The A-Unicornist

Holytape

2012-02-12T23:17:00.000-08:00

I don't remember how I found this website, but it's hilarious. Well... it's hilarious if you have a warped sense of humor like I do. Basically, this guy makes blasphemous art with duct tape. Then he pens these bizarre, Bible-like stories to go along with them. It hasn't been updated much recently, but there is plenty of entertaining stuff there. This site being what it is, I thought this excerpt was fitting:

Unicorns are evil – pure unadulterated evil. Most people don't know it, because they have been fooled. Do you know about those pictures of beautiful unicorns bringing happiness to the world and dancing under rainbows? Well, those picture are all lies – unicorn propaganda -- meant to hide the truth, the awful truth -- that only thing on this green earth that is more evil than one unicorn is two unicorns working together.

“How evil?” you might ask. Well, there was this unicorn that once shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. You might say, “That’s not too evil. That's just plain mean and violent.” Well, the unicorn shot then man, took his credit card, bought an expensive video recorder, came back, recorded the man dying, posted it on you-tube, and then emailed the link to the man's children and wife. And then rick-rolled them. Now that's evil – pure evil.

Have fun:

http://holytape-holytape.blogspot.com

QFT

2012-02-12T19:03:00.000-08:00

Religion asks questions like "What is the nature of God?" and "What is his plan for our lives?", but they never answer them. Such answers are impossible for three reasons: God doesn't exist, there's no way to find out the answer to those questions except for the unreliable method of revelation, and those revelations have given different answers to different faiths (and to different people within a faith). Religion doesn't answer any questions.

— Jerry Coyne

William Lane Craig: not even a pretend physicist

2012-02-12T12:11:00.000-08:00

If you've ever sat through one of William Lane Craig's academic essays on physics – and I have – it's easy to be impressed so long as you don't actually know that much about physics. This isn't to say that Craig doesn't know anything about physics; he actually knows a fair bit. But the difference between a physicist talking about physics and a theologian talking about physics is that the theologian obviously has an agenda. It's in Craig's personal interest to find information that appears to support his beliefs, and to be highly skeptical or even outright dismissive of anything that contradicts his beliefs.

Physics is complicated stuff, and even physicists are often hesitant to talk about its implications. There's so much we don't know, so many unanswered questions, that it's highly presumptuous to use our current state of knowledge as a boon to one's personal beliefs.

Which brings me to my frustration that started over in the "Apologetics 101" thread. We're discussing Craig's pet argument, the Kalam Cosmological Argument. The argument requires two things

The universe was created out of nothing (it didn't come from another physical reality)
Its cause was external to physical reality (God made it)

Simple as that. Craig is quick to jump on the bandwagon when evidence may support this, like in this excerpt from an essay he did for *cough* Leadership University:

This event [the Big Bang] that marked the beginning of the universe becomes all the more amazing when one reflects on the fact that a state of "infinite density" is synonymous to "nothing." There can be no object that possesses infinite density, for if it had any size at all it could still be even more dense. Therefore, as Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle points out, the Big Bang Theory requires the creation of matter from nothing.[1]

Physicists including Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Sean Carroll and Alexander Vilenkin have of course all postulated just such a hypothesis: that the universe was created out of nothing. Except that in their hypotheses, "nothing" is essentially a timeless quantum vacuum and, as Hawking says, the universe created itself out of nothing.

This would be fantastic news for Craig except for the tiny detail that it removes the need for a Creator. So, predictably, he objects, as he does here in his embarrassing criticism of The Grand Design:

What this implies is that Hawking and Mlodinow have not even begun to address the philosophical question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” For “nothing” in their vocabulary does not have the traditional meaning “non-being” but rather means “the quantum vacuum.” They aren’t even answering the same question.[2]

Craig does not like the implications of the universe creating itself out of quantum fluctuations. It makes his "non-being" definition of "nothing" irrelevant – because according to those quantum models "non-being" didn't exist (so to speak); in its place you had empty space, in an uncaused quantum region where time as we know it is meaningless. Craig doesn't actually have any rational grounds for objecting to this. He just doesn't like it, so he complains about semantics.

The idea that the universe sprang from a quantum vacuum was posited to explain observable features of the universe; it's not some conspiracy to remove God from the picture. The fact that it makes God irrelevant – or at least a theistic concept of God irrelevant – is a side effect that only matters to people clinging to that unjustified belief.

But Craig, being a black belt in sophistry, is not one to give up so easily. He likes to pull out the Borde, Guth, and & Vilenkin Theorem (aka the BGV Theorem) to bolster his case:

...three leading cosmologists, Arvin Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, were able to prove that any universe which has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space-time boundary.

Yes. The BGV theorem shows that inflation cannot go infinitely into the past, and we eventually reach a singularity. But in The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking elaborates on what the singularity really is:

"Although one can think of the big bang picture as a valid description of early times, it is wrong to take the big bang literally, that is, to think of Einstein’s theory [general relativity] as providing a true picture of the origin of the universe. That is because general relativity predicts there to be a point in time at which the temperature, density, and curvature of the universe are all infinite, a situation mathematicians call a singularity. To a physicist this means that Einstein’s theory breaks down at that point and therefore cannot be used to predict how the universe began, only how it evolved afterward.” [p.128]

Craig then slips up:

What makes their proof so powerful is that it holds regardless of the physical description of the universe prior to the Planck time.

This is actually a huge concession on his part. Because in all his talk about the Big Bang being evidence of creation ex nihilo, there cannot be a "physical description of the universe prior to the Planck time". If there is, as in quantum theories, then the singularity cannot be the "non-being" definition of "nothing" that Craig wants; it has to be the "empty space" definition that physicists use. Then, Craig biffs hard:

Their theorem implies that even if our universe is just a tiny part of a so-called “multiverse” composed of many universes, the multiverse must have an absolute beginning.

Wrong. The theorem does not show that the multiverse must have had an absolute beginning; rather, as Caltech physicist Sean Carroll explains,

[Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin] show that a universe that has always been inflating (in the same direction) must have a singularity in the past.[3]

In other words, the entire multiverse would not have a beginning, but any universe within the multiverse that is undergoing inflation has a singularity – a beginning to inflation.

And then we get to the motherload, the masterpiece of equivocation to which this whole post has been building up. When discussing quantum models like the Hawking-Hartle No-Boundary proposal or Vilenkin's quantum tunneling model, Craig asserts [emphasis mine]:

These models feature an absolute beginning of the universe, even if the universe does not come into being at a singular point. Thus, Quantum Gravity models no more avoid the universe’s beginning than do purported Eternal Inflationary models.

...but only one actually knows what he's talking about

What Craig has done here is score a meaningless semantic victory. He's saying that even if these models are correct, the universe still has a beginning. It's just not a beginning at a finite point. Except Craig seems to have forgotten that creation ex nihilo required by the Kalam is not the same thing as the universe creating itself from a timeless, pre-existing region of space-time. But he glosses over that distinction just so he can hand himself the shallow victory of proclaiming that the universe did have a beginning.

I'm not impressed. When physics show that the conditions required by the Kalam have not been met, Craig equivocates by suggesting that it's still a "beginning"... even though it's really just a beginning to inflation from empty space, not a beginning out of the "non-being" for which he had previously argued. Craig may speak with a pretense of authoritative knowledge of physics, but he's really just doing his best to interpret the evidence in a way that conforms to his beliefs. That's just the problem with a theologian talking about physics, and that's why Stephen Hawking held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge for 30 years while Craig was writing essays for an evangelistic online degree mill that isn't even accredited.

Verbosity (or, the ontological argument part deux)

2012-02-11T13:03:00.000-08:00

Philosophy is a mixed bag for me. I ate up (not literally) Dan Dennett's excellent book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which talks about the philosophical implications of evolution. But I'm also sympathetic to Stephen Hawking's controversial quip from The Grand Design: "philosophy is dead". Hawking's being hyperbolic, especially since his books tend to deal with philosophical implications of physics. I think that what he means, though, is that it is science which is on the forefront of human discovery. We can talk about how science is changing our view of the universe and our place within it, but philosophy cannot reveal any new truths.

I'm convinced that a lot of philosophy – especially religious philosophy – exists only for masturbatory purposes, so that academics can feel impressed with themselves. Remember my criticism of the ontological argument? Well, an alert reader brought to my attention an even more verbose wording of the argument – William Lane Craig's take on Alvin Plantinga's argument. It's a monster:

1. It is possible that amaximally great being exists.

2. If it is possible that a maximallygreat being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.

3. If a maximally great being existsin some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.

4. If a maximally great being existsin every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.

5. If a maximally great being existsin the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.

6. Therefore, a maximally great beingexists.

When you get past all of the pedantic bullshit, this isn't even an actual argument. It's literally nothing more than the bald assertion "God exists". Or, more specifically, "God, by definition, exists". A few problems, in handy bulletin format:

The concept of a "maximally great being" is entirely vague and empirically meaningless. "Great" is a qualitative description, not a quantitative one.
The first and second premises are redundant. Both are saying the exact same thing, which is, "It's possible that God exists."
The fourth premise is a fallacy of composition. It's saying, "If it's possible that God exists, then God exists." That's the crux of the argument, and it's a failure. It's based on the fallacy that "existence" is a property; it's not – existence is what you have to have in order to have properties in the first place. Otherwise, you're just talking about conceptual abstractions, not actual things.
The fourth, fifth and sixth premises are all saying the exact same thing.

Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig aren't stupid. They're both very well educated. But all they've done is concoct a ludicrously elaborate fallacy. It's a great example of intelligent people making embarrassingly stupid arguments. But the language is phrased in such a way that any layperson who reads it is going to say, "Um.... what?" To which the theologian replies, "Aha! See, you cannot refute my sophisticated argument! If you were educated in sophisticated philosophy like I am, you'd see that this is a powerful argument that proves the existence of God!"

This isn't unique to the ontological argument. The cosmological argument is similarly confusing with its sneaky equivocation fallacies. It's really important to be clear about what the words we're using actually mean, so when an argument is designed to be superfluously verbose and/or uses vaguely defined terms that allow for subtle equivocation, it's a sure sign that you've encountered some bona fide philosophical bullshit.

Deep thoughts

2012-02-10T21:59:00.000-08:00

Kirk Cameron just gives me kind of a foul taste in my mouth. One only cured with some good Scotch. I almost feel bad for the guy, and I admit that's partly because he looks like a teenager. But what a waste, to spend one's life spreading teh stupid with the likes of Ray Comfort.

Also, I don't know why anyone cares about what Ann Coulter thinks about anything. I think people just invite her on their shows because they know there's a decent chance she'll say something colossally stupid and/or hateful that will make for some free publicity the next day.

Prop 8

2012-02-09T11:05:00.000-08:00

The question of Proposition 8's constitutionality is likely headed to the Supreme Court. As is usually the case when the court does things they don't like, conservatives blame it on "liberal activist judges". I watched the vile sub-human beast Ann Coulter on MSNBC the other day, and she opined that judges have no right to subvert the will of the people. Since a (slim) majority voted in favor of Prop 8, it's unconstitutional to say it's unconstitutional.

Funny. I always thought civil rights were the kind of things that aren't just up to the majority. I mean come on, lots of states weren't happy about the Civil Rights Act being imposed on them, and I think it's safe to say that if we'd let individual states decide through the vote whether to preserve segregation, lots of us here in the Southwest would still be drinking from "white only" drinking fountains.

The Constitution guarantees two very important things: first, the 14th Amendment declares equal protection under the law. That means that as long as the government – whether state or federal – provides various incentives (tax and otherwise) for married couples, you don't get to say that marriage is okay for some people but not for others. Secondly, Article VI – the Supremacy Clause – guarantees that federal law always supersedes state law. That means that if something is unconstitutional, states can't grant themselves exceptions to the rule – like voting for pro-segregation legislation. It's the same reason why the annual ritual of various backwards idiots in state legislatures attempting to shove creationism into the science classroom is futile – it's already been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. There's no opt-out clause for states, and you know why? Because the Union won the fucking Civil War, that's why.

Prop 8's constitutionality (or lack thereof) will be a major landmark not just for gay rights, but for civil rights in general. In the unlikely event that the Supreme Court decides that it's constitutional, they'll be saying that a majority vote can override a fundamental constitutional protection. That would be a defeat not just for gay rights, but for human rights.

William Lane Craig defends the ontological argument

2012-02-07T13:09:00.000-08:00

A few posts back I half-jokingly said I wished someone would really try to defend the ontological argument. It's just such a profoundly stupid argument that I really get a kick out of smart people dressing up its fallacies in fancy academic language. But then I randomly jumped over to ReasonableFaith.org (William Lane Craig's website), and it just so happens that a recent post finds him defending... you guessed it, the ontological argument.

I sarcastically summarized the ontological argument as:

God, by definition, exists
Therefor, God exists

That's really not a stretch – although the argument gets dressed up in masturbatory philosophical drivel (as you'll see in moment), it basically says that the "greatest conceivable being" (God) must have "existence" as one of its properties, otherwise that being couldn't be the greatest conceivable being. Let's listen to what Bill has to say on the matter:

A maximally great being is one that has, among other properties, necessary existence. So if it exists in one world, it exists in all of them! In that sense, such a being is different than contingent beings, which exist in only some possible worlds. A unicorn, for example, exists in some possible world, but not in all of them, for its existence is possible but not necessary.

If that sounds confusing, that's because it is. But to clarify one point, Dr. Craig earlier says,

To say that some entity exists in a possible world is just to say that such an entity possibly exists. It isn’t meant that the entity actually exists somewhere.

In other words, the terminology "possible world" is totally superfluous philosophical bullshit. You can just say, "It's possible that God exists". But of course it sounds way more academic to say, "A maximally great being exists in some possible world."

So, see if you can follow this: if a "maximally great being" includes "necessary existence" (as opposed to "possible existence") as one of its properties, that's saying that it exists not just in "some possible world", but in "all possible worlds", which means that any description of reality must include "a maximally great being exists". That's basically just a tautology, like saying "A being that has to exist has to exist."

As you can see, my sarcastic summary is actually pretty damn accurate.

Why it's dumb

He went there.

This is a stupid argument because "existence" is not a property – non-existent things can't have properties. They can have conceptualizations of properties, but since they don't actually exist they can't actually have properties. Non-existent things, like unicorns for example, are just abstractions, not actual things. To use that masturbatory philosophical language, you could say that a unicorn exists abstractly, but not ontologically – which is just a fancy way of saying that it's something we can imagine existing, but it doesn't actually exist.

You'd think that people with doctoral degrees in philosophy could distinguish between actual things and conceptual things, but apparently that is not the case.

Craig concludes,

Logic doesn’t falter here.

And the audience erupts with laughter. Really, I wouldn't bother responding to such stupid arguments were it not for the fact that lots of people actually take this clown seriously. To me, the ontological argument is proof positive that intelligent people are just that much better at constructing elaborate rationalizations of stupid beliefs.

Steven Pinker on the history of Christian violence

2012-02-06T10:31:00.000-08:00

Props to my friend Harry for bringing this to my attention. Taken from the Q&A page over at Steven Pinker's website, bold emphases mine:

--------

Wasn’t the spread of Christianity the main historical force that drove down violence? Jesus preached love, peace, and forgiveness. The Spanish missionaries eliminated human sacrifice in Latin America. Abolitionism in the 19^th century, and the Civil Rights movement in the 20^th, were inspired by the morality of Christianity and led by Christian ministers. The two world wars show what happens when people depart from the teachings of Christianity.

Jesus deserves credit for stigmatizing revenge, one of the main motives for violence over the course of human history. But things started going downhill in 312 when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and the historical facts are not consistent with the claim that Christianity since then has been a force for nonviolence:

The Crusaders perpetrated a century of genocides that murdered a million people, equivalent as a proportion of the world’s population at the time to the Nazi holocaust.
Shortly afterwards, the Cathars of southern France were exterminated in another Crusader genocide because they had embraced the Albigensian heresy.
The Inquisition, according to Rummel, killed 350,000 people.
Martin Luther’s rant against the Jews is barely distinguishable from the writings of Hitler.
The three founders of Protestantism, Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII, had thousands of heretics were burned at the stake, as they and their followers took Jesus literally when he said, “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.”
Following the biblical injunction, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” Christians killed 60,000-100,000 accused witches in the European witchhunts.
The European Wars of Religion had death rates that were double that of World War I and that were in the range of World War II in Europe.
Christian conquistadors massacred and enslaved native Americans in vast numbers, and perhaps twenty million were killed in all (not counting unintentional epidemics) by the European settlement of the Americas.
World War I, as I recall, was a war fought mostly by Christians against Christians. As for World War II and its associated horrors, see my answer to the previous question.

Certain Christian denominations, such as the Quakers, did indeed mobilize the abolitionist movement, but they came late to the party. Christianity had no problem with slavery for more than 1500 years, and agitation against the institution only took off with the writings of John Locke and other philosophers of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment, who found plenty of good secular reasons why slavery was abominable. The American abolitionists fought against a slaveholding South that was, of course, thoroughly Christian, including many ministers who defended slavery because it was approved in the Bible.

As for Martin Luther King, in his essay “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” he discusses his inspirations: ancient Greek and Enlightenment philosophers, renegade humanistic theologians who rejected orthodox Christian doctrine, and most of all, Gandhi. And of course the segregationists he opposed were all Christians, and several of the civil rights activists they murdered were Jewish.

This is not to single out Christians or Christianity as a source of violence; many of the contemporary alternatives were just as bad. And there have been times in recent history when Christian ideas and movements have been pacifying forces, particularly when they have been influenced the humanitarian currents I discuss in the book. But to say that Christianity has, overall, been a force for peace in history is factually inaccurate.

-----------------------

I've lost count of the number of times, in conversations with Christians, it's been claimed that Christianity was and is primarily a force of peace and civility. This is quite flagrantly false, and we shouldn't forget that while Christianity has been tamed by the forces of secular modernity, it was historically spread by the sword and inspired some of the most grotesque cruelty in history.

The US has a regressive tax system

2012-02-05T19:49:00.000-08:00

The rich pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes, right? Nearly half of Americans pay no taxes at all, right? Wrong. It's true as long as you're talking about federal income taxes, and ignoring overall tax rates that take into account local sales taxes, payroll taxes, state income taxes, property taxes, etc. etc. Some sobering statistics by way of Mother Jones:

... it's true that the federal income tax is indeed progressive. Conservatives are right about that—though it's not as progressive as it used to be, back before top marginal rates were lowered and capital gains taxes were slashed in half. But conservatives are a little less excited to talk about other kinds of taxes. Payroll taxes aren't progressive, for example. In fact, they're actively regressive, with the poor and middle classes paying higher rates than the rich.

And then there are state taxes. Those include state income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and fees of various kinds. How progressive are state taxes?

Answer: They aren't. The Corporation for Enterprise Development recently released a scorecard for all 50 states, and it has boatloads of useful information. That includes overall tax rates, where data from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy shows that in the median state (Mississippi, as it turns out) the poorest 20 percent pay twice the tax rate of the top 1 percent. In the worst states, the poorest 20 percent pay five to six times the rate of the richest 1 percent. Lucky duckies indeed. There's not one single state with a tax system that's progressive. Check the table below to see how your state scores.

So when conservatives are playing the world's saddest song on the world's tiniest violin, bitching and moaning about a 3% increase in federal income tax rates on the top 2% or saying that we should slash medicare, medicaid, social security and welfare before we even consider taxing the rich more, just show them this while you hand them a spoon and a bag of dicks.

Misquoting physicists

2012-02-05T12:24:00.000-08:00

The epic discussion in the comments section for the post "Apologetics 101" has gone, as discussions like that are prone to do, into pretty esoteric territory. The discussion has gravitated toward the First Cause arguments and whether the universe actually requires a beginning, which is kind of disappointing because just once I'd like to see someone really try to defend the ontological argument in a discussion like that. Oh well.

Anyway, the topic of whether the universe has a beginning is a thorny one, but it's a concept that's absolutely pivotal to belief in a theistic or deistic Creator (pantheists are off the hook). As Stephen Hawking so eloquently put it in A Brief History of Time back in '88, "So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?"

There's definitely a possibility that modern cosmologies will one day make the notion of a creator irrelevant. For now, Christian apologists like to cling to the standard model of the Big Bang, which seems to indicate that the universe began at a finite point in the past – at the so-called "cosmological singularity", where space-time becomes infinitely curved. When one commenter brought to my attention an article about a theorem from Alexander Vilenkin, a few minutes on Google found lots of attention about Vilenkin from Christians, including the notorious creationist blog Evolution News and an essay by the popular apologist William Lane Craig in which he quotes Vilenkin in a way that implies that physicists have resolved the issue:

...three leading cosmologists, Arvin Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, were able to prove that any universe which has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space-time boundary.

But, as is usually the case when theologians opine on physics, this is disingenuous. The reality of the issue is much more nuanced, as Caltech physicist Sean Carroll points out:

The singularity at the Big Bang doesn'tindicate a beginning to the universe, only an end to our theoreticalcomprehension. It may be that thismoment does indeed correspond to a beginning, and a complete theory of quantumgravity will eventually explain how the universe started at approximately thistime. But it is equally plausiblethat what we think of as the Big Bang is merely a phase in the history of theuniverse, which stretches long before that time – perhaps infinitely farin the past. The present state ofthe art is simply insufficient to decide between these alternatives; to do so,we will need to formulate and test a working theory of quantum gravity. [1]

Theologians can't get around the fact that the idea of a "beginning" is semantically thorny. William Lane Craig continues, disingenuously:

These [quantum gravity] models feature an absolute beginning of the universe, even if the universe does not come into being at a singular point. Thus, Quantum Gravity models no more avoid the universe’s beginning than do purported Eternal Inflationary models.

Problem is, that's only valid if you amend "beginning" to apply only to the observable universe. Or, to put it another way, cosmic inflation has a beginning (as Vilenkin himself explicitly states in an interview) – but it's a far cry from the creation ex nihilo that theologians yearn for. I don't think a semantic victory is quite what theologians are hoping for, but it may well be what they have to settle for.

That's the kind of precarious position that a believer can't avoid. Physics do not require the universe to have a beginning; and even if it does, a beginning that can be described mathematically will do little to bolster the notion that God had to be there to bring it about. Sean Carroll again sums it up nicely:

The importantpoint is that we can easily imagine self-contained descriptions of the universethat have an earliest moment of time. There is no logical or metaphysical obstacle to completing theconventional temporal history of the universe by including an atemporalboundary condition at the beginning. Together with the successful post-Big-Bang cosmological modelalready in our possession, that would constitute a consistent andself-contained description of the history of the universe.

Nothing in thefact that there is a first moment of time, in other words, necessitates that anexternal something is required to bring the universe about at that moment.

Further reading:
Sean Carroll: How Did the Universe Start?
3-part interview with Alexander Vilenkin

QFT

2012-02-05T10:56:00.001-08:00

Sam Harris and fireplaces

2012-02-04T11:31:00.000-08:00

Sam Harris has picked an odd topic to blog about: the hazards of wood-burning fireplaces. Everyone knows they're a terribly inefficient source of heat, but people still enjoy lighting them up occasionally because it smells good. Sam wants to convince you that this is a terrible idea and an immediate threat to your health:

I am sorry to say that if you feel this way about a wood fire [a "wholesome pleasure"], you are not only wrong but dangerously misguided. I mean to seriously convince you of this—so you can consider it in part a public service announcement—but please keep in mind that I am drawing an analogy. I want you to be sensitive to how you feel, and to notice the resistance you begin to muster as you consider what I have to say.

He then hits with this scientificish condemnation:

Once they have exited your chimney, the toxic gases (e.g. benzene) and particles that make up smoke freely pass back into your home and into the homes of others. (Research shows that nearly 70 percent of chimney smoke reenters nearby buildings.) Children who live in homes with active fireplaces or woodstoves, or in areas where wood burning is common, suffer a higher incidence of asthma, cough, bronchitis, nocturnal awakening, and compromised lung function. Among adults, wood burning is associated with more-frequent emergency room visits and hospital admissions for respiratory illness, along with increased mortality from heart attacks. The inhalation of wood smoke, even at relatively low levels, alters pulmonary immune function, leading to a greater susceptibility to colds, flus, and other respiratory infections. All these effects are borne disproportionately by children and the elderly.

And he concludes with a stern warning:

If you care about your family’s health and that of your neighbors, the sight of a glowing hearth should be about as comforting as the sight of a diesel engine idling in your living room.


Fire.... bad? Or fire.... good?

Sam is being dumb. Not because he's wrong about the statistics, not because he's wrong about smoke inhalation being a bad thing, but because the statistics he cites create a false equivalency. He begins the blog by talking about people in the modern industrialized world who use fireplaces only occasionally (and likely briefly). Then to show that it's dangerous, he cites statistics from people who live in developed nations and/or are raised in homes that use wood-burning stoves or fireplaces as primary heat sources.

Well, that ain't the same thing. Sam hasn't offered any evidence that the occasional short fire produces significant health consequences. Now granted, that's not the same thing as saying it's smart. It's still really inefficient and is producing at least some level of frivolous pollution. But his stats don't jive with his alarmist message. What's really annoying about the article though is that he's posturing it as though it's a critical-thinking exercise that even many self-proclaimed skeptics are going to fail, but the then sticks the root of his argument in a logical fallacy. I'm not impressed.

The Rapture: directed by Roland Emmerich

2012-01-31T19:43:00.001-08:00

A friend from my church days posted this on Facebook. Apparently this gets some people really emotionally worked up. I thought it was hilarious.

Probably not the best time to proselytize...

2012-01-31T19:15:00.001-08:00

Apologetics 101

2012-01-30T12:17:00.000-08:00

The First Cause Argument:

Everything has to come from something
The universe is a thing
Ergo, the universe had to come from something. Like God.
p.s. - God doesn't have to come from anything

The Design Argument:

The universe was designed to support life
How do we know? Because we're alive!
Ergo, God designed the universe

The Morality Argument

I think some things are just wrong, regardless of what anyone else thinks
That proves there is a transcendent source of moral values
Ergo, God gave us morals

The Ontological Argument

God, by definition, has to exist
Ergo, God exists

The Argument from Reason

If God didn't exist, there wouldn't be any reason for me to believe I am reasoning about this
I'm reasoning about this
Ergo, God exists

The Teleological Argument

Things that exist now are more complex than things that used to exist
This proves that the universe was designed to eventually produce these things
Ergo, God exists

That should get you started. If any of these don't make sense, pray about it until they do.

Adam and Eve, and the bullshit train

2012-01-29T11:29:00.000-08:00

I meant to comment on this the other week, but I've been busy. Over at Huffington Post, Biblical scholar and evangelical Christian Pete Enns has an op ed about the non-existence of Adam and Eve, and why this should not be a problem for Christians. First, I do have to give him credit for at least acknowledging the fact that Adam and Eve did not exist, which is more than can be said for the majority of Protestant pastors:

Evolution is a threat, and many evangelicals are fighting to keep Adam in the family photo album. But in their rush to save Christianity, some evangelicals have been guilty of all sorts of strained, idiosyncratic or obscurantist tactics: massaging or distorting the data, manipulating the legal system, scaring their constituencies and strong-arming those of their own camp who raise questions.

Right, so the non-existence of Adam and Eve poses some serious problems for Christians, and they haven't handled it very gracefully. So, what's the solution? Re-interpret the Bible!

Since the 19th century, through scads of archaeological discoveries from the ancient world of the Bible, biblical scholars have gotten a pretty good handle on what ancient creation stories were designed to do.

Ancient peoples assumed that somewhere in the distant past, near the beginning of time, the gods made the first humans from scratch -- an understandable conclusion to draw. They wrote stories about "the beginning," however, not to lecture their people on the abstract question "Where do humans come from?" They were storytellers, drawing on cultural traditions, writing about the religious -- and often political -- beliefs of the people of their own time.

Their creation stories were more like a warm-up to get to the main event: them. Their stories were all about who they were, where they came from, what their gods thought of them and, therefore, what made them better than other peoples.

Likewise, Israel's story was written to say something about their place in the world and the God they worshiped. To think that the Israelites, alone among all other ancient peoples, were interested in (or capable of) giving some definitive, quasi-scientific, account of human origins is an absurd logic. And to read the story of Adam and Eve as if it were set up to so such a thing is simply wrongheaded.

See what he's saying? He's saying, Well of course Adam and Eve didn't really exist! That story was obviously never meant to have been taken literally.

Here's the problem though. You know who did think that Adam and Eve were real people? The apostle Paul. Pastor Tim Keller, author of The Reason for God, illuminates the issue:

[Paul] most definitely wanted to teach us that Adam and Eve were real historical figures. When you refuse to take a biblical author literally when he clearly wants you to do so, you have moved away from the traditional understanding of the biblical authority. . If Adam doesn’t exist, Paul’s whole argument—that both sin and grace work “covenantally"—falls apart. You can’t say that Paul was a "man of his time" but we can accept his basic teaching about Adam. If you don’t believe what he believes about Adam, you are denying the core of Paul’s teaching.


Not really real

Enns' article is a prime example of the kind of backwards-rationalization – draw the conclusion first, then interpret the evidence to fit it – that drove me from Christianity. For thousands of years, people have assumed that Adam and Eve were real people. Contra Enns, primitive people most certainly were interested in giving a quasi-scientific account of their origins. How do we know? Because it was science that showed Adam and Eve to be made-up. Where were the Christians prior to Darwin, prior to our modern understanding of genetics, telling their fellow believers not to take Adam and Eve's existence factually? Why isn't that mentioned, I dunno, in the Bible?

It's obvious to anyone with an iota of reason what is really going on here: science is exposing the foundation of Christianity as false. We already know that most of the stories in the Old Testament are fiction. But it's been scientists, not theologians, leading the charge; Christians are the ones scrambling, in the aftermath, to re-engineer their theology so their beliefs can co-exist with the facts.

h/t Jerry Coyne

Heard on Facebook

2012-01-29T10:32:00.000-08:00

"I believe in morality, which is doing what is right regardless of what I am told... not in religion, which is doing what I'm told regardless of what is right."

Paula Deen has diabetes

2012-01-26T19:21:00.000-08:00

Huffpo has a link on Facebook showing Paula Deen stuffing her face with a cheeseburger. This probably wouldn't be a big deal, save for the fact she was recently diagnosed with Type-2 diabetes. She complained about the lack of support, but swiftly secured an endorsement for Viktoza (a diabetes drug).

Type-2 diabetes is not cancer. Or, more aptly, it's not Type-1 diabetes. Type-1 is childhood-onset, and it's genetic. There's nothing you can do about it. Type-2, on the other hand, is a preventable disease brought on by lifestyle choices. Paula Deen cooks crap, eats crap, and she's fat. Here's a radical idea: eat healthy food and exercise regularly, and you won't be fat and you won't get Type-2 diabetes.

So pardon me if I don't roll out the sympathy parade for some who lives an unhealthy lifestyle and promotes unhealthy eating – even to kids. You reap what you sow.

A little stick of Type-2 diabetes

My religious philosophy in a nutshell

2012-01-25T19:30:00.001-08:00

Report: The vast majority of Protestant pastors are creationists

2012-01-25T12:12:00.000-08:00

(via Crocoduck.com)

Nothing like starting a day with a facepalm: A survey of 1000 Protestant pastors conducted by Lifeway Christian Resources found that an overwhelming majority of them are evolution-denying creationists and believe that Adam and Eve were real people. Writing for Crocoduck, Josh Engen echos my thoughts to a tee:

I think most of us can agree that LifeWay’s survey is painting a pretty terrifying picture here. In most of the world, pastors have a far more influential voice than scientists, teachers or politicians, and we’ve been stuck with a group of leaders who insist on speaking authoritatively about a subject that they know nothing about.

Precisely. I've talked a bit about the problems that Adam & Eve's non-existence poses for Christian theology [more], and as I've said, Christians take one of two ways out of it: they either choose to reject science, or they make shit up to plug the gaping holes in their theology. It appears that while the well-educated Biologos types are happy to use the more creative approach, most Protestant pastors are taking the more willfully-ignorant approach and preaching it to their congregants. Depressing.

Read the full article here.

Steve Novella takes on Chinese medicine

2012-01-23T23:42:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of Steve Novella, and his recent blog ripping apart the stupidity of Chinese medicine is a prime example. It's a must-read.

This isn't a small deal. Being a personal trainer, I hear a lot about various aches and pains and the lengths people will go to fix them. Every time a client says, "I have an appointment with my chiropractor tomorrow!" I have to bite my tongue. Being in a professional environment I have to voice my opinions judiciously, and I generally don't tell people what I really think about chiropractic (like, it's a fucking pseudoscience and a total rip-off) unless my opinion is solicited directly. It's not just chiropractic, of course; I hear a lot about "detox" diets, acupuncture, Mona Vie, miracle foods and all other manner of pseudoscience and outright bullshit.

People are gullible, and it's easy for those well-versed in the language of woo to sound credible through the use of sophisticated-sounding language. Hell, just the word "subluxation", the basis of all chiropractic "medicine", is technical-sounding, but, in the words of Wikipedia,

In 2009, four scholarly chiropractors concluded that epidemiologic evidence does not support chiropractic's most fundamental theory. Since its inception, the vast majority of chiropractors have postulated that "subluxations" (misalignments) are the cause or underlying cause of ill health and can be corrected with spinal "adjustments." After searching the scientific literature, the chiropractic authors concluded:
"No supportive evidence is found for the chiropractic subluxation being associated with any disease process or of creating suboptimal health conditions requiring intervention. Regardless of popular appeal, this leaves the subluxation construct in the realm of unsupported speculation. This lack of supportive evidence suggests the subluxation construct has no valid clinical applicability."^[33]

Buyer beware. And, read Steve Novella's blog.

Movies that I'm supposed to hate, but don't

2012-01-22T23:35:00.000-08:00

I saw Underworld: Awakening this weekend with a few friends. We all liked it. One of my friends is the same one with whom I saw the first movie in 2003, and we both liked that. Critics, on the other hand, have always dismissed them. My dad saw Red Tails, which is getting mostly negative reviews, probably because people love to hate George Lucas. But my dad apparently enjoyed it quite a bit.

I also really liked The Immortals a few months ago, which has gotten ho-hum reviews. It was directed by Tarsem Singh, the same guy who directed The Cell. The Cell also got ho-hum reviews, and I freaking love that movie.

Anyway, I was reading the box office report and audiences apparently really like the new Underworld movie based on CinemaScore, which I had never heard of. According to Wikipedia, it's a research firm that has audiences score movies on an A-F scale, and it's exceedingly rare for a film to get an F. One of the few to be totally hated by audiences? The Box, starring Cameron Diaz. Maybe it was my low expectations, but I couldn't figure out why it was so loathed. It was a spooky sci-fi throwback to old Rod Sterling style horror and, being a fan of that genre-style stuff, I thought it was great.

I think the moral is, fuck what other people think. Now, a low aggregate might affect how much I want to see a movie I'm on the fence about, but if I want to see a movie, dammit, I'll form my own opinion. Besides, critics and audiences alike often change their tune. John Carpenter's The Thing was panned by critics and flopped at the box office. Carpenter himself is quoted on Wikipedia as saying,

"I take every failure hard. The one I took the hardest was The Thing. My career would have been different if that had been a big hit...The movie was hated. Even by science-fiction fans. They thought that I had betrayed some kind of trust, and the piling on was insane. Even the original movie’s director, Christian Nyby, was dissing me."

Carpenter had the last laugh, because it's now revered as a modern classic by critics and horror fans alike. And, predictably, the new one – which I enjoyed – was totally panned. Well, fuck you. I love the widely panned espionage/romance flick The Saint with Val Kilmer and Elisabeth Shue. True Grit, which critics said I was supposed to like, was so dull and predictable it practically put me to sleep. I suppose most of the time my tastes are in line with the aggregates. I liked The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I thought the new Conan was painfully average. Every so often though....

The 10 Commandments: the basis of our laws and morals

2012-01-22T22:22:00.000-08:00

NonStampCollector does it again:

It's really tempting...

2012-01-22T15:32:00.000-08:00

Spied on Facebook...

You have no idea how tempted I am to reply to stuff like this. Just smart ass crap like, "Or, do other stuff." Then I tell myself to pick my battles.

I'm also amused by the dichotomy of a praise-the-lord post being immediately preceded by a post by a flagrantly blasphemous metal band.

Bill Donahue is a pitiful excuse for a human being

2012-01-22T13:20:00.000-08:00

The Catholic League threw a 10th anniversary "Celebration and Conference" ... um, celebrating, apparently, the 10th anniversary of the Boston abuse scandal being exposed by the media. 75 people attended, and 25 of them were speakers. Not much of a conference, amiright? Aside from the conspicuously bizarre choice to have a "celebration" of the revelation of widespread child abuse in the Catholic church and a systematic coverup, professional asshole Bill Donahue offers his usual hateful diatribe:

A whopping 75 people turned out for the conference, 25 of whom were the speakers. How embarrassing. It’s clear that the professional victims’ lobby is spent. Everyone else has moved on, but those who have an ideological, emotional or financial interest in continuing this saga cannot let go. What a pitiful bunch of malcontents.

I don't think any further commentary is necessary.

A new kind of Euthyphro

2012-01-20T20:31:00.000-08:00

Does God have reasons that rationally justify his moral commands, or are they arbitrary and simply to be obeyed?

This is why I think this is worth thinking about: I've heard a lot of theologians say that we are to obey God's commands – that the mandate for obedience intrinsically follows. Why? What's in it for us? God says, love thy neighbor. Did God just pull that out of his holy rear? Or are there good, logical reasons why I ought to love my neighbor?

Here's the trick: if there are rational reasons why I should be kind to others instead of cruel, then I don't need to resort to obedience as a reason to do them, and God is irrelevant. But if commands are simply to be obeyed, then we've rendered rationality irrelevant.

Discuss.

Obama on secularism

2012-01-17T13:06:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine posted this on her Facebook page, and I think it's a great quote. But in my view, it doesn't only apply to the legal side of things. Any discussion of morality must ultimately be explained in humanistic terms. The de facto theistic retort, which boils down to, "it's wrong because my interpretation of my holy book says it is," doesn't get us very far.

The (bogus) historicity of the Old Testament

2012-01-15T02:12:00.000-08:00

[Note: This is sort of a preview of the work-in-progress that is my book (with edits to make it more blog-friendly), taken from the second chapter: "Why I Am Not a Christian"]

The Old Testament is full of some extremely barbaric stuff – ritual human sacrifices, slavery, rape, genocide, stonings – and most of it is commanded by the Hebrew god. But if there's a saving grace to the stomach-churning cruelty, it's that it probably never happened. The Old Testament is almost entirely fictional. But shouldn't this be problematic? Isn't the Bible supposed to be the Word of God? How do Christians (and Jews, for that matter) reconcile this? How do they amend their theology to account for the fact that this is all just made up? Let's look at some of the more significant historical claims in the Old Testament, and how we know they are false:

I.Creation

Few,save perhaps for a fringe of fundamentalists, hold that the Genesisview of creation is anything but fiction. The order is wrong, and nonsensical: water exists beforeanything else (and apparently does not need to be created); light iscreated before the sun, the Earth before the stars, plants beforeanimals. We now know that this is simply a creation myth, just likethose found in innumerable cultures all over the world. We now know the universe is some 13.7 billion years old, and that our sun is a third-generation star formed from the debris of supernovae in the distant past, and that the Earth formed over several billion years.

II.Adam and Eve

It issimply impossible, given everything we know about molecular biologyand genetics, for all of humanity to have come from two individuals.

In terms of human genetics, the concept that all humans descended from two historical persons is impossible.^[17] Genetic evidence indicates humans descended from a group of at least 10,000 people, and to account for the observed human genetic variation it would take an impossibly high mutation rate if all humans descended from two individuals several thousands of years ago as young Earth creationism claims.^[17][Wikipedia]

There have been some spurious attempts to salvage the myth with mitochondrial Eve, the matrilineal most recent common ancestor of all living humans. But not only was she not the only woman alive, but her patrilineal counterpart – Y-chromosomal Adam – lived some 140,00 later. Adam and Eve's non-existence creates some big conundrums for Christian theologians, but more on that later.

III. The Flood

The Biblical narrative of a worldwide flood is well-established as fictional. Not only does it counter everything we know about the geological record, but the logistics of it are hilariously absurd. While most Christians have abandoned this story as fiction, there is no shortage of literalists such as Ken Ham, who is funding a multi-million dollar replica of the Ark.

In Chapter 2 of his book Believing Bullshit, Stephen Law looks at the perpetuation of the Flood myth and highlights some of the absurdities:

"So how did Noah feed all his creatures while they were at sea? Christian Information Ministries suggests they hibernated:

How Noah and his small family could have cared for this large menagerie is unknown, not to mention the sanitation problem! What we must remember is that this event, i.e., the Flood, had supernatural elements. For instance, the animals came to the Ark against their natural instincts (Gen. 6:20). It is therefore reasonable to assume, as some creationists do, that the animals' metabolism may have been slowed down during their confinement, even to the point where some of the animals may have gone into a state of hibernation.

Of course, once we allow “supernatural elements” to play a role, we could just say that God shrank the dinosaurs to pocket size during their journey. That would also deal with many of these problems." [more]

IV.The Exodus

Similarlyimportant to the Bible is the story of the Exodus. Thousands of Jewswere enslaved by Egypt, until Moses stood up to the corrupt Pharaohand, with God on his side, freed God’s chosen people and led theminto the desert, where they wandered for 40 years before establishing what would become the Davidic Empire.

There’sa big problem with this famous story: there isn’t a shred ofhistorical evidence for it. Egypt has for hundreds of years been perhaps the single greatestarchaeological hot spot on Earth, and yet no trace of evidence thatJews were enslaved enmassehasbeen found, and there is no mention of it in any Egyptian writings. Furthermore, the archaeological evidence we do have shows the origin of Israel to be indigenous. From Wikipedia:

The archaeological evidence of the largely indigenous origins of Israel is "overwhelming," and leaves "no room for an Exodus from Egypt or a 40-year pilgrimage through the Sinai wilderness."^[21] For this reason, most archaeologists have abandoned the archaeological investigation of Moses and the Exodus as "a fruitless pursuit."^[21] A century of research by archaeologists and Egyptologists has found no evidence which can be directly related to the Exodus narrative of an Egyptian captivity and the escape and travels through the wilderness,^[18] and it has become increasingly clear that Iron Age Israel - the kingdoms of Judah and Israel - has its origins in Canaan, not Egypt:^[22]^[23]

V. The conquest of Canaan and the Davidic empire

Thegenocidal conquest of Canaan has similarly been shown to be a work offiction. From Wikipedia:

Bythe 1920s, it was clear that the idea of an Israelite conquest ofCanaan - the story of the book of Joshua - was not supported by thearchaeological record. The response of the time was to propose thatthe main biblical idea was still correct, but that the Israelitesentered Canaan peacefully instead of through conquest. Later, eventhis compromise was abandoned, and the Israelites were interpreted tobe indigenous Canaanites. The revision of Israelite origins hasimplications for Israelite religion: whereas the bible had depictedthem as monotheists from the beginning, the new understanding is thatthey were polytheists who harboured a small and ultimately successfulgroup of monotheistic revolutionaries.[8]

Thenew understanding, even if it recognised the Israelites as Canaanitesby origin, still treated post-Conquest biblical story as realhistory. But eventually this also came under challenge: if, after 200years of archaeology, there is still no direct evidence of theexistence of David and Solomon, then they too must be fiction, theproduct of Jews of the 6th and 5th century Persian empire. The mostradical reconstruction goes even further, alleging that the Jewsoriginated as a "mixed multitude" of settlers sent toJerusalem by the Persians, where they concocted a past forthemselves. There are few scholars who believe this, but itdemonstrates how the paradigm (the argument) has shifted.[9]

As Steven Pinker notes in The Better Angels of Our Nature, "If there was a Davidic Empire stretching from the Euphrates to the Red Sea around the turn of the 1st millennium BCE, no one else seems to have noticed it." [p.11]

Theological hurdles

Over at the Christian blog Wide as the Waters, Jack Hudson has a post where he talks about the historicity of the Old Testament. He makes an important claim:

There were no archeological controversies over ancient Greek or Roman religious beliefs because they were never understood to be historical in nature – they didn’t pretend to be. We don’t talk about Hindu archeology or Buddhist archeology because those religions are not reliant upon historical facts. None of these religions even pretends to be the product of a set of events that occurred in a particular time and place in history; only vague references to certain individuals whose actual existence is unimportant to the belief system.Biblical belief however is definitively set in a particular places and times and concerns certain individuals. [link]

Exactly. The Bible is rooted in historical claims – so since we have overwhelming evidence that many of those historical claims are false, it creates real problems for Christian theology.

Take Adam & Eve. Their non-existencecreates a theological conundrum: the Fall of Adam and Eve is thecatalyst for curse of sin upon all humankind; the entire purpose ofChrist’s death and resurrection is to right the wrong of the Fall.Pastor Tim Keller, author of TheReason for God,explained the dilemma in an articleforthe website ChristianityToday:

"[Paul]most definitely wanted to teach us that Adam and Eve were realhistorical figures. When you refuse to take a biblical authorliterally when he clearly wants you to do so, you have moved awayfrom the traditional understanding of the biblical authority,"Keller wrote. "If Adam doesn't exist, Paul's whole argument—thatboth sin and grace work 'covenantally'—falls apart. You can't saythat 'Paul was a man of his time' but we can accept his basicteaching about Adam. If you don't believe what he believes aboutAdam, you are denying the core of Paul's teaching."

This means that Christiansare forced to either deny science or re-interpret the Bible inlight of our new-found scientific knowledge. “Perhaps sin enteredthe world gradually”, they might say; “perhaps Adam and Eveweren’t the first humans, but were still the first to rebel againstGod.” This kind of post-hocrationalizationis the inspiration for evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne’sfrequent quip: “Theology is the art of making religious virtues outof scientific necessities”. Isn't it ironic, after all, that no one seems to bother mentioning that most of the Bible is a metaphor until after empirical investigation has shown its historical claims to be false?

If the Bible is so easily re-interpreted as metaphorical, how much of a stretch would it be to re-interpret the New Testament in the same way? The historical facts are not on the side of the gospels either, but with 2/3rds of the Bible being mostly fictional, what's another third? I suspect it's nothing that some clever theological gymnastics can't dance around.

Happy birthday, Ken Pulliam

2012-01-14T03:02:00.000-08:00

Today would have been Ken Pulliam's 52nd birthday. I didn't know him personally (though I certainly wish I could have picked his brain over a glass of Scotch), but I read his blog regularly, and respected him greatly. I took it as a tremendous compliment that he followed this blog, and his picture in my "followers" list acts as a reminder of a great mind lost far too soon. I wish his family well on what's surely a rough day for them, and I strongly encourage my readers to check out his outstanding blog:

Why I De-Converted from Evangelical Christianity

A really simple way to unhinge God from morality

2012-01-12T13:03:00.000-08:00

Yeah, you know that old canard: without God in the picture, there's no reason to consider anything right or wrong, to treat anyone kindly instead of cruelly.

So, try this. Think of someone you love. Your wife, husband, gf/bf, best friend, mother or father, black cat, etc. Imagine there were no rules. No commandments or laws. What's stopping you from gutting that person and bathing in their entrails? Remember, it's not illegal and there's no commandment not to do it. So why not go for a nice warm intestine bath? Next time someone shows you their brand new baby, why not just take the baby and toss it in the street? And don't let your friend's dog drool all over you – just stab it a few dozen times! Can you think of one single reason, just one, why you might not think it's a good idea to do any of these things?

I'd wage that any reasonable person can think of several. First of all, we have an innate sense of empathy toward others most of the time that acts as a sort of bulwark against violence. We recognize that they feel pain just like we do. So at a biological level, most of us don't want to do violent things for no reason.

Then there's the fact that we realize there are consequences, regardless of any laws. If we could all just indiscriminately kill each other, we could never trust each other. If we couldn't do that, then we could never cooperate. That means no division of labor, no sharing of resources, no sacrifices for one another. We're all left to survive completely on our own – against nature, disease, starvation, predators, and ninjas.

We can probably even think of some good reasons to be truly altruistic. Maybe we help others in need because we recognize that it could just as easily be us in need and we'd like to live in a world where we or our loved ones are taken care of when they can't take care of themselves, instead of a world where everyone who's powerless to stop their own suffering is simply left to the wolves.

Really, it's an easy argument for the non-believer to win. We don't have to prove that objective morality doesn't exist or that God doesn't exist. All we have to do is show the believer that they can probably think of at least one pragmatic reason why they shouldn't treat others cruelly. That's enough to prove that moral behavior is not dependent on any God or any commandment, but on our shared humanity.

Hitler blaming

2012-01-11T12:49:00.000-08:00

Larry Moran over at Sandwalk has a post up where he's talking about Christians' attempts to link Hitler with Darwinism and atheism. It's a pretty desperate ploy for anyone who knows anything about history.

I'm pretty sure Hitler didn't invent the idea of being a would-be world-conquering tyrant. Let's not forget all the Christian imperialists who conquered the land most of us are now sitting on, slaughtering and enslaving much of the native population. The Spanish Christians even implemented Encomienda, which was the systematic regulation of Native American labor through slavery, brutality, and forced conversion. Or shall we go back to the Saxon wars, where the pagans of Northern Europe were conquered and forced by the sword to convert to Christianity? Ever wonder why Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter are on dates that originally coincided with pagan holidays? Some might argue, per our war in Iraq, that Christian imperialism is alive and kicking – I believe it was Ann Coulter who said we should "bomb them and convert them to Christianity".

The persecution of the Jews? Does anyone really think Hitler invented that? Martin Luther, the German (fancy that) theologian who was the godfather of the Protestant Reformation, was a raving antisemite who late in life wrote a book called On Jews and Their Lies in which he extolled the persecution, isolation, imprisonment and execution of Jews. And who was behind the Inquisition, which was the systematic torture and execution of Jews lasting several centuries? A bunch of atheists? No, try again... it was the Christian church.

Obviously Hitler wasn't doing anything new. The Christian persecution of Jews has a long and nasty history, with accusations of blood libel and host desecration being recorded well into the 20th century. But more than that, Hitler frequently spoke of his Catholic faith in writings and speeches. Was he just a paper Christian? Maybe, maybe not. But it's not like Christians hadn't been doing for hundreds of years the same kind of Jew-hating things and world-conquering things that Hitler was doing.

So, that brings us to Darwinism. Presumably this is relevant because of eugenics, which was advocated by some high-ranking Nazis as a justification for some of Hitler's more macabre practices. But there's a massive hole in that argument, which is that even to the extent that eugenics was considered by scientists (before scientists ditched it because it's a pseudoscience), no reputable scientist ever advocated anything remotely like what Hitler was doing. There's certainly no Darwinian basis for the notion that German people were part of some superior "race".

To me, these kinds of ploys tend to vastly oversimplify the reasons why tyrants like Hitler come to power and do the things they do. There are all kinds of cultural, economic and political factors that must reach a sort of "perfect storm". I don't know any atheists who've said that Hitler did what he did because he was Catholic, although obviously his beliefs about Jews are intertwined with Christian beliefs and practices. What's more, even if Hitler were an atheist, I don't see what that would prove. Atheism is not an ideology. It means you're not a theist. I'm an atheist, sure, but I'm also a secular humanist – which advocates for positive values rooted in our innate human solidarity.

Stalin was (presumably) an atheist, but he was also a power-driven megalomaniac who sought absolute control over his people. I have to scoff when I hear Christians call Stalin's Russia an "atheist society". Coercing people into abandoning their religion under the threat of military force is not an atheistic society. For that, we can look to the modern cultures in Northern Europe, where citizens have voluntarily left the church in droves. And although I'm a little skeptical of the true number of "atheists" in those countries, as "unaffiliated" is often conflated with atheism, it's clear that people in developed secular nations – the United States being an outlier – are making less and less room for religion in their lives. And, it just so happens, these are some of the most peaceful, prosperous nations on Earth. Is that because they're non-religious? No, but if rejecting religion were the perilous endeavor some Christians make it out to be, those societies ought to be in complete disrepair.

So, this post ended up being much longer than intended. I even added a picture. And just for fun, I'll add another that has nothing to do with anything. Knibb High football rules!

Steve Novella on the supernatural

2012-01-09T21:42:00.000-08:00

This talk is branded as a talk about consciousness, and it is that to an extent – he talks a bit about dualism and the implications of neurology. But it's really just a good general talk about what constitutes good science and why appeals to supernatural explanations are simply worthless.

I especially like the line at the end, in reference to the Discovery Institute's claim that science should change to accommodate supernatural hypotheses; Novella points out that we don't dismiss supernatural hypotheses because we have some bias against them, but because they are untestable and unfalsifiable: "They want to change the rules because under the rules that work, they lose."

Where did the good blogs go?

2012-01-06T13:22:00.000-08:00

I have a pretty decent list of blogs bookmarked. I don't read them every day (most of them aren't updated every day anyway), but I at least visit them every few days or so and check on the content. It's a mix of skeptic blogs, atheist blogs, science blogs, and yes... a few Jesus blogs.

But I don't really read any of the blogs that got me into the atheist blogosphere. I don't even remember the last time I visited Pharyngula. PZ's thickheadedness in the "define atheist" and elevatorgate incidents really turned me off from the guy. Jen over at Blag Hag is starting to sound no different than the blame-the-patriarchy feminists she used to incisively critique. Luke at Common Sense Atheism doesn't even really blog anymore, and the stuff he does now for Less Wrong is so bloated and needlessly esoteric that it's hardly worth the trouble. John Loftus seems more interested in self-promotion than in dialogue over at Debunking Christianity. And Unreasonable Faith is little more than a bunch of reposts from Christian Nightmares. Friendly Atheist is still good, though it's really more about news and events surrounding the atheist community than it is about theology, philosophy, skepticism, or what have you (which is totally fine).

Fortunately though, there are still plenty of good atheist blogs out there, where the authors have interesting things to say. Like these:

Advocatus Atheist
Dead Logic
For the Sake of Science
Fallen From Grace
One Minion's Opinion
Respectful Atheist
A Tippling Philosopher
The Atheist, Polyamorous Skeptic

Go forth and, uh... well you know.

A defense of evidentialism

2012-01-05T12:51:00.000-08:00

The YouTube user "Evid3nc3", who's done a thoroughly outstanding series of videos on his deconversion from Christianity to atheism, has a new video up today in which he defends his epistemological stance of evidentialism against common misconceptions. Being that I'm an evidentialist as well, I can only say... I concur.

Seriously this time

2012-01-04T20:30:00.000-08:00

I'm working on a book. Yeah, I hear you saying, like we haven't heard that before. Everyone knows that when you say you're "working on a book" you're actually spending all your free time playing Skyrim.

That's partially true. Okay, maybe even mostly true. But here's the thing about me and books: I'm not deluded enough to think that a whole lot of people are going to care about what I have to say on things like morality, cosmology, evolution, or theology. I work as a personal trainer for a living, and spend most of my spare time failing at shred guitar. I'm not some Harvard or Oxford academic, and while that doesn't sound like the most exciting line of work, it usually is enough to convince people that the book you're writing might be worth a gander.

So instead of focusing on a single subject as I've been inclined to do in the past, I'm going to basically tell my story. I'll be starting by detailing my life as a Christian, and my deconversion. I'll then explain why I deconverted from Christianity, why many years later I rejected theism entirely, my thoughts on epistemology and secular humanism, and lastly what life is like as an atheist – including my thoughts on why I think it's important to speak out about religion.

The best part is that I've already written most of the book. It's right here, in this blog. I'm writing some new material and revising old stuff to fit the continuity of the book (I've got a few chapters drafted), but much of it will be a sort of "best of" of this blog. One thing I hate about blogging is that every so often I do something I'm really proud of, and a week later it's buried in the archives and hardly anyone ever reads it. This way I can put my best work in one place.

Also, it's going to be dirt cheap, if I charge for it at all. I'm mainly interested in getting it out there and, with any luck, becoming a more recognizable name.

Blogging might be a tad slower than usual, at least in terms of really involved stuff. I'm still working through Pinker's book and I'll post any interesting thoughts on it as I go, but it's a slow read since I'm not one to sit around reading for hours on end. I sit around doing legato exercises on my guitar for hours on end. And playing Skyrim.

Stephen Pinker on "The Better Angels of Our Nature"

2012-01-01T12:45:00.000-08:00

I'll continue to blog my thoughts on this new book. In the meantime, here's a great interview that gives a good overview of the synopsis and answers some common questions.

h/t: Harry

Update: Another.

Christianity in a nutshell

2011-12-31T18:31:00.000-08:00

h/t: Michael Hawkins

Oldie but goodie

2011-12-31T16:31:00.001-08:00

Total war

2011-12-28T19:53:00.000-08:00

I first heard the term "total war" many years ago in reference to a series of real-time strategy video games, like Rome: Total War. In fact, if you do a Google search for the term, the first links are game-related.

But in reading Stephen Pinker's new book, I've learned there's a much nastier connotation to the term: genocide. Total war means not just killing your enemies, but their families too. You burn their villages and utterly wipe them. And while the relatively famous Biblical accounts of divinely-commanded genocide in the Old Testament are almost certainly fiction, total war wasn't that unusual in tribal warfare.

It's interesting to consider why. How could anyone, even tribal humans, do such horrible things? I've talked before about the hard-wiring of our empathetic circuitry – why wouldn't that be sufficient to stop people from killing babies? Pinker recounts events, detailed through historical writings and archeological findings, of truly grisly atrocities.

Imagine two feuding tribes. They both feel threatened by the other, and reason that to protect their own existence, they must kill the other tribe. But they don't wait for war; instead, they conduct a raid, piercing the first victims with arrows as they meander out of their tents to pee. In the ensuing commotion, the rest of the men and all the children are slaughtered. The women are mostly killed, but the occasional nubile young woman will be kidnapped and forced to bear the children of her family's murderers. From the Bible, in the book of Numbers:

31:17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
31:18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

Why would anyone do such horrible things? Survival. Because women can only bear so many children, and because a single man can impregnate many women, women were viewed as commodities. Kidnapping the women and raping them ensured the propagation of one's own tribe.

Why kill the children? Simple: because it could be reasoned that any offspring would grow up and desire revenge, threatening the safety of the tribe in the future. The safest thing to do, it would seem, was to resort to total war – wipe them out.

My point with all this isn't to justify such horrors. But I think that we tend to look upon the savagery of our tribal ancestors with scorn and disdain, and seldom stop to consider that intellectually, physically and emotionally, they weren't much different us at all. In a time when resources were scarce, starvation and disease were lurking constantly in the shadows, infant mortality was high and the threat of predation was imminent, there was much more competition and such hostilities seemed rational. And had any of us been born into such cultures, the odds are that we would have been gutting pregnant women and slaughtering children too.

Why I'm not a Christian (in a nutshell)

2011-12-27T02:03:00.000-08:00

Given that it's that festive time of year centered on a certain mythical deity, I've decided to offer up, as concisely as I can, the two major reasons why I deconverted from Christianity.

1. The events depicted in the Bible are either impossible or almost certainly fiction

The story of Creation is a myth bearing no resemblance to reality – light is created before the sun, the Earth before the stars. Many Christians, realizing this, simply say it's metaphorical. Not literal. But the reality is that until scientists came along and proved it couldn't have happened that way, there was no reason not to take it literally.

Adam and Eve couldn't have existed. Evidence from molecular biology shows that humans descended from a population of no fewer than 10,000 of our evolutionary ancestors. It's simply impossible for it to have been one man and one woman. But if there's no Adam and Eve, how did "sin" enter the picture?

Noah's Ark is also impossible. I shouldn't have to explain why (I'm not in the business of debating literalists), but NonStampCollector does a fine job of lampooning its absurdities.

There is zero evidence of the enslavement of Jews by Egyptians, much less an insurrection and exodus. There is no evidence of a sacking of Jericho or of a Davidic empire stretching from the Euphrates to the Red Sea. Some of the people in the Old Testament may indeed have existed, and many of the places are of course real. But the stories are exaggerated or altogether false – it's hagiography.

The New Testament is no more plausible. The events weren't recorded until decades after they purportedly happened. With the original manuscripts lost, we have only copies of copies, and they're rife with errors, contradictions, omissions and additions – all the hallmarks that they're man-made. The New Testament contains uncorroborated historical claims, historical errors, and supernatural claims for which there is and can be no evidence.

2. It doesn't make any damn sense

The central idea of Christianity is that God gave his only son as a sacrifice to atone for the curse of 'original sin' that has haunted humanity since its birth and doomed us to damnation in the afterlife. But with no Adam and Eve having actually existed, theologians have to conjure up convoluted rationalizations to explain where sin came from. And why is sin genetically transmitted? How could we possibly be guilty merely by being human? Nobody knows, of course – it's just uncritically accepted as a matter of 'faith'.

The absurdity is only beginning though. In the Old Testament, God decided that the best way to atone for sin would be to kill animals and burn their corpses. Heck, the Bible even says he likes the scent! How did God come to decide that this is how sins should be atoned? Who knows.

This didn't actually happen.

But that's not enough. God decides there's probably a better solution, so he sends his son to be the ultimate ritual sacrifice. Who is God's son? Why, himself! God is his own son. So he sacrifices himself to himself to pay a price he determined was necessary before he could forgive from a curse he put on us after two non-existent people disobeyed him and somehow genetically transmitted this curse to the entire human race.

But wait! It's still not really fixed, you see. God's eventually going to have a big war with the devil (which makes no sense since, being omnipotent, God could instantaneously will the devil out of existence), and all the good Christians will go to Heaven, and the Eden that never existed will be restored. But if humans are still capable of free will, why wouldn't someone eventually just rebel against God again, and totally screw up Heaven?

So, you have two options here: spend your life trying to rationalize these absurdities, or face reality. I chose the latter. I'm not a Christian because Christianity is fucking fiction, and there is not the slightest reason whatsoever for any remotely rational person to believe otherwise.

Reading material

2011-12-26T21:20:00.000-08:00

I haven't been blogging a ton lately, and this post is just to tell you that it'll probably continue to be sparse. That's because I've got 700 or so pages to absorb:

I read the first 16 pages or so last night. If you're unfamiliar with the book, Steven Pinker (a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, well-known in the secular community) argues, using mountains of research, that – contrary to the popular assumption – our world today is the most peaceful one in human history. Per capita violence, in virtually every area, is the lowest it's ever been. He then uses modern research in psychology, sociology and economics to explain why this is so.

He begins the book by talking about the violent Bronze Age societies, and after an unsettling tour through the appalling violence of the ancient Greeks, the Old Testament (much of it sanction and/or commanded by God), the crucifixions and bloody games of Rome, the use of torture to force confessions from Jews in the Inquisition (why not, if brief pain could save their souls for eternity?), and the celebration of the grisly deaths of several Saints, he concludes with a beautiful rebuke:

[The] point of this discussion is not to accuse Christians of endorsing torture and persecution. Of course most devout Christians today are thoroughly tolerant and humane people. Even those who thunder from televised pulpits do not call for burning heretics alive or hoisting Jews on the strappado. The question is why they don't, given that their beliefs imply that it would serve the greater good. The answer is that people in West today compartmentalize their religious ideology. When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years. But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful.

This is gonna be a good book.

Yule be sorry if you don't convert to Christianity

2011-12-26T20:53:00.000-08:00

The most awesome thing ever

2011-12-22T22:04:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I caught the trailer for The Hobbit, directed (of course) by Peter Jackson. Just when I thought 2012 couldn't get any more awesomerer...er, the new trailer for Prometheus has hit.

Why, you ask, is that a big deal? Because it's Ridley Scott's return to science fiction, a genre he practically defined for modern film making with Alien and Blade Runner. It's been speculated that this is a prequel to Alien, and while that much isn't certain, what is certain is that the movie takes place in the Alien universe – fans will recognize the ship and the massive cockpit where the original crew of the Nostromo found the corpse of the "space jockey".

It's a spooky and intriguing teaser, and with the caliber of talent involved I have high hopes for this one. Oh, and the special effects are jaw-dropping. This trailer must be watched in full HD.

Words of wisdom

2011-12-21T23:39:00.000-08:00

I remember a line from the movie Grumpy Old Men: "The only things you regret in life are the risks you didn't take".

I have to admit, that's been a hard lesson to absorb. But in retrospect, I realize that I've let certain opportunities slip away because I took the easy road. As long as something you want stays in your head, there's no possibility of failure. You don't have to face the ramifications: being hurt, disappointed, embarrassed, rejected, or whatever other undesirable outcomes may be possible. It's much easier to let it brew in your head as a comfortable fantasy. The truth can be hard to accept: nothing ventured, nothing gained. But as I grow older, a life of quiet discontent seems much less appealing than a life of spectacular failures and great passions.

So, I don't care what anyone says. I'm going to clown college!

Okay not really.

Actions and words

2011-12-21T21:00:00.000-08:00

I've had an interesting conversation/debate with my brother, a Christian, on Facebook today. I posted the following picture, which mocks "Tebowing", named so because Tim Tebow genuflects every time he scores a touchdown:

The point here is obvious: that it's absurd to believe that God helps you win football games while millions die of famine.

My brother responded by noting that Tim Tebow isn't just some paper Christian – he gave his entire signing bonus to charity, and is turning a luxury condo into a soup kitchen for the homeless. My brother then suggested that we non-believers have no business mocking or criticizing his beliefs because chances are we are not doing anywhere what he is to help the needy. So while we may find his underlying motives objectionable, we should still agree that they produce a "net positive" for humanity and avoid criticizing them:

I'm not talking about non-believers generally. I'm talking about you and everyone who feels it necessary to pile on in this post to dog the beliefs that motivate a man to kneel after a touchdown, which happen to be the same beliefs that motivate him to feed the hungry. I'd wager you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in a secular NGO or a religious charity who would take joy in doing the same thing you're doing with respect to anyone who was putting a hand to the plow and helping their cause, for whatever reason.

....

[Charity] "can only be measured by the degree to which giving becomes sacrificial", like the parable of the widow's mite in the Bible. So, while I don't care about the gross amount of one donation vs. another, I don't think you've got a leg to stand on unless you actually care enough to do whatever your parallel to Tebow's (spending his entire signing bonus on charity and living in a place while having it renovated to being a soup kitchen) might be.

....

And my point is that unless your beliefs net humanity a greater (albeit proportionally adjusted) good, the only thing you prove is how bad a case of plank eye you have.

I responded that no amount of charity exempts ideas from public dissemination and criticism, and that the latter is every bit as important to our humanity as the former. To which my bro replied, "Tell that to a starving child." My final response, I feel, is my coup de grace. I can think of nothing further to add. So here it is, in its entirety:

Tim Tebow's beliefs don't exist in a vacuum. While he's done acts of charity, he's also publicly campaigned for (and is a member of) Focus On The Family – which opposes gay rights and sex ed, promotes the subjugation of women in marriage, promotes the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design, and wants Roe V Wade overturned.

That is what I mean when I talk about the importance of the public dissemination of ideas. Those touchy-feely beliefs that are motivating him to do charitable things also motivate him to support an organization that opposes civil rights, science education, and the autonomy of women. Tebow doesn't get off the hook for that stuff because he's building a fucking soup kitchen. He can build a hundred soup kitchens and it will not elevate his beliefs above criticism. I may or may not be devoting "x" proportion of my time/income/possessions to charity in equal measures to him. But I'm not endorsing an anti-humanist organization either.

And, point of fact, a significant part of Africa's starvation today can be traced back to Christian imperialism. So while I'd sooner give the starving child a morsel than a book, in the long term I would stake much more than his own well-being on his valuing of reason and his rejection of dogmatic ideologies.

My bro's argument is one that he's used in the past to criticize Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and other atheist polemicists. His argument is that the effect of religion is a "net positive" for humanity, and atheism has nothing to offer but harsh words. To my mind, this is incredibly disingenuous. Atheism is not an ideology and atheists are a significant minority, so you are not going to find too many "atheist charities". But there are a litany of secular charities, including ones founded by both Dawkins and Harris. And I think it's very short-sighted to measure the impact of religion only by its modern charitable contributions when its ideologies permeate so many facets of our culture and have such a complex and often sordid history.

As humanists, we have an ethical duty to speak out against absurd and dangerous ideologies, even when they are enshrouded with a thin veil of charity.

Thoughts on Social Contract Theory (part 2)

2011-12-18T14:18:00.000-08:00

In part 1, I gave the general outline of Social Contract Theory. It's essentially the idea that we are a bonded, interdependent species, and that in order to survive and thrive we must live in cooperative social hierarchies. This necessitates the advent of certain rules, whether explicitly stated or not – that we must respect the needs and interests of others if we wish others to respect our own needs and interests. It could be said that the 'Golden Rule' is the unstated heart of all SCT.

Conventional SCT has been what Frans De Waal describes as a 'Veneer Theory' – i.e., we are in our most basic form cruel, selfish and tyrannical. It is only through our capacity for reason, whether it is as Thomas Hobbes suggests the ability to recognize our responsibilities toward others or, as John Locke suggests, our ability to recognize some transcendent moral authority to which we are ultimately subject. Either way, our nature is perceived as the disease, our capacity for reason the cure.

But modern research into moral behavior is telling us something very different. We're finding that many behaviors we've long assumed to be uniquely human – altruism, self-sacrifice, caring for the weak, etc. – are in fact quite common in the animal kingdom. They are most poignantly observed in our primate cousins, the chimpanzees and bonobos, but can be observed in a variety of intelligent mammals from dolphins to elephants.

There are two important points to take from this. The first is that our capacity for kindness and empathy did not begin with us, but has a long evolutionary heritage. It's simply absurd to believe that such traits emerged with us or, more absurdly, were bestowed upon us by the divine. De Waal, in an article for the New York Times, remarks,

I am wary of anyone whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior. Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for livable societies, is built into us? Does anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked social norms before they had religion? Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal? Humans must have worried about the functioning of their communities well before the current religions arose, which is only a few thousand years ago.

This echos the sentiment famously opined by Christopher Hitchens:

Let's assume the story of Moses is true, even though archaeologists have utterly discredited it. Do our Jewish ancestors have to put up with the insult from us at this late stage that, until they got to Sinai, they thought murder and theft and perjury were OK? Of course not. There would have been no such people if they thought that. There has never been a society or civilization that did warrant those things. And you don't need divine urging to see that they're wrong yourself.

The fact is that none of us behaves in a generally moral fashion primarily out of any sense of a rational obligation. We can certainly reason about moral behavior and attempt to alter our behavior accordingly, but most moral behavior is fundamentally irrational.

Take, for example, a mother caring for her newborn child. She does not need to be reminded of her moral obligation to care for the child; she instinctively cares for the child. Nor, if we see a toddler wander out into a busy highway, do we need to pause and ponder the virtue of self-sacrifice – we rush to help the child without hesitation. If we see a commercial for the United Children's Fund or some other such charity, we are shown images of suffering children. The advertisement does not wax on about our moral obligation to help others or our duty to do charitable works in service of a god, but attempts to elicit an irrational, emotional response; the advertisers hope that our innate sense of empathy will be triggered, that we will see a child like us or like our own children and feel compelled to help.

This means that much our moral behavior is not the result of a 'top-down' veneer in which we rise above our cruel and selfish nature through our power of reason. Instead, our capacity for altruism, empathy, sympathy, and self-sacrifice are deeply engrained within us. The Social Contract, then, is not written in our laws or our holy books – it's written in our DNA.

At this point, I haven't addressed how naturalism accounts for kindness and cruelty, and the circumstances under which cruelty arises; that's because I've spent considerable time discussing it elsewhere. So, for further reading check out my series on moral reasoning.

Hitchens on why Christianity cannot be believed

2011-12-18T12:28:00.001-08:00

Thoughts on Social Contract Theory (part 1)

2011-12-17T12:26:00.000-08:00

Note: I'm going to be splitting this post up into two parts, for brevity's sake.

Yesterday I was watching old videos on Youtube of Christopher Hitchens. In particular, I watched his second debate with Frank Turek, on the question "Which better explains reality – theism or atheism?" I don't know much about Frank Turek, but, while maintaining a half-yell for virtually the entire debate, he recited all the typical arguments – the cosmological, the teleological, the moral (Hitchens rightly pounced by pointing out that these are, at best, deistic arguments). Turek's challenge to Hitch on the moral front was especially facepalm-worthy; he did exactly what virtually all theists do: he falsely equated atheism with moral nihilism. The old, "Without God, everything is permissible" canard. (I've addressed one glaring failure of this argument here.)

Considering how a lot of these Christian apologist types like to posture themselves as learned in topics like philosophy and various sciences, it's astounding to me that none of them seem to have even heard of Social Contract Theory (SCT). This isn't some new, radical theory or something; it's been around since Socrates. And yet you can't throw a rock at an apologist without hitting some canard about how, without some absolute final authority, we have no reason to be kind to each other; why not, as Turek suggests, just kill each other?

The answer, I think is eloquently phrased by the primatologist Frans De Waal, in the book Primates and Philosophers:

Free and equal people never existed. Humans started out—if a starting point is discernible at all—as interdependent, bonded, and unequal. We come from a long lineage of hierarchical animals for which life in groups is not an option but a survival strategy. Any zoologist would classify our species as obligatorily gregarious.

In other words, none of us has the luxury of moral autonomy because we are dependent upon other people for every single aspect of our survival and well-being. It certainly is interesting that we are such profoundly social creatures that, outside of brute physical torture, one of the worst punishments we can think to inflict on another is solitary confinement. Of course, prisoners placed in solitary suffer tremendous psychological distress, but even then they are still reliant upon others for food and shelter.

Our need to live in cooperative social hierarchies is inescapable. And quite simply, we recognize that if we do not respect the needs and interests of others, others will have no reason to respect our own needs and interests. So, why not kill someone else if I feel like it? Because by doing so, I sever my trust with others. I'm immediately branded a danger that ought to be isolated from civil society. The degree to which I do have autonomy – the freedom to pursue my interests, relationships, and contribute to society (and reap the rewards of doing so) – will be taken from me.


Thomas Hobbes

Why not simply discard the weak or the ill – you know, throw the cancer patient to the gas chamber? Because we all recognize that it could just as easily be us who become afflicted with a crippling disease or injury, and we recognize that if we foster a society that disregards human life when it becomes a burden to others, we are likely to find ourselves or those we love similarly disregarded. Imagine, for example, if we declined to help Stephen Hawking after he developed ALS; we would have lost his countless contributions to physics and science education, and his family and friends would have lost the companionship of someone dear to them.

But this is only a partial explanation.

De Waal has discussed SCT, but finds it lacking. The Thomas Hobbes version, for example, assumes – much like Christianity – that it is our nature to be cruel and selfish, and that it is only our capacity for reason that allows us to transcend our brute evolutionary nature. But we are coming to realize that a great deal of moral behavior is not rational at all, but emotional; that we are not rising above our evolution, but act out deeply entrenched evolutionary traits. Reasoning about morals may be, to a large extent, just a sort of post hoc rationalization of fundamentally irrational behaviors.

More to come in part 2.

In memoriam: Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-15T22:21:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hitchens has lost his battle with cancer, at age 62. Far too young for such a brilliant mind. Hitch, you were an inspiration. I didn't always agree with you, but you were always provocative, always lucid, always eloquent. You cut to the heart of matters, had the courage to expose evil behind sacred cows, and faced death with dignity and courage. You will be missed.

"I suppose one reason that I've always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate that the universe is designed with you in mind.

Or even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me." - Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir

On "Tebowing"

2011-12-15T15:36:00.000-08:00

After reading this facepalmer from Fox News (shocking) that accused people mocking Tim Tebow's overt displays of piety of being "anti-Christian bigots", I thought it was about time to chime in. I'm not claiming to speak for anyone else here, but there are a few things to say about "Tebowing".

First, it's hypocritical. Jesus was flatly against these kinds of charades:

"Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven." [Matthew 6:1]

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men." [Matthew 6:5]

Secondly, it's silly. Why would anyone really, honestly think that God gives two shits about who wins a football game? I dare say that if God is indeed helping Tebow throw a ball around, he's got his priorities back-asswards. How about, I dunno, getting rid of the famine in Africa so all those millions of kids don't die every year? What's that Lord? After the playoffs, maybe? Puh-lease.

We have every right – nay, duty – to call it for the nonsense that it is. The real bigotry is coming from the religious loons who react with utter shock and indignation at anyone who dares criticize their shallow, self-aggrandizing displays of piety.

On the existence of the supernatural

2011-12-15T13:41:00.000-08:00

Things that are invisible and otherwise empirically undetectable look a lot like things that don't exist.

The language of dolphins

2011-12-13T21:46:00.000-08:00

Here's a fascinating one:

Researchers in the United States and Great Britain have made a significant breakthrough in deciphering dolphin language in which a series of eight objects have been sonically identified by dolphins. Team leader, Jack Kassewitz of SpeakDolphin.com, ‘spoke’ to dolphins with the dolphin’s own sound picture words. Dolphins in two separate research centers understood the words, presenting convincing evidence that dolphins employ a universal “sono-pictorial” language of communication.

I've read several books by the primatologist Frans De Waal, and the central theme of much of his writing is that humans are not as different from animals as we would care to admit; or rather, animals are much more like us than we would care to admit. It's perhaps comforting to reassure ourselves that we, with our superior intellects, are entitled to complete dominion over the Earth and all the instinct-driven beasts within it.

Then God said, "Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground." [Gen 1:26, NLT]

But nature is not merely "red in tooth and claw", and while the "survival of the fittest" is generally (falsely) portrayed as an every-animal-for-itself struggle for survival, the truth is that virtually all animals survive by living gregariously – in cooperative social hierarchies. In many mammals, particularly our primate cousins, we can see analogs of many behaviors long thought to be uniquely human – altruism, self-sacrifice, nurturing the weak and wounded, sharing food, and much more. We see emotions – pain of loss, joy, amusement, frustration – and we see complex social cultures and language.

So when I see something like this – the language of dolphins being decoded and understood – it reinforces to me that De Waal is right: animals are much more like us, and us more like them, than we've long believed. But for many, that's a scary idea. For now, we tend to view animals as objects – for our consumption, our entertainment. If we begin to view animals as conscious creatures like ourselves – with thoughts and emotions that in many ways mirror our own – we might have to change the way we treat them. And, perhaps even more daunting, we may have to change the way we view ourselves.

Thought of the day

2011-12-13T12:06:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 45:7 says,

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things

In Matthew 6:13, Jesus instructs his followers to pray,

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil

So, the Judeo-Christian god creates evil, and then wants you to ask him to be delivered from it. Makes perfect sense.

h/t: Michael Hawkins

Strong or weak atheism?

2011-12-11T11:09:00.001-08:00

Most atheists, it seems will tell you that they are "weak atheists"; that is, the extent of their atheism is a "lack of belief in gods". This is just another way of saying, "Gods may or may not exist, but their existence hasn't been sufficiently established by falsifiable evidence, so I do not believe in them." This is often thought of as a sort of "agnostic atheism", and it's pretty consistent with where most non-believers fall. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins rates belief on a seven-point scale:

Strong theist. 100 per cent probability of God. In the words of C.G. Jung: "I do not believe, I know."
De facto theist. Very high probability but short of 100 per cent. "I don't know for certain, but I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is there."
Leaning towards theism. Higher than 50 per cent but not very high. "I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God."
Completely impartial. Exactly 50 per cent. "God's existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable."
Leaning towards atheism. Lower than 50 per cent but not very low. "I do not know whether God exists but I'm inclined to be skeptical."
De facto atheist. Very low probability, but short of zero. "I don't know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there."
Strong atheist. "I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung knows there is one."

Dawkins places himself at a 6, as I generally do. But in my experience, most theists seem to associate atheism with "strong atheism", which is a positive statement that "Gods do not exist" – the last on the Dawkins scale. So theists claim that our arguments must then conclusively prove that gods do not exist, which of course is impossible since gods are purportedly supernatural and beyond the purview of empirical validation. When we refuse to answer (since it's an irrelevant challenge), the theist claims to have bested us.

But for me, it's not quite so cut and dry. Whether I consider myself a strong or weak atheist – a 6 or a 7 – depends very much on the kind of god in question. I think believers often take for granted that their particular conceptualization of God is only one of many, and different arguments become relevant depending on what a believer claims God is and does.

It's entirely possible to define God in such a way that his existence can never be verified. Deepak Chopra's god, for example, is a pantheistic "universal consciousness"; it's as if to say that the universe itself is alive and thinking. How could we possibly test whether the universe is conscious? Poke it? Talk to it? This is an idea that is in principle unfalsifiable. Technically, we have to remain agnostic, since we can't know with any reasonable certainty whether it's true. But since the concept is completely untestable, it's also invalid – and we can go on with our lives with the assumption that such a god is either non-existent or irrelevant. If there's one quote I hope ends up being attributed to me, it's this one I've repeated often: The only thing worse than a God that does not exist is a God that might as well not exist.

But a theistic god is a little different. A theistic god is one that reveals himself to people; he influences their thoughts, listens to (and answers) their prayers, performs miracles, and (depending on how much of a fundie you are) exacts punishment through natural disasters, disease, suffering, and death – or rewards through prosperity and good health. This is not a passive deistic or pantheistic god that is simply some ethereal "creative consciousness"; this is a god who creates, destroys, and interacts with human beings on a myriad of levels.

This type of god – the Christian, Jewish and Muslim type of god – is one I feel fully confident saying does not exist. I'm not just saying "probably not"; I'm saying "No way". That's because unlike a deistic or pantheistic god, a theistic god – because he interacts with the natural world – is testable. If indeed there is a God who does any of those things, there ought to be ample evidence of it. And yet for all the claims of faith healing, there is not one scientifically documented, independently confirmed case of a miraculous healing. Several studies on intercessory prayer have found no effect, and believers cannot distinguish purportedly answered prayers from random events. If we examine patterns of weather, climate, geological activity, etc. – or examine patterns of health, prosperity, suffering and death – there is absolutely no pattern whatsoever which suggests that any such thing occurs as a matter of intent. The tendency of some believers to retroactively connect such events with "God's judgment" is much more easily explained by confirmation bias. And finally, literally all of the theistic arguments for God's role in the creation of the universe, of life, of humanity, of morals, etc., are arguments from ignorance that attempt to place gods in the gaps of scientific ignorance – they are never based upon falsifiable hypotheses.

It could be argued that a theistic God still exists, but that he is nevertheless undetectable by any means of objective, independent inquiry. But a God that somehow influences the natural world, yet remains undetectable, is logically incoherent. In the words of Lisa Randall,

... logic and scientific thought dictate that there must be a mechanism by which this influence is transmitted. A religious or spiritual belief that involves an invisible undetectable force that nonetheless influences human actions and behavior or that of the world itself produces a situation in which a believer has no choice but to have faith and abandon logic--or simply not care."

Following my deconversion from Christianity, I spent many years identifying as a "theistic agnostic". For mostly emotional reasons, I was hesitant to let go of some sort of vaguely defined higher power, and I gladly would have stubbornly recited the cosmological, design and moral arguments with atheists (and indeed I did). But in time I realized that what mattered to me is not so much whether God exists, but whether God's existence ought to matter to me. God can always be conceptualized such that he's forever just beyond the purview of empiricism, rendering evidence of his existence based solely on unverifiable claims of 'revealed knowledge'. But nothing has been accomplished except to define God, if not out of existence, out of relevance.

Stephen Law tackles Plantinga

2011-12-10T16:28:00.001-08:00

Tristan authored a rebuttal of Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism over at Advocatus Atheist not too long ago, and now Stephen Law, who actually does this stuff professionally, has a paper up in the Oxford Journals called Naturalism, Evolution and True Belief that takes Plantinga on in even more detail. It's a beefy read, and personally I always find the heavy use of acronyms a bit confusing, but it's a good read if you're in to that sort of heavy philosophy.

Is Stephan Law's rebuttal successful? That's for you to decide.

The Perr-o-dies (see what I did there?) come rolling in

2011-12-09T19:03:00.001-08:00

Well, Rick Perry's made an ass of himself. I know, I'm shocked as well. And now, the parodies of his gay-bashing, falsehood-touting commercial have begun popping up. Some are clever, some are a little too try-hard, but it's encouraging that the reaction to Perry's bigotry and ignorance has been swift and merciless.

Shocking news: Biblical scholars are mostly Christians

2011-12-09T18:18:00.000-08:00

In his debate with Bart Ehrman, William Lane Craig – as he usually does – stated that there are four "facts" about the Resurrection:

Jesus' burial
the discovery of his empty tomb
his post-mortem appearances
the origin of the disciples' belief in his resurrection

Ehrman, however, didn't take the bait; instead he challenged Craig on whether those "four facts" have been sufficiently established as facts. After taking a pounding in that debate, Craig has devised an ingenious dodge to circumvent similar arguments in the future: he simply states that most Biblical scholars agree on these historical facts. Well, of course they do: they are almost all Christians! In other news, the vast majority of Muslim scholars affirm the historicity of the Koran.


The Ehrmanator

There are a handful of non-Christian Biblical scholars, but as you might imagine, work can be slim pickings for these folks. Most Biblical scholarship is done at theological seminaries, and what seminary wants to hire an outspoken atheist? Someone who thinks all the students are being taught a bunch of bullshit? Moreover, as Chris Hallquist notes, several of the more well-known non-Christian Biblical scholars, like Bart Ehrman and Robert Price, were originally fundies who got into scholarship because of their religious devotion.

So, Craig's 'four facts'? They're not actually facts. The rational thing to do is question the reliability of the Biblical account in the first place, and it's pretty shoddy. The earliest epistle was written two decades after Christ purportedly lived. The earliest gospel, four decades. All are supposedly (so we're told) based on eye-witness accounts and passed meticulously through oral tradition for all those years. Except there's no reason to believe anything in the New Testament is eye-witness testimony, and even if there were, modern research has shown it to be notoriously unreliable. And that meticulous oral tradition? Yeah, that was a Rabbinic tradition, not a Greek one, and no oral tradition is that competent at preserving details – which is further evidenced by the fact that the only manuscripts we have of these ancient books (which are not the originals, but much later copies) are riddled with errors, omissions, additions, and contradictions.

*Whew* Then there are the historical errors, the mythology, the flat-Earth cosmology, etc. I don't know what a divinely inspired book looks like, but I'm pretty sure I know a man-made book when I see one.

Evolution News says abiogenesis is in trouble

2011-12-09T12:20:00.001-08:00

Over at the always unintentionally hilarious Evolution News blog (which, contrary to its name, is a site for Intelligent Design creationism) there's an article about some new research which has supposedly undermined naturalistic explanations for the origin of life – aka abiogenesis.

Oh, but don't get too excited – the IDer's still haven't done any original research. They're reporting on a study published in the journal Nature which suggests that as soon as 500 million years after its formation, Earth's atmosphere may have had abundant oxygen. Here's where the conundrum supposedly arises: scientists (real ones, not IDers) have long though that an anaerobic environment – that is, a low-oxygen or "reduced" atmosphere – would be best for the formation of the amino acids that would eventually form RNA. This new research, according to IDers anyway, suggests that the time was far too short for RNA to have formed by "chance".

Well, not according to one of the authors of the study. In an article that is ironically linked to and even quoted in the article on Evolution News, the authors clarify:

The results do not, however, run contrary to existing theories on life's journey from anaerobic to aerobic organisms. The results quantify the nature of gas molecules containing carbon, hydrogen, and sulfur in the earliest atmosphere, but they shed no light on the much later rise of free oxygen in the air. There was still a significant amount of time for oxygen to build up in the atmosphere through biologic mechanisms.

Huh. I guess the ID guys didn't read the whole article. Of course, that hasn't stopped the them from saying that the study is a problem for "naturalistic" explanations for the origin of life... ergo Goddidit:

Several factors need to coincide in order for nucleotides or amino acids to form from purely naturalistic circumstances (chance and chemistry). The specific conditions required already made purely naturalist origin-of-life scenarios highly unlikely. Drastically reducing the amount of time available, adding that to the other conditions needing to be fulfilled, makes the RNA world hypothesis or a Miller-Urey-like synthesis of amino acids simply impossible.

There are several reasons why the Evolution News article deserves a major facepalm. Firstly, it's only one study, and there shouldn't be too many hasty assumptions based on it. This is the kind of stuff that needs to be researched by lots of people over a long period of time, with results confirmed and replicated by independent researchers. And the study doesn't even do what the IDer's say it does, at least according to the actual researchers who conducted the study.

But the biggest facepalm is in the glaring argument from ignorance at work here. Intelligent Design is supposed to be a bona fide scientific theory. If that's the case, then these 'scientists' ought to know that your theory doesn't become magically confirmed by default just because another theory has to be reformulated or discarded. It's painfully obvious that the 'theory' of Intelligent Design really just relies on purported failures of natural sciences, so that God – or wait, I'm sorry; an "intelligent designer" – can be plugged into the gaps. After all, isn't it telling that a blog supposedly devoted to the theory of Intelligent Design is called "Evolution News and Views"?

Well, sorry IDer's, that's not how actual science works. If you're going to demonstrate Goddidit, you have to present falsifiable evidence of the specific actions of a supernatural being – y'know, the how of Goddidit. What mechanisms are at work? What falsifiable predictions can be made? "A miracle happened!" is not science.Your pet theory has to stand wholly on its own ground, not just in the shadows of natural sciences. Real science has a tremendous track record of filling in those 'gaps', so placing God in them just ensures that divine explanations will become even more irrelevant than they already are.

Best of 2011

2011-12-07T22:25:00.001-08:00

The year's not quite over yet, but there's nothing really notable on the horizon for the last few weeks of 2011. So I'm going to go ahead and dish out my picks for the things that I liked most this year.

Best book: The Science of Evil by Simon Baron-Cohen

Yes, he's related to Sacha Baron-Cohen (they're cousins). But this book isn't satirical; it's an exceptionally well-researched exposition on human empathy that moves important questions about morality (how can people be cruel?) away from religion and into the empirical sciences. This is one of those books I consider essential reading for non-believers; it's by no means a polemic, and he even states late in the book that he does not have a "Dawkinsian anti-religious agenda", but it's the kind of book – like A Brief History of Time, Primates and Philosophers or Religion Explained – that takes a Big Question traditionally monopolized by religion and demonstrates not only that the religious explanation is inadequate, but gives us a way to move forward using science and rational inquiry.

Best movie: Super 8

Most of the movies I liked this year were action movies. Thor was great fun, as was Captain America: The First Avenger. I was also pleasantly surprised by Bradley Cooper in Limitless, and I really dug the visual intensity of Immortals. But looking back, I really enjoyed Super 8 the most. JJ Abrams never ceases to wow me; he's done Lost, Star Trek, and Fringe, all of which I love. Super 8 is a touching, humorous and exciting throwback to 80s movies like E.T. and The Goonies with great characters, impressive set pieces and just-right pacing. It's maybe not perfect, and I doubt that a throwback could ever be remembered as fondly as the movies to which it's paying homage, but I loved it anyway. The end credits, where the kids' 8mm movie is finally played, is absolutely hilarious.

Best game: The Witcher 2

I won't lie... this is a really hard toss-up between this game and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Right now I'm playing Skyrim, and loving every minute of its huge, open, beautiful world.

But The Witcher 2 has a sense of focus that Skyrim ultimately lacks. In Skyrim, your character is for all intents and purposes totally generic. Your decisions have little or no impact on the events unfolding around you, and on all of the major quest lines you're more or less simply along for the ride. There's a definite loss of urgency when you're tasked with saving the world, but can then wander off for weeks exploring the wilderness and looting dungeons.

The Witcher 2 isn't an unrestricted open world, but it's still very large. The game takes place in three acts, each which has a large central town encircled by large areas of wilderness that are rife with side quests. And unlike in Skyrim, the decisions you make in The Witcher 2 can completely change the outcome of the game. There's a real moral weight to many of your choices, and the tensions and conflicts always seem relevant. If there's any weakness, it's that sometimes the game gets a little Tolkien-like in its exposition and tries a little too hard to flesh out the lore, leading to some conversation trees that are bogged down by historical minutiae. But there's still a great story here with plenty of memorable characters.

It's also a real challenge. Most games allow you to ignore this or that and still coast by. But if you plan on beating The Witcher 2 on anything above "easy", you have to make use of all the resources available. You have to make potions, upgrade your equipment, and keep a healthy stock of ranged weaponry. And even though you're stuck with playing one guy – Geralt – the skill customizations allow for a satisfying variety of play styles.

It's also one of the prettiest role-playing games ever made. Yes, it looks much better than Skyrim. It's got its share of minor flaws and controversial design decisions, but it's still an immensely engaging, rewarding and fun game. And while Skyrim is a refinement of the four games before it, The Witcher 2 takes more risks and ultimately feels more original, so it ever-so-slightly takes the edge as my game of the year. Oh, and did I mention it has boobs?


I'll save the world later.

Best album: Assimilate Regenerate by Paul Wardingham

2011 was a great year for metal, and I've definitely been captivated by the new releases from Scar Symmetry and Opeth, among many others. But my pick for best album is a bit unorthodox – it's instrumental. Paul Wardingham is a guitarist from Australia, who primarily works behind the scenes as a producer. But his guitar ability is positively jaw-dropping, and he has the ability to write music that's complex and technically demanding while still being emotive, nuanced, and memorable. His style is also very unique – he employs a kind of "outside sound" using unorthodox scales and chord progressions that, fused with some touches of electronica, gives the whole album a distinctly futuristic sound. He's already back in the studio recording his next one, and I can't wait.

Best concert: Opeth @ Granada Theater, Dallas TX

I didn't love that Opeth forsook their metal roots on the new album, even though the songs are fantastic. And I was skeptical that I'd enjoy this show as much as I had enjoyed them when they came to Tulsa a few years back. But the show was absolutely awesome. They sounded phenomenal, and played a great set list – even going to an acoustic interlude for several songs. It doesn't hurt that I was there with my Favorite Person Ever, but it was definitely a memorable show.

Best new memory: Vegas

I'd never been to Vegas before, but man was it awesome. I don't even know how much of it was Vegas per se, but just the fact that I was there with five awesome friends. It was a long few days filled with lazy mornings, unholy amounts of amazing food, volleyball at the pool, and getting hosed and/or goofing off. I can't wait to go again.

Best cat: Alexi (of course), for the second year in a row!

Must... keep... eyes... open....

A believer's big fat fallacies

2011-12-07T21:53:00.000-08:00

See if you can spot the fallacy in statements like these:

The fact that the universe contains order and complexity shows that it operates according to finely-tuned laws
The observation that humans have an intuitive sense of right and wrong is consistent with the Christian belief that God has created us to adhere to a higher Moral Law
The reliability of our cognitive faculties is consistent with the belief that God designed us to be rational beings

With all these types of statements, while they may cause a skeptic's bullshit detector to start buzzing, it can be a bit difficult to identify exactly where the fallacy lies. They're used often in the rhetoric of theologians as a means of giving faith-based ideas the illusion that they are grounded in reason, but their usage reveals a poor understanding of how rational inquiry actually works.

Technically, the fallacy at work here is assuming the consequent, where necessary and sufficient conditions are confused. For example, an intuitive sense of right and wrong may be necessary to prove that we are created to adhere to a Moral Law, but it is not a sufficient condition for proof since there may be other explanations for our intuitive behaviors (and indeed there are). Virtually all primitive beliefs about gods controlling the weather, volcanoes, or natural disasters 'comport' with observation, but that is not enough to prove them true – a rational explanation must be falsifiable. In the words of philosopher Stephen Law:

"What a scientific theory requires if it is to be credible is not merely consistency with the evidence, but confirmation by the evidence."

That's a subtle but vital distinction, and it's precisely where theists stumble. Falsifiability is what allows us to gain reliable knowledge that a proposition is valid. If a proposition cannot be potentially disconfirmed, there is no way to identify whether it is erroneous or not. As an example, let's go back and look more closely at the first statement. Here it is again:

The fact that the universe contains order and complexity shows that it operates according to finely-tuned laws

If "order and complexity" are taken as the evidence, how could we tell the difference between a finely-tuned universe and one that isn't finely-tuned? After all, we don't have access to a universe in which order and complexity do not exist which might allow us to make comparisons. The theist's argument, then, is merely a tautology. To phrase it as a syllogism:

Premise 1: A universe with order and complexity requires finely-tuned laws
Premise 2: Our universe has order and complexity
Conclusion: Our universe has finely-tuned laws

Without access to a universe that does not contain order and complexity, there is simply no possibility of confirming or falsifying the first premise. The conclusion, then, is merely a re-statement of the premises. The conclusion cannot actually follow from the premises since the first is unfalsifiable, and therefor invalid.

How rational inquiry really works

A theologian might respond to all this by suggesting that scientific inquiry does the same thing: it creates a hypothesis, then interprets the evidence to fit. This type of claim is common among Intelligent Design advocates, who suggest that it's simply a difference of inference: we all observe that species change over time and have shared genetic traits, but 'Darwinists' infer common ancestry while ID advocates infer a common designer. This misses the side of the barn as to how science actually works, and it all comes back to the necessity of making falsifiable predictions. I'll even use an example from evolution:

We share almost all of our genetic material with chimpanzees. But there's one important difference: humans only have 23 pairs of chromosomes, while chimps have 24. For the theory that we share a common ancestor with other primates, this could be a big problem, because you can't just lose a chromosome – the offspring wouldn't survive. So there were one of two possibilities: one is that evolution was wrong; the other is that we do have all 24 chromosome pairs, but one of them had fused. Importantly, this is a testable hypothesis that can either confirm or falsify evolution. And sure enough, a definitive study published in the journal Nature proved that indeed, Chromosome 2 of the human genome is fused. So we are not, as the IDer's claim, simply making inferences to fit observation – we are establishing the theory by confirming testable hypotheses with evidence.

This falsifiability is the vital component that is missing from the tautological arguments of theologians. You cannot test the premise that our moral intuitions come from God, or that the laws of the universe are fine-tuned, or that God designed us to have cognitive faculties. That's why theists usually resort to arguments from ignorance, assuming that if a scientific explanation is not forthcoming, a supernatural explanation becomes valid by default. In reality, if an answer is not forthcoming, we defer to the null hypothesis: fancy talk for I don't know. And if we are to know, we must use an epistemology that has demonstrated itself to be reliable and valid through the confirmation of falsifiable predictions. Theology sorely lacks any such methodology, and is therefor doomed to the arbitrary whimsy of 'revealed knowledge' (God revealed the truth to me/him/them) that, in principle, can never be independently verified.

It's a deft retreat: take reason as far as it will go, and when you hit a gap, fill it with faith instead of simply admitting that you do not know. But it's a shallow ruse, and it's one that reveals the desperate emotional trappings of even the most 'sophisticated' theologian.

Rick Perry, in his own words

2011-12-07T19:08:00.001-08:00

I think all Obama needs to do to win the next election is just play the campaign ads from conservatives verbatim.

William Lane Craig says atheists are angry, whiny, and unsophisticated

2011-12-04T13:51:00.001-08:00

For guy who positions himself as someone who engages with and responds to the arguments and concerns of atheists, Craig does a consistently fine job of not having the first damn clue what the arguments and concerns of atheists actually are.

Serious treatment of the last post

2011-12-03T15:57:00.001-08:00

The pic in my previous post, to me, seems like the kind of thing you'd see on Christian Nightmares. It's just amusing all by itself... at least, to non-believers. To us, the absurdity of it is readily apparent. But obviously to that believer, and many like her, it's not absurd at all – in fact, it's a completely normal part of their lives.

Basically, this friend of mine goes to the doctor worried she might have kidney stones. It turns out to be a few cysts, one of which ruptured. She immediately praises the Lord. I'm going to be charitable here and assume she's praising God not for giving her a ruptured cyst, but for preventing her from having more serious (or at least more painful) health complications.

So here's the problem: where, exactly does God play his role? Why not prevent her from having any health complications in the first place? Since when is a ruptured cyst something to be enthused about? No matter how serious the problem, though, the believer could always thank God that it wasn't worse. Kidney stones? Damn. At least it's not cancer, so praise the Lord! It's cancer? Well at least the prognosis is good, so praise the Lord! The prognosis is bad? Praise the Lord for allowing me the time I have left.

Even the death of another can simply be rationalized as 'God's will'. It's here we get to the problem George Carlin so incisively lampooned many moons ago: if God has this perfect divine plan, and he's going to do his will in the end anyway, what's the point of prayer? If God sits around dishing out who gets sick and who gets well, why thank him for anything when he's just doing 'his will' without any regard to you?

But here's the most important part: how do you tell the difference between 'God's will' and something that would have happened anyway? You pretty much have to make the a priori assumption that God is the prime mover here, and then backwards-rationalize the evidence to fit. There's a name for that, of course: confirmation bias.

I'm gonna go back, again, to some of those quotes from Lisa Randall I love so much (emphasis mine):

"Clearly people who want to believe that God can intervene to help them or alter the world at some point have to invoke nonscientific thinking. Even if science doesn't necessarily tell us why things happen, we do know how things move and interact. If God has no physical influence, things won't move. Even our thoughts, which ultimately rely on electrical signals moving in our brains, won't be affected....

"If such external influences are intrinsic to religion, then logic and scientific thought dictate that there must be a mechanism by which this influence is transmitted. A religious or spiritual belief that involves an invisible undetectable force that nonetheless influences human actions and behavior or that of the world itself produces a situation in which a believer has no choice but to have faith and abandon logic--or simply not care."

In other words, we live in a material world. Even if you believe in the supernatural, ultimately everything here has to be transmitted through physical processes. Theists want it both ways: to say that God has an observable effect on the material world, but yet eludes empirical detection. In the case of God affecting various levels of illness, you have to make assumptions first and fill in the blanks later because there is no rational way to distinguish between God's will and random events.

Because God micromanages illness

2011-12-03T13:32:00.001-08:00

Spied on my Facebook feed just now:

Depleted uranium (and skeptical thinking)

2011-12-03T12:34:00.001-08:00

I always try to emphasize that my non-belief is not a doctrine (how can it be?), but the outcome of a rational epistemology. Good critical thinking skills, of course, should not apply exclusively to the supernatural. That's why a lot of non-believers are also skeptics about alternative medicine, psychics, the Illuminati, and whatnot. But if there's one truth about critical thinking, it's that it can easily be compartmentalized.

There are some exceptionally smart people who go to great lengths to rationalize absurd beliefs, who fail to apply critical thinking skills to one area or another when, on the whole, they are generally rational individuals. That's why I often like to point out, when I'm accused of painting theists as stupid because I think they adhere to an irrational belief, that Isaac Newton – one of the most brilliant minds that ever lived – spent much of his life as an alchemist. You can be very smart, in general, and very wrong about specific things.


This will ruin your day

So, depleted uranium. This was a random thing that popped into my head after I saw a graphic image of a beheading purportedly carried out by Islamic fundamentalists in Thailand. While the beheaded corpse (purportedly of a 9-year-old child) was very real and unsettling, I was hesitant to accept the entire backstory on its face simply because it was posted on a virulently anti-Muslim website. It reminded me of a few years ago, when news about depleted uranium being used in Iraq was responsible for all manner of birth defects.

These claims popped up all over the internet and were accompanied by disturbing, graphic pictures of grotesquely malformed children and fetuses. If you do a Google image search for 'depleted uranium', you'll find many such images. And, back in the day, my MySpace page (I know right) was lit up with references to the horrors of depleted uranium, supposedly responsible not only for those grotesque birth defects, but also high rates of cancer and the nebulous Gulf War Syndrome. But are those really pictures of children affected by depleted uranium?

Turns, out, probably not. A fact sheet published by the World Heath Organization shows no credible link between DU and the above health problems, and a review of literature by the RAND corporation found no significant harmful effects. Accordingly, we haven't heard much about DU, even from activists, over the last five years or so.

But when it was the topic du jour, I was admittedly swept up in the activist fervor. I saw the pictures, and was horrified. It further entrenched my resentment of an unnecessary and bloody war that had already cost many thousands of innocent lives. At the time, it didn't occur to me to simply ask some basic skeptical questions. What are the sources of these claims? What scientific literature is available? And, perhaps most importantly, are those pictures of deformed babies really the direct result of DU, or are they random images of birth defects simply attached to an alarmist story?

A basic truth of human behavior is that we do not always think rationally. It's pretty well established that we're often inclined to ignore our faculties of reason and go with our gut instead. That's why otherwise intelligent people will go to great lengths to rationalize beliefs that are ultimately rooted in emotions. And it's why, when we see pictures of deformed babies or beheaded children with the caption "_____ was the cause of this horror!", we tend to align our beliefs with our emotions rather than pausing to ask whether everything is as it seems.

Sophisticated theology (or, something that annoyed me yesterday)

2011-12-01T19:02:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I popped over to Debunking Christianity, where John had a post up talking about some the paradoxes of the omni-qualities of God (omniscience, omnipotence, etc.). It's a great post. But, like clockwork, some Sophisticated Theologian™ calling himself Dr. Günter Bechly chimed in to remind us all what intellectual cretins we all are:

"I am a scientist and not a Christian, but such arguments by new atheists are rather embarassing than convincing, because they show a fundamental ignorance or lack of knowledge about sophisticated theology. .... No professional philosopher could yet demonstrate that the concept of classical theism is logically incoherent.

I know, you're probably peeling your palm off your face. But wait, there's more! When asked by others to expound on Monolism, part of this Sophisticated Theology™ of which we're apparently totally ignorant, our umlauted teacher replied,

"I am not prepared to explain Molinism here (get a book, read some of the papers by Lane Craig on Molinism, and ... Wikipedia and Google are your friends)."

So you see, you foolish atheist, there are these sophisticated arguments that are in fact so sophisticated that they cannot possibly be concisely summarized and discussed. But if you simply were to read the books I have read, you'd know the folly of your ways.

I call shenanigans. All theology requires the a priori assumption of the existence of the supernatural and/or a revelatory epistemology. There is simply no road by which we can travel from the empirical to the non-empirical. That's why, in the end, even the most Sophisticated Theologians™ are reduced to arbitrary faith statements, like William Lane Craig tacitly admitting that the main reason he believes in God is because he feels it's true. We can dismiss Sophisticated Theology™ on its face because it's just a more rhetorically dress-up version of an invalid epistemology.

Elsewhere in the thread, Gunter further patronizes the deconverted:

"It is not a success if you bring people from theism to atheism with fallacious arguments, only because you can fool some non-sophisticated believers with pseudo-philosophy. For me an irrational atheist, who believes in atheism because of stupid and dogmatic arguments as those from Dawkins' "God Delusion", is not better than any Christian fundamentalist believing in the inerrancy of the bible because his megachurch told him so."

I always chuckle when people dismiss The God Delusion because it's not 'sophisticated' enough. It does precisely what it intended to do, incisively and effectively. But the larger point, I feel, is that anyone who radically alters their position because of the arguments of one person is probably lacking in the critical thinking department. Critical inquiry necessarily involves considering numerous, often diametric points of view. What makes Gunter think that anyone in that forum deconverted only because of The God Delusion?

So I, among others, called Gunter out on this bullshittery. His response? He called us "fundamentalists" and ran off. Look, theists – if you're going to claim that we atheists are ignorant of sophisticated arguments, the burden is on you to offer a concise summary of your position that can be discussed. Otherwise, we can just turn the bullshit train around and tell you that you need to read the entire bibliography of A.C. Grayling before we can even have a conversation. Patronizing others solely on the basis of them having arrived at a different conclusion than you have is just transparent ruse to mask your own lack of critical thinking. Stick that in your sophisticated pipe and smoke it.

The disastrous results of gay marriage

2011-11-30T19:55:00.001-08:00

This has been lighting up my Facebook feed today, and it's pretty impressive:

Of course, this is just a single example, but it's consistent with research.

Let me take a moment to really shove that abstract down the throats of religious conservatives, whose arbitrary interpretation of Bronze Age scriptures is the driving force behind most of the opposition to gay marriage in this country:

"More than two decades of research has failed to reveal important differences in the adjustment or development of children or adolescents reared by same-sex couples compared to those reared by other-sex couples."

All those horrible effects of gay marriage? They don't exist. Science has proved religion wrong, as usual.

Traditional Biblical marriage

2011-11-27T17:26:00.001-08:00

The other day on Facebook, a lesbian friend of mine pondered why Christians are not as anti-divorce as they are anti-gay-marriage. "You know", she said, "to preserve the 'sanctity'". This elicited the predictable response from several conservative Christians who opined about 'scripture' and 'Biblical marriage'. It is ironic that Christians don't crusade against divorce nearly to the extent the crusade against gay marriage, particularly because Jesus specifically stated, in Matthew 5:28, that it's a sin to divorce unless your spouse had an affair. That's every bit as much scriptural justification as their crusade against gay marriage – more actually, since Jesus himself never said anything about gay marriage.

But I digress.

Let's get something straight: the line that conservatives push about Biblical marriage being between one man and one woman is just something they made up. This is a classic case (there are lots!) of holier-than-thou Christians not actually reading their Bible. Traditional Biblical marriage is polygamy. Abraham, David, Jacob, Solomon, Moses, Saul, and many other patriarchal 'heroes' of the Bible had many wives. And nowhere does the Bible condemn it, at all.

My thought is this: as long as you're not hurting anyone else, marry whomever you want. Research on same-sex marriages overwhelmingly shows them to normal, healthy relationships; and children raised by homosexual parents are as well-adjusted as anyone else. Not that reality has ever stopped religious conservatives from believing stupid things. But you do have to love the irony. Yeah, sure, let's go back to 'Biblical marriage'. Can I have a few hundred sex slaves... er, concubines to go with my dozens of wives? Sure I can!

Of course, Christians will undoubtedly try to weasel out of that one by saying polygamy was only acceptable for the 'culture at the time' – you know, the way they do with slavery. But, like slavery, polygamy is never explicitly condemned. Funny that God remembered to command his people to stone rape victims and avoid combining fabrics, but forgot things like slavery and polygamy. The point is, if you want to use scripture to justify your bigotry, it's easy to cherry-pick. With a book as confused and obfuscated as the Bible, what else can Christians do?

Greta Christina: Why are you atheists so angry?

2011-11-27T14:24:00.001-08:00

I wish every believer I know would listen to this.

(h/t: Shaun)

Giving thanks

2011-11-24T19:06:00.001-08:00

I hope you've all had a great holiday. I have many things to be thankful for:

My amazing family. My parents live about 15 minutes away from me, and I love being able to see them so easily. I wish it were easier to visit my brother and his wife out in California, but a lot of people I know hardly see their family at all so I count myself lucky. My parents are supporting, loving, kind, humble, and honest. I admire them both very much.

My friends. I've had many of the same friends for many years (one of my best friends is someone I've known since middle school, nearly 20 years ago) and I feel very fortunate to have such awesome, fun, and supportive people in my life. I've had friends stick with me through good times and bad, and there's no real way to repay that except to pay it forward.

My co-workers and clients. I'm lucky to have a job that has good hours and is very low stress, and I work with some first-rate trainers and loyal, hard-working clients. I'm not the wealthiest guy in the world, but I have everything I need and then some so I can't complain. Besides, if I were rich I'd probably just be buying guitars all the time.

My health. A client of mine recently shared a great quote, presumably an old Persian proverb: "I used to complain about my shoes, until I met a man who had no feet". I follow Jason Becker on Facebook. Jason Becker was a prodigy guitarist who shocked the world of rock and metal guitar with his virtuosic ability at a measly 17 years of age. Now age 42, he lives in a wheelchair, paralyzed by ALS (the same disease that afflicts Stephen Hawking). So whenever I feel frustrated at the gap between my current ability that of a Jason Becker, I remind myself that I'm fortunate just to be able to play at all. Plus I can go to the gym, do crazy stuff like the Warrior Dash, etc. Not everyone is so fortunate.

My readers. I mentioned recently that I originally started this blog as a way to organize my thoughts; I never really had any ambition of gaining an audience. Over time the blog grew a small but steady readership, and while I'm not raking in the views of Debunking Christianity or the almighty Pharyngula, I've somehow managed to attract a small contingent of very smart people.

And lastly, I have to thank Carvin for giving me my best excuse for not having a wife. Seriously, they made me this. It's the most perfect instrument I've ever played and it inspires me to keep toiling away, hoping to achieve at least a portion of the kind of ability that made Jason Becker such a phenom 25 years ago.

Physicist Lisa Randall on the conflict between science and religion

2011-11-23T11:48:00.001-08:00

I totally stole this from Tristan (with his permission, of course), but it's just too good. I read Lisa Randall's excellent book Warped Passages a few years ago, and loved it. Her new book Knocking on Heaven's Door is on my short list, but Tristan beat me to it and yanked out a few quotes from her on the conflict between science and religion. I've never known her to have a Dawkinsian anti-religious agenda, but she knows her epistemology and these quotes really capture the heart of the matter:

"For a scientist, material mechanistic elements underlie the description of reality. The associated physical correlates are essential to any phenomenon in the world. Even if not sufficient to explain everything, they are required."

"The materialist viewpoint works well for science. But it inevitably leads to logical conflicts when religion invokes a God or some other external entity to explain how people or the world behave. The problem is that in order to subscribe both to science and to a God--or any external spirit--who controls the universe or human activity, one has to address the question of at what point does the deity intervene and how does he do it."

"Clearly people who want to believe that God can intervene to help them or alter the world at some point have to invoke nonscientific thinking. Even if science doesn't necessarily tell us why things happen, we do know how things move and interact. If God has no physical influence, things won't move. Even our thoughts, which ultimately rely on electrical signals moving in our brains, won't be affected...."

"If such external influences are intrinsic to religion, then logic and scientific thought dictate that there must be a mechanism by which this influence is transmitted. A religious or spiritual belief that involves an invisible undetectable force that nonetheless influences human actions and behavior or that of the world itself produces a situation in which a believer has no choice but to have faith and abandon logic--or simply not care."

"This incompatibility strikes me as a critical logical impasse in methods and understanding. Stephen Jay Gould's purportedly "nonoverlapping magisteria"--those of science, covering the empirical universe, and religion, extending into moral inquiry--do overlap and face this intractable paradox too."

"Empirically based logic-derived science and the revelatory nature of faith are entirely different methods for trying to arrive at truth. You can derive a contradiction only if your rules are logic. Logic tries to resolve paradoxes, whereas much of religious thought thrives on them. If you believe in revelatory truth, you've gone outside the rules of science so there is no contradiction to be had."

2011-11-22T20:38:00.001-08:00

My blog originally started out simply as a way for me to organize my thoughts. I never really had any expectations of a regular readership... y'know, people actually caring about what I have to say. But over the last couple of years my little blog has gotten itself a mildly respectable following, and I'm happy to say that 99% of the comments have come from intelligent, nice people.

But I'm also a bit frustrated that, over the last year or so, the blog has pretty much plateaued. My hits are up marginally, as are comments, but I haven't seen a dramatic growth in the numbers. The Facebook page has helped, as has dialogue on other blogs.

Anyway, in an effort to promote the blog a bit more, I decided to start sharing posts on Reddit. Bud over at Dead Logic had some crazy success with it, and the Secular Student Alliance got a big boost from it too.

Sure enough, in terms of raw hits, it's a success. My previous post garnered nearly 1,300 hits in a matter of hours (that's a lot for me). Other posts quickly hit several hundred. And yet, I don't consider it much of a success (at least not yet) simply because I'm not after 'hits'; I'm after a regular readership of smart guys and gals like the ones having provocative discussions in this post. And so far, Reddit has completely failed to increase the number of participating readers or subscribers (whether here or via Facebook).

So I'm curious... to any other bloggers, what have you done to increase your readership? What's worked, and what hasn't?

Oh, and p.s. – If you have your own blog, I have no qualms with you promoting it in the comments section here, as long as the content you're linking to is related to the original post. I don't do a feed sidebar because of space, but I do mention the blogs I read fairly regularly too and I'm always interested in new stuff.

Leading Republicans want a Christian theocracy

2011-11-22T13:46:00.001-08:00

Slate has a rather disturbing article filled with quotes from the Republican presidential candidates, uttered at a recent event called the "Thanksgiving Family Forum", in which they make it quite clear that they don't mind the idea of a theocracy at all – as long as it's an evangelical, probably Protestant theocracy. Noticeably absent from these proceedings? Mitt Romney. Of course, he's a Mormon, which means he's not a True Christian™. Anyway, read on for some highlights from this monstrosity. Truly, the best way to keep these people out of office is to just let them open their mouths.

p.s. – I'm reminded of Newt Gingrich's statement that the U.S. is in danger of becoming an atheist nation run by radical Muslims. Whatever that means....

The conflict between science and religion

2011-11-20T14:43:00.001-08:00

I occasionally peruse the blog of former-frequent commenter, now-banned Jack Hudson, and he recently posted this video interview with physicist/theologian Stephen Barr, which I wanted to comment on. It's essentially promoting accommodationism – the idea that there's no inherent conflict between religion and science. I'll let you watch the video for yourself, but because it's fairly lengthy, I've summarized what I view as the central points below.

The themes are as follows:

Science and religion answer different questions
Science has confirmed some of the things in the Bible
Christians are responsible for some significant advances in science
Atheists are committed to a dogmatic form of materialism that discounts the possibility of the supernatural (see the 19:00 mark)

This video does a great job of illustrating just how detached theologians are from the real issues concerning atheists. It's a terrible misunderstanding of our position at every front, and begs a few important corrections.

Science confirming the Bible (or not)

Before we get to the heart of conflict, let's take a look at the idea that science has confirmed certain things in the Bible, or certain things thought of by Christians. He mentions the Big Bang and the (misguided) notion that it shows a beginning of the universe, as well as Augustine of Hippo's theory of time.

There are several problems here. Firstly, if we were really to make a list of all the things that the Bible says about reality – about the origin of the universe, the development of life, biology, astronomy, etc. – the list of things proved wrong by science will surely be vastly longer than the list of things proved right. Even if we granted the tenuous notion that the universe has a beginning, the Bible gets just about everything else wrong. There's water before there's anything else, light before the sun, plants before animals, and the Earth forms before the stars. Further, Barr disingenuously frames the conversation as though to suggest that the idea of the universe having a finite origin was a uniquely Judeo-Christian idea. In reality, numerous cultures all over the world had such creation myths.

As to the notion that the Big Bang is the 'beginning' of the universe, I've devoted a fair bit of time to explaining why that's wrong, but here I'll let a physicist do it too. Suffice to say that the notion that science has confirmed anything the Bible has said is a case of cherry-picking both the Bible and the science.

And finally, to the idea that certain Christians have been instrumental in advancing science. So what? The philosophers of ancient Greece were pivotal, as were several atheists, deists, pantheists, and what have you. Funny how these Christian accomodationists fail to mention the advances in science that came from Muslims. Again, we have a case of liberal cherry-picking where the accomplishments of non-Christians are diminished or ignored entirely in order to create a false caricature of Christianity as some beacon of enlightenment.

Atheism, materialism, and the conflict between science and religion

The real conflict between science and religion doesn't come from who has the answers or who doesn't. For example, we could time travel back three millennia ago, and find that we lacked the technology to understand microorganisms. It could be rightly said that science had little to say on what, exactly, made people sick and how they ought to be treated. But that wouldn't render a supernatural explanation, such as demon possession, valid by default. We have to guard against a classic argument from ignorance fallacy – the fact that a scientific explanation is not forthcoming does not render a supernatural explanation valid by default. And yet, this is precisely the kind of God of the Gaps reasoning that many theists resort to, suggesting that a divine miracle was required for the origin of the universe or of life on Earth, simply because science has little to say definitively on these matters.

The conflict really lies not in the answers, but rather how we ask the question and, most importantly, how we pursue knowledge. The frequent accusation of 'materialism' is sorely misguided; there is nothing, in principle, which precludes us from discounting supernatural explanations. The problem lies in the fact that no one postulating supernatural claims has figured out a methodology by which any of the claims could be confirmed or falsified. Religious claims about reality are based primarily on revealed knowledge; and unfortunately for theologians, revealed knowledge, in principle, cannot be independently verified.

This leaves theologians in a precarious position. As the empirical methodology of science continually illuminates the world, frequently usurping religious claims about reality in the process, theologians are forced to retrofit their theology into the lexicon of scientific knowledge. This is precisely what Stephen Barr is doing in the interview when he claims that the Big Bang supports the Bible, yet selectively ignores the innumerable scriptures which science has proved false. I'm sure he would try to weasel out of that conundrum by suggesting that those inconvenient errors are just 'metaphors'. Of course, if science appears to confirm something... well, then clearly that was meant to be taken literally! Until the next scientific discovery proves it wrong, of course....

You'll never hear anyone using any sort of 'theological method' to understand reality, because one does not exist. That is the fundamental conflict between science and religion. Religion makes metaphysical claims about reality that cannot be independently verified – only awkwardly retrofitted into modern scientific knowledge. And while the independently verifiable methodology of empirical science leads to increasing consensus about controversial issues as erroneous ideas are systematically identified and discarded, the lack of such a methodology has the opposite effect in theology: as more specific unverifiable claims are made (e.g., about what God is, what God does, what God wants, etc.), the more divisiveness emerges in the theistic community. This is the watermark of a failed epistemology, and that is precisely what religion is.

Freethought Blogs sucks

2011-11-19T00:13:00.001-08:00

I don't know what it is with the migration of several of my favorite blogs to this network, but:

The templates are all totally generic and ugly
There are lots of intrusive ads

I don't see what the payoff is. Blogger and Wordpress are so much nicer.

The silliness of prayer, encapsulated by a believer

2011-11-17T18:25:00.001-08:00

I came across this video over on the always entertaining Christian Nightmares (which is entertaining because it more or less exposes the absurdity of Christianity in the words of its own practitioners). It's a clip about something called 'prayer circles' (not people standing around holding hands, if that was your guess). This guy is going on about the power of prayer, but the money quote is just past the 1:30 mark.

He says,

"Our prayers are like time capsules. You never know how or when or where God is going to answer them, but you can live with the holy anticipation."

There's a massive hole in logic in that sentence. The question is a simple one, but it's a big one to which no Christian (or theist in general, for that matter) has ever been able to give me a straight answer. Ready? It's this:

How do you tell the difference between a prayer that wasn't answered the way you hoped, and a random even that would have happened anyway?

The problem with prayer is that the believer has already assumed, upon praying, that the prayer will be answered. It doesn't matter if the prayer isn't answered the way they hope it to be. They might get the total opposite of what they actually prayed for, or nothing at all. It doesn't matter. Since the believer has already assumed that the prayer was answered, they have to find some way to creatively interpret mundane events around them to rationalize their assumption that the prayer was answered. It's classic confirmation bias.

This goes back to the core problem of religion: revelatory knowledge. There's simply no way at all to independently verify revelatory claims. So when someone has convinced themselves that God answered their prayer – even when the 'answer' looks nothing like what was asked for – the only rationalization they have is that they believe it out of sheer emotional conviction. There's no logical process, no objective methodology, for distinguishing between an answered prayer and a random occurrence. That's why the efficacy prayer isn't really testable, and it's astonishing that so believers think that's a good thing.

I'm a little bothered by this

2011-11-16T21:11:00.001-08:00

A few years ago, at the encouragement of my (devout Christian) older brother, I contacted the pastor of my parents' church just to see if he'd be interested in chatting. He replied that he would love to meet with me, and we eventually met and talked for about an hour and a half. At the end, he loaned me two books – one by Frank Tipler, a physicist, called The Physics of Christianity, which turned out to be one of the most loony books I've ever read. The other was a much more reasonable accomodationist tome by John Polkinghorne called The Faith of a Physicist. I originally tried to take notes on things I found questionable, but filled up pages so fast I had to stop.

John Polkinghorne

Anyway, some time later I contacted the pastor about meeting again. I wanted to talk about the books and about some of the issue we'd covered in our previous conversation. At the time, he had some medical issues, so I simply left a message. After he got through that, I contacted him again, through his secretary. After some time passed with no response from him (his secretary did reply), I contacted him yet a third time. No dice. I gave the book to my parents, and told them to pass the message on that I wanted to meet with him again. They returned the books to him, but he never contacted me.

Some time later, he added me on Facebook. We didn't correspond directly that often, but did exchange both friendly comments and butt heads on a few issues – though never uncivilly. I recently realized I hadn't heard anything from him in a while, so I typed his name in the Facebook search bar, went to his page and discovered he had unfriended me.

So, fine whatever, I'm not losing any sleep. But I don't get it. Christian doctrine holds that the fate of my eternal soul rests in my faith, or lack thereof. Why would he not even want to talk? And why on earth would he decide to cut me from his 600-plus friends roster? Obviously, as a non-believer, I occasionally say things that ruffle the feathers of believers. But goddammit, it's important to exchange ideas. It's especially disappointing because he's one of the few truly educated pastors to whom I had access.

A while back, my brother went to a dinner hosted by Francis Collins. It was a small affair with a round-table discussion, and he said he really wished I could have been there, for two reasons: one, because it would have given me the chance to directly converse with educated believers, and two, because my perspective would have been a welcome (to him, at least) counterpoint to what was an exclusively theistic audience. I lamented that, while I enjoy blogging, I find it quite frustrating that it's so difficult to find believers with whom I can engage in actual conversation.

And one of the few I had found decided that he didn't want to meet with me or even read what I had to say on Facebook. I'm a little disappointed, but I'm also simply bothered by the fact that someone educated is closed off to engaging opposing perspectives. If you were passionate about the truth, wouldn't you be interested in opinions that differ from your own? Otherwise, you're simply trapped in a self-deceiving bubble designed to protect yourself from the possibility that you could actually be wrong.

Theistic strategies for elevating faith to the stature of science

2011-11-15T18:59:00.001-08:00

I think that if there's one overarching goal of the modern new atheist/skeptic/freethinking/whateveryouwanttocallit movement, it's to remove from our culture the notion that faith is a good thing. Faith is, by definition, believing in things in spite of – or even because of – a lack of evidence. When we have good evidence for something, we don't actually need faith – we can just accept reality as it is. I mean, isn't that alone a good reason to chuckle at the so-called logical 'proofs' of God's existence? If it was that easy, if we really had proof that God existed, faith would be pointless.

If there's another position that should be evident among new atheists, it's that we love science. We love it so much that we're even accused of scientism! One of the interesting contrasts between science and faith is that both claim to be means of "knowledge", yet only one of them has given us reliable information about the reality we inhabit that we've been able to use for all those advances in technology that have made our lives better and easier. The theologians, meanwhile, still haven't figured out how to deduce what God (assuming one exists) actually is. We atheists are right to point out that science is the preeminent epistemological methodology in the world. Actually, it's the only one, because the others (like faith) don't actually have a methodology by which we can discern between true and false information through objective, independent verification.

But theists are very closely tied to the emotional security blankets of their religions, so they work very hard to elevate faith to the same level of epistemic prestige as science. There are two major ways they do this:

1. Claim that science can't answer the Big Questions

Science, so they say, may be able to tell us a lot about the natural world. But it can't tell us why the world exists, how we ought to live our lives, how we ought to treat others, or what things we should most value.

To point, that's true: science can only tell us how the universe works, not why it exists. And unfortunately, it can't give us any reason why we should even care about existing at all. But I submit that religion doesn't actually answer these questions either. At best, religion just pushes the question back a step.

Let's say, for example, that you decide that the reason you should value life is because God created you, he loves you, and he has a purpose for you. Well, why should you value that? Why should you care about God's plans? Maybe you don't even really like the idea of a deity dictating your destiny, and you'd rather just figure things out for yourself. Or perhaps you decide that this life is important because it is the prelude to an eternal life. Well, why should you care about that? Theism hasn't actually answered anything; it's just arbitrarily dictated that 'meaning' should be derived from supernatural things instead of found here in our Earthly lives.

And let's say that this world exists because God decided it should, and you go to Heaven when you die. Why does that world exist? Why should anyone care about heaven? Heck, why does God exist? What's the point? Why shouldn't God just destroy himself?

At a certain point, we simply take certain things as axiomatic, such as our intrinsic valuing of our lives, or that we generally value well-being and try to avoid suffering unless we find it necessary for some greater aim that will increase well-being. Even supernatural beliefs ultimately succumb to the idea that we should believe in God because it's ultimately what will maximally increase our well-being – self-interest can never be removed from the equation. Theism can displace that axiom and land it on the supernatural, but it's only shifted the problem around – it still hasn't given us a better reason for why we ought to have self-interest.

2. Claim that science requires faith, too

Theists also try to claim that science is based on philosophical assumptions which cannot be proved. Take C.S. Lewis' old argument from reason:

One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the popular scientific philosophy]. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears... unless Reason is an absolute[,] all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based."

Here's a similar perspective from a theist blogger:

...despite its pretensions to rationality, science itself is based on a faith that the future will be like the past. The rational process of induction, the method of logic upon which all scientific generalization is based, involves the premise that the observations scientists make about the past can be extrapolated into the future. But this assumption, as David Hume famously pointed out in the 18th century, is based not on reason, since it can be established neither by induction nor deduction, but on custom and tradition--things that atheists like Coyne claim characterize religion, not science.

In other words, the idea that the world is reliable, understandable, objective, etc., is all just something we have to take on faith. And since science is just another form of faith, theists are justified in having faith in supernatural things (like gods).

But the problem is this: that the world can be objectively comprehended, that our brains give us a (generally) reliable understanding of the world, that reality exists objectively and independently of us, etc., are not assumptions – they are observations. And science can do something extraordinarily powerful that faith cannot: can make falsifiable predictions about reality.

Now you could, as an exercise in intellectual masturbation, push this into the realm of metaphysical absurdity by suggesting that we have to make the assumption that we really are making those observations, that we really are experiencing this reality, etc. And that would be correct; I'm assuming that I'm really here, in front of my computer typing these words, and that my existence is not the manifestation of, say, a unicorn brain suspended in a jar made out of magic carrots. But that's the case with any reality. Again, imagine you were in Heaven. Wouldn't you still have to assume you were really there? How could you be absolutely certain that you weren't still alive on Earth, perhaps in a coma or a vegetative state and merely imagining Heaven?

It's true that scientists do make some assumptions. For example, scientists make the assumption that the laws of physics are the same throughout the observable universe. But this is a reasonable assumption, because no matter how far into space we've peered, the laws of physics do appear to be the same and we can find no logical reason to assume they shouldn't be. We also make lots of unconscious assumptions on a daily basis; when I sat down to write this, I didn't feel a need to check my chair to make sure it my body wouldn't pass through it. But that's because in my entire life, and with all the interactions with other humans I've had, I've never heard any good evidence that solid objects can pass through one another.

So theists try, and fail, to paint science and faith with the same brush. But Stephen Hawking said it best:

"There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."

Hiding behind a fallacy

2011-11-14T21:02:00.001-08:00

It really grinds my gears when Christians try to give their religion credit for all the sociocultural progress we've made, all while blaming atheism for everything from economic woes to Stalin's genocide. It's astounding self-deception, one in which the innumerable Christians responsible for histories greatest cruelties and injustices are dismissed as not being 'true' Christians; that way, Christianity is responsible only for the pleasant things, and all the unpleasant things can be blamed on atheists or misguided believers who never would have done such things if only they'd had the correct theology.

It simply cannot be ignored that Christians were responsible for, among many other atrocities:

The wanton killing and displacement of Native Americans
Encomienda
The Atlantic slave trade
The Crusades
The Inquisition
The Nazi regime and the antisemitism that inspired the Holocaust
Witch burnings
The KKK
The murder and forced conversions of Germanic peoples (the Saxon wars)

Importantly, I don't think people did these things because they were Christian, just like I don't think Stalin was a tyrant because he was an atheist. No non-believer thinks that being a Christian will by definition lead to such things. However, religious fanaticism intertwines effortlessly with imperialism and the demonization of outsiders. The important point, then, is that Christianity not only didn't stop these people, but it was often used as an inspiration and/or a justification for these atrocities. To suggest that these people were simply misguided Christians, or not 'true' Christians, is to hide behind the No True Scotsman fallacy in a transparent charade of self-deceit.

The truth is, people will do kind things and cruel things with or without religion. Human solidarity has, quite necessarily given our gregarious and interdependent nature as a species, existed as long as humanity has, and we made it for 198,000 years before Christianity came along to enlighten the lost – whether by words or, if that didn't work, by the sword.

Explaining the Holocaust

2011-11-13T09:26:00.001-08:00

Back when I did my series on morality, I used the Nazis – and the Holocaust in particular – as an example of people doing really cruel things. In truth, the inhumanity of the Holocaust – while still fairly fresh in our minds because it was relatively recent – is far from an isolated incident. Encomienda, the Atlantic slave trade, the Trail of Tears, tribal warfare in Africa are just a few of the many examples of humans doing horribly cruel things to others en masse.

How do we account for this cruelty? It seems a little easier to account for something like a serial killer or child molester – we just say something like, that person was a sociopath. One of my clients works as a prison nurse, and has told me that one thing the prisoners frequently have in common is a horrible childhood full of abuse and neglect. Another former client works as a public defender specializing in death penalty cases. He's told me that only a very small percentage of killers are true sociopaths – that most are people who would, in most circumstances, never imagine themselves taking anyone's life. They typically feel great shame, guilt and regret.

But when cruelty is systematic, as it was in the Holocaust, it's hard to believe that everyone is a sociopath, or that everyone had an abusive childhood, or that everyone just found themselves in a brief, extraordinary circumstance. How do we get so many people working together to do such cruel things?

Theism leaves important questions unanswered

The theistic explanation is simply that people are inherently evil. As I explained in my morality series, that's a woefully inadequate explanation. It doesn't tell us why some people are more cruel than others; it doesn't tell us what takes an ordinarily kind, empathetic person to treat another person as something less than human – a mere object to be disposed of or abused. It might say that in certain circumstances, everyone – even the best of us – is capable, at the very least, of contributing to a great cruelty. But it does nothing to illuminate what those circumstances are or why the threshold of empathy varies from one person to another. "Evil" is not something we can study scientifically – empathy and cruelty, however, are.

The notion that religion prevents people from doing wrong is problematic. The Nazis were not some atheistic regime (Hitler himself was openly Catholic, and it's common knowledge that several prominent Catholic figures were sympathetic to the Nazis), and certainly the millions of Nazi soldiers fighting across Europe were not a bunch of godless non-believers. Germany was (and is) an strongly Protestant country. And are we really to believe that those behind the atrocities I listed in the first paragraph were all a bunch of heathens? And are we really supposed to believe that they would never have committed such horrors, if only they'd had a better grasp of the correct theology?

If morally right action were in any way dependent on having the correct religious doctrine, then – there's always been such a vast disparity of doctrines – we'd see those with the correct doctrine being exceptionally good, uniformly opposing wanton cruelty. But this is not the case, and Nazi Germany is a fine example: there were plenty of Protestants and Catholics on both sides. Clearly, it's inadequate to charge that these people contributing to Nazi horrors simply had the incorrect theology. It fails to tell us why so many others with virtually identical theologies did not commit such acts of cruelty, or why faith did not motivate them to take action in opposition.

A history of antisemitism

Martin Luther, the German theologian, was the godfather of the Protestant Reformation. He was also a fervent antisemite. From Wikipedia:

In 1543 Luther published On the Jews and Their Lies in which he says that the Jews are a "base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth."^[13] They are full of the "devil's feces ... which they wallow in like swine."^[14] The synagogue was a "defiled bride, yes, an incorrigible whore and an evil slut ..."^[15] He argues that their synagogues and schools be set on fire, their prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes razed, and property and money confiscated. They should be shown no mercy or kindness,^[16] afforded no legal protection,^[17] and these "poisonous envenomed worms" should be drafted into forced labor or expelled for all time.^[18] He also seems to advocate their murder, writing "[w]e are at fault in not slaying them."^[19]

Now, I'm certainly not suggesting that Martin Luther, influential though he was, was in any way responsible for Nazi ideology; the notion that Jews are less than human did not originate with Luther, and it certainly did not originate with Nazism. These ideas were embedded among Christians for many centuries, and their permeation through Western European culture provided the gateway to, in the right set of circumstances, commit appalling acts of cruelty upon those people. The first step toward all human cruelty is to deprive others of their humanity – to see them as objects unworthy of dignity, fairness, and freedom.

With these ideas entrenched among the German people, it was simply a matter of time before the right set of circumstances allowed them to scapegoat the Jewish people. In the widespread economic despair following World War I, a charismatic leader spoke to the German people's sense of entitlement and dignity, and exploited a centuries-old contempt for Jews. And thus the gears of cruelty began turning.

Diffusion of responsibility

There's a concept in sociology called diffusion of responsibility. It happens mainly in large groups of people, and it was in fact used in defense of Nazis during the trials that followed the war. Now, undoubtedly many Nazi soldiers and officers were "just following orders." But we might expect, in the face of witnessing such horrors as gas chambers and macabre medical experiments, and even with the widespread contempt of Jewish people, that a noble act of defiance would be more common. But the diffusion of responsibility largely prevents that from happening by allowing most involved to rationalize that they were not directly responsible for the cruelty that unfolded. As Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen explains in his book The Science of Evil [p.164-5]:

Psychologist Christopher Browning's book Ordinary Men used Zimbardo's Stanford Prison experiment to explain the activities of the Reserve Battalion 101, a Nazi killing unit that murdered an estimated 40,000 Polish Jews in World War II. They were just following orders. Consider this simplification of the chain:

Person A: "I simply had the list of Jews in my municipality. I did not round up the Jews, but did pass this list on when requested to do so."

Person B: "I was told to go to these addresses, arrest these people, and take them to the train. That's all I did."

Person C: "My job was to open the doors of the train – that was it."

Person D: "My job was to direct the prisoners on to the train."

Person E: "My job was to close the doors, not to ask where the train was going or why."

Person F: "My job was simply to drive the train."

[Through all the other small links in the chain that could lead to...]

Person Z: "My job was simply to turn on the showers out of which the poison gas was emitted."

Cohen describes this phenomenon using the concept of the "banality of evil". Few, if any, would defy their commanding officers over such banal tasks. In isolation, each is benign. None require the complete erosion of empathy that, say, beating someone to death does. But each link adds to a chain that ends with unspeakable cruelty. And since the Holocaust was not even known until after the war, it's highly unlikely that common soldiers, and even many officers, had any knowledge of what was truly happening in what they were told to describe to Jews as 'work camps'.

We've seen how 'evil' and other religious explanations fail to account for the complex factors involved in such organized cruelty, and how insidious ideas embedded in a culture can, under the right conditions, manifest with dire consequences. This goes back to an important point I discussed at the end of my morality series: that accurate information is pivotal to our ability to make rational moral judgments. The problem with the notion that Jews are sub-human – the kind of venom spewed by Martin Luther – isn't that it's 'wrong' according to some divine standard. The problem is simply that it's objectively false. There is no rational basis for singling out Jewish people as being any less human than anyone else, which is why an irrational belief system like religion was needed to play a central role in the spread of the idea. It's also why, if we're to prevent such cruelty in the future, we ought to value truth and reason above all else.

A quick thought on divine morality

2011-11-11T18:36:00.001-08:00

The idea that our morality is bestowed upon us by God is one that, to me, has always suffered from a problem so obvious that it really shouldn't even need mentioning.

Nobody has direct, objective access to God. Now, some people will of course claim they have personal access to God, but these claims are not independently verifiable – which is pretty important when you're living in an social, cooperative and interdependent society. If someone tells you God spoke to them, how could you possibly substantiate – objectively – whether their claim was true? Revelatory claims, by definition, fall outside the realm of empirical knowledge. Are God's commands known from his Holy Book? Whose interpretation of which one? And again, how can those claims be independently verified?

So even if it were true that God's commands form the basis of our moral compass (and of course I don't think it is), it would pretty useless to us unless we all could independently verify exactly what God's commands are. But since that's not possible, the result is that all these believers who claim that the basis for their morality is 'objective' end up being on the exact same page as everyone else – they have to find reasons, motivated by rational self-interest, to value certain behaviors and condemn others.

"Scientism"

2011-11-10T14:08:00.001-08:00

I linked to this over on the A-Unicornist Facebook page, but I also wanted to link to it here because I think it's just that damn good. Shaun at The Atheist, Polyamorous Skeptic has an outstanding post responding the accusation of "scientism" that is often leveled at non-believers. Choice quote:

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that the critics of the so-called “scientistic” people (one is tempted to juts call them “scientists”) seem to not understand the position as it is commonly used by those, such as myself, who believe that science is the preeminent epistemological methodology in the world (perhaps the universe!). The other part is, as has been pointed out, that this method conflicts too much with theological methodology which is often non-empirical. People like [theologian John Haught] have a bias, a conviction that ties them to a set of doctrines which make claims at odds with science, and so they see something beyond the reach of empiricism.

But to say something is beyond empirical reach is to say that there are non-empirical things. Well, how would they know? How could they know? From where could they get that data? Revelation? By what train does the “revelator” travel in order to get from a non-material world to a material one? What are the connecting tracks made of? Without a justification for how they get their information, were are right to be skeptical.

Read the full post here.

As I echoed in my comment on Shaun's post, we non-believers often point out that it is a fallacy to place God as an explanatory mechanism in places of scientific ignorance – the origin of life, of the universe, of consciousness, etc. When we do this, we're often accused of a dogmatic adherence to materialism, naturalism, or the aforementioned 'scientism' – the notion that we are refusing to even consider divine explanations.

This is simply a false characterization of our position. Our objection is a valid one which should be easy to comprehend: that the inability of science to explain something does not render a divine explanation valid by default. Throughout history, a great many things were thought to have divine or supernatural explanations, only to have scientific explanations usurp them. As Sam Harris has frequently pointed out, it's hard to think of a single example of the opposite happening .

But to the objection that we are unwilling to so much as consider divine explanations, or that we are dogmatically committed to materialism, nothing could be farther from the truth. We are simply committed to systems of evidence that demonstrate their claims. Well, we only have one of those, and that is empirical science. Theologians have not been able to postulate a system by which we could reliably discern true divine claims from false ones; instead, they simply place God in the gaps while attempting to cantilever assumptions based upon our rational understanding of the natural world into realms that are in principle beyond the purview of rational inquiry. The folly of such an approach should be readily apparent.

I can haz computer?

2011-11-09T20:55:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the modern miracle of express shipping, I have a shiny new motherboard. Literally shiny, since my old one was a little dusty. I still won't be blogging much... I had to reinstall Windows, so I'm in the exciting process of re-installing all my programs and getting everything the way I like it. Then, since everything is working now (y'know, like that new memory I was installing when my computer keeled over), I'm finally going to get around to overclocking the living shit out of this thing, which will take a few days. Oh, and Skyrim will unlock tomorrow night, so I'll basically be in my underwear for the next week, eating reheated pizza and drinking Mountain Dew by the gallon.

Here's a pic of my new rig. I'm thinking of painting some flames on it:

Update: Well, that was easy....

4.1ghz. And I'm not even pushing the damn thing. When I started building PCs back in 2006, the AMD FX chips were the kings, and it was a huge deal if you could overclock it by an extra 100mhz.

Moral objectivity and oughtness

2011-11-08T20:03:00.001-08:00

QualiaSoup continues his already outstanding series on morality by absolutely demolishing William Lane Craig's pet moral argument (and more!). A must-watch:

That which we most desire...

2011-11-07T19:54:00.000-08:00

Hey look! Computer access... after hours at work.

In my computer-less evenings, between lengthy bouts of guitar practice, I'm reading a great book called On Desire by William Irvine, a professor of philosophy at Wright State University. It's a thought-provoking examination of how desires drive our behavior, how they're formed, and how we can deal with them. In my reading thus far, Irvine has briefly touched on an interesting point which strongly links desire to our moral behavior, and it got me thinking in new ways about some theistic arguments I've heard in the past.

Motivated self-interest

In his debate on morality with William Lane Craig, Sam Harris asserted that our desire for well-being is something we take as axiomatic. Craig's response was that we don't have any objective reason to desire well-being, so using it as a cornerstone of moral judgment, as Harris does, is just begging the question. The theistic argument is that morality is derived from authority; they argue that the chain of authority (our parents, the law, etc.) logically must terminate somewhere -- presumably with the ultimate, infallible authority of God.

When I discussed this with theists around the time of the debate, I posed what I thought was an obvious question raised by that assertion: why ought we care about obedience to authority? Or, to put it another way, why ought we value God's commands? By asking these questions, I was trying to state what I thought was a fairly obvious truth: that motivated self-interest can never be separated from moral behavior. Presumably, we ought to obey God's commands because it's in our best interest, both individually and collectively, to do so.

The theists with whom I discussed this issue, however, attempted to argue that God's authority simply warranted obedience intrinsically. It shouldn't be difficult to see that this is really just avoiding the question; I want to know why we would value obedience to God's authority. What would be in it for us?
But when we acknowledge that, even on a theistic view, our obedience to authority is made valuable by motivated self-interest, an interesting thing happens: God becomes irrelevant. That's because it's simply unnecessary to place God at the endpoint of our motivated self-interest. Back to the Harris' axiom, the question why ought we value well-being is, quite simply, because well-being is intrinsically desirable.

By contrast, think about hunger pangs. Why should we care about eating? Well, because hunger pangs are uncomfortable. Why should we care about relieving discomfort? Because discomfort is intrinsically undesirable. I could meld this with Sam Harris' definition of morality, and say that all forms and degrees of suffering are intrinsically undesirable.

A basis for morality

So when the question Why be good? (or similar questions such as Why be kind to others?) is raised, the answer lies in motivated self-interest. It's worth noting that obedience to authority is a woefully inadequate basis for such behavior; does any theist really believe that the only thing preventing him from, say, murdering and eating his family, is because he'd offend God if he did? But why care about offending God? If it is because it is in one's best interest not to offend God, the theist is right back where he started -- motivated self-interest.

We can easily recognize that we are innately bonded and interdependent. We depend on others for literally all aspects of our physical, emotional, and mental well-being. And because we recognize that others have similar needs and interests as our own, we can easily deduce that it is in our best interest to cooperate peacefully with others; that is, if we want others to respect our needs and interests, we ought to respect the needs and interests of others. Living with others simply mandates such a 'social contract'. If we lived alone in the wilderness, we would have complete moral autonomy -- no obligations to anyone but ourselves. But it would be a miserable and likely brief existence, and it is not something any of us truly desire.

An argument from consequence

One last thing: sometimes theists, unable to effectively counter the above arguments, will resort to a desperate appeal to consequence by pointing out that people can, and throughout history have, inflict suffering upon others to maximize their personal well-being, or cooperated to do cruel things.

There are two things to be said about this. Firstly, people have done great cruelty in the name of religion as well -- religious fanaticism is inarguably one of the greatest sources of cruelty in all human history. So if pointing out shortcomings in our gregarious nature is meant to bolster religion as a bastion of moral guidance, it's failed. But the more important point is that there are consequences to the exploitation and cruelty of others, many of which are not always immediately apparent. A person who makes his fortune through deception and exploitation will make many enemies; all the great human institutions of cruelty ultimately fell, in many cases because the oppressed -- or those sympathetic to them -- stood against tyranny.

Most importantly, though, we have learned all too slowly that we have far more to gain from others by cooperating with them than by exploiting them. If our ancestors had given Africans education and freedom instead of bondage, or if we had treated women and men as equals throughout history, would we not be a vastly more peaceful and prosperous species than we are today? How many individuals subjected to slavery, servitude or treated as the property of their husbands might have been great leaders, innovators, thinkers, educators, scientists, or inventors?

That is why, ultimately, our impetus to treat others with fairness and dignity can always be traced back to motivated self-interest. We can recognize -- though not always easily, unfortunately -- that a world in which we value the needs and interests of others is better for us and for those we care for and depend upon the most.

It may be a little slow...

2011-11-05T15:45:00.000-07:00

So I decided to upgrade my RAM on my PC, from 4GB to 8GB. RAM is really cheap these days (4GB was a measly $30), so I figured why not? I got the RAM yesterday, popped the two new modules into my motherboard, and... the computer wouldn't boot. Two hours of troubleshooting and a call to the motherboard maker's tech support and it was determined that somewhere in the process of installing the memory, the motherboard shorted out. I'm in disbelief! The easiest upgrade possible ends with me replacing a motherboard. Ugh.

Anyway, I'll have pretty limited computer access for the next couple of weeks, so it'll be pretty quiet 'round here. Of course, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim comes out this week, so when I do get my PC back up and running I will quickly become enslaved to the massive time drain of Bethesda's open-world RPG. Set expectations accordingly.

In the meantime, check out some of my favorite blogs:
Dead Logic
Advocatus Atheist
For the Sake of Science
The Atheist, Polyamorous Skeptic
One Minion's Opinion

Hey atheists!

2011-11-04T12:45:00.001-07:00

A few reasons to reject "God did it"

2011-11-04T12:26:00.000-07:00

God did it is more or less the cornerstone of all 'sophisticated' theological arguments. The First Cause arguments, the design arguments, the moral arguments... they all fall back on the same appeal. If it sounds like I'm oversimplifying, well, I'm not. Because the thing about using God as an explanatory mechanism is that nobody has the first clue how God actually does anything. He just, y'know, does. Worse, no one can offer the slightest explanation as to why God does anything. It's just, errr, his 'will'!

For example, we now have the theistic camp firmly split into (coincidentally) a trinity: young-earth creationism, intelligent design, and theistic evolution. The last group is by far the least wrong, and make an effort to show that evolution is compatible with faith. But here's the problem: all you can ever do, even if you fully accept modern science, is retroactively make God fit. You can never tell us before hand why or how God would design anything at all. Which brings me to the first reason to reject God did it:

It doesn't actually explain anything

We never had any theologians telling us that God would have designed evolution by natural selection (and genetic drift). The 'intelligent design' advocates can't actually explain why God would design us with eyes that have a blind spot and with retinas that are upside-down. We never had theologians telling us that God would have, obviously, designed an exponentially expanding universe dominated by dark energy. It may be hard to imagine, but until the last century we didn't even know that 'the universe' consisted of anything beyond our own galaxy. And man were we wrong! But where were the theologians telling us just how small and insignificant we really are?

That's the Achilles's heel of theology: it has no explanatory power whatsoever. All a believer can do is observe the facts that science has illuminated, then retroactively agree that God, of course, would do it precisely that way.

But that's not all. Theology complicates things. As much as believers like to rant against 'materialism' or 'naturalism', postulating theological concepts raises more questions than it answers... and I don't think is really answers any questions at all anyway. That's the other problem with God did it:

It makes things more complicated

I'll give a few examples. First, let's take the 'First Cause' arguments. These arguments require that we
postulate the existence of some kind of 'supernatural causality'. Well, what is that? How does it work? How can we test it, measure it, or observe it? We can't, of course. And the only reason its existence is inferred in the first place is because it's required to make First Cause arguments work! The circularity should be painfully obvious.

Dualism is another example. It requires that we postulate the existence of a 'non-physical' substrate that somehow interacts with the physical brain. But what is it? How, exactly, does it interact with the brain? Everything we know about the brain suggests that consciousness is fully the result of material processes. Sam Harris, in a debate with Rabbi David Wolpe, hit the nail on the head: if we damage one part of the brain, we see very specific loss of function. We can lose our ability to feel empathy, to respond to emotions, to recognize faces, to remember names, to solve math problems, etc. We can lose all the functions that make us who we are. And yet the dualist believes that when the entire brain is damaged in death, our consciousness somehow rises from the brain, presumably with all of our memories and faculties intact.

I'll restate a great quote from TheraminTrees:

"My loyalty is not to naturalism or materialism, as some folks suggest; my loyalty is to systems that demonstrate their claims."

Theology – at least 'natural' theology that attempts to fit God into our understanding of the natural world – can never demonstrate any of its claims. It can't tell us anything we don't already know. All it can do is strain logic in a desperate bid to squeeze God into ever-tighter gaps of our ignorance. If that alone isn't a great reason to be an atheist, I don't know what is.

Jerry Coyne vs. John Haught debate (with a slice of controversy)

2011-11-04T11:43:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't been paying attention in the atheist blogosphere, there's been a bit of a fuss. On October 12th at the University of Kentucky, Jerry Coyne debated John Haught, a Catholic theologian who's written a lot of books about the compatibility between science and faith. Jerry Coyne, as anyone who reads his blog could figure out, argued that science and faith are antithetical.

The controversy comes from the fact that bizarrely, Haught refused to consent to the release of the video. After a massive influx of emails, student petitions, and outrage on the blogosphere, Haught relented... sort of. At first, he made a list of strange demands, including that Coyne apologize for something Haught presumably found offensive, and then publish a three-page letter from Haught on his blog. Coyne didn't apologize, and he stuck Haught's letter in the comments section. Haught relented, and consented to release the video. What a facade! Don't agree to a public debate if you won't stand behind your performance.

Haught got smoked pretty badly. Jerry's an expert at exposing the silliness of 'sophisticated' theology, and in my estimation Haught is really out of his league here. But hey, what do I know? Judge for yourself:

Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? October 12, 2011 Q+A with Jerry Coyne and John Haught from UK College of Arts & Sciences on Vimeo.

Cosmically insigficant

2011-11-02T13:16:00.000-07:00

People sometimes ask me if it's depressing facing death as an atheist. I mean, when you die, you're just gone. No white light, no harps in the clouds, no gold-paved city, no reunions with those who went before you. Just the end. And I tell them, no – it's actually kind of the other way around. To me, it's a much more depressing thought that this life isn't good enough – that it's just a preparation for the eternal life to come. Over at Evolutionblog, Jason Rosenhouse phrases it eloquently:

I really don't understand people who say life has no point or meaning unless it's a prelude to the eternity we will spend with God in heaven. This seems precisely backward to me. It is hard to imagine anything more pointless and soul-crushing than the thought that we are just marking time here on Earth while waiting for our real lives to begin after we die. Whatever meaning life has surely arises in part from the fact that it is finite. You have only so many years in which to cram as much experience, learning, love, friendship or whatever else it is that gives you satisfaction, so you had better make every moment count. That's the realization that gives life its point and its zest.

This thought also applies to the significance of how we live our lives. Certain theologians muse that unless our actions have cosmic significance, they just seem completely pointless. Why live if you're just going to be gone? Why do good if, in a thousand years, no one will remember or care?

People who think like that are missing out. Imagine you do some small, random act of kindness – like, say, buy a sandwich for a homeless guy. Did you solve all his problems? Did you give him a second chance? Did you change the world? Is anyone going to remember, or care, in a thousand years (or in eternity)? No. You met someone who's had a rough life, and you're brightening his day just a tiny bit. You reminded him that people are out there who care. Shouldn't that be enough? Why would it matter whether your act of kindness would be remembered, or whether it would be cosmically significant?

When we get to the end of our lives, hopefully we've made the best of it. Hopefully we've been lucky, and made it through without a lot of suffering. Hopefully we're leaving behind lots of friends and loved ones whose lives we touched, and we did what we could to live the happiest lives we could. And maybe we hope that the kindness we've shown others has helped make the world just a little bit of a better place – because we care about those we're leaving, and we want them to go out with a smile on their face too. Eternity doesn't care about me, but that's okay – I don't care about eternity.

'Religious values' are human values

2011-10-29T14:00:00.000-07:00

I was perusing WEIT, and Jerry Coyne has an email up from Dan Barker, the preacher-turned-atheist who is now president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. This section stuck out to me in particular:

During my debates on morality I point out that all of the good teachings in the world religions (which show up in all of them) are really HUMAN values: peace, love, cooperation, and so on. Those values transcend religion, and are in fact the values we use when we are judging from the outside whether we think a particular religion is good or not. (So they must not originate from within religion.) When you factor out the common teachings shared by all religions (the good stuff, the humanistic stuff), what you are left with are NOT good teachings. The so-called “religious values” that Christians, Jew, Muslims and other groups hold are divisive, idiosyncratic, and unproductive to moral discourse: what day of the week you should worship, how women should dress, what foods are permitted, whose beards can be shaved, who is allowed to be married, and so on. Thinking of it like that, there is actually no overlap between “human values” (informed by science) and “religious values” (derived from holy scripture).

This is really important. You can't throw a rock at a Christian without hitting some argument about how our most cherished values were bestowed upon us by Christian Truth. This is obviously false for several reasons. First, it flies in the face of our biology and our evolutionary heritage, which have shown that those values had developed among our ancestors and are observable (albeit in more primitive form) in our modern evolutionary cousins – not to mention the fact that humans had survived, spread and multiplied for some 190,000 years before any of the modern religions even existed. Secondly, those values – selflessness, altruism, compassion, charity, kindness, and the like – can be found in cultures all over the world, including innumerable isolated indigenous cultures. And thirdly, many of history's greatest atrocities have been committed under the guise of spreading Christian culture: the Crusades, the Inquisition, Encomienda, the genocide of native Americans, the African slave trade, and (arguably) the Third Reich. If those cherished values were so intimately woven into Christianity, one would imagine that predominantly Christian cultures would have worked to prevent, rather than inspire, so much cruelty.

There are, of course, many 'moral' values that are indeed the product of specific religions. And without exception, they are flatly absurd. So absurd, in fact, that most believers dismiss them as culturally irrelevant. That includes commands specifically given by Christ that modern Christians nonchalantly ignore, as well as the scriptures that are endlessly re-interpreted to make the religions conform to the progress of modern secular humanism.

"The Playboy Club" and porn

2011-10-28T08:49:00.000-07:00

I recently watched the three episodes of The Playboy Club on Hulu, and I enjoyed the show. Yeah yeah, it's like the old joke about reading Playboy for the articles, but I actually did enjoy the plot and the characters.

Aaand it's canceled.

Its cancellation was due in no small part to the absolute onslaught of conservative media watchdogs slamming the show for being "pornographic", well before the show had even aired. That's right. The show was roundly condemned for, among other things:

Objectifying and degrading women
Advancing an anti-family agenda
Distributing pornography
Breaking the law

... all before anyone had actually seen the show. It was enough simply to be associated with the Playboy brand. The conservative media group Parents Television Council raised the biggest huff, sending threatening letters to NBC affiliates and petitioning advertisers to cut ties with the show. The controversy was enough to slap NBC into barely even promoting the show and, as the ratings slid and advertisers were pressured into cutting support, cancellation became inevitable. The accusations of distributing porn are even more laughable to anyone who's actually seen the show, which is pretty much devoid of sex and nudity.

Is Playboy even porn?

Playboy is pretty tame by today's standards, and calling it 'pornography' really begs the question of what, exactly, constitutes 'porn'. Playboy shows nude women. That's it. To each their own, but I think it's ridiculous to claim that the mere display of the naked female form is dirty and evil. Following the cancellation, the PTC released a press statement saying, "We're pleased that NBC will no longer be airing a program so inherently linked to a pornographic brand that denigrates and sexualizes women." I'm at a loss as to how the mere display of the naked body denigrates women, and I don't remember when human sexuality became something to be reviled, feared, and condemned.

Truthfully, as Hef himself said in a Tweet (Hef tweets?), the show should have been aired on cable where it could have found a more mature audience and been free to be a bit edgier. It's just sad that after 50 years, our culture still has not progressed to the point that women can openly express their sexuality without being condemned as "anti-family" and "pornographic". And shame on NBC for not sticking behind their show, promoting the hell out of it and telling these conservative idiots to take a hike. It's reminiscent of Comedy Central's ridiculous censorship of South Park episodes 200 and 201 (still not available on the South Park website) after threats from Islamic groups. Every time we bend to groups like this, we're saying, "Gosh... you're right! We shouldn't air something that might possibly offend someone!" Hey, here's an idea... if you don't like it, don't fuckin' watch it.

p.s. - The conservative media reaction is reminiscent of its reaction to the video game Mass Effect, which allows the player-character to enter into intimate relationships with other characters, and includes the possibility of homosexual relationships. A Fox News segment described the game as having "the ability for players to engage in full graphic sex". Not only was it completely false, but it begged the question of why the media was in a huff over an M-rated game intended for adults.

The future according to Microsoft

2011-10-27T19:57:00.001-07:00

Surprisingly devoid of robot overlords.

I would be blogging more, but...

2011-10-27T19:35:00.000-07:00

Battlefield 3. So there.

Love, marriage, and other quandaries

2011-10-23T20:28:00.000-07:00

It's been heavy on the heady stuff here at The A-Unicornist. So here's something a little more introspective and personal.

I'm 32, and single. That old saying "Youth is wasted on the young" has become more and more apparent as I've gotten older. I think, in a lot of respects, I've been sort of a late boomer. It wasn't until I got out my last long-term relationship, which had lasted two years, that I really began to grow as an individual. My career was finally stabilizing (making a living as a personal trainer is not easy!), and I had control of my finances. And after finally finding the guts to end an unhealthy relationship, I was free to really develop my own identity.

I've had relationships since then, of varying degrees – one-nighters, friends with benefits, intense love... but nothing's worked out. Through the course of it all, I've grown incalculably. I've always considered myself introverted, but for most of my life I was terribly shy. I spent a considerable amount of time actively developing my social skills, and now I can do things I could never have done just a few years ago – I'm comfortable in most all social occasions, and that includes striking up conversations with strangers and meeting women (I generally avoid flirting in elevators, though).

My experiences over the last several years have also powerfully changed my perception of love, relationships, marriage, and the expectations with which many of us are raised. I grew up with the idea that there was 'someone out there' for me, my soulmate, 'the one'. But – and I don't mean this to be cynical – that's a delusion, one that we buy into all too easily. The reality is that there are many, many people out there with whom we are compatible. And no matter how much we think we're in love, relationships are a never-ending process. Sometimes people grow closer, sometimes they grow apart; it's not good or bad, but just a cold reality. One relationship failing, no matter how gut-wrenching, does not spell the end for us. There's always a new beginning.

But the truth is, most of us greatly fear the unknown. We'll often endure misery as long as we can bear it just to avoid the scary idea of not having someone, or of starting over. That's exactly what kept me in a unhealthy relationship with someone struggling with addiction, and I think it's exactly what propels many people to enter into relationships for the wrong reasons or to endure them when they'd be much happier if they just moved on. Change is always a difficult process, but it gives us a unique opportunity to better ourselves and to ultimately be much happier.

I've come to realize that what I fear most is not being without a companion the rest of my life, but of being with the wrong person and quietly suffering in a relationship that is just stable enough to keep me bearably unhappy. That, alone, is enough to encourage me to enjoy my singlehood. Right now, sort of on the tail end of a passionate but ultimately hopeless relationship, my heart's not really in the game and I'd rather just hang out at home – playing guitar, reading, blogging, attempting to perfect my comical cooking skills, etc. I'm sure in time I'll be ready to get back out there and start meeting people. But for now, I'm happy with the realization that someone else cannot give you happiness. You have to find it for yourself. If you're lucky, maybe you'll have the chance to share it.

Thoughts on the Universe

2011-10-23T14:43:00.000-07:00

If there's anything that grinds my gears, it's this snarky question often posed by believers to atheists (actual phrasing may vary):

"If there's no God, Mr. Smartypants Atheist, where did the universe come from? Huh? Riddle me that! Do you think everything just came from nothing?"

In the last post, I linked to a Reasonablefaith.org Q&A in which W.L. Craig said the following:

In fact, here you should turn the tables and ask [atheists] how time could come into existence with no causal conditions whatsoever. That is truly bizarre. Why did time and the universe begin to exist at all? How could they begin to exist in the absence of any causal conditions?

The typical response from non-believers is "I don't know" – which is perfectly valid. After all, if we knew why and how everything got here, physicists wouldn't have jobs.

But the better response is to point out that simply assuming that the universe 'came from' anything at all is to presuppose the conclusion of First Cause arguments. After all, that's exactly what we're talking about when we say A came from B – we're talking about cause and effect. That's where Craig stumbles in the quote above; the first cause arguments, like the Kalam Cosmological Argument, are merely designed to argue that the universe requires a First Cause – not to prove that the First Cause is God. The non-believer is not arguing that the universe was caused by 'nothing', but that there did not need to be a cause at all.

An uncaused universe?

There is nothing we can rightly call the 'beginning' of our universe at all, and that includes the 'singularity' at the epoch of the Big Bang. In The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking elaborates:

"Although one can think of the big bang picture as a valid description of early times, it is wrong to take the big bang literally, that is, to think of Einstein’s theory [general relativity] as providing a true picture of the origin of the universe. That is because general relativity predicts there to be a point in time at which the temperature, density, and curvature of the universe are all infinite, a situation mathematicians call a singularity. To a physicist this means that Einstein’s theory breaks down at that point and therefore cannot be used to predict how the universe began, only how it evolved afterward.” [p.128]

This means that the 'cosmic singularity', which theologians have been known to claim is the beginning of the universe, is really just a mathematical artifact of our incomplete understanding of the universe – one that shows we need a quantum theory of gravity.

A common objection to the idea of an uncaused universe is that the universe cannot be infinitely old. I have no idea if this is a valid criticism (I'm no mathematician), but either way it's a false dilemma. Perhaps, as Stephen Hawking and Jim Hartle contended in their No Boundary proposal, time would function like another dimension of space prior to the Big Bang, rather than being an 'arrow' as we experience it today. Perhaps the universe is cyclic. Perhaps the multiverse is the "giant levitating superturtle". In all cases, our experience of time doesn't give us a complete picture of what time really is.

All this simply means that the universe very well may exist uncaused. It didn't 'come from' anything or anywhere; it just is. There are two very good reasons to believe this is the case:

The logical incoherency of First Cause arguments [more]
Every modern theory of cosmology disposes of our conventional understanding of time

Goalpost shifting

2011-10-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

Whenever you present an argument against theism, and a believer responds by telling you that your argument has failed to disprove anything or that you didn't prove 'materialism' or 'atheism', call them out on their goalpost shifting. It's the non-believer's job simply to show that a theistic argument doesn't prove what the theist claims it proves. That's it. That's all it takes to show that the theist's beliefs are ill-founded.

For example, I've heard from more than one Christian that they would doubt their faith if the resurrection could somehow be disproved. But all the skeptic has to do is point out that there's no particular reason to believe that the resurrection happened in the first place. Or consider that counter-arguments to First-Cause arguments are often met with an incredulous, "You haven't proved the universe came into existence materially!" It's goalpost shifting, and it's dishonest. The skeptic's job is simply to argue that First Cause arguments don't prove what theists claim they prove.

I see that kind of stuff all the time in theist arguments. In an old Reasonablefaith.org Q&A which I used for some material here, William Lane Craig was presented with the argument that just because causality applies within the universe, it doesn't mean causality applies to the universe. His response? Monstrous goalpost shifting:

[Atheists] might say that even simultaneous causation presupposes time. Yes, the cause and effect occur at the same time. But then why couldn't such a causal dependency exist timelessly? In simultaneous causation the cause and effect exist co-incidently. But in a timeless state two things can exist co-incidently in a dependence relation. So if simultaneous causation is possible, I see no reason to think timeless causation is impossible. [link]

Instead of providing evidential support for his assertions, he challenges the skeptic to disprove their mere possibility. Which is, of course, both absurd and irrelevant – virtually anything we can imagine is merely possible ("Prove that superintelligent unicorns do not exist in an alternate reality in which our universe is merely an experiment!"). This kind of goalpost shifting happens all the time when someone lacks the humility to acknowledge that their argument has been undermined.

That "I am the 53%" guy

2011-10-22T07:35:00.000-07:00

Daily Kos has reposted a great open letter to this guy:

This stood out to me the most:

Do you really want the bar set this high? Do you really want to live in a society where just getting by requires a person to hold down two jobs and work 60 to 70 hours a week? Is that your idea of the American Dream?

Do you really want to spend the rest of your life working two jobs and 60 to 70 hours a week? Do you think you can? Because, let me tell you, kid, that’s not going to be as easy when you’re 50 as it was when you were 20.

And what happens if you get sick? You say you don’t have health insurance, but since you’re a veteran I assume you have some government-provided health care through the VA system. I know my father, a Vietnam-era veteran of the Air Force, still gets most of his medical needs met through the VA, but I don’t know what your situation is. But even if you have access to health care, it doesn’t mean disease or injury might not interfere with your ability to put in those 60- to 70-hour work weeks.
Do you plan to get married, have kids? Do you think your wife is going to be happy with you working those long hours year after year without a vacation? Is it going to be fair to her? Is it going to be fair to your kids? Is it going to be fair to you?

The article reflects the reaction I had to this picture. First, I don't see why having to work two jobs and endure 70-hour work weeks are things to be proud of. Sometimes it's just what you have to do, but it's a pretty shitty life, especially if you have a family. Working two jobs, and still not being able to afford health insurance? That's something to boast about? Does that make you tough? When you get sick, what happens? I mean, a bout with the flu could seriously impact your earnings if you have to miss work from two jobs -- what happens if it's cancer? And if you can't even afford it for yourself, what happens if you have kids? Are you going to tell them that vaccines are for pussies? Stitch them up yourself when they take a spill on the playground? Hold them in front of the microwave to treat their cancer?

There are other long-term questions. If you have to work this hard just to get by, how much are you saving? Because, as the article rightly observes, two jobs and 70 hours isn't going to be so easy in 30 years. What happens when you reach retirement age, or when people simply won't hire you because there are plenty of younger, tougher workers wanting your jobs? What about your kids' college education? Is this the kind of life you want for them, too?

Obviously this fellow has worked hard, and I don't think anyone want to diminish that. But working yourself to the bone just to scrape by is not the American dream.

What the hell happened to Thunderf00t?

2011-10-21T22:22:00.000-07:00

Thunderf00t. Remember when that guy was relevant? It seems like not too long ago his videos on science and creationism had attracted so much attention that he sat down across from Richard Dawkins, Ray Comfort, and some nutbars from Westboro Baptist. Today, this is what his 'latest videos' look like from my Youtube subscriptions:

"Faith, the new stupid!" Really? "Cruci-FICTION", a very un-funny video with Mike Lee, the 'Religious Antagonist'? Really?

The guy's gotta be burned out, because this is just lame. Now, you can poke fun at religion in ways that are both humorous and thought-provoking, as fellow fans of NonStampCollector know. It's called satire. NonStampCollector is masterful at it, and I think satire can be very effective (think George Carlin, Penn Jillette or Ricky Gervais). Calling faith "the new stupid"? Going to a hardware store dressed as Jesus to shop for boards and nails? Not incisive, not thought-provoking, not funny. Thunderf00t's apparently gotten tired of engaging theism and pseudoscience constructively, because this is just lousy material.

Look, I'm not one to advocate pulling punches when we criticize religion. But stooping to purely antagonistic mockery doesn't help anyone. We're not going to persuade any believers by patronizing them. All this kind of crap does is reinforce the generally misguided belief that atheists are assholes. Until Thunderf00t gets back on track, I'm unsubscribed.

Quick thoughts on Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

In a lot of respects, the Occupy Wall Street protests mirror the Tea Party rallies -- disorganized, partisan (but nobody admits it), and not particularly unified on any particular goal. The overarching themes are good ones: the greed and irresponsibility of big banks, and the weakening of the middle class.

But I'm bothered by something. Back when Clinton was President and America was in the midst of a historic economic boom, one of those Dateline-type news shows had a special about debt in America. While the economy was booming, Americans were taking on record debt such that what used to be our 'savings rate' had become our 'negative savings rate'. I was barely old enough to vote and didn't have any credit cards, but I remembered thinking, This is gonna come back to bite us.

It's easy to pin the problems of the economy on wealthy corporations and big banks, many of whom raked in record profits even as the economy tumbled and unemployment soared. And certainly, I don't want to diminished the unequivocal fact that banks engaged in stupid and irresponsible practices that hurt their customers, only to receive a nice padded bailout from Washington.

But the fact is, Americans have been reckless too. Bigtime. Average credit card debt in American households is over $10,000. Personally, I've been through my share of credit card debt, and learned my lesson in the process: I don't buy stuff I can't afford. Crazy, right? Who'd a thunk? As a musician, there's not a day that goes by when I'm not drooling over some gorgeous guitar or amplifier. Or effects board. Whatever. I have a pretty fat credit line -- far more than I'll ever need -- and it'd be easy to just slap one of those purchases on the card. But I don't. I know that if I tuck money away for a while, that gear will still be there when I can afford it. I don't go out and waste money on expensive drinks at bars and clubs, and I only go out to eat on special occasions.

And that's not to say I'm Scrooge McDuck. If you want to be a personal trainer/guitar teacher, it had better be because you love what you do, not because it's going to net you that Mercedes coup. But I'm afloat, and don't take on more than I can handle.

Imagine if each of those American households had that $10k in savings! We'd still have issues with income disparity than make it harder for working-class Americans to save, and we'd still have irresponsible banks and corporations. But we'd at least have our own houses in order.

31:17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
31:18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.