Global Atheist Convention – Sunday Wrapup

• Peter Singer started the day off with his usual accounts of a secular utilitarianism. It was very similar to the other talks I’ve heard him give about his latest book The Life You Can Save as well some other tidbits. I’ve already listened to quite a lot of this from Singer from talks like this one so I didn’t get that much new out of his appearance but it was still great to see him in person and experience his rigour.
• Ian Robinson followed with a presentation about atheism as the logical endpoint of a spiritual quest. An interesting topic but I found him to be a bit all over the place.
• Kylie Sturgess gave a short but excellent presentation that was the only one in the conference focused on skepticism as well as empirical data. A while ago, she got some questions about evolution, spirituality and the paranormal tacked onto a survey of Queenslanders. There were some interesting findings on the gender gap: men are more likely to believe in things like conspiracy theories whilst women outranked men in things like new age beliefs and interestingly (at least for Australia) creationism. In terms of creationism there was a fairly surprising discovery: the main indicator of belief in creationism is degree of religiosity regardless of which church a person belongs to. So if someone says religion plays a small part in their life then they probably accept evolution even if they belong to a fundamentalist church with creationism as the official line. Conversely, people who said they take religion very seriously were very likely to be creationists even if they belonged to a church that “endorses” evolution as true, eg. the Catholic Church.
• Robyn Williams of the ABC’s science show followed. The sign of a good public speaker is if they can sound entertaining rattling on about anything and this is what he did. Most of what he said made perfect sense and was lively and thoughtful, but it seemed all over the place as if he randomly went from one unrelated anecdote to another.
• Jamie Kilstein followed with a 10 minute comedy routine that could have been a 1 hr routine compressed 6-fold. He talks very fast, to the point that others described him as speaking in tongues. This was not a failing though, just part of his great style. He did his gay marriage routine that I’ve seen before (Youtube sample here) and then for the stuff prepared especially for the conference did a bit about creating another counter-religion (like the Flying Spaghetti Monster) called the Church of the Smiling Vagina.
• Dan Barker gave a very engaging version of his deconversion story: from an extreme fundamentalist preacher for 25 years who composed several bestsellers in evangelical music (still in use today) to his gradual movement towards more and more liberal versions of Christianity and then nonbelief. Particularly harrowing were his personal struggles as he stopped believing quite a bit before he stopped preaching. Since his livelihood depended on witnessing through the medium of organ music, he found it very hard to just stop, having nothing to fall back on. But it was when he performed for a small town where the town atheist attended the service, and when he saw him being unafraid of being forthright about his unbelief that he finally said enough is enough. This is topical as Dan Dennet has just published a paper (that I’ve yet to read) — PDF link here on closeted atheist clergy.
• Richard Dawkins closed the conference off. I always find it amusing to compare the real Dawkins to the caricature of him that’s trumpeted in the media (which includes both religious and mainstream media). The caricature is arrogant, “strident” and “militant”, whatever those mean. The real Dawkins was probably the most tempered, humble and polite speaker of the weekend. The caricature is full of polemic. The real Dawkins probably had the most content in his talk and gave me most food for thought. The caricature is philosophically naive and ignorant of viewpoints other than his own. The real Dawkins was more philosophically sophisticated than a lot of other speakers. His talk was twofold: the gratitude for evolution and the evolution of gratitude. The first part dealt with fine-tuning, why we are here, how improbable it may have been for us to be here and the anthropic principle. There are a few things I disagreed with which I may post on later but in general it was pretty solid. The next section was the converse: a new speculative theory on the origins of religion meant to be an alternative to the one he proposed in the God Delusion. The theory is that humans are extremely social animals such that social relations form the very core of our cognitive apparatus. Therefore, concepts like fairness and gratitude (which are indispensable to our functioning) are very deeply ingrained, for instance when a child laments at the world that “it’s not fair!” that it rains on her birthday. So, these same sentiments fire in our brains even where there is no agent causing them, for instance gratitude for our existence (hence the positing of creators) and notions of universal fairness (hence the positing of divine lawgivers). It’s a very intriguing idea that I’ll also post on later, one that’s more plausible than the desire-to-believe-your-parents posited in the God Delusion. His conclusion brings further irony about caricature Dawkins vs real Dawkins. The caricature aims only to demean and “reduce” things to “mere” trivialities. The real Dawkins speculated on religious sentiments coming from very profound, admirable and human dispositions — a misapplication of an otherwise-noble brain apparatus.

And there it all ended. Most speakers signed books after their talks so naturally Dawkins generated an infinite queue which seemed to loop in on itself like a snake eating its own tail. Overall, a good first start in Australian conferences of godlessness, but I can already think of heaps of ways it can be better the next time around. There’s talk of a followup in 2 years so stay tuned!