for Americans to own a home outright. Is that really a good idea?”

Trump, in classic form, dismissed her concerns: “It’s not even a big deal. I mean, you go from 40 to 50 years—”

Ingraham corrected him: “Thirty to 50.”

Trump is the guy who thinks “groceries” is some exotic, old-fashioned term. (He’s never shopped for groceries in his entire life.)

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Fact-checking.

PolitiFact, 11 Nov 2025: Can Trump create $2,000 tariff dividends, 50-year mortgages or direct health care payments?

These are unlikely to pass, and this piece looks at the implausibilities of the three proposals. (Essentially, this is another item about how many people don’t actually understand how the world works.)

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First of all, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales appeared on KQED’s Forum show a couple weeks ago.

KQED Forum, Mina Kim, 31 Oct 2025: Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales on How to Build Trust

Wikipedia, the crowdsourced encyclopedia, is one of the world’s most visited websites, with 11 billion page views each month. Its founder, Jimmy Wales, credits its success to one thing — trust — which he sees at odds with our increasing loss of faith in institutions and in each other. In his new book, he lays out what he calls a “blueprint for building things that last” in volatile times.

It’s all about trust, and self-checking.

So when we think about the trust that readers have in Wikipedia, there’s a few elements that are really, really important. First of all, the transparency of showing sources. You know, whatever we say, we should link to a source, and the source should be high quality — you know, respected magazines, newspapers, academic journals, that sort of thing. So that really helps a lot, because you can check the information — where it came from. Another really important element is neutrality — the idea that Wikipedia shouldn’t take a side on any controversial topic. And, you know, to the extent we live up to that, I think it helps to build trust because people say, “Okay, they’re not here to convince me one way or the other; they’re just here to explain the debate to me.” And I think that’s really, really important and something that we need to continue to improve and to focus on.

(Because it’s human nature to trust others — tit for tat — until they betray you. Then you change your strategy.)

A really good interview. Wikipedia is about honest, intelligent people, who are trying to find a consensus about what is real, and true. (And I think there are more of them in the world than their critics.)

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On the other hand, there’s this.

The Atlantic, Renée DiResta, 11 Nov 2025: The Right-Wing Attack on Wikipedia, subtitled “The free internet encyclopedia is widely used to train AI. That’s why conservatives are trying to dethrone it.”

Late last month, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia with 855,279 articles, no human editors, and no way for users to request improvements beyond a suggestion box addressed to its eponymous chatbot author. The tech entrepreneur is eager, he has said, to “purge out the propaganda” that he argues afflicts Wikipedia, the venerable user-generated reference source. But some Grokipedia articles are near replicas of Wikipedia entries. Other articles in the new source seem conspicuously sanitized: The article about the U.S. government’s now-defunct foreign-aid agency fails to mention Musk, who boasted about his role in “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

The article doesn’t mention Conservapedia (this is a Wikipedia link; I’m not going to link to it).

Another of Wikipedia’s guiding principles is “assume good faith”—which its prominent critics are not doing. Musk and others have taken to calling it “Wokipedia.” Sanger, who has become an outspoken critic, argues that Wikipedia has adopted what he calls a “GASP” worldview — globalist, academic, secular, progressive.

Well, because that’s reality. In an inescapably globalist society, there is no going back to religious tribalism, as conservative evangelical Republicans would like.

Posted in conservatives, Politics, Psychology | Comments Off on Discipline, Lies, Ignorance, and Consensus Truth

Cruelty, Nonsense, and Reality-Checks

Posted on Wednesday 12 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman says Trump knew full well how his Great Gatsby-themed party looked just as millions of Americans were about to lose federal food assistance — the cruelty is the point;
  • Short items about church/state separation; how “God’s authority” is not a legal defense; Mar-A-Lago Face requests; firing investigators targeting your friends; what “great red cities”?; Trump pranked; Obergefell; Trump doesn’t know what a magnet is; Trump thinks people quit their jobs to get SNAP; Trump thinks Mamdani is a communist, with a helpful chart to distinguish various “isms”; Tucker Carlson thinks chemtrails are real, with a helpful response detailing the logistics needed for that to be true; and how Trump thinks talent in the US is lacking.
– – –

Catching up on items in the news from the past week. This sets the tone.

Paul Krugman, 4 Nov 2025: The Big Smirk, subtitled “The cruelty is the point, party edition”

There’s been plenty of scathing commentary about the lavish, Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party Donald Trump threw at Mar a Lago — a party complete with sequined, feathered dancers and, yes, a scantily-clad woman in a giant martini glass. The party, held just hours before 42 million Americans were about to lose federal food assistance, as 1.4 million federal workers are going without pay, was grotesque. It was also, like everything Trump, unspeakably vulgar.

…

During Trump’s first term Adam Serwer wrote a justly celebrated article for The Atlantic titled “The cruelty is the point.” He argued that cruelty, and the joy some people take from inflicting cruelty, are what bind Trump’s most loyal supporters to him:

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united.

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How do I know these fact-checks on Facebook are more reliable that things said by Trump and Carlson? An exercise for the reader.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Politics, Psychology | Comments Off on Cruelty, Nonsense, and Reality-Checks

Jonathan Haidt, THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS, post 5 (conclusion)

Posted on Tuesday 11 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”
With second subtitle “Why the Meaningful Life is Closer than You Think”

(Basic Books, 2006, xiii + 297pp, including 54pp acknowledgements, notes, references, and index. Hardcover with no dust jacket.)

(Post 1, Post 2, post 3, post 4)

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Now, a final review and some thumbnail summaries. What was this book about again? Happiness? Ancient wisdom? The meaning of life? All of the above? The themes and structure of the book are not crisp enough for me to boil them down without reading through my notes one more time… That’s what I’m doing today, to distill the book down as much as I can.

There are three aspects of each discussion. The take according to ancient wisdom; the take according to modern understanding; and my own take on how Haidt thinks the modern understanding contributions to happiness and/or meaning, especially if they involve things that are not objectively true.

Ch1: Divided Self
Ancient wisdom: the mind is divided, e.g. rider and elephant, or rational vs emotional.

Modern understanding: The mind is divided in at least four ways — mind vs body, left vs right, new vs old, controlled vs automatic — and understanding these allows us to be aware of self-control, mental intrusions, and why arguments are difficult to win.

Ch2: Changing Your Mind
Ancient wisdom: We control how we think about the world by behaving ‘philosophically,’ by rising above it.

Modern understanding: Retrain the elephant via meditation, cognitive therapy, or Prozac.

Ch3: Reciprocity
Ancient wisdom: We live by love or reciprocity.

Modern understanding: We understand ultrasociality as an outcome of evolution; similarly tit for tat strategies for dealing with people have led to methods for controlling cheaters; we use gossip to keep track of relationships and reputations; we can be aware of how these methods can be used against us.

Ch4: Faults
Ancient wisdom: We focus on the flaws of others.

Modern understanding: We realize that we all think the same way; think that we’re right, others are biased or even evil; but this is a myth. Realize it’s a game and stop taking it so seriously; don’t judge; be more empathetic.

Ch5: Happiness
Ancient wisdom: Happiness comes from within; abandon all attachments.

Modern understanding: It also comes from outside yourself. Happiness is a combination of one’s biological set point, the conditions we live in (some of which we can control), and connections from marriage, religion, or even money. We’re happier making progress toward goals than actually achieving them. Learn to adapt. Find a flow; don’t obsess over multiple options.

Ch6: Love
Ancient wisdom: Old ideas of behaviorism (e.g. be affectionate to your child only when they behave) have been discredited, as have the ideas of Freud and others.

Modern understanding: People need attachments, from children to romantic relationships. At the same time, some constraints in your life, via attachments can make you happier. (But this leads to the duality of conservative and liberal approaches to life.)

Ch7: Adversity
Ancient wisdom: People need adversity to fully develop.

Modern understanding: Perhaps we’ve overreacted, thinking that any kind of stress is bad. Adversity might help only at a certain time of life, for teens and young adults. Don’t see the world in terms of black and white; the wise appreciate shades of gray, and middle courses of action that are better for everyone in the long run. But don’t be a pessimist; life isn’t about karma. Try to make sense of things instead.

Ch8: Virtue
Ancient wisdom: Being virtuous leads to happiness.

Modern understanding: Enlightenment ideas of reason and utilitarianism are too narrow because they don’t appease the emotions. Positive psychology is a response to ideas of traditional values. Conservatives see constraints on society as being good, but our modern society is more diverse, so those constraints are no longer practical.

My take: Here’s a cleavage between being ‘happy’ and understanding what to do when you really do have problems to solve.

Ch9: Divinity
Ancient wisdom: In addition to closeness and hierarchy humans perceive an axis of ‘divinity.’

Modern understanding: We understand that some of those feelings, e.g. purity vs disgust, are explained by natural selection. Awe and transcendence are available without any literal divinity. Debates about such feelings fuel the culture wars, with poles of community vs autonomy. Yet maybe science should accept religiosity as normal and healthy.

My take: Religiosity may be ‘healthy’ since human nature is about survival, and not apprehension of the real world. True understanding and appreciation of the real world cannot involve religiosity (except concerning human nature itself).

Ch10: The Meaning of Life
Ancient wisdom: The question implies that life has some “for” purpose; or contrarily, that there isn’t any “for” reason, we just are.

Modern understanding: The only question the author can answer is about purpose *within* life. Thus the happiness formula, which entails being engaged with the world. Group selection is plausible after all, given the evolution of morality: a mix of altruism and selfishness [[ the progressive/conservative opposites ]]. So the meaning of life is in understanding what kind of creatures we are, getting conditions right, and waiting. Find a coherence among your personality, your relationships, and your work. If you do, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.

My take: But understanding what kind of creatures we are includes understanding things in ways that religiosity would reject. Haidt’s recommendations are not always consistent with each other. Do you accept religiosity to be happy? You must reject it to understand what kind of creatures we are.

Conclusion: On Balance
Life is about conflict and balance. There is no evil; nearly all people are morally motivated, and no one person or culture has all the answers. The place to look for wisdom is with your opponents: they understand some things better than you do.

My take: The themes evoked in the final pages anticipate Haidt’s next book, THE RIGHTEOUS MIND, in how various moral sentiments are stronger in some people than others. The more conservative of those sentiments, e.g. sanctity/degradation and authority/subversion, reflect the priorities of “ancient wisdom,” i.e. what I call base human nature. Do we look for wisdom there? Perhaps only to understand our fellow human beings. My idea of happiness and the meaning of life is to be true to reality: to understand the world outside the blinders of human existence. Not to deny human nature, but to understand it in a larger context, and understand what else is out there.

Posted in Book Notes, Human Nature, Meaning, Morality, Philosophy, Psychology | Comments Off on Jonathan Haidt, THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS, post 5 (conclusion)

Busy Weekend: Quick Summary

Posted on Monday 10 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Friday I had a PCP (primary healthcare physician) appointment; an annual checkup, though they don’t use that word anymore. Insurance difficulties. Just a 10-minute chat. D Frey had already seen all my blood work. No problems.

On Saturday we did a quick drive from Oakland down to LA, on the I5, to visit Y’s younger son Michael and his wife’s new daughter, Leila, for her 100-day party. A Chinese tradition.

And Sunday morning we drove home, up the I5.

Sunday afternoon we visited the Silverbergs, for a visit and take-out dinner. He had fallen and hurt his hip, and was house-bound. I had never been to their house before. This was a … thrill.

On Saturday, while we were in LA, my contributor copy of the Gary Westfahl anthology with an essay of mine arrived. I posted about this on Facebook, since my own essay is fully visible via Amazon’s “Read Sample” feature.

Posted in Personal history | Comments Off on Busy Weekend: Quick Summary

The Absence of Empathy

Posted on Friday 7 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m still working this past week on summarizing and assessing the 2006 Jonathan Haidt book THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS. I can’t quite wrap it up today, or soon, because we’re doing a quick trip down and back to LA tomorrow and Sunday, and probably won’t do any posts over the weekend. For now, I’ll note the usual political items.

The story all over the news yesterday and today:

The New Republic, 6 Nov 2025: Trump Just Stands There After Man Collapses During Press Conference, subtitled “One of the guests at Donald Trump’s press conference on weight loss drugs passed out during the event.”

A man appeared to collapse Thursday during a press conference to debut a deal to make those drugs more affordable, while President Donald Trump simply looked on.

As if annoyed that his press conference had been interrupted. Concern? Of course not; that would betray compassion. Trump (and MAGA) is not compassionate, or empathetic.

Continue reading →

Posted in conservatives, Morality | Comments Off on The Absence of Empathy