Notes from Evil Bender

PZ has pointed out that D’Souza couldn’t wait to explain how the Virginia Tech shootings must be connected to atheists in some way. And what did he figure out? Those atheists just aren’t very nice! Why, they probably don’t even care that people died. Materialism!!!1!

Aside from his complete stupidity (which PZ points out well) and his utter lack of logic and argument, I want to point out one other problem with his piece, one that, unlike the rest of it, is at least an error that can be instructive. D’Souza writes:

The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho’s shooting of all those people can be understood in this way–molecules acting upon molecules.

Besides the fact that the central claim–that atheists just don’t care about others–is patently obvious, there’s something interesting going on here. D’Souza–supposedly a great thinker–can’t distinguish between things which have a physical reality, and those things which have none, or at least no direct reality.

In short, D’Souza is committing the fallacy of reification, for he believes that for something to have a kind of reality it must be physical. Or more appropriately, he is incorrectly ascribing the reification fallacy to scientists (make no mistake, it is the methodology of materialism he objects to, not simply to atheists), to set up a straw man.

Emotions aren’t made of matter, D’Souza is practically screamed, so atheists don’t think they’re real. And emotions aren’t particles, so they don’t exist for atheists either!

But many concepts which are useful or even essential in understanding the world do not have a physical correspondence, as  every atheist knows but D’Souza apparently does not. Emotions are influenced by our bodies, but that doesn’t mean there is an “emotion gene” or the like, a physical object with a one-to-one correspondence to “love” or “fear.”

Likewise, larger concepts, like “society” or “law” do not have a strictly material meaning–they are not, of course, merely “molecules acting upon molecules”–but they do not violate the methodology of materialism because they can be explained–despite their lack of a physical existence–without any appeal to the supernatural.

D’Souza probably knows this. I suspect he must realize that no atheist truly denies the reality of emotion, of sympathy for murder victims. But that won’t stop him from making these dishonest and ignorant claims.

I wonder if the higher power D’Souza claims to believe in would approve of his claim, or of the contempt it shows the dead.

Let me spell it out for you, Mr. D’Souza: you can claim atheists don’t care about others all you want, but that doesn’t make it so. But the obviously disdain you show for others when you make arguments like this one makes a strong case that you are the one who is incapable of human response to this tragedy.