Matthew Henty

Eliezer Yudkowsky at Less Wrong has an interesting post called, “Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism” which puts the endless debates about belief, atheism and “new atheism” in a little bit of context. He ends up defending Dawkins and Hitchins too, which perhaps makes me sympathetic to his argument.

His argument is that “Atheism” is really made up of two distinct components, which one might call “untheism” and “antitheism”.

Where,

A pure “untheist” would be someone who grew up in a society where the concept of God had simply never been invented – where writing was invented before agriculture, say, and the first plants and animals were domesticated by early scientists.  In this world, superstition never got past the hunter-gatherer stage – a world seemingly haunted by mostly amoral spirits – before coming into conflict with Science and getting slapped down.

…..

So if you come up to the Untheists and say:

“The universe was created by God -”

“By what?”

“By a, ah, um, God is the Creator – the Mind that chose to make the universe -”

“So the universe was created by an intelligent agent.  Well, that’s the standard Simulation Hypothesis, but do you have actual evidence confirming this?  You sounded very certain -”

“No, not like the Matrix!  God isn’t in another universe simulating this one, God just… is.  He’s indescribable.  He’s the First Cause, the Creator of everything -”

“Okay, that sounds like you just postulated an ontologically basic mental entity.  And you offered a mysterious answer to a mysterious question.  Besides, where are you getting all this stuff?  Could you maybe start by telling us about your evidence – the new observation you’re trying to interpret?”

“I don’t need any evidence!  I have faith!”

“You have what?“

And at this very moment the Untheists have become, for the first time, Atheists.  And what they just acquired, between the two points, was Antitheism – explicit arguments against explicit theism.  You can be an Untheist without ever having heard of God, but you can’t be an Antitheist.

…..

There’s nothing inherently fulfilling about arguing against Goddism – in a society of Untheists, no one would ever give the issue a second thought…….  Yet in the long run, the goal is an Untheistic society, not an Atheistic one – one in which the question “What’s left, when God is gone?” is greeted by a puzzled look and “What exactly is missing?”

And as for the claim that religion is compatible with Reason – well, is there a single religious claim that a well-developed, sophisticated Untheist culture would not reject?  When they have no reason to suspend judgment, and no anti-epistemology of separate magisteria, and no established religions in their society to avoid upsetting?

Exactly correct.

And lets not get into an argument about how good it is that we have belief, how much better it makes us feel. It isn’t real, so please can we just move on?

Simon Caulkin is one of my favourite columnists. I turn to the page he shares with William Keegan in the Observer Business & Media section first of a Sunday morning. They both remind me of things I know, make me think, and help me understand things I only nearly knew or understood before.

Last Sunday, Simon Caulkin addressed the Healthcare Comssion report on the Stafford Hospital, amongst other things. Now, we know that targets distort behaviour. That is the purpose of setting a target, to focus effort and enterprise in a particular direction, towards a particular aim. We also know that this focus of attention in a particular direction leads to a reduction in focus in other directions. And we know that you can only set a target for something you can measure. Such as the average waiting time in the A&E of Stafford Hospital.

We know all these things. Yet, perhaps, we didn’t know that the result of setting targets (such as, to repeat, the average waiting time in the A&E of Stafford Hospital) would be 400 excess deaths between 2005 and 2008. That too is worth repeating; 400 excess deaths between 2005 and 2008.

Now, anybody with a hint of common sense (or any training in cost benefit analysis) knows that against this tremendously high cost we must measure the benefits of setting such targets. I don’t know what they are, though I imagine they are things such as fewer very long waits in the A&E of Stafford Hospital before admission to a ward. This probably saves lives. How many? Was it worth it?

Caulkin ends his article with a health warning for targets proposed within the pages of the Academy of Management Perspectives:

Goals may cause systematic problems in organisations due to narrowed focus, increased risk-taking, unethical behaviour, inhibited learning, decreased co-operation, and decreased intrinsic motivation.