Back in November, I had applied to participate as a member of the Atheists Team on CBC TV’s Test the Nation: IQ special:
Our in-studio participants are divided into six teams: Twins, Politicians, Believers, Atheists, Contact Sports Athletes and Nerds. Each team is made up of 30 Canadians (that’s 180 total participants!).
I got notified on December 11th (CC’d with 38 others) that “we have received your application, it looks fantastic, and we’d love to confirm you as part of our LIVE show on Sunday, Jan. 24th [2010].”
Hadn’t heard anything back from the producer of that show since then, so I followed up for the second time on Friday … and finally found out that I’d been placed on the standby group for that team, i.e., I’d only actually get to play in the studio if other people cancelled.
Had I known that, I wouldn’t have spent nearly every spare moment of the past month and a half working through practice IQ/psychometric tests (i.e., books by Philip Carter and Ken Russell, H. J. Eysenck, Alfred Munzert, plus “IQ Builder” software, etc.; well over 100 tests in total), to be as fully prepared for that as I could be. (I could literally compose those tests myself by now, and you wouldn’t know the difference from having had an “expert” do it.) Because, you see, while all of the rest of the scores were going to be kept anonymous, the person with the highest score overall will be announced there on national television. And wouldn’t that have been a boost—i.e., in Google name-searches and advertising/P.R. you can’t buy—to the work (i.e., books and I.T.) and play (wink) prospects of the person who got the highest score?
If you were putting together a team of atheists, and had a chance to have someone who’s previously tested at a 157 IQ on the Mensa preliminary test, and who had written a guru-debunking book endorsed by Susan Blackmore and John Horgan (“America’s Dan Falk“—no relation), and who was working on another book which will explain in magnificent detail and breathtaking scope how religion and meditative spirituality evolved from paleolithic times to today—and thus why no rational person should pay any heed at all to those, so that the atheist position is the only sensible one to take—what would you do? Of course: Put that person on standby, where you’ll use their skills only if someone “better” cancels out. On a team of thirty.
I don’t buy that there are thirty people in the country—or even thirty people in the world—who know more about why religion (even its esoteric branches, which gave rise to the exoteric ones where the meaning of the symbols is utterly missed, and even taken literally) is not a viable approach to reality, than I do; but apparently there will be a full thirty in Toronto over this weekend. (Truthfully, I know of at most one person other than myself who could even consider writing Spirit on the Brain and succeeding in that … and he’s probably out surfing.) Sam Harris hasn’t figured it out; and when Daniel Dennett was asked why he hadn’t included Eastern religions/philosophy in his Breaking the Spell, he responded that he didn’t know enough about them to write about them.
When Dawkins and Hitchens write about religion in their books, they likewise explicitly out-scope that experiential (not belief-based, opposite-of-fundamentalism) subject. They have to do that, because they simply don’t know enough about the complex and subtle aspects of esoteric spirituality, to competently write about it. Nor do the vast majority of atheists know, ’cause they stopped with their investigation of the subject—confident in their answers to the most important questions of existence—at precisely the point where real spiritual seekers like myself started. (When skeptics try to write about mysticism, they typically either reduce it to the Maharishi and TM, as James Randi does; or compose total hatchet-job garbage on the subject, a la the ignorant Protestant Martin Gardner on Jiddu Krishnamurti. There too, it gets into print simply because 98% of the world’s most-prominent skeptics don’t know the difference, i.e., they don’t have the background to know that they’re being fed total crap from one of the most-respected people in their field, so they go ahead and publish it even in Skeptical Inquirer, fer Chrissake.)
I do know enough to write about esoteric spirituality, in the context of debunking and atheism. And that’s probably part of the problem right there: I’m working so far above the heads of even the “experts” (e.g., Four Horsemen) in this subject, solving problems that they literally don’t even know exist, that they can’t even competently assess my position in that hierarchy.
Oh, and I’m possibly also just a smidge too humble. And not ironic enough.
Einstein had the same problem. Heh. Seriously though, he did. (He’s also estimated at 160 to 180 IQ … and was a “Spinoza-ean believer/atheist,” so who knows what the producers of this show would have made of that? Probably put him on the standby team, too!)
Granted, the CBC show will be calculating averages based on sex, hair color, age, marital status, city vs. rural, and the like. (Though oddly, not by race. Go figga … my nigga.) So they weren’t just purely looking for the highest-scoring people, but will rather also have been deliberately populating each of the groups they’ll need to split the results down by. (Though since the participants were self-selected before being further selected by the people at the CBC, whatever results they come up with will be inherently statistically meaningless. They may have entertainment value, but that’s truly all.)
But still, this is a fucking IQ competition. How the holy hell do you justify taking the person who probably has the best chance of ringing the bell on it, and just having him ride the bench? Just look at the leaders of the respective teams, read the vapid stuff they wrote in response to the second round of questions, and compare that with my submission (PDF), and then try and tell me I’m wrong. (Here are the websites of some of the other people who were CC’d on that atheist-team email: Atheist Expressions, Derek Rodgers, Gary Roberts, heywoody.com, Dan Falk. And of course CFI/EA. Do you honestly see any content there, anywhere, that can compare with what I produce, esp. in terms of original debunking, incl. wrt religion? No, you do not; even for CFI, it’s not even close. Not that I advertised this site in that application, of course—then they’d have a real reason to leave me out, eh?)
If I didn’t know better, I’d start to wonder whether God didn’t want the atheist team to win the competition! Because, if you were God, isn’t this exactly what you’d do, to sabotage their chances? 
Or perhaps it’s simply that I’m not a “real atheist,” for stuff like this:
We’re still left with the question about “why Something exists, rather than Nothing.” Anyone who makes the effort to do the research can be certain, beyond a reasonable doubt, that neither “revealed” religion nor meditative experiences can provide any insight at all into that question. If there is an answer, it’s not something that any human mind has had ever had access to, or likely ever will have access to.
Awfully close to “agnostic” rather than “atheist,” isn’t that? You know, to still be leaving open the possibility that there may be a reason why there is Something rather than Nothing!
Atheists make dumbfuck arguments about infinite regresses (e.g., “who created God?”) even when, as Steven Dutch has noted, there’s no reason, in principle, why the universe couldn’t be structured as an infinite regress. And then they say, “Well, why shouldn’t the laws of physics be self-existent, put there by no one?” … even though “God” can’t be accorded the same tolerance and position! (There’s an attempted, detail-bereft, straw-man focused rebuttal by Dawkins’ fans here. UTTER FAIL: Dutch, as far as I can tell, is no “believer” in any religious claptrap; but to the Dawkinsphere, he must be. After all, why else would he be trashing the Dawk?)
Dutch:
For openers, so what if there’s an infinite regress? If you explain each designer by a higher order designer, so what? Why can’t the universe be organized this way? What proof do we have, anywhere, that an infinite regress is not possible?
More to the point, science accounts for observations by laws, and accounts for those laws by higher laws. Magnets have poles, like poles repel and unlike poles attract. We account for magnetism through Maxwell’s Equations, which tie electricity and magnetism together. More recently electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force have been successfully interpreted in terms of a more complex law.
There are only two possible end states of this process. We either keep on finding higher level laws in an infinite regress, or the process stops someplace. When (if) that happens, we will have laws that exist for their own sake, that have no explanation other than themselves. The multiverse, the hypothesis that the universe consists of an infinite number of universes all with their own physical laws, confronts us with both problems. We will end up saying that our universe just happened to get laws that enable life to evolve (the laws just exist with no higher justification), and then we will still have the problem of explaining why other universes keep getting spawned. Again, we’ll either end up with an infinite regress, or things that just are with no higher explanation. If we try to evade the issue by postulating a network or ring of interlocking laws at the base of everything, we will still have to explain why that network of those laws. Either there are higher explanations, or something that just is.
Effectively Dawkins postulates that natural selection just is, without having any deeper cause. Why should natural selection work? Why should it mimic design? Why should it produce order at all? How can any natural random mechanism favor statistical improbability? Why didn’t selection result in organisms capable of resisting selection? Why didn’t it (shades of Lamarck) produce organisms capable of changing their own genes in response to change? [Dawkins' fans may think that this is nonsense, but it's a perfectly valid "meta"-algorithm idea: There's no reason, in principle, why genes should merely be selected against, rather than changing themselves in response to selection pressures, a la Lamarck.] Since most religions postulate deities that are self-explaining, that is, they just are, Dawkins really doesn’t come up with any logical improvement. Instead of a deity that just is, Dawkins invokes natural selection that just is.
Dawkins appears to take pride in a total ignorance of theology. At least the late Carl Sagan thought of this issue.
If we say that God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed? (Cosmos, Ch. 10)
Which is just as valid—but also just as much hand-waving bullshit-invalid—as is the claim that God has always existed!
There’s really surprisingly little thought gone into the whole atheist endeavor, if you ask me. (As a man I admire once noted, they really haven’t added much of note since Bertrand Russell.) But then what would you expect from a region of inquiry in which the utterly middling Ophelia Benson is considered to be insightful and, indeed, to be the most prominent female atheist alive? (At least, I’ve seen none with vaginas [can't say breasts, as she doesn't have any!] who are more prominent or <*cough*> insightful.)
Ach, I guess I really don’t belong on any “Atheist Team.” Still just a “community of one,” alas.
Either way, this reminds me of a night out I had at a pub on Bloor, a couple of years ago. Met a woman half a decade older than I am, who couldn’t believe I was still available, and was complimenting my teeth and going ga-ga over the long hair I (used to) have. For several hours, we had our hands all over each other … until she started to get cold feet about me being too young and too smart for her. (She herself was nevertheless smart enough to figure out that I’m really, really smart, just from an hour or less of casual conversation. Most people can’t manage that much—in fact, the stupidest people in the world actually think not only that they’re above average, but that I’m dumb.) So when she left, rather than letting me get her number, she told me she’d get in touch with her friends, to set me up with a woman younger and brighter than herself (which, understandably, she didn’t follow through on).
So in one fell swoop, I got rejected by a woman for being too young, too smart, and too handsome!
This (“standby” group) is like that. Sort of.
P.S. Note how the last of the CBC “practice tests” is set, according to the gaps in the existing series, to be posted on January 26th, i.e., two days after the show. That should have been a red flag, right there.
Go figure, my nigure.
