To the exent I can make any sort of sense out of this stuff at all, you seem to be imlying that those of us who don’t like religion and do like discovering the truth about the natural world have never heard of Hume and consequently are in the constant habit of collapsing the gap between is and ought. Meanwhile, back in the world that the rest of us inhabit, most of the “socal Darwinism” (a phenomenon that has nothing whatever to do with evolutionary biology) in the contemporary US is strongly associated with the Religious Right.

There’s a not insignificant amount of comfort to be had from taking the pernicious garbage issuing from the Bush White House at face value. It’s simple, it scans, and it’s child’s play to rebut and refute. It makes the other side feel good about themselves while at the same time keeping the stage-set presented by the presenter and his script-writers intact. So Bush’s policies are “mistaken” and the result of incompetence, as opposed to intentional and duplicitously conceived.
Much of this discussion occupies similar ground.
The simple and easily met fallacious arguments of the bizarrely powerful ID constituency is idiotic self-delusion; the wishy-washy bland non-assertions of the well-fed ecumenicals is complicity and cowardice.
These are simple and easily analysed, readily explained by anyone brave enough to take on the consequences.
That Bush may have been used as thoroughly as the American people is discomfiting, scary.
That the present state of the nation’s soul may be a result of intentional manipulatiop, and not rampant self-delusion is equally scary.
On the other hand we have the insistence on Darwinian explanation for life as we know it coming from people who are adamantly rejecting any organic Darwinian selection on the human genome as it’s now configured – now that we’ve evidently arrived at the apex of our development.
Maybe the ID crowd’s representative of something more than just the awesome strength of aggregated idiocy? Maybe science in a pure unbiased mode does not and never will exist in human terms? Maybe there’s something else, something bigger and more fateful going on?
Academia’s got a lot to do with what we think are the irreducible fundamentals of discourse – truth trumps desire, the impartial facts are central. In the real world these things aren’t paramount, they’re just strategies, no immediately better than deception and self-delusion; because what matters is what works, solely and finally, selection proves fitness – that’s Darwinian, baby.
In that context the belief in scientific truth as a kind of redemptive quantity is nothing more than religion by another name.
At the same time the anti-Darwinian bunch are up to a mess of heinous duplicities that are textbook examples of Darwinian call-and-response. Like a plant that emits poisons from its roots, or an ant colony hormonally charged to attack alien drones.
And again, triple-conversely, present society’s rife with this Darwin-in-a-box trip that makes it okay to deny the sculpting force of the natural world, the pressures that gave us our “gifts” such as they are – intelligence, quickness, a complex immune system – while at the same time cheerleading a campaign to have economic losers fed to the wolves.
Social Darwinism full-strength or watered-down is waiting behind a lot of the more benign points of argument here.
In Academia possession of the truth furthers survival, and we’re all processed by Academia for at least 12 years or so. This skews the p.o.v. for a lot of otherwise rational minds.
In the real, non-anthropocentric world, possession and dissemination of the truth may over long enough spans of time further survival, but in the short run without much digging we can all find examples of the obverse. And nature’s full of camouflage and deceptive adaptations, where the truth of some coloration or sound is reconfigured to some creature’s advantage, and/or some other’s disadvantage.

LogicGuru: “…whether God exists or not, what’s the problem?”

There was a politician on CSPAN speaking to the egregious nature of the Mohammedan. He said something like
“I have no problem with people talking to God. They can do it all day if they want, I don’t care. It’s when God starts talking to them…”
In the town where I live, when I was a kid there were a few street crazies who would go around talking out loud to “people who weren’t there”. Now there’s dozens of people on the street whenever I go downtown, talking on cell phones. Same thing, except there’s an assumably verifiable human presence at the other end, now. Maybe that’s analogous, maybe it’s not.
An atheist obviously would say God doesn’t talk to anyone, because there is no God. So talking to something that doesn’t exist is at best a kind of hobby, a diversion. But getting communications from your hobby – that’s clinical.
An atheist would also say it’s stupid and a waste of time to pray to the spirit of a tree before you cut it down, because there’s nothing there to receive your prayer.
Certainly if there is a God, if there are spirits we should talk to them, as opposed to pretending they don’t exist and possibly incurring their wrath. But how can we know?
And right there’s where it starts to get scary and uncomfortable. Because somebody’s got to put it on the line, don’t they? Who that would be and how they’d do it are outside the scope of this thread. But I would like to repeat something I’ve been saying for some time now.
The human mind in its locus of the brain is the center of any atheist’s claim to fame, to wonderfulness, to grace and beauty in the world. That brain came out of the flux of animate matter on this planet, Earth, which is a flyspeck of presumably inanimate matter in orbit around a minor star in a universe filled with stars. Every bit of driving energy the brain has and uses comes from a incredibly minuscule portion of the energy given off by that minor star. Really really minuscule. To look at the celestial imagery caught by the Hubble space telescope, or even just the night sky itself, and assume what that is is nothing more than real estate, mostly uninhabited, is an act of arrogance that dwarfs the hubris of Western Man’s “conquest” of the New World, but it comes right out of the same place.
Both scientific atheism and religious fundamentalism have one central thing in common, they’re both violently anthropocentric – one by default and one by dogma.
Those of us who think the arrogance in both those positions may actually be the real problem are getting lost between them, and the unnecessary and artificial amplification of that polarity’s a big part of what’s doing it.

On the rest we’ll have to agree to disagree. Widespread indifference to the truth or falsity of one’s beliefs can’t be a good thing in itself even if it has few direct bad consequences in many cases; and as people like Dawkins and Harris have explained at length, the pervasive fellow-traveling atmosphere of even wishy-washy Christianity provides a friendly growth medium for the flourishing of more harmful forms, which have a tendency to out-compete the more anodyne forms where the former have established themselves (eg. much of the US below the Mason-Dixon Line). I don’t expect followers of the diluted variety to welcome that message, but I do think there is some validity to it.

They have a notion that there’s “something there” and like the show and the sociability but they don’t care about the details, don’t have any militant agendas about evolution or anything else, and their primary ethnical concerns are with being nice and seeing to it that their kids don’t engage in high-risk adolescent behavior.

So what’s so bad about that? I LOVE religion. I enjoy it. Lots of people do and, whether they’re right or wrong about the metaphysics, whether God exists or not, what’s the problem? They aren’t crusading against atheists, promoting creationism or attacking gays—they’re running bake sales, chatting with friends at coffee hour and singing hymns.

Second, the system or construct that explained the world for the early Greeks was first and ethics was a derivation from it. Ethical norms were things humans could propound in view of, and deriving from, the truth of the real. But they were distinct from theoria, and were a choice only there in any consequential way for humans.

Religion was what humans did to get by – with the gods and fates – as a result of their understanding of the nature of the world. Kind of like paying the vig.

Even amongst conservatives who pay lip service to the party line, most don’t really care. There are only a few activists amongst fundamentalists and secularists who are making all the noise—which is being exploited for political purposes.

Maybe we in Academia have a peculiar take on religion because we meet few ordinary religious believers. So looking at the world from our perspective there are our kind of people, who are for the most part completely secular, and the great unwashed masses of fundamentalists out there in the Real World. It just ain’t so.

Well I guess it is trivially true because of the get out “unimproved in any other way”. The question is whether alternative moral and social codes and rituals would replace those of religion naturally and inevitably. Certainly it is not the case that atheists are somehow missing out, so it is not obvious that without spiritual religion those that are currently non-atheists would be missing out on something. The assumption would seem to be that these people are somehow temperamentally dependent on religion, and could not cope without it.

But no vapors. And no sense that anything he said was threatening to me as a providentialist Christian who thinks the evidence for evolution (and natural selection as the guiding force) is pretty compelling. He wouldn’t even be that threatening if I were a fundie. Frankly, Hume would be pretty far down on the list if I were going to recommend a book to an intelligent design-believing friend in hopes of changing their mind. I have recommended some of Dawkins’s books—the earlier ones where he sticks mostly to biology and doesn’t pretend to know anything about religion. I glanced at the Kitcher book in the book store the other day and it looked very good—I’ll probably buy it sometime and loan it out.

Getting back to Hume, the fact is that the origin of the apparent design in biological systems was a legitimate scientific problem and until Darwin came along, the notion that some intelligent designer was the cause was the leading reasonable candidate for a solution. Hume points out that the designer wouldn’t necessarily have much if any resemblance to the Christian God. It might be a committee, or an incompetent god or maybe some unknown process. Yawn. Point out a real alternative to a designer, which Darwin finally did.

“A world unimproved in any other way which lacked spiritual religion would be a worse world.”

isn’t rated as the controversial issue here.

The statement for example implies that either the Dutch have improved in some mysterious way, unknown to me, or the US is a better place.

The statement also fails at being consistent with a coherent view of a non religious world.

People don’t offer these community services because they are religious, but because either they feel the need themselves or they are convinced by other people to behave like that.

And neither is going to disappear when people stop being religious. A scientists could easily verify this by comparing religious and non religious communities across the world.

Religion is different for the song and dance, not for the motivation, needs and wishes of people.

The holy cows, Wodan, Mercator, God et al., are a result, not a cause. And thus dropping them doesn’t make the world a worse place.