From Yahoo!Answers

Somebody using the screen name "discovery" recently asked the following in Yahoo!Answers.

Philosophers argue that God is a delusion. How should I structure my essay.

This raises the question: is his essay supposed to be about the contention that "God is a delusion," or about the philosophers who argue that? The former requires that he think about God himself, the latter only that he pass along the thinking of others.

Let's imagine that he is expected to think about God himself. The statement "God is a delusion" covers a lot of ground. There are various ways of being wrong, so it is logically possible for an atheist to deny that God is a delusion -- to maintain that God is some sort of category error.

Nonetheless, let's again make the field-limiting assumption that the claim that God is a delusion simply denies that God exists. However many distinct ideas there are of God, there are that many distinct meanings to a possible denial.

Let us make a further limitation of the field in the spirit of the Passover/Easter season. One common and historically important meaning of God is as a giver of laws for human conduct, a moral legislator. With all that in mind, I proposed on Yahoo! the following structure for a possible essay:

1. Define the idea at stake. We know that government officials tell us what to do and punish us when we fail to do it. We know also that throughout history people have appealed to a higher Authority and its Higher Laws. "Let my people go!" they say to this-worldly legislators.

2. So: Is the idea of God defined in that way a delusion? Consider three influential arguments:
2a. Hobbes, The earthly state, the Leviathan, is the only proper source of guidance so there is no appeal, no excuse for disobeying Pharoah or King Charles.
2b. Kant. Although Kant adhered to religious faith in his own manner, he held explicitly that the argument to God as a moral legislator fails because our human reason by itself explains to us how we ought to act. The law to which we appeal when we defy the authorities is within us, not above us.
2c. Contemporary atheists argue that 'God' as people conceive of Him is a pretty lousy legislator, who tells them to fly airplanes into skyscrapers for example. So we're better off without such a legislator. This is presumably related to 21b, and specifically to what Kant was saying here, but Kant's broader system allowed room for further distinctions in which contemporary atheists (Hitchens, Dawkins etc.) are uninterested.
From each of these points of view, then, we could maintain that God is a delusion.

3. There are counter-arguments to each of those three arguments. Depending on how long your essay is going to be, you can either provide them in full or merely hint at them.

Stephen Jay Gould

It was on this day, September 10, in 1941 that Stephen Jay Gould was born.

Gould was both a paleontologist and a popularizer of science, who died of lung cancer in May 2002.

Above all, IMHO, Gould was a fine writer, and he had the good fortune of leaving a Magnum Opus behind -- The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002)-- its publication date preceding his death by only two months.

In this work, Gould described evolutionary theory as a tripod. One leg is the agency of the individual organism. The second leg is the efficacy of natural selection in bringing about changes in form. The final leg is the full sufficiency of the first two legs, as a mode of explanation.

That third leg, Gould calls "scope." For critics of Darwin often make some concession to the effect that his theory has some value, but only if its scope is confined to "microevolution." Darwin's view, and Gould's, was that "extended through the immensity of geological time," natural selection and the agency of individuals make up a mechanism "fully capable of generating the entire pageant of life's history."

What is that "agency of the individual" thing, though? It is only worth listing this as a "leg" if there are other possible units of selection that might do some or all of the work. For example, Dawkins looks inside the individual, and speaks of individual genes are agents. The whole biological organism is too large a proposed "agent" on that view. Another point of view might be that the individual is too small an entity -- one ought to think of flocks or herds, social units, as the relevant agent.

Finally, let us note that Gould himself had a fairly complicated attitude toward both of those proposed agents -- the social unit and the gene. But as a historian of science, insisting on what Darwin thought, Gould wrote this: "Darwin insisted upon a virtually exceptionless, single-level theory, with organisms acting as the locus of selection."

Ben Stein Watch: And Filbert Too

Our boy Ben has a new sidekick. Newer even than Shaquille O'Neal.

I refer of course to a squirrel namedFilbert.

At least I'm reliably informed that Filbert is his name although this particular clip doesn't use it.

What kind of accent would you say this squirrel has?

Anyway, the name "Rocky" was already taken, but it is a reasonable inference this is meant to be part of a series, and we'll learn more about Filbert over time.

A spokesman for the folks behind this ad say: “Ben Stein is the consummate professional and consumer advocate. Throughout his career, Ben has helped ordinary citizens better understand the personal effects of various consumer issues. Ben Stein is the right spokesperson to highlight the importance of a consumer’s credit scores as Americans search for ways to take greater control of their personal finances.”

Keep telling yourselves that.

Meanwhile, on another Ben Stein related front, I've found this piece of "danged-dignified" amusement, which involves PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins.