Siderial Heresy

We have the power to change minds.

2009-03-18T18:48:00.000-07:00

Last Fall, I put together a skeptics event on my campus that was retroactively dubbed "Skepticon." And here we are, just a few short months later, preparing for Skepticon II, which will honestly make Skepticon I look like chicken feed.

Today, PZ posted a blog about a grateful e-mail he received from a student who attended the first Skepticon.

Last semester I took a Religions of the World course, and as an extra-credit assignment, I was given the option to attend an event at the Missouri State University, at which you spoke. I went, and let me tell you, it was probably one of the most jarring and terrifying moments of my life. I'd always known there were those who strongly opposed religion. In fact, one of my best friends in high school was an extreme skeptic, who constantly asked me the tough questions, you know, the ones that usually can only be answered with "He works in mysterious ways." But I'd never been in a room packed with people who whooped and cheered every time a stab was taken at the way I'd chosen to live my life. It was chilling and upsetting and I wanted to leave every second since you'd first opened your mouth. I didn't hate you for saying it. How could I? It was your belief and you were sharing it, which you have every right to do.

But what horrified me the most wasn't the room full of atheists, or the seemingly impenetrable arguments you provided that I should completely dump my faith and see the world in a different light. What turned my stomach and threatened to send me off the edge were the stories you told of Christians giving the rest of us a bad name, such as those at the Catholic Mass when the student stole the cracker and received death threats. I suppose hypocrisy is simply the nature of the conventional Christian. They act like children in a tree house that throw rocks at anyone who hurts their feelings.

Atheists ranting about how the past five generations of my family are superstitious crackpots I can handle, because the atheists are standing for what they believe, but when people who claim to have devoted their lives to furthering the love and compassion that Jesus showed start acting in ways that negate every message they've ever tried to present, or they choose which biblical rules they want to follow and which to ignore, and things like that, it really just makes me sick.

Anyway, I suppose this isn't terribly interesting to you in any event, but I've resolved to stop sitting in church and being spoon fed pre-cooked beliefs, and to start seeking answers by asking questions I was afraid to before. The founder of Buddhism once said, "Do not believe these things because I've told you to, but find truth through your own experiences." I've adopted that to the core of my beliefs.

I still believe in God, and I still consider myself a Christian, but I'm seeing things in a different light. I'm finding the meaning behind the rituals and traditions, rather than just believing there's power in "holy" water or an oyster cracker. I've begun searching for the reasons why certain rules are administered, instead of just saying "because the bible says so".

I don't know if you'll ever read this, and I don't know if I'll ever come in contact with you again, but I want to sincerely thank you. I know I completely missed the purpose of your speech, but whether or not you actually accept my thanks isn't the point. I hope that maybe others of my faith can learn the lesson I did, and I definitely think that it's a good idea to listen what nonbelievers have to say.

After all, knowledge never really hurt anyone, right?

So often I hear people say "What's the point of being an evangelist of reason, nobody's going to change their minds." That's pure bollucks, and it's precisely what the fundamentalists want you to say. People do change their minds.

The Skeptical Student was a Christian when I first met him here at MSU. He changed his mind.

In my five years of being a vocal skeptic and critic of religion, I've received over 40 e-mails from people who thanked me for helping them abandon faith. They changed their minds. Who knows how many more never e-mailed me?

Ben over at War on Error changed his mind.

I changed my mind.

Our nation is slowly changing their minds (and even our nation is only following the pattern of the world), and it's because finally, for the first time in the course of the human experiment, a large contingent of people are charging past the taboo of criticising faith and demolishing the pretensions of religion without apology.

Good reasoning is irresistible. If the case for any proposition is strong enough, you will helplessly believe it, whether you can admit it to yourself or not. We have the power to wake people up and expose them to the light of reason. And faith, like cockroaches, does not do well in the light.

"The premise of evangelical atheism is that you can introduce people to the importance of reason and they will come to a reasonable conclusion on their own. The premise of evangelical faith is that people must accept an arbitrary belief because an arbitrary judge, who the convert may not query, demands it. The former kind of proselytizer ought to be called a teacher, but is more often called an arrogant asshole; the latter ought to be considered a liar, a fraud, and an arrogant asshole in fact, but they actually believe they are humble servants of the lord." ~ PZ Myers

Science, you're doing it wrong

2009-03-12T07:09:00.000-07:00

It's come to light that one of the biggest names in anesthetics, Dr. Scott S. Reuben, fabricated data on 21 of his over 70 papers in peer review. This is huge because of the impact of Dr. Reuben's work. It is also huge because every anti-science theocratic wackaloon is going to begin flying this as a banner for how science is "just a bunch of theories" and contaminated with contingency. In short, Dr. Reuben has hosed countless patients whose anesthesia was administered based on his work; he has hosed the scientific community by occupying a bank of resources that could have been more productively used elsewhere; and he has hosed people like me, who take the time out of their lives to defend science, and must now blog about it rather than getting that extra thirty minutes of sleep. Dr. Reuben should have his ankles bound to a cement block, doused with oil, set on fire, and then just before he burns to death be kicked into a lake to drown. Such is the penance for aggravating me (commenters be warned).

Seriously though, the scientific world is simply baffled about how this type of thing could have slipped past peer review. Many religious people will cite this as some form of vindication for how peer-review surely fails to jettison bad science, with their implication being that it has failed to jettison scientific ideas they do not like based on ideology rather than even a cursory understanding of the scientific method. They'll probably also type their truimphant nonsense on a computer that could not function except for what peer-review has produced on the function of electromagnetism. Tools.

So before the following argument goes flying (and I'm sure it will), let's take note of something very important. Science is sadly, not contingency-free. No method is. And when we hear the shrieks of "Ha! Science got it wrong!" it's important to note that science actually got it right. When error like this does arise in science, who gets the credit for correcting it? Faith? Of course not. The credit belongs to good science. Even now, scientists are in the process of correcting this error, and our policy on anesthesia will change to cohere with what we do have a right to claim knowledge of. Remember, the world around you is a symphony spun by the fruits of science. It is not faith that has given us plentiful food, clean water, reliable medical treatment, computers, and so on, but rather the same processes that have caught Dr. Reuben (albeit, inexplicably much later than usual) and will abandon him to shunned obscurity henceforth.

The fact that peer review and the scientific process catches frauds and corrects errors is not a testament to the frailty of science, but rather to a strength that can only be acquired by such a scrutinizing process of self-improvement. It is what science has so right that religion has so wrong. And now we're about to get hit by a wave of stupidity, insisting that because scientists were slow to catch this fraud that the yarn about talking snakes and magical gardens somehow explains anything or has provided a single iota of human knowledge - which shows about how reliable their reasoning is. The truth is that science has the ability to admit that its talking snakes were mistakes. Good luck getting the same concession from a clergyman.

And now, a quote from my father in response to a religious person exclaiming that there's power in prayer (turns out, there's not):

"I'll pray for you" is a phrase some Christians use in order to make themselves feel smugly superior by doing nothing at all, especially when they are unable to defend their position through truth, reason, or logic. It is nothing but a form of one-upsmanship, usually heard as a last desperate shot when their arguments are lying in tatters around their feet along with all caps and lots of exclamation points.

Beautiful. I can tell I'm going to be using this one in abundance.

We are winning

2009-03-09T10:08:00.001-07:00

"It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window." ~ Sam Harris

Slowly, but very surely, people are dropping religion.

The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.

These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, "the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion," the report concludes.

There really is no other possible outcome. Information is antithetical to unreason, and we are truly in an age of information. With every new discovery, it becomes more and more superfluous to appeal to magic.

I really do think that our generation will be the one to drive religion to the fringe in this country: where it rightly belongs.

(If you really want to bathe in stupid, read the comments on the article)

"People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power." ~ Sam Harris

Deliver us from evil

2009-03-05T12:01:00.000-08:00

I spend an inordinate amount of my time shredding the bad arguments of religiously unreasonable people. Years of doing this has helped acclimate me to the horror of dogma and the way we can kick compassion to the curb for the arbitrary whims of a pernicious and mythological god.

However, some things still disgust me so much that they defy any attempt to find the right phrase or wording to convey how stupid, how callously inhuman they are. This is one of those times. Here's the title:

Brazil girl, alleged rape victim, aborts twins
The procedure on the 9-year-old girl draws complaints from Catholic church

And here's the text. Read ahead if you'd like to ruin your day and what faith you had left in mankind.

RIO DE JANEIRO - A 9-year-old girl who was carrying twins, allegedly after being raped by her stepfather, underwent an abortion Wednesday despite complaints from Brazil's Roman Catholic church.
Police said the stepfather has been jailed since last week.
Abortion is illegal in Brazil, but judges can make exceptions if the mother's life is in danger or the fetus has no chance of survival.
Fatima Maia, director of the public university hospital where the abortion was performed, said the 15-week-old pregnancy posed a serious risk to the 80-pound girl.
"She is very small. Her uterus doesn't have the ability to hold one, let alone two children," Maia told the Jornal do Brasil newspaper.
But Marcio Miranda, a lawyer for the Archdiocese of Olinda and Recife in northeastern Brazil, said the girl should have carried the twins to term and had a cesarean section.
"It's the law of God: Do not kill. We consider this murder," Miranda said in comments reported by O Globo.
Calls to Miranda were not immediately returned.
Brazil is home to more Catholics than any other nation.

Monsters.

What god could exist that would not be ashamed of Christianity? What god could possibly allow these faith-drunk madmen to speak for him? Irrationality is dangerous, and there is no more productive engine of irrationality, and no more impenetrable edifice of outlandish stupidity, than religion.

On the incompatibility of science and faith

2009-03-05T08:06:00.000-08:00

An old voice teacher of mine, a brilliant friend named Marvin Murphree, linked me to this article the other day which suggests that science and faith are compatible. I think otherwise.

Non-overlapping Magisteria

The author of the aforementioned article went the route of saying that science and religion address different questions, with religion tackling the who and why and science explaining the what and how. However, I take issue with his use of the word "explain."

Religion just makes stuff up that is false by any sane definition of the word. That is not how science operates.

What's more, he bases religion's magisteria on implied truths that have no evidence supporting them. While we know there is a what and how to the operation of the universe, who says that there must be a who and why? I submit that there is no reason to assume there is a who or a why to the functionality of the universe, and most certainly not an omniscient, perfect intelligence. A look at the universe reveals it to be the work of a fairly incompetent engineer at best, as it took billions of years of trial and painful error to reach its current state. A perfect designer would not require such a system. It is also still riddled with a host of simple errors that are just what we would expect to see in a universe that operates on a series of mindless rules, but that are just bizarre if a god created anything. These are things like the existence of the appendix, babies heads being bigger than the birth canal, and the clunky nature of DNA.

Furthermore, everything that we have explained has been found to have a natural rather than a supernatural explanation. Everything. You may respond that surely some intelligence put into place those natural explanations, but how do you know this? Before answering, be sure to have a good explanation for why your reasoning doesn't apply to the creator you're suggesting as well.

The questions that religion purports to answer here are superfluous before any evidence is provided to show that they are legitimate.

Religion is based on scientific questions...it just gets the answers wrong

The author of the article says:

No amount of logic must deduce they oppose each other. They're asking different questions, which lead to different answers, but not necessarily contradictory answers.Religion errs when it seeks to dictate the range of answers science can discover.

But the question "Did a man rise from the dead 2000 years ago?" is a question of Biology. And the question "Did Jesus walk on water or transmute water into wine?" is a question about Physics. The Christian faith makes a magnificent glory of how these propositions fly in the face of science, which is why they're called "miracles". But science has the (obvious) answer to both of these questions, and religions have no sound evidence for why the natural order was abrogated in the ways they claim. The entire Christian religion is based on the truth of Jesus' resurrection, which could not conflict with science more.

Differences in Method

The very nature of making a truth claim implies some degree of testable prediction about the future. A simple example would be the statement "I own a chess set." The implication here is that if you sift through every possession I own, amongst them you would find a chess set. Science makes testable predictions in this vein;

If we add wings and the right type of engine, this vessel will fly.
If we use the proper type of filament and apply electricity, it will produce light.
If we replace a particular organ, this patient will live.
If we apply our hand to the knob and turn, the door will open.

Religion does no such thing, but the fact that religion attempts to make such claims is the reason that science has been a one-way erosion of religion from the get go. Don't believe me? Try this simple, two-question test:

Think of one thing for which we once had a religious answer, but for which we now have a scientific answer (this one should not be difficult).
Think of one thing for which we had a scientific answer, but for which we now have a religious answer (don't waste too much of your time).

The notion of faith is used, without evidence, to force assertions into areas we have not explained (argument from ignorance) and even into subjects we have explained. The idea that you can believe anything without evidence or good reasoning is anti-scientific, and this isolation of thought is why schoolboards everywhere are having to combat religious wackos who want to dilute science at best, but more often purge the parts of it that conflict with their faith. The fact that some scientists believe in a god or that some believers accept Evolution has everything to do with the partitionable nature of the human mind, and nothing at all to do with the idea that the two schools of thought are compatible. Scientific reasoning will lead you to conclude that men do not rise from the dead, and that they do not walk on water. It would be a terrible scientist that would accept either claim without evidence.

So the truth claims made by religions do not meet the criteria for being a legitimate truth claim by any sane standard. Science thrives on such things.

Also, science places a very high premium on overturning truth claims upon the discovery of new evidence. This is why if you were to revive a very well-educated man from the fourteenth century, his understanding of math, science, history, and any academic discipline would embarrass a modern five year-old. But his understanding about scripture would be spectacular, easily exceeding most religious people nowadays. Why is this? There are only two real possibilities:

That we reached the zenith of our understanding of god at a time when our understanding of every other subject was completely inchoate. (not likely) or...
Religion, and the faith that supports it, is the mere maintenance of dogma, and does not admit of change - even in the face of academic advance.

Religion does not overturn its claims because its truth claims are not falsifiable. The presumably liberal theologian who penned the article says theistic Evolution is compatible with his faith, but I'd be curious to know if there is any fact of the world that would not be compatible with his faith? That is not because his faith is strong, but because it is built on an idea that is not falsifiable (the way scientific ideas must be). Self-fulfilling prophesies are worthless as a means of explanation.

Moreover, even theistic scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth Miller compartmentalize their scientific mindset by failing to hold their religious beliefs to the same standards they hold their science. If you are asking if an idea is merely possible given your presumptions, you will almost never be disappointed (my belief that pixies authored the universe and put all the natural mechanisms in place remains strong, as every new discovery confirms and strengthens my belief by revealing a mechanism of the universe, which I know was put there by pixies). Instead, if we are using scientific reasoning, we must ask if the best explanation for a universe that is pitiless and indifferent in its execution and laden with all manner of engineering flaws, is a loving, omniscient god (or pixies). Clearly, it's not.

Why this guy's outro was made of fail

This part made me want to claw my eyes out:

Sometimes, atheistic evolutionists annoy me. They overstep their bounds, confident that because they feel they have good answers for the what and how of creation, they do not need a Who or why.

The universe does not need a who or a why - it appears to be chugging along just fine with its mindless processes and inanimate objects. We probably get annoyed with you because you insist it does need a who or a why without providing any evidence. That is not "overstepping our bounds," it is simply making a rational appraisal. Do you have some manner of evidence that the universe has an ultimate purpose or was blasted into being by a god? Show us. But in science it is never noble to pretend to know things you do not (it's even less noble to say we are overstepping our bounds by calling you on it).

He goes on:

But more than annoy me, they make me sad. For when they close their minds to the possibilities outside their sphere, they also close their hearts to a relationship with the God of love, Who has transformed my life and filled it with meaning and purpose. I feel sorry for them.

Ah, the old implications that atheists are forlorn people who are close-minded to their salvation. What crap. My mind is open to god the same way it's open to unicorns. If you take me out behind your house and show me that you have a unicorn tied up (and I can actually use its blood to heal my wounds), I will change my mind so fast it would make your head spin. The same is true with a god. My mind isn't closed, there's just no evidence. What there is, is an entire demographic of religious people who use crummy arguments to support a conclusion that is not bound by reason, even as they claim their faith is reasonable.

Don't feel sorry for us. The univere is a wonderous place full of unimaginable surprises. We are capable of seeing it for the magnificence it possesses in full, rather than through the blurry lens of fantasy. Furthermore, we don't have to deal with the cognitive dissonance, n00bs!

Ultimately, it all boils down to evidence and good reasoning. Science embodies them, and religion thrives on finding ways to avoid their constraints. This leaves about as much room for compromise as a coin toss.

Bad Philosophy Part II

2009-03-02T06:41:00.000-08:00

Lauren has written a positively wonderful list of common logical fallacies employed by religious people. Read up! It'll prevent you from getting taken advantage of or bullied by religious people.

Also, familiarize your children with it. Religious people love to prey on the minds of those too young to defend themselves.

Ad Hominem: Attacking the person instead of their presented ideas.

Ex: OMG! You are just a mean, evil atheist who is going to hell because you don’t believe in Jayysus.

Appeal to Ignorance: appealing to ignorance as evidence for something.

Ex: Since we have no evidence that God doesn’t exist, he must.

Argument from Omniscience: Saying that all people, everyone everywhere think or believe a certain thing.

Ex: Everyone believes something! (Orly? How can you support this claim o’ omniscient one? I submit that you cannot.)

Appeal to Tradition/Belief: Saying something is true or good because it has been done for many years/decades/centuries.

Ex: Christianity has been around since, like omg forevers! So it must be true! Also-My parents raised me to believe in god so it’s what I believe.

Appeal from Authority: Using the words of an ‘expert’ on the subject to add credibility to your claim.

Ex: Ben Stein believes in god and he’s, like, really smart!

Argumentum Ad Baculum: Presenting an argument that is based on a threat.

Ex: If you don’t believe in god you will burn forever in the fiery depths of hell with no marshmallows, sucka!

Appeal to Ignorance: Assuming that someone will accept your argument because there is no proof of the contrary.

Ex: Because there is no proof that God doesn’t exist, you should accept that he does.

Appeal to Pity: Trying to get the other side to feel sorry for you to get them to agree with you.

Ex: I have nothing but god in my life, I was a bad person before and now I am good because I have accepted my savior, therefore religion is credible.

The Bandwagon: Arguing that just because lots of people are doing it makes it right.

Ex: Like, hundreds of people believe in god, so there must be one!

Begging the Question: Demanding your audience accepts whatever conclusion you come to without any sort of support or evidence to your case.

Ex: Worshipping a god improves the morals of society. (What proof do you have, Mr./Miss jesuspants?)

Burden of Proof: When one argues for something and then forces their opponent to prove otherwise.

Ex: You think god doesn’t exist? Prove it! (Apparently atheists are always on trial for their beliefs so we have to be well read motherfuckers while everyone else can skip around happily ignorant.)

Circular Reasoning: Stating in your argument what you’re trying to prove.

Ex: God exists because the bible tells me so, the bible exists because god created it.

Confirmation Bias: When one who is presenting an argument purposefully ignores the evidence that does not support their cause.

Ex: People of religion who expound upon the powers of prayer based on a few cases where it happened to work out rather than the millions of other ways it has not.

Confusion as to Correlation=Causation (Or Cause/Effect): Assuming that because two factors are linked when there is no verifiable proof that they are.

Ex: Stalin was an atheist and look at all the bad shit he did. Therefore, all atheists must want to do bad shit. (This can also be called ‘guilt by association’-all atheists are like Stalin)

False Dilemma/Dichotomy: Presenting only two options, one of which must be true.

Ex: Either the universe came about by chance or by design. It didn't come about by chance. So, it must have come about by design.

Hasty Generalization: Drawing a conclusion about a population using a sample that is not large enough.

Ex: That one atheist I met is a real jerk. All atheists must be jerks.

Non-Seqiutor: When a conclusion doesn’t follow what evidence has been presented.

Ex: We can't figure out how any natural process could account for the complexity of the human cell or whatever complex biological entity. Therefore, an intelligent designer must have put these parts together in the cell.

Middle Ground: Attempting to accept that the middle ground between two extreme ideas must be right simply because it is the middle.

Ex: Agnostics. (Suckers! Lol.)

Misleading Vividness: Allowing recent events to overshadow facts and evidence.

Ex: Person 1-I’ve been thinking about becoming an atheist. Person 2-What? No! Last week I talked to this atheist and they were really mean and spiteful and no one liked them at the church bake sale. Person 1-Oh! I guess I won’t, then.

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc: Assuming that because one thing happens after another that the two are linked.

Ex: After you prayed super hard for a pay raise at work for a couple weeks, you got one. Therefore, the power of prayer has been proven.

Poisoning the Well: A type of Ad Hominem fallacy, this is where someone spreads unfavorable information about a person (true or false) in order to discredit whatever they should say.

Ex: Don’t listen to them, they’re atheists! *Gasp!*

Red Herring: When an arguer will change the subject in order to divert attention from their crap argument.

Ex: God exists. You don’t think so? You’re a bad person! Look at all the bad stuff you do!

Reification Fallacy: When someone treats an abstract belief or hypothetical construct as if it represented a concrete event or physical, tangible entity.

Ex: God.

Relativist Fallacy: When a person rejects a claim by asserting that the claim might be true for others but is not for them for whatever reason.

Ex: Person 1-You’re claim that a god exists is unjustified, unsupported by any evidence, and riddled with logical fallacies, therefore I cannot accept it. Person 2-Well that may be true for you but it’s not for me.

Slippery Slope: Presenting a chain of events and assuming that one will inevitably lead to the other and so forth so you must accept a claim.

Ex: If you don’t believe in god, then you are a bad person, bad people go to hell, in hell you burn eternally, burning eternally sucks, so you should believe in god.

Special Pleading: Someone applies standards, principles, rules, etc. to others while taking themselves (or those they have special interest in) to be exempt, without providing adequate justification for the exemption.

Ex: I am a Catholic. I follow the bible, as do my peers because it is what we believe is right. I use birth control, though, because I am a pretty princess.

Straw Man Fallacy: To distort or misrepresent the arguments that you are trying to refute.

Ex: You don't believe in god? Why would you believe that everything just appeared?

Two Wrongs Making Right: Justifying one’s actions because another has done the same.

Ex: How can you give me crap for criticizing my religion when you do the same? (This has no relevance to an argument, people.)

Weak/False Analogies: Comparing two things that aren’t really alike in all of the relevant respects.

Ex: Atheists and religious people are the same because they both believe something.

Um...why?

2009-03-01T18:28:00.001-08:00

I ganked this without remorse from Andrea the Nerd.

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. -- Genesis 3:16

And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days: and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean.--Leviticus 15:19

But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die.--Deuteronomy 22:20-21

For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.--1 Corinthians 11:7

Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak.... And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home. -- 1 Corinthians 14:34-35

Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.--1 Timothy 2:11-12

And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing.--1 Timothy 2:14-15

No man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth. These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins.--Revelation 14:3-4

[link]

...I don't get it.

(P.S. Yes, I realize that this is a selection across multiple religions, but as the majority of those in the US are Christians, it is still quite appropriate.)

Spot on. I've never understood how any competent female (well, how any competent person, but especially women) could subscribe to such a flagrantly and historically sexist religion. This is a testament to the sultifying powers of faith.

Feedback

2009-02-27T08:08:00.000-08:00

This blog has been used thus far for more researched blog entries, but I'm going to start blogging here more frequently and with a more jovial/rage-filled tone. I'm also going to rename the blog. I'm thinking something like "A Harmony of Reason" or something like that. Something that would marry my love for music with my love for skepticism.

Any ideas?

Revulsed, but not surprised

2009-02-27T08:03:00.000-08:00

You'll recall my recent entry about Republicans being petty and stupid, which I think was a very tame assessment of them. I think the stupidity of Buttars and Jindal especially, is so maladaptive and lacking of basic human empathy (opposition to science that prevents national disasters and extreme bigotry to normal people) as to be considered evil.

Yet, the Republicans never cease to raise the bar for harrowing amounts of doltish lunacy. Meet Dave Schultheis, Republican senator from Colorado. He thinks providing HIV testing to pregnant women, rather than being a necessary step towards the suppression of the disease, is a bad idea because it would promote promiscuity. However, the fun doesn't stop there...

“What I’m hoping is that, yes, that person may have AIDS, have it seriously as a baby and when they grow up, but the mother will begin to feel guilt as a result of that,” he said. “The family will see the negative consequences of that promiscuity and it may make a number of people over the coming years begin to realize that there are negative consequences and maybe they should adjust their behavior.”

Yes, he just said that bringing a child with AIDS into the world would be a suitable punishment for sleeping around. No real concern for the poor kid, but boy wouldn't it be a suitable punishment for the mother? Ah, family values.

This is reminiscent of when we released a vaccine for HPV, a disease that is responsible for 1 out of ever 4 cases of cervical cancer. Hard-lining religious kooks and their Republican mouthpieces opposed that one as well, also on the grounds that it would supposedly encourage promiscuity. That's right, they wanted to keep cancer as a detterrent for sex.

These people are batshit crazy.

We live in a world where you can have responsible sex with many different partners with almost certain safety, if you're employing all the protections available. Do it. If you're uncomfortable with even the amazingly small chance that something could go wrong in that case, work on your oral skills. There's no reason not to aside from paranoia brought on by silly notions about men in the sky, angels, and the evils a-dancin'. Sex is not a bad thing (in fact, it can be quite enjoyable). Educate yourself. Educate your kids.

There are, of course, other excellent ways to reduce your chance of pregnancy or contracting an std...

This cultish obsession that our various religions have with virginity was stupid enough to begin with, but if it's going to extend into an arena where we utilize children as pawns fodder in our culture wars to punish a mother for making mistakes (as if a disease that slowly kills her isn't punishment enough) it is unarguably time to send this rancid bit of ancient morality back to where it came from; it has separated us from our humanity at this point. Hell, it separated us from our humanity when we cast the first stone for paltry, imaginary crimes thousands of years ago...and here we are in the 21st century, dredging the ignorance of our ancestors into the present and voting for people who promise to continue doing so.

Really...I just can't even fathom this. Who but the devil himself could think that bringing a child into this world with a life-threatening disease, a child that will almost surely be orphaned in short order after the death of its mother from the same disease, is a fitting punishment for a single mistake? These people are monsters. Sadly, they're also your leaders.

Republicans are being petty and stupid

2009-02-26T07:53:00.001-08:00

But mostly stupid. It's no secret that the Republican party is the party of fundamentalist Christianity in all its fetid forms, so this should come as no surprise.

I didn't get to see Bobby Jindal's appeal to emotion following Obama's speech, but the youtube videos would have made me roll on the floor busting a gut if this guy didn't represent at least half the votes in a state. Jindal bypassed any argument of substance (if such an argument existed) and went straight to trying to tie Obama to the ineptitude of FEMA's response to Katrina.

On top of that, he stuck with the most maladaptive consistency amongst the Republican party: that of being anti-science. In talking about the pittance in the stimulus for monitoring volcanoes, Jindal said "Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.".

A few things here. Number one, and I want to put this as delicately as possible...

VOLCANO ERUPTIONS KILL PEOPLE YOU INSENSITIVE DUMBASS!!!!

Aside from killing people, they do tons of damage. The last eruption of Mt. St. Helens cost us 2.74 billion dollars. And the US has the third most volcanic eruptions per year (behind Indonesia and Japan). The amazing irony here is that we actually have the capability of determining almost precisely when a volcano will erupt. It requires the installation of a relatively inexpensive GPS system to monitor movement in the ground. The lion's share of the cost of these systems is for their installation and maintenance, which creates/saves jobs. Consider that Mt. Redoubt in Alaska has been threatening to erupt again since January, and we have been unable to determine the time of eruption because, wait for it, we lack one of these relatively inexpensive GPS systems there due to, you're never going to believe this, lack of funding. Thanks Bush administration that gutted science and education funding.

Second, we should be monitoring the eruption of spending in Washington? Where were our Republican saviors the last eight years?

Third, does anybody else find it a little ironic that the governor of Louisiana thinks it's wasteful to support funding for the prevention of national disasters? That's like a general saying it's wasteful to spend money on kevlar and guns. Let's face it, right now the Republican party is contaminated with people who are completely oblivious to reality - and yet they affect laws that should be based entirely in reality. They chose Jindal, one of their shining lights, to attempt to rebut Obama - and this is what one of their best and brightest brought to the table. Ug.

Moving on, how about Senator Chris Buttars out of Utah, that festering pile of religious quackery that wants to dictate the lives of others (but not have them lash back)? He has some opinions about gay people that are about as far removed from reality as you can get:

"What is the morals of a gay person? You can't answer that because anything goes."

Or how about this one?

"They're probably the greatest threat to America going down I know of."

Well, I know a lot of homosexuals, and I think that sentence is true...but not in the context Buttars was going for. Innuendo ftw!

Thankfully, Buttars was stripped of his committee appointments, but then we got to hear some measly, wormy defense of Buttars:

"I want the citizens of Utah to know that the Utah Senate stands behind Senator Buttars' right to speak, we stand behind him as one of our colleagues and his right to serve this state," Waddoups said. "He is a senator who represents the point of view of many of his constituents and many of ours. We agree with many of the things he said. ...We stand four square behind his right [to say what he wants]."

And then there's the woman they thought was the best choice to be a heartbeat away from leadership of the free world who, when asked at a bipartisan conference by her fellow Republicans if she'd like to share some of her plans and proposals for the upcoming legislation, responded:

"I feel like you guys are always trying to put me on the spot."

Yeah...those Republicans and their "gotcha" questions.

Forgive the alliteration, but right now the Republican party is run by a cultish collection of clowns. It is hindering forward progress and obstructing important legislation with paltry concerns like the demands of their faith and the obstruction of human rights. It's also introducing rank idiocy like everything above into our governmental discourse when it should be laughed at and jettisoned immediately.

These are your leaders, and faith prompts people not only to vote for them, but to defend them, even when they are the most compassionless and nonsensical - in fact, it prompts religious people to defend them because they are compassionless and nonsensical.

Is there any greater force for the enshrinement of stupidity?

Ideological Bullies

2009-02-20T07:15:00.000-08:00

Boogity boogity boogity!!!

When you don't have facts on your side, your one recourse is to try and scare/intimidate people. Don't believe in Jesus? Well...

A) Here's a reasoned case for why you should, replete with tangible evidence.
B) You're going to hell then!!!

We all know which one they choose.

Anyway, the same mindset plays through when they talk about the effects of non-belief on various political ideas, such as treating gay people like full-fledged human beings.

This ad is featured in the Salt Lake Tribune by a group called America Forever. Isn't it scary-looking? One would almost expect to find "WAR IS PEACE, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH" at the top. You know how sometimes people will have a contest about who can guess how many M&Ms are in a jar? Well next time, we can try guessing how many grammatical errors are in a wingnut diatribe. Seriously, extreme faith in biblical truth seems to correlate with an inability to form senteces.

Also, what is it with overt religious types and the need to randomly slam the all-caps key? I mean, how often do you read in an Astronomy or other science text book something like:

According to Einstein's THEORY OF GENERAL RELATIVITY, a black hole is a Region of Space from how the gravitational field is SO POWERFUL THAT NOTHING, INCLUDING ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION (e.g. visible lite), can Escape its pull after having FALLEN far out its event horizon!!!!!!!!

The reason they do the big letters thing is to make the normal people of the gay community seem scary, like a threat. After all, the bible-thumpers have no case, so that's all they have left - just like when when they try to convince people of god's existence. These people are just ideological bullies, and all bullies hate it when people push back.

They've probably been reading this book too much. I wonder who could have left that review...

Radio Reminder

2009-02-19T15:23:00.001-08:00

Tonight I'm going to be a guest on the show JetGroove, an online radio show on The Growl. The show starts up at 11pm CST, so down some coffee and stay up.

Also, they take call ins and the number is up on the web page. Call in. Badger me. Ask me to explain things you know I can't.

Response to Paul Summers

2009-02-19T13:21:00.000-08:00

A while back Stephanie Perkins, a friend of mine who is now the regional director for the gay rights group PROMO, asked me to pen a response to a letter that got posted in the Springfield News-Leader by Paul Summers. His letter was about upcoming legislation here in Missouri that would bring greater opposition to the bullying of lgbt teens in public schools.

I didn't think that my response would get posted, since they wanted it cut down much further than I possibly could and still keep all the ideas in line, but they did.

Of course, some of the more pious members of rural Springfield are out in force in the comments section talking about what an evil, terrible, person I am. Almost all of them are tossing out the same complaint that Summers did about how the bill should be inclusive of more groups than just gays; an argument I addressed in my letter. I had pondered just copy/pasting an excerpt from the text of the bill, which it seems I should have:

"Bullying that is reasonably perceived as being motivated by actual or perceived race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, gender, sexual orientation as defined in section 557.035, RSMo, intellectual ability, physical appearance, or a mental, physical or sensory disability or disorder; or on the basis of association with others identified by these categories; is prohibited."

These people have not even read the blasted thing. They are just swinging their bible blindly in the dark hoping to thump something that isn't there.

There is no argument, no matter how air tight, that could dissuade these people, because their moral ideas are derived from beliefs that are immune to any conceivable challenge from the world of evidence. Such is the danger of allowing people to become comfortable believing crazy things.

Abortion should remain legal

2009-01-22T05:43:00.000-08:00

The following will be a growing document. I will add to it every time I encounter a new argument.

Intro

"From a point of view outside of this affair, the killing of a neurologically inactive fetus is no greater a harm than the killing of a mouse, and in fact decidedly less--a mouse is neurologically active, and though it lacks a complex cerebral cortex, it has a brain of suitable complexity to perceive pain." ~ Dr. Richard C. Carrier

The most frequent canard I encounter in discussing the morality of abortion is that it takes a life. As with any philosophical discussion, we need to first define our terms to ensure that we are all on the same page when we use the word "life" (or the words "baby" and "child" for that matter). After all, many things have life; they possess cells that replicate, undergo the Krebs Cycle, etc. Objects on this list include trees, sperm, and cancerous tumors. The list is literally so extensive as to defy concise description. So obviously "life" in the sense of merely being alive doesn't mean all that much, since we typically don't weep over chopping down a tree and we can be downright insistent on purging tumors. Clearly, there is a difference between something being alive and something having a life, and it seems that those who are opposed to abortion also make this distinction whether they admit it or not, since none of them mourn the loss of a tree.

Where then, do we draw the line on when it is alright to destroy something that is living (because if the loss of living cells bothers you, it's time to stop scratching your nose)? This point must be reached somewhere, since most of us would consider it morally wicked to snuff out the life of a freshly born human being. What are the criteria? At what point does the collection of cells within the pregnant female acquire a "life" such that it is separated in terms of humanity from other living things?

I suggest it has everything to do with consciousness and the ability of a being to suffer its own loss. This even makes sense medically. The point at which you are medically dead is when there is no activity in your central cortex (when your brain "flat lines"). At this point your heart may still be beating with the help of a pacemaker, your cells will still be active, and your lungs may still be breathing with the help of a respirator, but this is all irrelevant since the conscience that constituted "you" is gone and will never return. At that point your body is simply engaging in autonomous functions. There is no reason to consider you still alive or to grieve when we unplug your life support.

With a fetus, the brain does not become electrically active until the fifth month (typically the 20th week). Until that point, it is no different than killing anything else that is alive but cannot suffer its own loss. When we say the words "baby" or "child", we imply a creature that has lost something when it stops "living"; a zygote, an embryo, or a fetus is not a child. It is a collection of cells (until the end of the second month when minute organ development begins to occur), nothing more.

Argument from potential

An argument that almost unavoidably arises at this point is that a zygote will one day become a child (perhaps the next Beethoven!) if left unchecked. These people do not seem to realize that every sperm in my body is a potential human being (it just needs the female egg, itself a potential unique, glorious human being). Yet the prospect of this lost potential does not seem to frighten them out of their chastity (trust me, it doesn't). Why not?

I am certain that if all human beings went Sodom and Gomorrah-style crazy with lust, we would eventually produce a physicist that would dwarf Stephen Hawking or Einstein, or a composer that would reduce the work of Mozart to child's play. That's no reason to do it. The dire consequences of augmented, unmitigated population growth are very well documented. A woman should feel no obligation to produce a child she does not want, simply because that kid might be the first John Conner.

Why then do we care about the potential of a particular set of cells in the female because they share a similar potential?

Argument about souls

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, And before you were born I consecrated you; I have appointed you a prophet to the nations." ~ Jeremiah 1:5

There is not a scrap of evidence to suggest we have a soul that existed before birth or that will exist after death. All evidence suggests that conscience is tied exclusively to a functioning brain. Religious people can profess their certainty in this until they are blue in the face, but until they can evince even a decent reason to believe that it's true, they are just wrong by any rational standard.

Of course, nobody is insisting that religious people forfeit the right to reproduce as they please; nobody wishes abortion to be forced on anyone, even if their reasons for avoiding them are ludicrous. But you most certainly do not get to use your delusions to inflict others with their arbitrary, unfounded standard.

Argument from post-abortion trauma

In 1987, Ronald Regan asked then Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to produce a report assessing the possibility of trauma in the would-be mother. Scott's report concluded that "the available scientific evidence about the psychological sequelae of abortion simply cannot support either the preconceived notions of those pro-life or those pro-choice." This was as generous as the highly conservative Koop could be without being flagrantly dishonest. However, Regan ordered the report to be re-written to say that women did suffer post-abortion trauma, and it was (though Koop separated himself from it both publicly and during investiation) from this re-written report that the idea that abortions induced trauma was born.

Since both the announcement of that one disingenuous paper and the resulting beat down from the scientific and medical communities, all of our credible medical bodies have been in perfect harmony on the facts. The American Psychological Association sums it up nicely:

"The most methodologically sound research indicates that among women who have a single, legal, first-trimester abortion of an unplanned pregnancy for nontherapeutic reasons, the relative risks of mental health problems are no greater than the risks among women who deliver an unplanned pregnancy."

All the same, even if a higher portion of women did suffer depression after their abortions, you cannot shackle everybody for that. Women should still get the choice. However, the science is conclusive that no greater threat to mental health exists for having an abortion, so the argument is moot.

Outro

Abortion provides societal good by helping to mitigate population growth and by not saddling women with children they are not ready for, and there is no downside. All arguments to the contrary depend on either wrong information, outright lies, a lack of knowledge about the nature of pregnancy, beliefs about reality that are contra to the evidence and accepted on nothing more than faith, not spending enough time taking in the philosophy of the situation, or some conglomeration of all of the above. To quote Richard Carrier for the second time in this post:

"An act that causes no involuntary harm and produces some benefits for individuals and society in general should never be outlawed. This is based on the principle that laws should only exist to preserve and protect the liberty of individuals and, when no liberty is at stake either way, to increase the general welfare of all citizens."

There is no logical or empirical grounds upon which to illegalize abortions.

Information on Debates and other Discourse

2008-12-09T10:18:00.000-08:00

Due to my dwindling amount of time, I need to reorganize a little bit. I need to ensure that if I am going to be expending hours of my time, that it be done in a productive way. Below is any information you will need in order to acquire some of my time. :D

First, to get ahold of me, send an email to jteberhard@gmail.com.

Debates

I do debates in two formats: live debate and by blogalogue.

Live Debates

For live debates, there will need to be a specific debate topic and a competent moderator (preferably one with an established reputation of fairness). Beyond that, the format is up to you (and, of course, must be agreed upon by both participants), but I will need to know the format in enough time to prepare. If the topic is switched without my knowledge, I will not attend the debate.

Also, if I am required to travel, I will need you to cover my travel expenses. Neither heresy nor being a student pays very well, it turns out.

Blogalogues

If you wish to discourse with me on the web, this is the format I insist upon. It ensures that there is public pressure on both parties to be reasonable, and it allows me to focus my attention rather than spreading it out to FSM-knows how many comments on my various blogs.

As with live debates, there will need to be a specific question. Typically, whoever is making the positive claim should go first, though I am flexible on this.

All entries must be posted on both blogs.

Speaking

The only expense that must be covered is traveling if I must travel a fair distance. Otherwise, I am happy to speak, assuming you want me to cover a subject in which I feel comfortable. This would be subjects like the existence of god, critical thinking, gay rights, the scientific method, the reliability of science, etc. I will also need to know the duration for which you wish me to speak.

Publicity

If you want me to live debate or speak, I will plug your event on my blogs as well as within the community at Missouri State University. In the process of advertising, if you wish to use a picture you may use one of the following images:

The Large Hadron Collider

2008-11-30T08:07:00.000-08:00

An Astronomy student named Aron McCart recently asked me to review a research paper he was doing for a class. I loved the paper so much, I asked it I could repost it to my various blogs. Click on all images to biggify them.

Abstract
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The LHC is 7,000 more times powerful than any other particle accelerator ever created (LHC Safety Study Group). This has led to a renewed concern over the safety of high-energy particle collisions. This paper will examine the main safety arguments from both sides. The original safety concerns of high-energy particle collisions are the production of stranglets (stranglets will be described later in this paper) and micro black holes. Stranglet concerns have been disregarded because other particle colliders like the RHIC actually have a higher chance of creating stranglets (LHC Safety Study Group). In addition, most of the scientific community has dismissed micro black hole arguments with arguments centered on cosmic rays and Hawking radiation (Benjamin Koch). Many members of the scientific community, including the German Society of Physicists (KET), claim that lone arguments like Dr. Rossler’s arguments are based on a fundamentally flawed understanding of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It is the conclusion of this paper that LHC poses absolutely no danger to the Earth or humanity, and furthermore, the research from the LHC could fundamentally change the way we understand the universe and could lead to science fiction-like technologies.

Introduction
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Description of the LHC

The LHC is the largest, most expensive, most technologically advanced, and most powerful science experiment ever built by man. The LHC is a particle collider that physicists use to study the fundamental nature of matter by learning how particles behave during collisions. The LHC is designed to collide opposing beams of protons or lead ions and take extremely high-resolution pictures of those collisions. What makes the LHC so unique is that it is capable of accelerating particles to near the speed of light. It uses a huge series of the largest superconducting magnets ever built to shove particles though a metal 3.8-meter wide 17-mile circumference circle. It is located mostly in France and crosses the Franco-Swiss border at four different points. CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) began construction of the 8.2 billion dollar project in 1986. Construction was completed in summer 2008 and test runs commenced in September. However, during a test run one of the magnets failed and caused operations to cease until summer of 2009 (Large Hadron Collider).

Purpose of the LHC

In the standard model of particle physics, the last unobserved particle is called the Higgs boson. If the standard model is correct, the Higgs boson should exist. The Higgs boson is smaller than atoms, the protons and neutrons that make atoms, and the quarks that make protons and neutrons. It is theorized that Higgs boson is what gives all particles mass. However, since the Higgs boson has never been observed, the standard model is incomplete. It is hoped that during high energy collisions the Higgs boson will be created by breaking up other particles thus confirming the standard model. There are other less powerful colliders that have failed to create the Higgs boson, like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York. It is the hope of physicists that accelerating the particles to 99.999% speed of light the LHC will finally produce the Higgs boson (Large Hadron Collider). However, the most exciting part about the LHC is the possibility of proving the standard model wrong or finding other particles predicted by highly theoretical extensions of the standard model. For instance, the first real physical evidence of extra dimensions predicted by string theory might be observed at the LHC, or the graviton might finally be directly observed. If we can observe, predict, and control gravitons, things such as anti-gravity, artificial gravity and floating cars will be more of a reality instead of science fiction. However, it is expected that LHC will fall short of creating the energies for these theoretical particles to form, and that the LHC will not even find the Higgs boson. In fact, Steven Hawking, a world famous physicist, has placed a 100 dollar bet that LHC will not find the Higgs boson. He added, “That [the LHC] will show something is wrong, and we will need to think again” (BBC).

LHC opposition

The LHC has been subject to opposition from within the scientific community. The opposition is primarily related to safety concerns, like stranglets and micro black holes; however, there are some moral and ethical concerns as well. The scientific opposition is isolated to a few individuals, and has largely been considered discounted by the rest of the scientific community (KET) (Plaga) (Benjamin Koch) (Rossler). The scientific opposition consists of a few individuals working alone to form what other scientists consider self-contradicting arguments. By contrast, the response to scientific concern is dismissed by CERN-sponsored studies and large groups of independent scientists working together. The ethical concern is why the LHC has received billions of dollars for its construction while there are other issues, like poverty, deserving of the funding (Rossler). Poverty and other issues are very deserving of the LHC’s funding, but the LHC’s potential impact on science and humanity certainly justifies the LHC’s large price tag.

The first objections to the LHC’s safety were brought before it was even close to being completed. Similar arguments were brought up at the RHIC in New York. Walter L. Wagner is an American botanist and a former radiation safety officer. He earned his Biology degree with a minor Physics from UC Berkeley. Wagner contended that the differences between high-energy collisions with cosmic rays and the upper atmosphere are different from the “at rest” collisions at the LHC and could potentially have catastrophic consequences in the form of an Earth-devouring black hole. He tried to stop full-energy collisions unsuccessfully in US and European courts (Lite). Dr. Otto E. Rossler has similar concerns about black hole creation, but his arguments are considered self-contradicting and fail to bridge gaps between his claims and evidence (KET). The most recent and convincing arguments come from a German astrophysicist, Dr. Plaga Rainer. Dr. Rainer believes that you cannot rule out the possibility, however unlikely, of Earth-devouring black holes and dangerous theoretical Hawking radiation (Plaga). Ultimately, all of the opposition has failed to stop the LHC from operating at its full capacity. In summer of 2009 the LHC will achieve energies five times that of any collider before it (Large Hadron Collider).

Stranglets
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Stranglet properties

Stranglets are microscopic parcels of strange matter. In particle physics, normal atoms made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons are called nuclear matter. Nuclear matter is what the elements consist of and what gives them their unique properties. The individual protons, neutrons, and electrons are made up of quarks--specifically, up and down quarks. However, strange matter equally consists of up, down, and strange quarks while nuclear matter does not contain strange quarks. Strange matter more simply put is matter made of equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks that are more stable than nuclear matter, but for the purposes of this paper, negative stranglets are the subject for concern. Positive stranglets would be repelled by ordinary matter posing no threat. However, negative stranglets would actually be attracted to normal matter. It is theorized if negative stranglets were to come into contact with ordinary matter, it would instantaneously convert the nuclear matter into strange matter removing any properties it originally had. The concern is that a negative stranglet could convert the entire Earth into strange matter erasing at the atomic level every unique property about the Earth (Witten).

Evidence against stranglets

First, strange matter has never been observed anywhere. Strange quarks have been detected and created in laboratories for decades, but they have always decayed within a nanosecond, and more importantly have never created a stranglet. Strange matter is supposed to be the end product of nuclear matter if nuclear matter is not stable infinitely. It is also purely theory that strange matter could be more stable than nuclear matter. Regardless, the most likely place to find strange matter is neutron stars. Neutron stars are the end product of a star that is not quite massive enough to turn into a stellar black hole, but much more massive than our own star. At the atomic level, neutron stars are literally a gigantic nucleus packed so tight that individual atoms cannot form. Neutron stars are the focus of the search for strange matter and the focus of stranglet arguments (LHC Safety Study Group) (John Ellis).

If a neutron star contains strange matter it is called a strange star. However, there are many difficulties when it comes to finding these theoretical strange stars. Astronomers have been observing neutron stars for many decades, but the problem with detecting strange stars is that we are not sure what the observable difference is between strange stars and neutron stars. There are many great starting points, but astronomers lack the understanding of strange matter to form observational tests. However, observations of neutron stars have not demonstrated great cause to doubt they are neutron stars. In essence, we have not found any strange stars which when taken in context with the LHC, gives reason to worry about the formation of negative stranglets (Ghosh) (LHC Safety Study Group) (John Ellis).

Micro black holes
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Black hole properties

Micro black holes are essentially black holes that have incredibly low mass. In astrophysics, we believe that the smallest star that can form into a black hole is estimated to be 25 solar masses or 25 times the mass of our sun. Normal black holes usually come in two types: stellar mass black holes formed from the collapse of super-massive stars and billion plus solar mass super-massive black holes at the center of most galaxies (Black Hole). The common understanding of black holes sucking up everything around it is incorrect. Except for the event horizon, everything is normal about the gravitational field. For instance, if our sun was to magically turn into a black hole right now, our orbit, Mercury’s orbit, Jupiter’s orbit, or any other gravity-dependent variable would not change in any way whatsoever. However, our solar system would freeze because black holes do not shine as our star does. Besides the fact that our sun will never be a black hole, the only difference between it and its theoretical black hole twin is its radius. In our sun’s case, the radius is much larger than its event horizon. The sun’s black hole twin has a radius that is smaller than it’s event horizon. The event horizon is the point where light can no longer reach escape velocity. On the other hand, micro black holes have been theorized to form when super high-energy cosmic rays collide with atmospheres or the surfaces of neutron stars. At this incredibly low mass, micro black holes are supposed to evaporate into bright flashes of dangerous gamma radiation, according to Steven Hawking. Almost the entire scientific community has regarded the radiation to be negligible because it would be such a small amount. The other concern about micro black holes are if this incredibly small black hole could begin to accrete. They have masses around the atomic level, so their gravity is very small. Not only would it be very implausible for micro black holes to accrete a significant amount of matter, they are expected to leave the Earth near the speed of light.

Scenarios of micro black hole formation

There are two main scenarios proposed for micro black hole formation. However, Dr. Plaga proposes a third scenario that he believes is the one to be concerned about.

• The produced micro black holes decay immediately in flashes of gamma radiation via Hawking radiation.

• The produced micro black hole would pass through the Earth in any direction near the speed of light accreting an infinitesimally small amount of matter, if any.

• Dr. Plaga believes that astrophysical evidence does not rule out the idea of a micro black hole accreting matter, and that a micro black hole could be stable and not escape Earth’s gravity because the particles at the LHC collide from opposing directions at similar energies while cosmic rays collide with much greater energies from a single direction.

Evidence against dangerous micro black holes

The main concern about micro black holes and the LHC is that when the LHC is colliding protons at its maximum energy of 7 TeV micro black holes could form. One of the main arguments against the black hole formation within the LHC is cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are high energy rays that originate from things like supernovae and black holes. These cosmic rays have energies that are literally 100,000 times greater than what the LHC produces. Throughout Earth’s 4.5 billion year history over 100,000 cosmic rays have struck the Earth. The basic argument is that if these much more powerful collisions that occur with cosmic rays happen all the time while the Earth still exists, then the much less powerful collisions at the LHC pose no threat (John Ellis) (Steeven B. Giddings).

Some people have rightly pointed out that the model of cosmic ray collisions with the Earth does not rule out dangerous micro black holes (Plaga). A much more convincing argument lies in astrophysics. As said earlier, neutron stars are essentially huge atoms because the neutrons are packed so tightly atoms do not have room to form. These neutron stars are the perfect target for cosmic rays. The fact that neutron stars are so dense exponentially raises the probability that a micro black hole would form from cosmic ray collisions. In observations of neutron stars, no micro black holes have ever been observed accreting mass from neutron stars (John Ellis).

Shortly after Dr. Plaga published his article making the claim that micro black holes could remain in the Earth and accrete matter at a runaway rate, Dr Steven B. Giddings and Michelangelo L. Mangano published a paper claiming that Dr. Plaga’s math contains basic inconsistencies. Also, another paper titled Exclusion of black hole disasters at the LHC was published summarizing all arguments made for black hole formation, and the paper concluded that the LHC poses no danger in any logical manner. The basic argument behind dismissing Dr. Plaga’s argument is if micro black holes can remain within the Earth’s gravitational influence, then it must occur in things like neutron stars where the gravity is much stronger. Also, if the black hole does remain within the Earth or neutron stars, there is no risk of the black hole accreting matter on timescales less than its natural lifetime (The Earth’s natural lifetime is estimated to be 13 billion years.). Essentially, because a neutron star has never turned into a black hole and that Dr. Plaga’s math is inconsistent, the last remaining scenario of a black hole disaster poses no danger at all (Benjamin Koch) (John Ellis) (Steeven B. Giddings).

Conclusion
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The LHC represents the next great step in our understanding of how matter works. The standard model that physicists have been working on for decades could be proven correct, or it could send physicists back to the drawing board as Stephen Hawking predicts. If the LHC discovers extra dimensional particles, like the graviton, the LHC could shed light on string theory or even the multi-verse theory. Up until now, those theories have only consisted of elegant mathematical formulas with no physical evidence making them largely hypothetical. For the first time ever the LHC could turn them into real physical science. If the graviton can finally be observed, man’s future space exploration could greatly exceed the bounds of our solar system. Things like floating cars or anti-gravity enhanced spacecraft that could finally make space travel economical could exist. Graviton control could make things like moon bases and Mars bases a fraction of a percent of their current proposed costs.

Not only is it extremely exciting for particle physicists, it is also exciting for big bang researchers. The LHC will spend some of its operating time recreating energies that have not been seen in the universe since almost instantly after the big bang occurring. While the big bang theory explains the current observable evidence, it does not explain everything about how the big bang actually worked. The LHC could solidify or modify the big bang theory to a much higher degree increasing our understanding of the origin of our universe greatly.

After examining the current scientific debate about dangerous scenarios at the LHC, it becomes clear than neither stranglets or micro black holes pose any real danger. The proposed dangerous scenarios for stranglets already exist at places like the RHIC, and the LHC is actually less likely to produce stranglets than the RHIC. Also, all proposed scenarios for micro black hole formation have been examined in great detail by many in the scientific community, and there is a consensus among almost all scientists that none of the possible scenarios for micro black hole formation pose any threat to the Earth. This concludes that the LHC poses absolutely no danger, and it represents the next great leap in our understanding of the universe.

Works Cited
________________________________________
BBC. On the hunt for the Higgs boson. 9 September 2008. 19 November 2008 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7598000/7598686.stm>.

Benjamin Koch, Marcus Bliecher, Horst Stocker. "Exclusion of black hole disaster scenarios at the LHC." arXiv (2008).

Black Hole. 19 November 2008. 19 November 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_holes#cite_note-21>.

Ghosh, Sanjay K. "Astrophysics of Strange Matter." arXiv (2008).

John Ellis, Gian Giudice, Michelangelo Mangano, Igor Tkachev, Urs Wiedemann. Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions. CH 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland: Theory Division, Physics Department, CERN, 2008.

KET. "The LHC is safe." Wuppertal: University of Wuppertal, 1 August 2008.

Large Hadron Collider. 19 November 2008. 19 November 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider>.

LHC Safety Study Group. Study of potentially dangerous events during heavy-ion collisions at the LHC: Report of the LHC Safety Study Group. Geneva: CERN, 2003.

Lite, Jordan. Judge scraps lawsuit over Large Hadron Collider. 9 September 2008. 19 November 2008 <http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=judge-scraps-lawsuit-over-large-had-2008-09-30>.

Plaga, Rainer. "On the potential catastrophic risk from metastable quantium-black holes produced at particle colliders." arXiv (2008).

Rossler, Otto E. A Rational and Moral and Spiritual Dilemma. Tubingen: University of Tubingen, 2008.

Steeven B. Giddings, Michelangelo L. Mangano. "Astrophysics implications of hypothetical stable TeV-scale black holes." Physical Review (2008).

Witten, Edward. "Cosmic Separation of Phases." Physical Review (1984).

Gay Marriage: the Arguments

2008-11-12T07:33:00.000-08:00

This is a collection of all the arguments I have heard against gay marriage, and the reason why they are factually errant, logically vacuous, cruel and without empathy, or a combination of the three.

In order to get into some of these arguments, we all need to be on the same page about marriage's development. Historically speaking, the notion of marriage is a nebulous concept that changes constantly. While marriage traditions differ greatly from culture to culture, marriage within Jewish culture and subsequently Christian culture was seldom an issue of love, but rather a means of producing children, securing bloodlines, and managing property rights. This is why a widow was made to marry her husband's brother. Also, throughout much of it, women were considered chattel, which was a different way of saying "property" (the word itself being derived from "cattle").

The History

Polygamy.

"Although [polygamy] was lawful among the ancient fathers: whether it be lawful now also, I would not hastily pronounce." ~ St. Augustine, The Good of Marriage

Indeed, even Martin Luther, the catalyst for the Protestant Reformation from which we derive what would become our Christianity, wrote "I cannot forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict Scripture."

In 1650, the parliament of Nürnberg decreed that men could take up to ten wives for a brief period, and the Catholic Church adopted it.

Religious philosophers, starting with Augustine in the 5th century, debated the issue of polygamy for centuries. However, it was the Roman Catholic Church that put an official end to the practice in the 12th century.

Endogamy.

Marrying only within a particular social group (the opposite of exogamy, which is marrying outside your particular social group). Many Muslim groups still engage in this, as do some Christian groups. Until 1967, Christian groups opposed exogamy in the form of marrying somebody of a different race (thus supporting endogamy). Names for these types of laws were often similar to Virginia's "Racial Integrity Act," and they were justified as defending the traditional meaning of marriage. They did this citing passages from the bible, the most frequent of which was Phinehas and the curse of Ham. It should be noted that these laws would have prevented the marriage of Barrack Obama's parents.

Arranged Marriages.

These have been prevalent throughout history. We owe arranged marriages to the Hebrew edicts that marriage preserve property rights, as well as the tradition of marriage to tackle primarily financial issues. Often these marriages were conducted by proxy, in which somebody stood in for the groom. It is this tradition of marriage as a financial matter that gave us the idea of a dowry.

It was the troubadors of the 12th century that introduced the concept of romantic love to the notion of marriage, and begun to emancipate us from marriage, both in the religious and political sense, as an economic institution.

The list of assundry changes to the idea of marriage could quite literally go on forever, but this should be sufficient for arguments I'm about to make.

The Arguments

It is plain to see that any argument against gay marriage is merely bigotry dressed up as an argument, and if we are to be moral, good human beings with sensible moral imperatives, we must oppose bigotry wherever it rears its devout, ugly head.

We cannot "redefine marriage."

We cannot redefine marriage for whom? Marriage exists in many cultures and many faiths differently than it exists in yours. There is not a single definition of marriage, and the United States government recognizes several faiths as legitimate religions that have a different definition than yours. Many of these faiths will marry people of the same gender. To recognize one religion over another legally is an abrogation of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights.

By saying that we cannot redefine marriage, you are simply saying that the country must recognize your idea of marriage and grant you the monopoly on the concept. This is flagrantly discriminatory and for no good reason.

We must keep the traditional value of marriage.

Again, you do not seem to grasp the notion that there is no "traditional" value for marriage. The term is broad, and even marriage in your faith changes constantly (historically speaking). You really just want to force others, with their own notion of marriage (which is just as legitimate as yours) from keeping with their tradition. So in reality, it is you who is ignoring other cultures by demanding that they adhere to yours.

Also, as we've seen, tradition is a very poor measuring stick for what is fair. Traditionally, the United States allowed you to keep slaves (until we broke from that wicked tradition). Traditionally, blacks were not able to marry a majority of the citizens in the United States who didn't share their ethnic minority. We rightly eliminated those laws - far later that we should have. Tradition should be eliminated if it conflicts with compassion. There is no need to maintain a practice from a dated society with different needs than our current one, that conflicts with modernity. To do so could only be called regressive and stupid.

My brother put it very well once:

"I hear there are some voodoo hoodoo tribes in Africa where it’s a passage to manhood to rip some poor sap’s still-beating heart out of his chest and eat it raw while prancing about on a bed of hot coals and whacking off with their free hand. I hope they get rid of that tradition – that one sucks.

Some traditions should be flushed down the proverbial toilet, or at least be given a few rigorous wipes to make them applicable to modern society."

Homosexuality is a life-style choice.

Even if it is...who cares? Your traditional marriage once forbid marriage to a non-believer, which is certainly a choice. Why should whether or not loving somebody of the same gender is a choice even matter?

The following is a non-sequitor, since whether or not it's a choice is irrelevant.

Our most prestigious batteries of medical minds say it's not a choice. This is from the American Psychological Association in response to the question of whether or not homosexuality is optional:

No, human beings cannot choose to be either gay or straight. For most people, sexual orientation emerges in early adolescence without any prior sexual experience. Although we can choose whether to act on our feelings, psychologists do not consider sexual orientation to be a conscious choice that can be voluntarily changed.

All credible medical bodies are in concert with the APA on this subject. In order to part ways from them, you must have a good reason to deny the consensus of the experts. What is it?

Marriage is for the production of children.

Your idea of marriage may be. But, once more, you do not hold all the rights to the notion of marriage. Nobody is insisting that you must alter your particular set of tribalistic rules to accommodate groups you want to exclude, so nobody wishes to alter your concept of marriage. It is you who wants to forcibly exclude other ideas of marriage from their protection under the first amendment because those ideas do not mesh with yours. If you can do that, what prevents others from doing the same to you?

If marriage were for the production of children, we would have laws against impotent couples (which make up about 15% of marriages), we would take away children from single-parent homes, and we would make procreation requisite for marriage. We do none of the above. We tried to do so in 2007 with Washington Initiative 957. Initiative 957 or the "Defense of Marriage Act" would have required a couple to prove they were capable of having children in order to be married, and it would have annulled their marriage if they did not produce offspring within three years. The measure failed and rightly so - because marriage is not exclusively about producing children in the eyes of our country.

If you want your definition of marriage to be about producing and rearing kids, great. Nobody is saying you cannot do this. But to insist that others forsake their traditions, religious or otherwise, and abide by yours is tyrannical and wrong.

Even if it were about raising children, adoptions happen (many of the orphans coming from straight-marriage homes), and gay people are certainly capable of handling that responsibility. The American Medical Association, perhaps the most austere medical organization on Earth, supports gay people raising children:

Our AMA will support legislative and other efforts to allow the adoption of a child by the same-sex partner, or opposite sex non-married partner, who functions as a second parent or co-parent to that child.

The American Psychological Association follows suit:

Studies comparing groups of children raised by homosexual and by heterosexual parents find no developmental differences between the two groups of children in four critical areas: their intelligence, psychological adjustment, social adjustment, and popularity with friends. It is also important to realize that a parent's sexual orientation does not indicate their children's.

According to the Department of Human Services in my home state of Arkansas, on any given day there are about 3,700 children are in foster care with only about 1,100 foster homes ready to take them. So even if gay people cannot produce children (a fact that is irrelevant for the purpose of denying them marriage), they can still adopt and provide a child with a loving family they wouldn't have had otherwise.

If you are denying gay people familial rights that currently, in states like Arkansas, prevent them from adopting children, your policies are hurting children even as you pose as defenders of our progeny. If you are doing this, you should be ashamed of yourself.

The slippery slope argument.

The idea is that if we let gays get married we must also let polygamists get married. I have also heard other wretched comparisons used with this argument, like if we let consenting adult gays get married we must also let pedophiles marry their prey or let people marry animals.

This argument was also invoked by pious Christians leading up to the landmark 1967 decision to allow interracial marriage. If we let blacks marry whites, what next? The correct answer is, nothing. Each issue must be weighed on its individual merits and for fairness of its own account. If the slippery slope argument is to hold, what keeps us from slippery sloping in the other direction? What keeps the government from saying that you can't marry whomever you choose based on your income, or some other arbitrary measure?

In the case of gay marriage, you are not protecting anybody. These are consenting adults, who have found happiness in each other's arms. There is no harm. There is no danger. Why do we need to have laws against this? Who are we protecting by doing so?

The one-size fits all approach to marriage.

The idea here is that gay people have the same rights as straight people: they can marry somebody of the opposite gender. This is really just another way of saying that your particular idea of marriage (out of tens of thousands on Earth) should be the only one, and that people somehow have full rights because they can adhere to your sense of marital propriety.

That's just stupid.

Outro

This is a growing document, so I will be perpetually adding facts to it and addressing new arguments as they arise. If you have anything to contribute, please e-mail it to me at jteberhard@gmail.com or leave a comment.

All of us know what it is like to be discriminated against for one reason or another. If you would prevent that unpleasantness from being visited on perfectly normal and perfectly good people for no good reason whatsoever, speak out.

While life may not be fair, the unfairness does not have to come from us, as compassionate human beings. If you have a sense of justice, and want to wash your hands of unethical treatment of others, speak out.

If you want to be somebody who views us as a single race trying to share happiness on this rock we call Earth, rather than an agent of a balkanizing tribe, speak out.

In short, if you have empathy, and truly want to transcend the vagaries of our different cultures, to share yours and acknowledge others', you cannot sit silently on this issue - and you must not let any of the terrible arguments that allow people to ignore the well-being of others to advance.

Why I'm not a Christian

2008-10-20T10:18:00.000-07:00

Why I was a Christian

I adopted belief in Christ when I was fifteen. I did so having never read a page of the bible. So why did I do it?

I assumed that if so many people believed it, there must be something to it. I mean, how could most of the people in the United States be wrong? Also, my fellow church-goers befriended me. As do all fifteen year-olds, I suffered from low self image, and my conformity to Christianity was a certain way to get “friends” (I now realize that my definition of that word was a bit wonky at the time). But I prayed, felt god was speaking to me (though he was never clear), and adopted the stances of my church as my own.

While I was a Christian, I attended church regularly. I made the trip with them to a rally of Promise Keepers in Tennessee. I witnessed to people, and I held that homosexuality and other things I was assured in church that god didn’t care for, were immoral perversions. After all, how could so many people be wrong?

It also made me feel intelligent. I lived outside a small town growing up, and would spend many nights going outside and taking in the stars. At that time I knew nothing about Astronomy, but in my mind I didn’t need to know. God created the stars, and in lying there and appreciating them I was taking part in god’s handiwork – in essence, I was communicating with god. In my eyes, this made me amongst the most blessed people in the world, for I knew everything about the stars that was necessary to know. Sure, there were processes in place that made them shine, but it was all part of god’s plan. Furthermore, I was certain that even the scientists knew that god catalyzed the stars, and that they knew they were just uncovering the way god decided to make it all work – everybody believed in god, including scientists, and those that didn’t were rightly reticent to say so.

Why I changed my mind

My parents had always had gay friends growing up and, because they were kind and good people, they had also been my friends. I started to wonder if god would really send those good people to hell. So, when I was on the cusp of twenty-one, I began to read the bible and, sure enough, it does condemn homosexuality in no uncertain terms. How could that be? Homosexuals, though immoral perverts, were typically nice people. When I met malicious people such as thieves, bullies, etc, they were despicable and cruel and worthy of contempt. But homosexuals were not like that, they were not criminals. They were hurting nobody. It was strange…god despised homosexuality; he despised it to the point of annihilating entire cities because of it. Yet, he enjoyed the occasional human sacrifice.

What I was reading in the bible appalled me. I may have cast the monstrosity of it aside, saying that god’s ways are inscrutable or something like that; except that it was shortly before I started reading the bible that I also began to read up on Astronomy. The difference between the bible and even the most elementary Astronomy book astounded me. There was no need to explain away seemingly atrocious parts of Astronomical texts – they were written plainly and precisely. They were stuffed with so much information, things that I could not even come close to comprehending as a child, but that they were always willing to explain if I applied myself.

Conversely, the bible insisted that I could not question. It made a virtue of obeying even the cruelest edicts without pause (see the story of Abraham and Isaac or of Jephtha and his daughter). There was never a case of god ever explaining anything to anybody. It occurred to me that this was why people were always bickering over what god’s will truly was, even in my old church. It was because the bible is a muddled book from which we can draw no precise conclusions the way they could in Astronomy.

It was at this point that I realized that Christianity was absurd, but I didn’t drop it entirely. Perhaps god really worked in mysterious ways? Later that year, I finished my first read through of the bible and realized I needed a basis for comparison – so I picked up the Koran. Suffice that it suffered from the same problems as the bible. Both were filled with tall tales and demands that our moral sense reject issues of happiness and suffering, as the bible had with homosexuality. Still being a pseudo-Christian, it was painfully obvious that the Koran was not the word of god. It was silly in places and frightening in others, but it was clear that no intelligent person could think it was the work of a higher power. Like the bible, it was ignorant of everything in my Astronomy books, and it said several things that were just plain false. It followed that it was constructed by people who were much more ignorant than Astronomers, and no such person (or persons) could be called a higher intelligence.

But it was so similar to the Old Testament, the book that began the religion that provided myself and so many others with such a sense of empowerment. At that point I was forced to admit that I was wrong. The bible was constructed in an ancient time where people would have known very little about humanity. Its atrocious ideas of morality were every bit as horrendous as I had thought they were.

I have since read it through twice more to make sure of this, and every time I am increasingly disappointed in the younger me. Though I felt myself enlightened when I used to look at the stars, it is now clear that I was calling my ignorance of them “god” and, as a result, I was proud of my ignorance. Such is the effect of a world view that makes a virtue of believing without seeing, and makes belief the object of focus rather than the effort required to formulate the belief. I was ignorant of morality, I was ignorant of science, and it didn’t bother me. Unfortunately, my beliefs dictated my actions (as they do for every person), and because I had never truly thought about them, I acted ignorant. I opposed the rights of normal people, and I viewed good people as lesser humans.

Faith in Jesus made sure I had “friends” but it made me a bad person. I realized later that no matter how many “friends” I had, that I hated myself for what I had done and how gullible I had been.

Ever since that time I have worked to figure out who I am and how the world really works. For any belief I hold now, anybody can ask me at any time “How do you know that?” or “Why do you believe that?” and I will be able to explain it to them using the same methods that revealed the true nature of the stars. I have also come to understand that belief without reason informs people’s actions, and that we’re all playing on the same team down here. Ignorant beliefs, like mine in my youth, are dangerous. They are divisive.

And I now realize that it would be immoral of me not to fight unreason.

Why I think people believe in the Christian god

It should be exceedingly plangent that I think the application of thought to your world view will eliminate belief in god. As Richard Carrier concisely puts it, “The only way to maintain belief in god is to remain ignorant of the facts or to make a virtue of being unreasonable.” The facts of the world are in contradiction to Christianity, and the only way to keep god in your world view is to remove science from it. Yet, there are people who are only unreasonable about god, but perfectly reasonable in every other capacity. Why? Here are the reasons I suspect:

1. Indoctrination.

It is no secret that people tend to adopt the beliefs of their parents. This is true in Christian homes, Mormon homes, Muslim homes, etc.

If this is the case, I can understand how it would be difficult to part ways with your faith, even if you realize that it’s false.

2. The truth can suck.

Is it so surprising that religion thrives? Nobody wants to die, so the notion that there is some nebulous place where everything we love will be returned to us after we die for all eternity is a very appealing proposition. That doesn’t make it true though.

Sadly, the truth does not conform at every turn to our sense of wishful thinking the way our various religions do. The universe is pitiless and unfair, and discovering the truth about it forces you to confront many unhappy facts. Facts like:

You will one day lose your conscience.
Ugly people will be lonely no matter how nice they are. Biology ftl.
Every 100 million years on average, a meteor of sufficient size will strike the Earth and eliminate most of the life on it.
The Earth will be destroyed by stellar radiation or consumed by an expanding Sun in a relatively short amount of time, astronomically speaking.

Remaining ignorant of these facts and others does not make them go away. They will still be true, and acknowledging the facts of the universe that makes them true not only prepares you to deal with them, but it may also enable us to conquer them one day. If the facts of the universe aren’t what we want them to be, with understanding and insight we can change them. Religion is antithetical to this.

3. Being a Christian helps me to be accepted.

Yeah, it does. But that’s not an argument for truth, even if I can understand why that would make it hard to leave.

It’s better to be hated for who you are than loved for who you aren’t though. If you are thinking about why you believe what you believe, there will be people waiting to hang out with you. It may cause your previous “friends” to ostracize you, but if it does…are those the kind of friends you want?

Outro

Think about what you believe. Think about why you believe it. Think about how you know. Be curious, embrace evidence, and don’t be afraid. Don’t let anybody threaten you into a belief or scare you away from stating only what you have a reason to believe, and stridently rejecting what you have no reason to believe. They will try – it’s all the various faiths have.

Pick up an Astronomy book and see the difference in approach. Talk to a skeptic (I’ll volunteer), and see if we need to frighten you into agreeing with us.

I love you, and I love mankind. That is why I do what I do. That is why I criticize your beliefs with the same tenacity that I have criticized my own.

An Explanation of Global Warming Part I

2008-09-23T19:47:00.000-07:00

During the last century, we averaged .07 degrees C warmer per decade (which lept to .13 degrees in the last 50 years). This is from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007. Our concern should be that even a little bit of warming exacerbates the problem. This is because CO2 does not function in water the same way most molecules do. Most molecules are more soluble in warmer water, but CO2 is less soluble in warm water. This means that by even increasing the temperature a little bit, we are reducing the ability of our oceans to hold CO2. This creates a positive feedback situation with our atmosphere that begins a self-perpetuating cycle in which the C02 not absorbed by our oceans helps our atmosphere to trap more heat, which causes the oceans to be able to hold less C02, so on and so forth. The figures atop this paragraph represent that little bit of warming that will catalyze an exponential increase in temperature in the troposphere (where we live).

For more on this, read here.

Here are the relevant graphs:

The consistent warming of the troposphere is a fact. Period.

So, how much are we contributing to this? First, see this graph.

That is how much we are augmenting the problem. Remember, even a little increase creates an exponential increase, and it's clear that such an increase is precisely what we have. We can cross reference the above research through a variety of methods such as examining the C02 inferred from polar ice cores.

They all point to the exact same conclusion. We can also measure the ppm (parts per million) of C02 in the atmosphere, and we have gone from a pre-industrial average of 280 ppm to 385 now (and this trend is continuing). The only way you could shrug this off is if that addition 105 average ppm didn't make a difference, which I've already established for you it does.

Now, onward to basic physics.

Blackbody radiation:

Suffice for now that a blackbody is a perfect radiator, and thus absorbs energy at all wavelengths and thus reflects none.

You'll also need to have an elementary understanding of Planck's Law, which deals with emission vs. wavelength at a particular temperature. There are several forms of this law, but the one most relevant here deals with wavelength in terms of microns (the reason will become apparent later).

I'll also be using the Wien Displacement Law (the 1st derivative of Planck's Law), which provides us with the peak emission for a specified temperature.

Lastly, you'll also need to be marginally familiar with the Stefan-Boltzman Law (the integral of Planck's Law), which gives us our total emission intensity for a specified temperature.

So, let's start with Solar Irradiance. The surface of the sun runs at about 5,780K - this all must get distributed to our planet somehow. We determine this by using Planck's Law:

(5.67 * 10^-8 Js^-1 m^-2 K^-4)(5,780K)^4
= 6.3 * 10^7 Js^-1 M^-2
= 63 MW per M^2

We can also find the peak wavelength we receive from the sun via the Wien Displacement Law:

Wavelength (in um [microns]) = 2,898um * K/5,780k = .501um = 501nm

These numbers will come in handy shortly. I'll take a moment to point out that it should be clear in this case that we cannot make science say whatever we want. Science points directly, and unequivocally, to very specific conclusions. I say this because I am composing this primarily as a response to somebody who asserted that we could, in fact, make science say whatever we want.

Now, the total amount of energy reaching our outer atmosphere is 1,370 Wm^2. From this, we derive two different figures.

1. The energy delivered to our cross section (pi * r^2)
2. Total amount dispersed over Earth's surface area (4 * pi * r^2)

The total of 1 divided by the total of 2 should give us the average energy reaching our outer atmosphere. This comes out to 342 Wm^2.

Now, go back to blackbody radiation - this is how the Earth works. If the Earth had no atmosphere, it would absorb 342 Wm^2. What temperature would this predict, that would radiate that same amount of power?

342W/m^2 = (5.67 * 10^-8 * w/m^2K^4)T^4
T = 279K or about 6 degrees celsius.

This is pretty damn cold, so something must be missing.

What's missing is the Earth's Albedo. This encompasses what solar irradiance gets reflected from things like clouds, ice caps, water bodies, light colored land, etc. For the Earth, our Albedo is about 30% of solar irradiance.

Figuring out how much energy reaches our surface is pretty easy after we have our Albedo. It's Solar irradiance * (1 - a), with "a" being our Albedo, which comes out to about 240 Wm^-2. So, to attain a stable temperature, we need to balance incoming energy with emitted energy. The 240 Wm-2 in, must be balanced by 240 Wm^-2 out via blackbody radiation of the Earth's surface.

We can use the Stefan-Boltzman Law to determine what surface temperature we would expect to find in this case.

T ={ [240 Wm^-2] / [5.67 * 10^-8 Wm^-2 * K^-4]}^-1/4 which comes out to be 255K (or -18 degrees C).

So, the 255K represents -18C, but we observe the average temperature of the Earth to be about 15C. This predicts 390Wm^-2. How can this be?

It's because about 150Wm^-2 never escapes back into space. It gets absorbed by the atmosphere and re-emitted to the surface. The primary variable in this is greenhouse gasses.

Before I go on, I'll stop to say that I hope you're getting a feel now for how science is not simply a matter of guesses. It is a very precise process of using what we know to wrest our circumstances from a mute nature.

Additionally, before we go forward, it's really not important that you understand any of this (or that I understand all of it which, allow me to assure you, I do not). All that is important is that the experts do understand it. They have dedicated their lives to this, and understand it better than anybody else on the planet. That is why they are in consensus, and it is the reason that people like John Coleman, non-scientists masquerading as experts, are not present in peer-review - their arguments would simply never survive it.

Part II will be coming shortly.

Review of the intro to "I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"

2008-08-12T09:05:00.000-07:00

Recently, I sat down with a very pleasant young lady to discuss proof for a creator. After our initial discussion, she asked me to read the Introduction to "I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist" by Frank Turek and Norman Geisler, which I agreed to do in exchange for her reading Richard Carrier's "Why I'm Not a Christian". The following is an objective review of the chapter I read.

This book begins by outright stating that by rejecting Jesus’ divinity, atheists are partaking of a "faith": faith that Jesus is not the son of God. The book also boldly claims that such faith is a greater separation from our good senses than Christianity. This is not true. An atheist must accept nothing on insufficient evidence to reject the idea that a man was born of a virgin, rose from the dead, and flew into the sky two thousand years ago. Christians really do already accept this reasoning: no Christian must accept anything on insufficient evidence to dismiss every other cloying fantasy that has ever crept into the human mind. The fact that they wish to pretend that atheists doing so is somehow unreasonable is a double-standard implemented by devout members of every faith that continues to be presented as though it were a legitimate argument.

For example, how many Christians have a full, working understanding of the religion of Islam? I’m sure there are a few floating around out there, but in three years of talking to Christians ad naseum, I’ve yet to find a single one who possessed an understanding of even the basic tenets of Islam. Yet none of these Christians have required a comprehension of a fraction of Islamic doctrine in order to dismiss it as patently absurd (and evil, in most every case). No Christian must disprove the idea that Muhammad spoke with the angel Gabriel or that he ascended into Heaven aback a winged horse. The arguments of prophesy fulfillment or historical corroboration do nothing to help Islam here – and almost every Christian is not moved to even become acquainted with the nature of these arguments as they are brought forth by Muslims. Only the atheist has realized that the biblical god is no different. To quote Sam Harris:

"Consequently, only the atheist is compassionate enough to take the profundity of the world’s suffering at face value. It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion - to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources - is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity. It is a necessity, however, that places the atheist at the margins of society. The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors. It would be hilarious if so much were not at stake."

Having addressed the double-standard that embodies this book, I will now highlight a few of the points made in the Introduction that I find suspect.

On page 18, the book speaks about one of Turek’s religion professors who, when asked if there was a god or not, responded "I don’t know". Here is how Turek responds:

"Wait a minute, you’re teaching that the Old Testament is false, and you don’t know whether there’s a God or not?"

One does not need to be certain that god does not exist in order to dismiss the myth of Christianity in full, especially the portion of the myth that resides in the Old Testament. The God hypothesis should not stand or fall based on its most unpleasant candidate. The fact that the teacher admitted his ignorance as to whether some other manifestation of a creator existed (one whose attributes were not frequently in conflict with logic and common sense) in no way indicates that his understanding of the Old Testament is incomplete. The truth is that nobody knows whether or not an ambiguous creator exists, and just because the teacher elected to concede this does not mean his understanding of ancient scripture is lacking.

In the world of intellectual honesty, "I don’t know" is a very defensible position when faced with a reasonable mystery. It is far more honest than using sacred mysteries as a shield behind which to hide your false certainties. This should have been obvious to Turek, instead he uses his professor’s honesty as a criticism.

Turek then goes on to attack universities (all of them). He suggests that universities should should show how the fields of art, philosophy, the physical sciences, mathematics, etc, fit together to provide a unified picture of life. He accuses universities of failing this task, while teaching that every viewpoint, no matter how ridiculous, is as valid as any other. His example?

"…except the viewpoint that just one religion or worldview could be true. That’s the one viewpoint considered intolerant and bigoted on most college campuses."

One needs to look no further than the absence of intelligent design in the science curriculum to realize that collegiate academia is more than willing to reject bad ideas, even against the will of the majority of the population. Furthermore, I know several professors who believe that one worldview can be true (head over to the biology department of your local campus, and most of the professors will affirm this for you). Contrary to Turek’s claim, I strongly doubt there are many teachers with a liberal understanding of many religions who suggest that more than one of them can be true: this is because most faiths are incompatible with one another; Christians believe in only one god, therefore all the Hindus are wrong. Muslims think anybody who believes in the divinity of Jesus is going to hell (Koran 5:71), so all the Christians are wrong; etc. The divisive, incompatible nature of our various faiths are so palpable that they continue to produce nearly unthinkable levels of violence in their defense. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews versus Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians versus Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians versus Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants versus Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims versus Hindus), Sudan (Muslims versus Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims versus Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims versus Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists versus Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims versus Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite versus Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians versus Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis versus Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. In the last decade, the incompatibility of religion has been the exclusive cause of death and violence in several places around the globe.

So I’d say the idea that more than one religious viewpoint can be true is a position that is not laudable and not held by many, if any, college teachers despite Mr. Turek’s assertions to the contrary. What he likely meant to imply was that many people in the Ivory Tower consider all religions, including Christianity, to be equally probable (or improbable), which I will gladly concede to him. To Christians, it is obvious that Muhammad’s miracles are poorly constructed fabrications, and that anybody who considers the Koran to be the word of an omniscient creator has never read the book critically. However, this is precisely the way devout Muslims view the Bible and Christianity (and the way many of us view all religions). Consider that right now every Muslim has the exact same set of reasons for believing in Allah that Christians have for believing in Jesus. These reasons are either equally convincing or they are equally false.

Turek then claims:

"If God exists, then there’s ultimate meaning and purpose in your life…On the other hand, if there is no God, your life ultimately means nothing."

What a load of unadulterated rubbish. Simply because our lives may not have some form of ultimate, cosmic significance does not mean that our lives have *no* significance. Without god, life is what you make it personally, and many decisions you make hold the significance of affecting others. Additionally, for those embracing religious certainty as a healthy segue to ultimate meaning, the significance of how our actions affect others is frequently lost, buried beneath an unwavering desire to serve the will of an invisible god – a will that not even his followers can agree upon.

I am really trying to find something positive in the introduction to this book – I really am. I’m currently on my sixth trip through its pages, and I have found so very little that makes logical sense as this book attempts to set the foundation for its case. I could literally do a line by line dissection of the introduction clearing up the rampant misconceptions of Mr. Turek. That being said, I’ll focus on the things that jump out at me.

The book continues on, employing several blanket generalizations such as:

“Easygoing Americans are more apt to believe that no religion is the truth.”

Well, I just looked at the Harris poll for 2007 and it says that 84% of Americans believe in one religion as the truth. These easygoing Americans, to which Turek is referring, represent easily less than 10% of our population. The point is that this statement was meant to corral most Americans (practically all), but fails to do so. The fact that 84% of the American populace believes that have found the one true God in Jesus (there are others who believe the one true God is found elsewhere) also sheds some light on statements like this one, which the introduction advances in droves:

“In America, truth in religion is considered an oxymoron.”

Obviously Turek is attempting to construct a straw man with which to do battle when there is no straw available. Not even I consider truth in religion to be oxymoronic – I simply believe that religion considers an honest search for truth to be irrelevant. Now, this is very different than searching for reasons to support your conclusion: many Christians, including Geisler and Turek, ardently pursue such reasons. It is the inability of the faithful to let go of their preconceptions when the reasons render them false that is the problem. As I have said before, there is a vast ocean of good reasons to believe that the divinity of Jesus Christ is not only a delusion, but a pernicious delusion. As if that weren’t good enough, there is not a single good reason to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin (a claim made by Alexander the Great, Genghis Kahn, and literally thousands of others), rose from the dead, and ascended into the sky. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Jesus never lived, and amazingly little evidence speaking to his physical existence. But I digress…

Turek then goes on to claim on page 24 that because religion and science address the same questions (where did we come from, etc) that science and religion are not “mutually exclusive categories as some have suggested.” I suggest this. Not only do I suggest this, I have screamed it from the mountain tops for years.

Again, to quote Harris:

"Faith has obliged us to lie to ourselves repeatedly and at the highest levels about the compatibility between religious faith and scientific rationality. The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science. It is time we conceded a basic fact of human discourse: either a person has good reasons for what he believes, or he does not. When a person has good reasons, his beliefs contribute to our growing understanding of the world. For instance, there happen to be very good reasons to believe that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. Consequently, the idea that the Egyptians actually did it lacks credibility. Every sane human being recognizes that to rely merely upon "faith" to decide specific questions of historical fact would be both idiotic and grotesque - that is, until the conversation turns to the origin of books like the Bible. The breadth of our scientific understanding includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world. If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin these beliefs would necessarily form part of our rational description of the universe."

Of course, the claims of Christianity are not included in our rational description of the universe, and rightfully so.

Next we find the sentence:

“Is Christianity reasonable? We believe it is.”

Of course you do, otherwise why write the book? I can appreciate this. However, just three sentences before you wrote:

“Some [truth claims made by Christianity] are unverifiable dogma.”

This also occurs on page 24. Unverifiable dogma is not reasonable. Period. Consider that only 15 short years ago, Galileo was absolved of his heresy. His crime? Making claims about reality that conflicted with the “unverifiable dogma” of the Catholic Church. 400 years after being forced to recant his understanding of the Earth’s motion under pain of death, the Catholic Church finally, begrudgingly said “our bad.” Was this reasonable? No. Was this purely the product of unverifiable dogma? Yes, yes it was.

Unverifiable dogma is nothing more than strongly (I say strongly, in my experience “untouchable” is a more apropos word) held beliefs that a person holds with no good reason to corroborate them. Other unverifiable dogmas include The Flying Spaghetti Monster (in all His Holiness), Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Poseidon, Baal, etc. At no point is it more reasonable to hold an unverifiable dogma rather than simply saying “I don’t know.”

Right after that, Turek gives us this sentence completely in italics, as though this will be the monumental straw that breaks the atheist’s back:

“Once one looks at the evidence, we think it takes more faith to be a non-Christian than it does to be a Christian.”

There it is. I addressed this idea in the very first section of this review, but I’m going to add one more thing here. Is it really a departure from our skepticism to reject the idea that Christians are in possession of a magical book? Or that a man was born of a virgin over 2,000 years ago? Or that he rose from the dead? Or that he ascended into Heaven? We do not need to accept anything on insufficient evidence (faith) to reject these claims – and neither do Christians.

Is it a leap of faith for any Christian to deny that Muhammad spoke with the angel Gabriel in his cave? Is a Christian being morally irresponsible if he/she finds the following claim to be repulsive: “It’s the universal, divine will of God! That is why the caste system of Hinduism (which results in tons of discrimination, violence, and death) is a moral necessity?” Despite what practicing Muslims and Hindus will say, Christians need not disprove these things to dismiss them as being not only completely without merit, but utterly worthy of our intellectual contempt. Yet here is Frank Turek, informing me that it is unreasonable faith when I do the exact same thing.

Now, why do Turek and Geisler think that atheism requires faith? They believe this because people do not hold absolute beliefs – they hold probable beliefs. Finally I have found some common ground where I can actually agree with Turek. People do hold probable beliefs, and this is important to note because of an oft-cited canard of the theistic argument that is doubtlessly present later in this book. Many times, Christians will say something like "Yes, the evidence suggests that Jesus’ resurrection is almost certainly a myth, but couldn’t something turn up down the road that proved it to be true?”

Yes, yes it could. That doesn’t make it reasonable to believe your particular proposition about god without any good evidence now. This argument can be used to justify belief in anything, and Christians will laugh this argument off when it is used for anything but their own God. No sane human being can be expected to hold beliefs based on information they don’t have, let alone information that no human being has. Yet this is the very life-blood of faith-based religion – that of pretending to know things you don’t.

So, why would Turek bring this up when the fact that we hold probable beliefs is a cudgel to be dropped on most Christian ideas? He does this to illustrate that, though we do not hold all of the answers, this does not mean we are not able to come to a conclusion. While this is true, it is not true when applied to the end that Turek is trying to achieve. He says that faith covers a gap in knowledge, so that if a Christian has 95% certainty in the divinity of Jesus, faith only covers the 5% that is unknown.

Here is the problem with that, and this problem should be obvious to virtually anybody. Atheists have unknowns the same as anybody, but we are not forcefully shoving ad hoc explanations into the crevices of the known. We simply say “I don’t know”. Again, many Christians will respond “so there’s a chance I’m right because you don’t know!” Well, yes there is, but it is still unreasonable to believe things based on bad reasons right now, just because there’s an insanely small chance that a good reason might surface in the future. You still believe in things on bad reasoning right now, and what is to be celebrated about that?

Turek is implying that faith covers unknowns, but that is not how Christians utilize it. To them, faith covers things we do know, with almost all the certainty we could possibly desire, that conflict with the conclusion that Jesus is Lord. Here is the difference in how “faith” applies to the atheist (the way Turek would like to apply it to Christianity) and the way it applies to Christians:

The Atheist:
Everything in the world that we have been able to study at length has turned out to be the product of mindless forces working on inanimate objects, even the order we observe. What gives our solar system its apparent order is the force of gravity working on minute chunks of stuff (planets), and gravity is the bending of space-time, and all you need in order to bend space-time are chunks of stuff…like planets. So it is logical to have “faith” that observable order elsewhere is also the product of these forces.

The Christian:
Even though it is obvious without invoking the relevant sciences that men cannot fly, I still believe that Jesus flew into the sky after his resurrection, which is something else we know doesn’t happen.

In one case, we are honestly leaving the unknowns intact and acting off what we do know. In the other case, we are attempting to demolish unknowns with bad conclusions and virtual impossibilities. Unfortunately, it seems the rest of the book is based upon the reader being unable to note this very important difference in application.

Turek then tries to claim that science supports Christianity, even though 93% of the members of the National Academy of Science, our most prestigious scientific body, claim to be atheists. Here are some of his claims with brief rebuttals:

1. The Big Bang.
While Turek smartly admits the Big Bang occurred, he says that we are left to choose whether nothing came from nothing or whether someone (read God) created something from nothing. But his representation of the Big Bang is not the one held by cosmologists.

In order for the Big Bang to have occurred, we require general relativity and vacuum energy. In essence, the laws of physics had to have been in place, as well as the singularity from which the universe erupted. Beyond that, all we need is mass and we know that mass-energy as a whole can never begin or end (the First Law of Thermodynamics states this). Most Christian scientists hide behind the fact that our equations cannot pass the Planck Length into the Big Bang (about 10 to the -40 seconds after the Big Bang happened). Turek has opted not to do this and, in doing so, has placed himself within the grasp of known science – this is a situation that, by virtue of its intellectual honesty, is going to act upon Mr. Turek without mercy. Also, given current developments by Dr. Lee Smolin and other physicists regarding multi-verse theory, it is becoming much more apparent that the infinite regress problem strongly favors a naturalistic outcome, as though Occam’s Razor didn’t already favor it in this case.

2. DNA.
DNA contains a lot of information, which Christians believe could only have been put in place by an intelligent creator. Turek says that Christians have evidence for this conclusion, though he doesn’t provide any of it in the introduction. Here is why I think this is incorrect.

The first DNA strand would not have held so much information, but instead it would have held just enough to get it started so it could evolve, and it would not require much to get the original strand started: only an array of polypeptides. ‘Lo and behold, what do cosmologists and astronomers think were abundantly present on our planet in the beginning? You got it – polypeptides. Of course, you’d also need a little luck: you would need fluctuations of temperature sufficient to remove portions of the pools from thermal equilibrium, and these occur in just the same way that organized convection cycles arise naturally when water is heated. With these things in place, as they likely were in the beginning stages of our planet, virtually all scientists believe the development of complex reproducing systems is guaranteed, as a result of naturally-occurring "autocatalytic cycles" (Nature Dec ‘05 p.38 on the “virtually all scientists”).

3. Prophesy.
Look it up on the internet. The “prophesies” of Christianity are numerous and far-reaching – to go through and illustrate why all of them are either uncompelling or easily fabricated would take far more time than I’m willing to put into this review. Besides, if they are prophesies from the One True All-Powerful God, all I would have to do is disprove one of them, and any Christian with their empiricism intact should concede that this is not difficult.

Then we get Turek’s 12-point logical progression, many of which are self-evident such as #2: the opposite of true is false. But what gets me is #3 (I touch on some of them more in-depth here):

It is true that the theistic God exists. This is evidenced by:
1. Beginning of the universe (Cosmological Argument)
2. Design of the universe (Teleological Argument)
3. Design of life (Teleological Argument)
4. Moral law (Moral Argument)

Friends, these arguments are antiquated and dead – it’s just that many Christians don’t know it. Look them up on wikipedia, the science and refutation to them are up there. I’ll just do some brief touching on them.

1. Cosmological Argument
The idea here is that everything that exists had to have a creator. The theistic solution to this: a being that requires no creator. Ingenious. Christians, like atheists, already concede that something can exist without a cause. It doesn’t necessarily follow that whatever exists without a cause has to have a mind/conscience, as Christians claim.

2. Design of the Universe.
To establish this, Christians will point to pockets of order, insinuating that all order requires a designer. Again, the mind of God must be a highly ordered, highly complex thing, yet Christians will not drop the same standard on their own beliefs here.

Romans did the same thing, pointing to the motion of the planets as order. Then along came Sir Isaac Newton, who established that the order of the planets was not God’s doing, but simply the force of gravity.

The next step for Christianity, amongst other superstitious groups, was to say that God was the cause of gravity. Well, then came along Albert Einstein who determined that gravity was just the bending of space-time, and that all you need to bend space-time is, as I said earlier in this review, objects. The next step for Christians is to say that God gave objects their ability to bend space-time, but this is starting to look like a pretty bad argument. The point is that order arises out of disorder in our universe naturally, as the product of mindless forces working on mindless objects. On the other hand, we’ve never once found evidence of divine influence on anything. So even if we have an instance of inexplicable order, we have no reason to believe that this order is the product of God and not of natural forces.

Hannah, to whom I promised this analysis, countered me with the second law of thermodynamics, which I had one Christian (a physics major, no less) do before. This results of a misunderstanding of the second la w, this is highlighted nowhere more clearly as in the work of Illya Prigogine, who is famous for proving that order results from increasing entropy in dissipative systems, which augmented the likelihood of spontaneous complexity. The irony is that the second law as we know it today with Prigogine’s additions (which won him the Nobel Prize in the 70s) helps explain pre-biological evolution and, in fact, almost all order, even functional order in organic systems, as a "purely deterministic" consequence of the laws of physics. So it is more than a little ironic that the second law gets invoked in defense of the idea of God it truly helps destroy.

It is my understanding from others like myself that this invocation of the second law is becoming more frequent, so read up and be ready if you like to talk with theists about cosmology.

3. Moral Law
I have written so much on this that it’s exhausting to even think about. I find it baffling that Christians will shout moral law until they’re blue in the face, and then defend their “magical” book with the same tenacity, even though the Bible is full of the most reprehensible moral ideas imaginable. Other books write far more concisely and with infinitely more wisdom about morality than the Bible: the Tao Te Ching and the Vedas for starters.

After this, Turek admits on page 30 that many Christians believe simply because they enjoy the cloying proposition of an afterlife that Christianity has to offer. This is understandable. Who can be surprised at the spread of a notion that conforms to our sense of wishful thinking at every turn?

But then Turek says that atheists “believe” in atheism because they want to. Really? We know of the empty promises that serve as the theistic motivation for wanting to believe – what is the atheist’s motivation? Turek says it is because we don’t want to give up control of our lives. I suppose this is true to an extent, but we have already given up control of our lives in many areas: to government, to laws…various things indicative of the social contract. Personally, I am simply unwilling to surrender my mind, my skepticism, and the best methodology for determining matters of truth, as Christians and other faithful people have done – as God demands that we do in Proverbs 3:5:

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding”

Why would a God ask that we do this? Wouldn’t God make finding him to be the product of a reasonable conclusion? Geisler and Turek claim to think so, but then why is this line present in God’s holy book? Of course, Christians will attempt to manufacture excuses for verses like these, but a good and wise man's message would not need excuses. It follows that the Bible was written neither by the wise nor the good.

The very last thing I’ll touch on in the introduction to this book is the free will argument, which it seems cannot be avoided in discussions about Christianity. Actually, I’ll let Richard Carrier do it for me:

“Either the human will is more powerful than the will of God, and therefore can actually block his words from being heard despite all his best and mighty efforts, or God cares more about our free choice not to hear him than about saving our souls, and so God himself "chooses" to be silent. Of course, there is no independent evidence of either this remarkable human power to thwart God, or this peculiar desire in God, and so this is a completely "ad hoc" theory: something just "made up" out of thin air in order to rescue the actual theory that continually fails to fit the evidence.

Meteorologists can disagree about the weather forecast, but they all agree how weather is made and the conditions that are required for each kind of weather to arise. And they agree about this because the scientific evidence is so vast and secure that it resolves these questions, often decisively. It can't be claimed that God has violated the free will of meteorologists by providing them with all this evidence. And yet how much more important is salvation than the physics of weather! If God wants what Christianity says he wants, he would not violate our free will to educate us on the trivial and then refuse to do the same for the most important subject of all. Likewise, if a doctor wants a patient to get well, he is not vague about how he must do this, but as clear as can be. He explains what is needed in terms the patient can understand. He even answers the patient's questions, and whenever asked will present all the evidence for and against the effectiveness of the treatment. He won't hold anything back and declare, "I'm not going to tell you, because that would violate your free will!" Nor would any patient accept such an excuse--to the contrary, he would respond, "But I choose to hear you," leaving the doctor no such excuse.”

I and countless others have chosen to give God a fair hearing if only he would speak. I have read the Bible cover to cover more than once. I would listen to him even now, at this very moment, yet he remains silent. Therefore, it cannot be claimed that I am "choosing" not to hear him. And therefore, the fact that he still does not speak refutes the hypothesis. Nothing about free will can save the hypothesis here.

I will conclude by saying that writing this has exhausted me – not because my mind is being taxed to produce counter arguments to Turek’s, but because I shouldn’t have to. I’m sure I could write 20 more pages on just the things wrong with the introduction to this book, much of it just as obviously illogical as the rest. Hannah, the girl with whom I met to speak about religion and who asked that I read the introduction to this book, is very sweet and obviously fairly sharp. I have taken other recommendations from intelligent Christians in the past, always with the assurance that “this is the book that really gets the apologetics right!” Every time I am met with the same arguments. Every…single…time. I’m beginning to lose my optimism when I encounter such claims.

Hannah agreed to read Richard Carrier’s “Why I’m Not a Christian” in exchange for me reading this. If she does an analysis I will post the link on here.

Morality and Atheism

2008-07-29T21:45:00.000-07:00

As far as the basis for morality, there are several things that prompt atheists to be moral, as well as what results in the more atheistic countries being the most moral in terms of social wellness (low crime rates, low teen pregnancy, etc - see the United Nations Human Development Report released annually). It is often asserted by religious people that without god watching over us, we would spend all of our time killing our neighbors, raping their pets, and trying to steal their pornography. Obviously, this is not the case.

It is also very telling when religious people ask atheists why they are moral. It's almost as if the implication is that the only reason they do not steal, murder, and rape is because they are frightened of god. Kohlberg would certainly have something to say about this.

Anyway, there are several mechanisms in place, both biologically and philosophically that explain why atheists are often moral people. I will balance this with how I believe faith encourages immorality.

A Secular Morality

1. Via Evolution.

There are god-knows how many papers (both in peer-review and elsewhere) explaining the evolution of morality.

To save you the trouble of looking them up yourself (though I encourage you to do so anyway, so that you can be familiar with some of them), here's the Reader's Digest version.

Your body is composed of various chemical compositions, all of which result in your demeanor. If we introduce certain chemicals to your body, you will instantly become more affable. We have such a chemical balance inherently in our genes. Where did it come from?

At the start of the Cretaceous Era our ancestors, the great apes (which also exhibit morality and are a social species), moved into the trees to avoid predators. This preceded an evolutionary adaptation for better depth perception which, due to the genes involved, resulted in a narrower field of view (which they have passed to us). This prompted birds of prey to attack the apes, which meant the ones who cooperated, who worked in groups, were the ones who survived and reproduced more than their individualistic brethren. This explains at least the biological facets of human empathy.

2. Personal gain.

This branches from point #1, but life is much harder as a social outcast, which is precisely what one becomes when they steal or such from their neighbors. Once people realize that they have more to gain from being moral, rather than the personal hell they cast themselves into otherwise, there is plenty of reason to be kind to others.

There is so much more, but for now these two should suffice. Richard Carrier is an authority on the subject, and actually tackles it with a bit more humor than I do.

How Faith Fosters Immorality

1. Poor definition of morality.

Questions of morality are questions of human happiness and suffering. The problem with religion, particularly Christianity and Islam, is that they tend to assert that questions of morality are not questions of happiness and suffering.

Evidence of this is in the news daily, and it paints the history of your faith with red. Morality for the faithful is about following god's supposed will, which often shows little concern for what is best for fostering happiness and a sustainable society.

For this reason, Christians on the whole (in political polls, etc) seem to be more concerned with what is "right" than what is good. Again, Kohlberg would probably shed a tear at this point. This is the basis of immoral behavior at the influence of religion.

An example of this is the amount of effort dedicated to gay marriage, where no harm is perceivable, and comparatively how little time is spent by Christians opposing genocide.

2. Religion encourages a failure of our epistemological accountability.

"The worst problem with religious morality is that it often causes good people to act immorally, even while they attempt to alleviate the suffering of others. In Africa, for instance, certain Christians preach against condom use in villages where AIDS is epidemic, and where the only information about condoms comes from the ministry. They also preach the necessity of believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ in places where religious conflict between Christians and Muslims has led to the deaths of millions. Secular volunteers don’t spread ignorance and death in this way. A person need not be evil to preach against condom use in a village decimated by AIDS; he or she need only believe a specific faith-based moral dogma. In such cases we can see that religion can cause good people to be much less good than they might otherwise be."

~ Sam Harris

Epistemological accountability represents how people are obligated to hold good reasons for what they believe, lest their good intentions become wickedly immoral (I go into this with far more detail here). Without the influence of dogmas, we would still have good people doing good things and bad people doing bad things - the kicker is what gets good people to do bad things.

As one example out of an ocean of candidates, consider the couple from Wisconsin who decided to treat their daughter's diabetes with prayer. Because they did not have good reasons for what they believe, their good intentions became the murder of their child. It almost makes one sick then, to read this:

"Dale Neumann told investigators that "given the same set of circumstances with another child, he would not waiver in his faith and confidence in the healing power of prayer," according to the interview statement."

The man has three other children.

For another example, consider the men who flew planes into the Twin Towers. Were they immoral? Very much so. However, I submit to you that their intentions were not bad - they believed, based upon the doctrine of martyrdom found in the Koran and the Hadith, that they were doing one of the best thing possible. Of course, as is so often the case, they concerned themselves only with what was "right" in accordance with the scriptures, rather than what was best for humanity. If the books upon which they based their lives were true, then they were right - their act of mass murder makes sense and was absolutely, without question, the right thing to do.

It is obvious that they have failed in their responsibility to have accurate beliefs, and this has resulted in maladaptive unreason enshrined as god's glory. Irrationality, and the bad ideas born of it, kills people and unmakes good intentions.

This brings me to the final point I'd like to make - where morality does NOT come from, and that is from Christianity and other faiths.

Where Morality Does Not Come From

(Note: Many of these arguments originate with Sam Harris. He also tackles this issue beautifully in his piece The Myth of Secular Moral Chaos.)

Consider even the ten commandments - one would think that upgrading these precepts would be extremely difficult, even impossible. These are the only things that god felt the need to give us himself (carved in stone, no less). However, improving them is not difficult, it is incredibly easy.

Take the 2nd commandment - no graven images. Is this really the second most important thing? You could literally place any edict in place of the second commandment and you would have immediately augmented the wisdom of this supposedly inerrant text. How about "Don't beat your children?" How about "Don't pretend to know things you don't?" How about "Recycle your plastic and glass?"

Beyond that, portions of the ten commandments are flagrantly immoral. If you catch your best friend worshiping a graven image, working on the Sabbath, or committing adultery - you're supposed to kill them (and if you're unwilling to kill them, your neighbors are supposed to kill you). You may say that these things no longer apply (this itself is arguable from a biblical standpoint). It's true that we're no longer burning witches and heretics at the stake, and that's a good thing - but you're still not disavowing the fact that for 4,000 years, this pious cruelty would have been moral under the Christian system. This could all have been prevented if you, myself, or almost any other mere human living in the world today had authored the book.

However, the obvious reason we do not need the bible to establish our moral lives is because it is we who decide what is good in the good book. When we read something like the golden rule in Matthew 7, it is we who decide that this morsel of moral wisdom is a keeper. Conversely, when we read something like Exodus 35:2, which tells us to kill people for working on (what would have then been) Saturday, it is we who decide that this is the most vile lunacy imaginable. The important thing to note here is that we are the keepers of moral judgment even when reading our holy books, and if it is we who are making those calls, why do we need the bible?

Are we a Christian Nation?

2008-07-18T17:08:00.000-07:00

This document is an answer to many of the Christian Nation claims I encounter.

Intro

"Among many other weighty objections to the Measure, it has been suggested, that it has a tendency to introduce religious disputes into the Army, which above all things should be avoided, and in many instances would compel men to a mode of Worship which they do not profess."

~ George Washington, to John Hancock, then president of Congress, expressing opposition to a congressional plan to appoint brigade chaplains in the Continental Army (1777).

As a bit of basic history, the primary population of the United States initially was built on tobacco production based on envy of Spain's wealth at the time. It was economy that first fueled our nation, not faith. This makes sense, since this was the Age of Enlightenment, when Aristotle's idea of a god who did not interfere in our lives was the most prevalent belief. Christianity did not become a major player in our nation until the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s.

Most of our founders subscribed to this view. Even those, such as George Washington, who professed Christianity as their religion, often put a more Aristotlesque twist on their faith.

1. "Most of our Founding Fathers had Christian Seminary Degrees"

A commenter in an internet forum answered this one succinctly:

"Roger Ray, a frequent contributor to the Springfield News-Leader, has a seminary degree, and is a licensed minister. He denies the divinity of Jesus Christ. The same is true about Thomas Jefferson, a graduate of William and Mary, who wrote the Jefferson Bible, which was his translation of the KJV, eliminating any reference to the deity of Christ. Christian Seminaries were all there was. And Chrisitan Seminaries offered many secular degrees, most of which the founding fathers (the few who held degrees) had. None of them were theologians, few of them were Christians."

So, while the claim that many of our nation's founders held seminary degrees is true, the implication those advancing this point are trying to make is not at all true.

2. Our laws were founded on the ten commandments.

If all criminal law is based on the ten commandments, how come we do not have laws against worshiping other gods, working on the Sabbath, adultery, worshiping a graven image, blaspheming the name of god, or being covetous? That's seven of the ten commandments that are not enshrined in our laws.

In reality, only two of the ten commandments are against the law in the United States: do not kill and do not steal. These same two laws are found in every civilized society (and in many of the uncivilized ones), because they are part of the social contract with our government, which is bound to protect its citizens.

More to come.

On Love

2008-07-18T13:55:00.000-07:00

I like to take a rational approach to natural phenomena, psychology, society, and all subjects, and I firmly believe that they [subjects] are grounded in mathematics. In the words of Nobel Prize laureate Professor John Forbes Nash, "It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reason can be found." I propose to you, concordantly, that it is only in logical equations that the reasons for and of love can be found. I spent much of my life (330 seconds {approximately}) in rigorous pursuit of this equation, and would like to share with you my latest hypothesis. Simplified for [morons].

Mean boob curvature s(mBc) + Ass radius (Ar) - Gross female mass (GFM) divided by the Brain cell ratio (BCr) = approximate % of projected dynamic affection

(mBc + Ar) - GFM = [approximate] % PDA

~ Tim Eberhard, in response to my first attempt to put these thoughts onto paper.

This post will not deal with the physical aspects of what makes love, but rather on what meaning we should assign to the word. "Love" as a concept is the key to what may provide our life's greatest happiness. However, it also destroys relationships of all kinds, resulting in people who were once very close never speaking to each other again. What I will do in this entry is propose a means by which we may maximize the positive, life-altering aspects of love, while minimizing the destructive parts.

I should also note that while the idea of desire often comes attached to love, that is not what I'm talking about here. In fact, one of the greatest flaws of this world is that the virtues which make a good person are not the virtues that make an attractive person. Many people are loved but not wanted, and this article will deal only with the notion of love as being separate from desire.

Words as a means to meaning

There is a reason that the first thing one must do in a philosophical discussion is to define their terms - it prevents us from being on completely different pages. This is the most true with the word "love". What does it mean? Does it mean a lifelong commitment forsaking all others? Does it mean I find you adorable but I would never touch you in a sexual way? There are millions of things the word "love" can mean. I'm going to suggest a universal meaning for the word, one that can apply every time we say it, that at once captures all of the beauty of mankind tied to the word and rejects the damaging power the concept possesses.

What should we mean when we say "I love you"

How often do we see two people become the best of friends, only to later become lovers, and then later reach a point where they are bitter enemies; the polar opposite of the couple they once were? How does this happen? Did the two people change so much that the deep connection they once had has gone? Was that connection ever really there?

When we unpack the word "love" we find many other ideas all bound to the idea. In fact, one could even argue that love is built upon several other concepts (and that its definition changes based on what concepts we tie to the term). However, when examining the contents of the word, we find many other qualities that nobody would desire ordinarily, that seem to lose their stigma when we reinsert them into the word "love." Such concepts include greed, obligation, and jealousy to name a few. Nobody wants to be greedy, but when we love somebody it becomes perfectly reasonable to demand that you get them all to yourself. In this way, the manner in which we tend to view love acts as a Trojan Horse I hope, in the next few paragraphs, to express my sense of befuddlement with this, and to suggest that it is a type of Gordian Knot that we need to cut.

Imagine there are two boys, Matt and Damon. Matt and Damon both know a girl named Sally, and both think she is the best thing since sliced bread. Both of them are also almost exactly identical, but with one major exception; if Sally were to wind up with Damon, Matt would be elated. Because Sally's happiness is his concern, it doesn't matter where Sally winds up - Matt is happy when she's happy.

However, if Sally decides she would be happier with Matt, Damon will not be happy. He will take it as a blow to his self-esteem, and will be generally put out.

Here's the crux of the matter: what does each stance accomplish? If Sally winds up with Matt, will his reaction help him get her or any other girl? Not at all, in fact it may even result in Sally having less happiness with the man she's chosen.

There is nothing at all constructive in Damon's outlook that cannot be gained from Matt's outlook, yet there is so much more positive to be gleaned from the latter. Moreover, Sally is far more likely to be comfortable with Matt, which will make her more likely to choose him.

So what philosophy produces Matt's outlook? Quite simply this: when we tell someone we love them, all it needs to mean, and all it should mean is, "You are an exemplary person. The world is a better place for having you in it, and would be an even better place for having more of you in it. Therefore, I am invested in your happiness."

That's it, and it applies to whomever you say it. If we only mean that we are invested in someone's happiness when we love them, we will never be unhappy when they find it - regardless of how they do so (or how many people they find it with).

I will close this section by saying that after my first naive exploration into relationships, I was very cautious with the "L" word. I realize now, after a fair amount of introspection, that I was never really apprehensive about love, but about all the miasma that came with it. We should be free to tell everybody we love that we think the world is better off for having them, and that we are personally invested in their happiness. There's nothing obligatory or frightening about that.

How this affects the idea of relationships

As with the definition of love, I feel there is an ideal philosophical approach to relationships. In my experience, most people think the goal of a relationship is to stay together. For a long time, this has seemed odd to me. How often do you see a relationship where at least one party no longer wishes to be a part of it, yet they stay together because to "make it work" is the goal? When this happens, animosity grows and before you know it two people who were once the best of friends can no longer stomach each other's pressence. That love and relationships have the power to destroy friendships is a travesty.

But what if the goal of a relationship was simply to discover if the two of you are compatible? If you find out you're not compatible, you can rejoice in accomplishing your goal and go on - maintaining your friendship with the person. If your love for each other means what I suggest it should above, then you will be happy when the other is happy, and if not being in a physical relationship or a more time-consuming relationship will mean happiness for them, then it should also mean happiness for you.

I suspect that several of you are wondering at this point, "Doesn't that demolish the idea of monogamy?" Good question. If you and the object of your affection would be happy dating and being physical with a multitude of people (and you can work out something sensible to ensure the good health of all parties), what would keep you from loving more than one person? The answer is, nothing. Nothing would keep you from loving more than one person - but that doesn't mean you must love more than one person.

It also does not unmake monogamy, though it does lessen our dependence on it. Imagine for a moment that someone knows that you will be sincerely happy for them no matter who they elect to be with. They know they have a guilt-free choice, and can simply go wherever they want to be the most. Imagine they know all of that, and they still choose to be with you. That's beautiful! It's so much more beautiful than someone choosing to be with you because they feel, in some small way, obligated. It is my belief that a relationship based on love as I define it, in which people are encouraged to act as they choose without obligation or guilt will last longer and be far more genuine than any other. Frankly, it's the way monogamy should be but almost never is.

So often we think we need someone, rather than just being able to enjoy them. The need portion of the equation is where the danger is, and with no upside. We need to remove it.

What this does not solve

Numerous facts about our biology and neurology confirm that physicality is a human need akin to eating and drinking, not merely a craving. If you are to be a psychologically healthy person, you must feel desired by the opposite sex to some extent. Love does not nencessarily cover that. As I said atop this entry, the virtues that make a good person (somebody easy to love in the sense i describe) are not entirely the virtues that make an attractive person. There are many very good people who are intelligent, kind, and hard-working, who starve of this essential aspect of humanity, and no matter how much we love them it doesn't make up for it. In my estimation, it is the most unfair aspect of human existence.

How often do people work to achieve something magnificent in the hopes that it will convince an admirable member of the opposite gender to look past their flaws and love them, only to find out they were loved all along, and that such virtues do not always equal desire, which we often think comes tied to love? Very often, in my experience. I wish I had a solution to this. I wish my philosophy of love were an answer to this problem. But it's not.

Outro

This will be a growing document, as I'm sure I'll receive ample criticism for it. That's ok. :D

Blogalogue with Mike from Emergent Faith

2008-07-06T08:55:00.000-07:00

Mike has graciously accepted my invitation to a blogalogue and has even taken the initiative to make the first post.

I've been invited to a debate about the value of faith by JT Eberhard (an opponent of faith). We will see where this goes, but I think the first step would be to define my understanding of faith. I'll be drawing heavily on Marcus Borg's description of faith found in his book “The Heart of Christianity”. It may be the most helpful description that I've ever read. Confusion about how to translate the Greek word “Pistos” or “Pistis” may be the root of most problems in understanding faith. Much like the word “love”, there are many different uses for the word “faith”. When we are careless with these translations we end up creating a great deal of confusion.

Faith as Assensus

This is faith as belief or intellectual certainty. Faith as belief means attempting to claim certainty that a propositional statement is true in the absence of conclusive evidence. This is the most common modern use of the word faith found in religions (think of “blind faith” or “faith like a child”). Christians frequently use this meaning of faith to describe their certainty that the stories found in the Bible are historically accurate (that the literally happened). The more certain they are about the historicity of a story, the more they feel they can claim that they have faith. It often means believing something that is “hard to believe” and again, the more difficult or impossible the idea is to believe, the more faith the person can claim they have. This type of faith is little more than a delusion. It resembles the behaviors of a cult (it probably is). If this were the only possible meaning of faith, then I'd probably be the first one to throw faith out the window.

This faith as belief has a long history of division and destruction. In many fundamentalist religions it is used as a litmus test for membership. This is the faith found in creeds. It may include a belief that a particular definition of God is correct (orthodox) or it may go further by including such hard to believe items as a virgin birth, miraculous events, resurrections, and a literal physical afterlife. Regardless of the length of the list of requirements, I don't think it is ever helpful. I see no need to believe something is true if it can't be supported by evidence. Opponents of religion often make the same mistake as fundamentalists by misunderstanding the purpose of a religious (mythical) story. The purpose of a myth is never primarily about transmitting historical facts. Proving that the story is a myth, merely states the obvious and ignores the fact that myths are meant to transmit meaning not facts. My definition of faith does not include this type of shallow faith as belief.

Faith as Feducia

The closest English word is “fiduciary”, but that isn't a good translation. The best translation might be “trust”. Faith as trust does not mean to trust a set of propositions without evidence (that would simply take us back to the idea of “assensus”). Soren Kiekegaard said that this type of faith as trust is like floating in a deep ocean. If you struggle, if you tense up and thrash about, you will eventually sink. But if you relax and trust, you will float. We trust because we have reasonable evidence. I trust I will wake up alive tomorrow because I have reasonable evidence that suggests I will. This type of faith is not afraid of scientific scrutiny. In fact, it has a thirst for evidence. The more evidence we have the more we can trust. Not because we hope the water hold us up, but because we trust our understanding of buoyancy. The opposite of this kind of faith is anxiety or worry. Without any faith as trust, we would go crazy with anxiety. As a Christian, I have developed faith (as trust) that the deep truths about life found in the Christian stories will hold me up (make me better). These truths include ideas about love, justice, non-violent protest, and the power of forgiveness as opposed to violence, oppression and revenge. This is not a blind trust in the historical accuracy of our sacred myths, but it is a trust in the ability of their deeper meanings to make positive changes in lives throughout the world. This is not a trust without evidence. It is a recognition of many repeatable tests I've observed myself and that have also been recorded throughout history in many cultures and echoed in many different religious stories.

Faith as Fidelatis

Fidelity or faithfulness is concerned with a commitment to something or someone. Being faithful to my wife means I do more than just say I love her. I act on that love. To be faithful to a set of stories means that I don't simply read the stories and forget about them. Faithfulness means I actually seek to apply their meanings to my own life. Often, fundamentalists focus narrowly on fidelity as the opposite of infidelity. When they do this, they imply that in order to live out the truths of this set of stories, they must avoid, deny, renounce, and disprove all other stories. That is not what I wish to convey with faithfulness. For example, I love my wife, but in order to love her I do not have to prove all other women (or men) in the world are unlovable. Other people may be just as or more lovable, beautiful, or desirable (even though my wife may not want me to publicly state that fact). I can be faithful to my country without claiming everything in Europe is worthless or evil. In the same way, fidelity to the Christian stories does not mean I can't read other stories and find truth within those stories. Fidelity should not become a paranoid nationalism or religious bigotry (though it often does). I'm most faithful to the Christian story when I liberally apply its truths about love, justice, and forgiveness in my life. Christian faithfulness is following through on our declaration by living out our commitment to this way of life.

Faith as Visio

Faith as vision is a way of seeing the big picture. I'm not talking about some kind of hope in a supernatural afterlife. I'm talking about seeing the long term results of our actions. The opposite of faith as vision would be shortsightedness or a kind of blindness to reason and logic. A person who lacks faith as vision would only be concerned with the immediate results of their actions. Impulsive revenge is a result of lacking clear vision. A person with vision could look past their first impulsive reactions and think logically about the action that will yield the best long term results. Christian faith as vision is enhanced by our stories. Stories that fill our vision with the values of love, justice, and forgiveness are helpful in developing a healthy hopeful vision for life. This type of faith as vision is the inspiration behind the many Biblical uses of light as a metaphor for improved or restored vision. Our many stories about causing the blind to see are symbolic references to the power of faith as vision. Faith becomes a vehicle for improved vision (by your faith you are healed).

Why do I have faith?

I trust that by adding the deep meanings of the Christian stories to my own vision, I can faithfully apply these ideas to my life and in some small way it might make the world a better place.

My response:

Mike,

Thanks for taking the initiative to open! Usually there’s a bit of squabbling there, so kudos to you for seizing the reins and running. Also, good idea to begin by defining our terms – in a discussion about whether or not faith is beneficial, it’s probably a pretty sound notion to make sure we agree on what we mean when we use the word.

I think we can both agree (an agreement in a blogalogue on faith, you say? Strange…) that the first definition you give, faith as Assensus, meaning faith in a proposition with no evidence, is not a desirable quality. A walk down the halls of an asylum could solidify that point. However, while we can easily rule it out as a means of discerning truth, if we are talking about whether or not “faith” is beneficial to hold, we cannot rule it out. Perhaps somebody has this type of faith that they are Mother Theresa and are out to help the impoverished? Any belief can be beneficial, so I feel as though we need to tackle it from another angle.

Since any belief (no matter how preposterous) can be used to adduce beneficial results, let’s focus on what produces malignant results – specifically, what causes good people to do bad things. We can likely agree that most people have good intentions when they act, which works well for humanity. The problem is that our beliefs are the gatekeepers of our actions, which is why I think every human being has a responsibility to hold good reasons for what they believe. This is the concept of our Epistemological Accountability, and it will be the basis for my entire response.

To illustrate this idea, consider the following scenario: you believe that the town in which you live is infested with zombies. If this supposition is true, then the right and good thing to do would be to grab the shotgun Hollywood-style, lock and load, and go to town on the advancing horde. If you were right, and they were zombies, you would rightly be canonized as a hero, with a big bronze statue constructed in your honor.

On the other hand, if you were wrong, and they weren’t zombies, you’ve just joined the ranks of some of the worst human beings to ever live. Because you did not have good reasons for what you believe, you rushed in to do something monstrous. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The real life examples of how faith, encouraging people to hold poor reasons for what they believe, caused good people to engage in detrimental behavior, are everywhere. Aside from a dogmatic disinterest in truth, this may be the most relevant reason that faith by Assensus should be strongly criticized: its ability to cause people with good intentions to do horrific things. I’ll await confirmation from you on whether or not you find this reason for rejecting faith by Assensus to be logical, but if not for this reason then for a litany of others, rejection of this type of intellectual bankruptcy is a point we both endorse.

One of the problems with your argument is that it fails to note just how many Christians (and truly, followers of virtually every other faith) do view faith in this way. Heck, 25% of this country thought Jesus would literally return in 2007 (46% found it "somewhat likely"), and 66% believe firmly in the truth of some type of scripture. We can see the evidence that people view faith this way all around us: what are the odds that Muslims would be drilling holes into each others heads at this very moment on the streets of Baghdad, or that such a large opposition to the rights of normal people in this country would be occurring even in the 21^st century without the “benefit” of this type of faith running rampant?

For the rest of the definitions you give, they seem to be variations on faith as a positive attitude in the face of uncertainty which, being a bit of an optimist, I can completely get behind. The thing is, I do not believe that religious faith, even in the metaphoric sense you’re defending, resides entirely in this camp. As I said above, I do not think the truth claims Christianity makes can be uncoupled from faith as Assensus. After all, what separates your claim of:

"I trust that by adding the deep meanings of the Christian stories to my own vision, I can faithfully apply these ideas to my life and in some small way it might make the world a better place."

…from the claim of a theistic Buddhist:

"I trust that by adding the deep meanings of the Buddhist stories to my own vision, I can faithfully apply these ideas to my life and in some small way it might make the world a better place."

…or a Muslim:

"I trust that by adding the deep meanings of the Islamic stories to my own vision, I can faithfully apply these ideas to my life and in some small way it might make the world a better place."

If there is no credible difference, then how is your trust in these metaphors not, at least in part, a bit of faith from Assensus? Or would you be just as happy picking and choosing stories out of the Koran? If you concede that they are all simply stories from which you can scrape out a few morsels of wisdom from amongst the piles of inhumanity (Kill people for working on Saturday? Martyrdom is a good idea? I can keep slaves? I should keep slaves? Etc.), what do you need them for?

If all we need are reasonable, good ideas in order to make the judgments on the best means to make the world a better place, why do we need stories dragging such long tails of metaphysical debris, that very frequently influence the minds of the more credulous to perform some of the most dispassionate acts imaginable? As Sam Harris puts it, your type of faith seems to give us bad reasons to be good when good reasons are perfectly available.

If we want to be good, we have an obligation to be interested in what is true, lest our good intentions become perverted. I do not feel you are advocating anything like that. Instead, you are advancing a position that we should be alright with people merely relaxing their dependence on superstition but not discarding it entirely (if I have misrepresented you here, please let me know in your next post). While this is certainly better than a full-blown disdain for reason in lieu of believing outrageous claims to truth with no evidence, it is by no means a solution – in fact, by lending even quiet support to this book, which claims to be true throughout, it seems we are perpetuating the problem of the vast number of people who view faith as a claim to literal truth.

Phew, sorry, I get a little long-winded. Here is a summation of my argument for you to pick apart as you choose:

1. If we want to do good, as most of us do, we have an obligation to have good reasons for what we believe – otherwise, we could wind up doing some very terrible things.

2. Even as a metaphor, you are still subscribing to truth claims, otherwise there is no reason to hold them. In doing so, you seem to be betraying faith and reason equally.

2a. If you are not grafting any sense of truth onto the stories you allow to influence your life, are you merely an atheist/agnostic who finds wealth in the positive metaphors in the bible? If so, how can you call that faith when you know the stories are false and when you know that simple reason can adduce which actions will create more happiness or alleviate more suffering in the world?

3. Ultimately, the argument that faith has the power to produce positive behavior can be applied to any belief (no matter how wacky), but that argument ignores bad beliefs' additional power to cause harmful behavior (from good people). For this reason, the argument about whether faith is beneficial or not must address the malicious side (not in an individual, but in a society).

4. In accordance with #3, the discussion about whether faith is good for the world cannot be separated from the discussion about whether or not a particular faith is actually true.

Sorry it got so long, and I look forward to hearing from you again in the next few days. Thanks again for taking the time to do this – I hope we can both come away having learned something new.

Best,

JT

Mike's latest post:

JT,

First, we should probably both note that it is common for new acquaintances to make some prejudgments and tend toward arguing against straw man positions. Let’s do our best to get past that. Maybe it is old hat for you to argue against the traditional Christian position, but that isn’t my position. I don’t have an argument against your criticism of “belief". I agree with you that belief without evidence is a road to bad decisions. You did make some other claims that I can address but to be honest, you’re barking up the wrong tree in your critique of beliefs.

Sam Harris does have a point that progressive Christians might share the blame for fundamentalist behavior. We run the risk of being guilty by association if we don’t stand up and call a spade a spade. However, I have no intention of standing by. I don’t advocate any actions based on speculation without evidence. I don’t ask anyone to trust the truths of a story if those truths don’t produce repeatable trustworthy results. I don’t advocate adopting the truth of a story on “blind faith”. You correctly made the connection that this faith without belief would invalidate any claims of one particular set of metaphorical stories as superior to all others. I agree. Actually, that is the very point I wish to make. I’ll gladly support the FSM (flying spaghetti monster) if someone develops a story around that character that could inspire, motivate, and improve society by pulling them into the discussion about what changes the world needs. I won’t claim the FSM is a real physical thing, but I’ll support the story’s artistic power to improve lives if it does prove to do that with any reasonable amount of success. Neither would I support a fundamentalist assertion that we should follow the teachings of a mythical FSM merely because the story says we should. The story must be true. Not true in its facts, but true in that its truths must work. If the story makes the case that a particular character trait, ethic, or social value is valuable, we must be able to test it and see supporting evidence.

I think you may be doing what fundamentalist Christians often do by assuming the only value of these sacred stories is located in their ability to document historical facts. You also run the risk of guilt by association if you feed the fundamentalists obsession with looking for a story's truth in the story's historical accuracy. You may be falling into the same illogical trap and therefore supporting their cause and fueling their passion to focus on the accuracy of the story. You are reinforcing their mistake of looking for truth in the wrong place. You keep saying “… but if the story isn’t true…” What you are doing is similar to suggesting a painting is not valuable unless it is an exact portrait of a real person, place, or thing. It sounds as if you're suggesting that if the Mona Lisa wasn’t a real person and if that smile was not an exact replica of an actual moment, then the painting should be devalued (or destroyed).

On another level, these stories go beyond lessons about life. They mean to invoke questions. They illicit our best reasoning skills and suggest that we seek a logical response to the tragically flawed characters and their often illogical decisions. Nobody should not be taught blind adherence to the mistakes these characters make. The stories should illicit anger in many cases (even anger at their often illogical God). These stories present ancient opinions about the world and ask for our criticism. The real truths found in the Bible are not what we find in its printed words. Like any piece of art, the truth and beauty of art is what happens inside you when you wrestle with the questions it invokes. Art pokes at truth but rarely states it in plain language. It inspires us to make the discovery for ourselves. Sometimes art does this by showing us something very wrong or even overtly false to shake us into a posture of thinking. Your critique of religion sounds much like the criticism of those who wish to censor certain music and art because they’re scared people may only see the surface level profanity rather than looking for its deeper truth about the ills or beauty of life. Logic and reason provided a firm grounding for promoting civil rights, but a religious man was able to gain support for the cause by invoking artistic religious expressions - "I have a dream...". Poetic prophetic inspiration is what religion is all about. Unfortunately, fundamentalists miss the point of the poetry and try to take the metaphors literally while ignoring the reasonable meanings.

I see all these stories as metaphorical - sometimes helpful and sometimes harmful (depending on whose reading). I have no support for the horrors of Christianity. If Christianity can’t be purged of its silly superstitions that result in horrible actions then it should die a quick death. The truth is that many (but not all) of these issues have been purged from Christianity. We should continue to purge them in the same we we should continue to purge our government of corruption. We don't throw away all hopes for a good government simply because of the current problems with the one we have. I’ll join you in that battle to make changes. However, I don’t think progressive Christianity has had a fair reading yet. I don’t think the idea of Christianity without belief has seen the light of day for more than only a few people. Zen Buddhism, for example, has had a better reading. It is evidence that we can uncouple faith from belief. Christianity should learn from the more modern strains of Buddhism.

To directly answer your points...

JT point #1 - If we want to do good, as most of us do, we have an obligation to have good reasons for what we believe – otherwise, we could wind up doing some very terrible things.

Will everyone listen to logic or reason without a provocative piece of art (or literature) to inspire them to start asking questions? Are you so sure that art cannot contribute in this way? I’m not so sure. I agree that logic and reason should rule the day and they should be the ultimate guardian of our behavior. But what will provoke the questions? Art and music has a history of bringing issues to light in society. I think artistic creative literature such as the Bible can serve this purpose.

JT point #2 - Even as a metaphor, you are still subscribing to truth claims, otherwise there is no reason to hold them. In doing so, you seem to be betraying faith and reason equally. 2a. If you are not grafting any sense of truth onto the stories you allow to influence your life, are you merely an atheist/agnostic who finds wealth in the positive metaphors in the bible? If so, how can you call that faith when you know the stories are false and when you know that simple reason can adduce which actions will create more happiness or alleviate more suffering in the world?

You may be assuming that I think religion takes us where logic could not. I'm not suggesting that. Religious stories need logical deduction or they lead us nowhere. Can you arrive there without the stories? Maybe. I didn't but I wouldn't rule out another persons path to the correct conclusions. I'm suggesting faith motivates many to look for logical solutions. It gives us a puzzle and says "go work out a solution". Good religion doesn't give any specific solutions. Bad religion gives rigid formulas for solutions, and limits our ability to apply the truths to each situation in a logical method. If the Bible (or any sacred text) gives us a truth proposition, then it should be tested and proven before we follow it. If it doesn’t yield testable repeatable results, then it is not really “truth”. You suggest I may be "merely an atheist/agnostic". Was that a knock on your own views? Why did you put the word "merely"? In many ways I am an atheist/agnostic. I’m certainly not a strict theist. I don’t glean any “facts” from these stories. They are all fiction in my opinion. But “fiction” isn’t the same as “false”. A false story is one that intends to be untrue in its facts. These stories are not false if they were crafted by people who never meant them to be taken literally. It isn’t the fault of the stories that they were placed in the wrong section of the library. This is something we can correct.

JT point 3 & 4. - Ultimately, the argument that faith has the power to produce positive behavior can be applied to any belief (no matter how wacky), but that argument ignores bad beliefs' additional power to cause harmful behavior (from good people). For this reason, the argument about whether faith is beneficial or not must address the malicious side (not in an individual, but in a society). (4). In accordance with #3, the discussion about whether faith is good for the world cannot be separated from the discussion about whether or not a particular faith is actually true.

I agree that the bad results of religion (no matter their good intention) should be on trial in public opinion. Those malicious interpretations and resulting behaviors should be brought to light and prosecuted. Again, you really are offer critique of shallow “superstitious belief” not the more robust definitions of faith that I provided. You will need to take that argument up with someone else since we both agree on that point. You continue to assume that “truth” means historically factual. You’ve confused faith with something that can either be true or false. Instead, faith is something you do or don't do.

JT, Please respond in any way you like, but I hope you will answer this one question as part of your response.

In your opinion, is George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” a true story?

Thanks for the dialog! This process has already been helpful.

Mike

And my response:

This is the first blogalogue I've had on the subject where my opponent and I can't seem to disagree on anything major. For instance, we can converge on the fact that belief in things on bad reasons (or no reasons, or in spite of evidence against it) is dangerous and to be both criticized and avoided. We also agree that a majority of the stories in the bible are likely false. As far as I can tell, we're off to a good start. :D While we're quibbling over definitions, I think we'll tie that down here in a post or two.

Your argument, as I am growing to understand it, seems to be that we can evince a few positive lessons from the bible, itself an ancient book that is teeming with inhumanity throughout most of it. I cannot argue against that proposition. What I can argue for are more productive means of getting to knowledge that are both more honest and less dangerous.

You appear to be equating biblical stories, as well as stories of other religions, with Grimm's fairy tales and stories like Rumpelstiltskin. I'm not sure that we could honestly call gleaning the moral concept that we should not steal from reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears "faith", especially when there are infinitely better reasons not to steal than the lesson learned from a story. Perhaps when you are a child, this is the best we can do (I don't think it is, but it's feasible), but I am certain that adults can do better.

There are plenty of moral lessons to be found in faerie tales such as Goldilocks, which almost always succeed in painting the bad guys, the ones engaging in flagrantly immoral activity, as models of what to avoid in your actual life (nobody wants to be Goldilocks, that's the whole point). However, most of our holy books (including the bible), having originated in a time when appalling inhumanity was often the norm, fail at this in the most excessive way. Consider Abraham's passing of the test of faith in Genesis: the fact that he was willing to murder his progeny is held up to us as an example, a metaphor if you will, for what is good. The same can be said of the doubting Thomas and his admonishment that it is a good thing to believe without seeing. This is the very thing we agree is to be most stridently avoided.

I'm not sure if people will get to a state of morality or not without art (another place we agree is that without logic, the stories have no impact, and logic works independent of them - so it's an interesting question whether or not we need such tales to get to logical moral conclusions), but even if I conceded that we couldn't, there's plenty of art to choose from which fully admits to being art or story. You could literally walk into a library blind-folded and, on your first attempt, find a book that is honest in its assessment of itself and its goals, that has a well-spring more to say about leading a sensible life than almost any religious text, including the bible. And still, reading such a book and acquiring its lessons could not truly be considered "faith", but rather reason (or even common sense). You must admit, that if Da Vinci were trying to convince us that the Mona Lisa was a photograph, it would be a terrible photograph indeed.

To your question: do I think Animal Farm is a true story.

No, I do not. It never happened. It is clearly a fictional story, and if it had claims to being factual littered throughout (including threats for not believing it to be true), I would rightly consider Orwell to be mad. As it lacks either of those things, I consider it to be a far wiser (and honest) lesson on morality than the bible. Are there positive lessons to be taken from it? Absolutely. There are also splendid examples of negative behavior that it urges me to avoid - and it implies them to be so, unlike the bible. I'm unsure how acknowledging this is a matter of faith.

Here's what it boils down to, and this is in agreement with what you said earlier about how such stories are powerless without a logical message: when I read Animal Farm, 1984, or The Ugly Duckling, it is me who makes the moral judgment call. The same is true with the bible (again, this argument comes from Sam Harris). When we read in Matthew to do unto others as we would have done to us (although, this was really the doctrine of Lao Tsze 550 years earlier), it is we who decide that this is a keeper as a moral precept. Conversely, when we read the story of Abraham and Isaiah, or of the doubting Thomas, or that we should execute people for breaking the Sabbath, it is also our own logic (and hopefully empathy) that lead us to conclude that these are wretchedly immoral ideas. If our own moral judgment is paramount, why do we need such stories in our adulthoods?

Also, because Animal Farm purports to be what it is, a work of fiction, we are not plagued by a vast majority of our population acting as though Animal Farm were a legitimate project upon which to base their entire lives, encouraging them to abandon the same sense of reason that both you and I agree we need in order to avoid becoming potentially dangerous from our beliefs.

So, let me conclude as I began, with some areas in which we agree:

1. We have an obligation to have good reasons for what we believe.

Faith as Assensus fails in this, so we both reject it and criticize people who adopt faith in this fashion. It is also inarguably true that virtually all people who have faith, have faith in this fashion (I provided links for why this is true in my last post). While I'm glad you are not persuaded by this type of belief, we are discussing what is best for society, not the individual.

2. Most of the bible stories are not true.

The kicker is that they claim to be, which gets people to Faith as Assensus. Additionally, if taking the few good moral lessons from them is tantamount to doing the same with admittedly false stories, such as Goldilocks, is reading Goldilocks a matter of faith? Also, would it not make more sense to cast aside books making false claims to truth, in order to avoid the very dangerous Faith as Assensus, and instead to advocate other wiser and more honest moral metaphors if, in fact, we do need art to get to morality (don't get me wrong, I'm a Music major, so hooray art!)? It seems this would also remove the need for ambiguous words like "faith."

And, since it seems to be in-keeping with both our idioms, I'll throw you a question for your next post: Is taking a lesson from the fictional stories in the bible any different from taking a lesson from the afterthought of an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? If not, are they both a matter of faith?

I've honestly never been approached with an argument like the one you're making, so this is adding to my knowledge bank as well. Additionally, you are pleasant and informed. As a result, I'm enjoying this as well. Can't wait to hear back.

Best,

JT

And from Mike:

JT,

I have to say this has helped me think about how I discuss faith. We’ve mostly agreed on the mythical nature of sacred texts and the need to interpret them through the lens of ancient writers without adopting their ancient superstitions. We also agree on the need for sound reason to rule our ethical choices. I actually disagree with your choice to label the stories “false” without further nuance. In other words, it is reasonable to suggest certain interpretations of the stories are “false” when fundamentalists claim the stories are factual. However, to label the story as false implies that you’ve judged the author’s intent to be something other than a symbolic interpretation of history. Maybe this is a bit of self-discovery about my own argument and common reactions to it. I find it interesting that you have the same basic reaction to my position as fundamentalist Christians. You each assume the story is true or false based on its surface level meaning. That does make it a form of fiction, but it doesn’t make it false. To say a story is false implies that it has no truth on any level. Can you really say that? You may consider a more nuanced accusation or else your position is shallow and you’ll loose your audience quick. I could see where the dialog could go sideways if we were actually more ideologically opposed or more emotionally reactive debaters. Wouldn't it be odd to walk into a book store and see books categorized as "true" and "false". There is a reason we don't use those terms when talking about books.

For example, what if we could go back in time and ask George Orwell “What is the book Animal Farm about?" I can think of two possible answers and neither answer would include a farm or talking pigs. One possible answer might be that the story is about Communist Russia, the ideals of Karl Marx, and the consequences of those ideas gone bad in the hands of Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin. Those are real historic people and events. If animal farm is about those events, then isn’t it a true story? Didn’t those things literally happen? The second answer I could imagine from Orwell would be that his story was about how power often (maybe always) corrupts people no matter their original intentions. Again, I think that answer also would mean this a true story. I don’t see many other options for Orwell (unless I completely missed the intention of the story). I imagine that if we told Orwell that we thought his story was poppycock or lies because pigs do not ever talk, he would laugh at us and wonder if we ever got past the 3rd grade. Therefore, I think that Animal Farm is a true story. I don’t think it is even about talking pigs. The intended message of the author is true. Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin are real people and they existed. Power does often do the things Orwell suggests. Those events which Orwell described did in fact happen, but instead of a flat dull historical reading, Orwell dared to capture the facts in a mythical epic story. If he had taken the logical historical approach, then I doubt we would have ever known the name George Orwell. Do you remember the author of your last history book? This is the basic difference between communicating truth in art and communicating truth in science. Nietzsche talked at great length about the power and beauty in Art. He even borrowed the idea of communicating his own truths trough parabolic stories. He didn’t claim God is dead, but he had one of his characters do it for him. It’s up to the reader to interpret what he might have meant and why he didn’t simply say it himself in plain logical language.

So why did Orwell do this? Why didn’t he just make a logical argument against corruption? Why not simply give us the bare details and let us decide how to react? I think he did this because artists (like yourself?) realize that art moves people to deeply see and hear an idea in a more profound way. It isn’t enough to transmit facts. The big logical decisions in the world often need to be personalized, even personified by art to take hold. They need to become “meaning” if they are going to shake the world. I loved Orwell’s book and I spent more time researching the facts about Karl Marx’s important ideas (both good and bad) and his misguided followers because of that book. I’m not sure I’d have been so interested if it had not been for that story. This is not a “false” story even though it uses fiction to express its truths about history and about life. Even hard line atheists in the soviet union realized this. They needed to create a social narrative (a myth) to do more than merely implement their logical goals to spread communism. They had to get people to buy into the idea. So, they invented the inspirational myth of “Mother Russia”. A symbolic representation ingrained in that society. These symbolic expressions helped create identity and solidarity and they are powerful tools. So when it comes to bringing truths to the attention of the public, I don’t think we, as adults, can do better than art. I think we need creative storytelling to make the social changes that both you and I probably agree on. Each of those symbols should be evaluated, but do you really mean to make the argument that symbolic art and narratives are ineffective carriers of truth?

It seems that our main difference lies in your assumption that artistic symbolic expressions of ideas (and even artistic expressions of history) are either invalid or at a minimum, they are grossly inefficient at transmitting meaning. The case you present sounds like someone who is opposed to symbolic art as a valid way to transmit meaning and even change the world. I find that hard to reconcile now that I know you are yourself an artist. Art does have its problems. It isn’t always logical. Along with the message of the artist, art brings with it the flaws of the artist. Art is truth told through the eyes of an artist. It requires us to look at the world from a different perspective. That isn’t always a perfect delivery system. Most art lovers appreciate those flaws. In fact, it is often the artist’s flaws that make the art so unique and valuable. Is the Bible flawed? Absolutely! But like a true lover of art, we should not be so naive as to only take a quick glance. We should dive in and see what it tells us about the artists. I have faith in the Bible in the same way that I have faith that Orwell’s book can teach people about the evils of power (not about talking pigs). The reason I don’t create any religious notions about Orwell’s book is because his book is very limited and it doesn’t really address my needs. The Bible however, does address me. It is about life, community, friendship, protest, and just about everything else. The Bible is true because it truthfully represents the perspectives of its various artists and their communities (even when those communities had bad ideas).

Now, on to the “true” story of Abraham…

If we see this story as art we don’t ask “did this happen”. Instead, we would say “why did the author write it this way?” and “what is the author (artist) trying to tell us about his life and his community?”

I think this story about Abraham tells us about the birth of a nation. It tells us that the fathers of Israel, represented by the character Abraham (which actually means father), was barely surviving their nomadic life in the desert. Through trials and struggles they survived to produce a nation. Like the birth of our nation, they had to be willing to commit (sacrifice) the lives of their children to the notion of building and securing this new community (in wars, famine, and difficult circumstances). This is not a horrible story about God’s test. It is not really a story about a father willing to kill his son any more than Orwell’s story was really about talking pigs. For Israel, somehow these sons were spared (so they figured they must have been blessed by God). These “fathers” were no more horrible than the fathers of American soldiers are when they sacrifice their sons for the benefit (even the birth) of a nation. (I have to interject here that I do not personally support war and violence, but that is another subject). These people always write victory in war as “God’s will”. In the same way, they write destruction and defeat as God’s will too. Abraham’s story is not a story about morals. It is a mythical telling of real history about the birth and survival of a community. Do we assume that George Orwell supported violence since his main characters committed horrible acts? No, we realize that he is using myth to portray history and that history was ugly. He embellishes and changes the time line for dramatic effect, uses symbolic characters, and yet we all really know what he is writing about. If someone started worshiping these talking pigs and claiming this was a factual story, we shouldn’t respond by destroying or belittling Orwell’s art. I have no problem condemning atrocities committed in the name of the Bible, but we can’t blame the stories or throw them out.

I completely agree with you that Christianity has skewed the story. I agree that this has created centuries of bad decisions. However, the blame lies with the readers who don’t understand symbolic language. They arrived at this conclusion by making the same mistake that you are making. They assumed that the story can only be read at face value. Do you see the connection? I also recognize why this is not clear for many people today. I understand why you (and fundamentalist religions) have read the stories so literally. The biggest reason is because the Bible is not a single book. It is a collection of stories. The bible does not anywhere claim that these stories are non-fiction. It does not claim that we must believe it to be non-fiction. It does say we should have faith in it, but as I’ve suggested, having faith in the truths of a story does not mean we should take its myths literally.

So when you say “We also agree that a majority of the stories in the bible are likely false” that isn’t true. I don’t agree that these stories are false. I won’t use that word for these texts. I also hear in your argument that you assume other myths tell us they are fiction. Really? I guess I missed that line in Goldilocks, Little Red Ridding hood, and King Arthur. Does Da Vinci add a disclaimer on the back of his painting that says the Mona Lisa is not a photograph, or do we rely on our reasoning skills to interpret this piece of art for what it is? It is no more valid to make the unnuanced claim that the stories are false than it is to claim they are factual. Both of those positions lack sophistication and knowledge about the ancient tradition of mythic artistic expression.

Peace

- Mike

My response:

First, I apologize that this has taken so long. Being busy for the lose...

We still seem to be quibbling over definitions. It seems that you are arguing over something that is analytically true while I am treating the concept of truth synthetically, the way almost every believer in our various religions does (See Analytic-Synthetic distinctions).

So, I'll need you to do me a favor. I'm going to provide you with a few scenarios, and I'll ask you to tell me in your next post which ones you would consider faith. If you could also explain on what ground you make the distinction, that'd be most excellent.

1. A person reads the bible and concludes that it is true in its entirety, that Jesus is the son of god, and that god has a will this person is to follow.

2. A man is walking around the streets of downtown New York exclaiming, with the utmost conviction, that he is Napoleon Bonaparte, and that everybody should fall into rank.

2a. A person sees this man and concludes that he is crazy.
2b. A person sees this man and concludes that he is correct.
2c. A person sees this man and concludes that he is happy, and that happiness means following your heart.
2d. A person sees this man and concludes that he is crazy, but that he is happy, and that happiness means following your heart.
2e. A person sees this man, concludes that he is actually Napoleon, and that he is happy, and that happiness means following your heart.

3. A child reads Goldilocks and the Three Bears and concludes that stealing is wrong.

4. A philosopher and biologist, working in tandem, conclude that chemical-based dispositions in human beings encourage us to be social and to cooperate, and that this disposition was likely selected for in one of our great ape ancestors. As a result, life would suck being ostracized from our herd, which is precisely what causing harm to others by various means, such as stealing, will result in. By recognizing that our own personal happiness will be greater by not stealing, we have a rationale for being honest in this way.

5. A person reads through the bible, noting that most of it is magical gibberish one would expect from a book written so long ago. They read the golden rule in Matthew (or in Lao Tsze's screed, the Tao Te Ching written over 600 years earlier) and decide, via their own common sense, that this is a good idea. They also read the parable about the doubting Thomas or what Leviticus says about people who break the Sabbath, and conclude that this is the most wretched nonsense imaginable.

6. A person has never read a word of the bible, but they go to church every week and know in their heart that Jesus is the one true god and that they are going to heaven.

7. A person reads a story in a news-paper about a serial killer who never smoked and lived to be 103 years old in prison. The person concludes that they should not smoke.

8. A person reads a peer-reviewed journal explaining the litany of ways that smoking shortens your life span, and elects not to smoke.

9. A person reads a story in a news-paper about a serial killer who never smoked and lived to be 103 years old in prison. This person does not want to be a serial killer, so they decide to start smoking.

Moving on to the rest of your post...

My use of the world false simply means that a story is not grounded in reality, which is an assessment we both seem to apply to scripture the same way we apply it to The Illiad. I am not denying it any meaning that is relevant to our lives, but I would not call inferring such meaning from these stories "faith." This is why I require the above distinctions in order to move forward with this.

On finding books on the basis of "true" and "false".

We do sort books by being fictional or non-fictional though, and we have a certain derision for people who, in their mind, would put those books in the wrong section. All stories, whether fictional or not, can have lessons or meaning, and I have already conceded that fictional stories can (and often do) have meaning, so there is no reason to continue producing arguments against an argument that that denies these stories have anything relevant to say. I do not think, however, that the word "faith' can be used for this.

I am a music major, so I am not of the mind that art is a poor transition to meaning. I have already said that meaning can be adduced from stories. I believe your perception of this is a result of our inability to define our terms, which I hope to fix soon.

On why we should not have faith, by definition of gaining lessons.

Even bad lessons can be taken from stories - it is our own sense of morality/common sense, which I spoke of earlier, that allows us to keep the "good" lessons. But having faith on the basis of learning from a metaphor is not always good, we need rationality applied to metaphors in order to ensure we get a positive result, and I'm not sure you can call that faith.

For instance, the vast majority of Christians take the "true" story of Abraham to mean that they should do whatever god wishes of them - a reading of the bible makes this a frightening proposition. They still received a lesson evinced by the bible...is this also faith?

Eager to get this sorted out, and eager to hear from you again,

JT

Bad Philosophy

2008-07-04T07:05:00.001-07:00

This is a list of some arguments that often get used to defend the existence of god, and why they are illogical.

1. Argument from Ignorance (Argumentum ad Ignorantium)

"When we did not know how the bumble-bee flew, was that an adequate ground for positing god as the answer, or was it instead cause for further scientific investigation aimed at finding out the natural explanation? All of science is the result of choosing the latter approach. Once there was a time when nothing was explained. Since then, everything which has been explained has been found to have a natural, not a divine, explanation. Although this does not prove that all future explanations will be of like kind, it shows that it is not at all unreasonable to expect this--and it is not a very reliable bet to expect the opposite."

~ Richard C. Carrier

Example: "You can't prove that god doesn't exist!", "You can't prove that Jesus didn't rise from the dead."

I have tackled this before in my post refuting common theological arguments. However, for the sake of being thorough, I'll tackle it again here.

Let's start with the obvious: this argument could be used to defend any number of wacky propositions. I can't prove that unicorns aren't prancing about behind my apartment, or that there isn't a Leprechaun awaiting me at the end of the rainbow. We can all acknowledge that only a fool would believe either idea just because we can't prove they're not there.

It was for the purpose of defeating the Appeal to Ignorance that Bertrand Russel authored his famous teapot argument:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

If somebody makes a claim to truth, such as with the teapot, they are implying they have a reason for believing it. Why is this? Consider the proposition that leprechauns do actually exist. In order to prove they do not, a person must search every crevice of the cosmos, lest the last place they looked may be where the tricky little green guy was hiding. This type of search is impossible for us (and those invoking the argument are aware of this). It is much easier for the person believing in leprechauns to present their evidence and to allow the claim to live or die based on their reasons for believing. The Argument from Ignorance is an attempt to circumvent the responsibility of making an argument based on the evidence someone has for the proposition they are advancing. Sadly, it often works.

So, how can we know anything? We can only know a few things with absolute certainty, and these things tend to be synthetic in nature, such as the proposition that A=A. Almost all of these truths only exist as exercises though, and are not claims to tangible truth.

For all the rest, we hold probable beliefs based on what information we have at the time. We view particular propositions as being probably true. In some cases, the probability borders on being all-but-certain, but we should always be open to evidence to the contrary. Examples include "The Earth revolves around the Sun", "People do not rise from the dead after three days", and "Prayer doesn't produce any positive changes." In short, we must be open to the idea of unicorns and leprechauns because we may one day find one, and we must be ready to change our minds given the new evidence.

The Argument from Ignorance only gets used when people have no reason to believe the things they believe. Nobody ever uses it when defending their shoe size or the existence of the tree in their front yard - there is no need to, since the evidence speaks for itself. In fact, if something didn't exist, what more evidence could we have than the lack of any evidence?

2. The Association Fallacy

Examples: "Hitler thought his ideas were the best thing for humanity too!", "The Romans were anti-Christian, and look where it got them!", "Stalin was an atheist too!"

This usually takes the following form:

1. X was an evil person.
2. X engaged in behavior Y.
3. Therefore Y is an evil behavior.

The problem with this logic is, like the argument from ignorance, it can be applied to a large list of scenarios. Imagine if somebody had said to Martin Luther King Jr. as an attempt to dissuade his efforts for civil liberties, "Have you noticed that everybody's mad at you? Y'know, Hitler thought he was doing a great thing too!"

Yes, Hitler was a very passionate person, but his passion was not the issue. What the Association Fallacy disregards is the fact that not every quality about a person carries with it the wickedness for which a person is famous. Hitler also had a mustache and enjoyed music - should either quality be avoided because they were shared by an evil man? Of course not.

Often the Association Fallacy is used to suggest that a particular quality was actually the cause of somebody's evil behavior. Imagine if somebody told you "The Romans allowed homosexuals to run rampant, and now their empire is destroyed!" Don't laugh, people actually use this line more often than you'd think. Of course, the Romans also had a fondness for grapes - how do we know that this was not the reason their nation crumbled?

Or what if somebody defending slavery said "The Romans allowed black men to be free contributors of society, and now their empire is destroyed!" Most civilized people would, at the very least, scoff at such a gigantic leap in logic, but why is the above example with homosexuals more credible than this? It's not.

Every argument needs to be argued on its merits, rather than the merits or accolades of those holding them.

3. Insults (Ad Hominem attacks)

Examples: "You just think that way because you're a liberal!", "Wow, that argument just shows what an idiot you are!", "That's just the type of thing I'd expect from somebody with brown hair!"

An Ad Hominem attack is an attack of the person making the opposing argument that does not seek to answer the argument itself. Again, let's start with the obvious.

Imagine I just suggested that homosexuals deserve equal rights and cite the AMA and the APA opinions on the matter as a deference to the experts. After all, these are the two most prestigious medical bodies in our country, and every credible battery of medical minds agrees with them, so abiding by what the experts think would probably be a pretty good strategy for alleviating suffering. Now imagine that I got this response, "Wow, this exposes you as being a huge liberal. What an asshole you are for being intolerant of my faith!"

I could be the biggest asshole to ever walk the Earth, but that would not, even for a moment, make me any more wrong on any subject. The only way to establish I am incorrect about homosexual rights is to show somewhere I have erred in logic, or establish that the opinion of the experts I used is inconsequential. Ad Hominem attacks accomplish neither. Consider how weak they would look elsewhere:

Debater A: "When two Hydrogen get fused into Helium in the Sun, they should create a nearly massless particle called a neutrino. These will be difficult to detect since they are so small that they should very seldom interact with other matter. In order to detect them, we have filled this container with Chlorine and have placed it in a mine to shield it from cosmic rays. When the neutrinos strike the Chlorine, it should create a molecule of Argon, and we can monitor how much Argon is created. We do not want to rely on this experiment alone, so we have also set up a lab to watch heavy deuterium water a few miles beneath the surface of the Earth. When neutrinos force molecules of such water to eject an electron, we should be able to measure it via Cerenkov radiation. As expected, the results from both experiments are consistent with each other."

Debater B: "Man, you sound like a real elitist jerk."

In my esteem, anybody invoking such an argument has all but conceded the point.

As an addendum, the presence of insults does not make an argument Ad Hominem. If Debater A had prefaced his bit with "I doubt a dumbass like you will grasp this", his actual argument would still stand. Ad Hominem is only when somebody intends degradation of a person making an argument to substitute for an argument against the position they're advancing.

4. Asserting your conclusion as evidence (Begging the question or Petitio Principii)

Example: "We know Jesus is Lord because he performed miracles like walking on water!"

Normally, you need a few logical steps to reach your conclusion. Something to the tune of:

1. I prayed to Jesus for a sign he exists.
2. The clouds parted and he floated down in a blaze of white light and shook my hand.
3. He hung around for a few hours and signed autographs. Thousands of people saw him, and my little sister videotaped the whole thing.
4. The shared experience by others leads me to believe that I was not hallucinating. Therefore...
5. Jesus exists and is god.

At no point do we see anything like:

1. God would have to be able to perform miracles.
2. The bible says Jesus performed miracles.
3. Jesus is therefore god.

If you're trying to establish that Jesus actually is the son of god to somebody who does not believe that proposition to be true, you cannot use your conclusion as one of your logical steps. Instead, in the above case, you would need to provide some evidence that Jesus actually walked on water.

5. Argument Ad Populum

Example: "95% of the people in the world believe in god - surely they can't all be wrong!"

Well yes, they can. At one point, everybody on the planet believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth - the fact that everybody believed it did not do anything to alter the true order of the solar system. At one point Zeus enjoyed almost universal worship, far more than the 33% of the world that currently claims Christianity as their faith. What Christian would consider such an argument a reason to believe in Zeus?

Throughout history, people have been wrong about a lot of things. The truth did not change when people decided to change their minds - we simply uncovered evidence for the truth that could not be ignored. Yes, lots of people currently believe in god, but that does not mean he exists any more than it means the Sun revolves around the Earth - how good are their reasons?

6. Straw-Manning

"To 'set up a straw man' or 'set up a straw man argument' is to describe a position that superficially resembles an opponent's actual view but is easier to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent (for example, deliberately overstating the opponent's position)."

~ Madison Pirie, How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic

Madison's description fits straw-manning to a T. The way it would look in a simple formula is as follows:

1. Person A holds position X.
2. Person B ignores position X and instead refutes position Y.
3. Person B concludes that position X is flawed.

Imagine for a moment my position was that Marijuana should be legalized, a straw man argument could look like this:

"I had a friend once who spent all his money on Marijuana. He lost his wife, kids, and job, then he went out an murdered eleven babies and their pet kittens. You want to turn people into that?"

We see this all the time in the argument on religion.

7. Appeal to Motive

This is a type of Ad Hominem fallacy (see point #3). The Appeal to Motive fallacy occurs when somebody tries to discredit an argument because of where it arose. Examples would be:

Debater A: There is a mountain of evidence for Evolution from various disciplines, all of which agrees with each other when cross-checked. This includes the predictability of transitional species in soil of a certain age and type, synteny, observed instances of speciation in species like Podarcis sicula and Culex pipiens, and a litany of others.

Debater B: Of course you believe in Evolution - you're an atheist!

Of course, Debater A's disbelief in the proposition of god by no means makes the evidences he lists any less powerful. Debater B has attempted to circumvent the argument by showing the possibility of bias, rather than defeating the argument.

Alignment with a certain group or position never, in itself, makes a person wrong.

Personal Note: This is why I dislike the use of the word "liberal" and "conservative." They are tiny boxes into which the broad spectrum of political thought cannot possibly fit, and they are frequently used by both sides (though, by far more often by religious people), to invoke an Appeal to Motive.

More to come!

Faith Plus Good Intentions: A Recipe for Disaster

2008-06-29T15:41:00.001-07:00

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

~ Samuel Johnson

We must begin with the fact that all of us have a responsibility to have good reasons for what we believe - this is referred to as our Epistemological Responsibility/Accountability. Most people have good intentions when they act, but what we believe often has a tremendous impact on whether or not we accomplish something beneficial with those good intentions. This is particularly where faith hurts us - it enables good-natured people with the most well-meaning intentions to perform the most vile deeds imaginable. Each section of this essay will come back to this one simple and obvious responsibility.

Faith as an Influence in Personal Lives

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”

~ Steve Weinberg

Consider the story of the parents who allowed their son to die of a urinary tract infection that created blockage. The cure was as simple as a catheter. Why did they do this? They did it because they believed that prayer and faith could heal the boy.

There can be no doubt that the parents did not want their son to die, and that they believed they were doing the most productive thing in order to help him recover. But because they did not make it a priority to have good reasons for what they believed, their overwhelming desire to save their offspring resulted in his death.

Sadly, bad reasoning shows a tremendous amount of resistance to change. After all, in many cases of people indulging in unreasonable behavior, they already have an aversion to rationality - with only good arguments at our disposal, what more can we do? For further evidence of this, examine the similar case of the Neumann family, which occurred shortly before the story I linked above. They also prayed their child to death, which is horrific enough in its own right. The really frightening thing is how the faithful often react in these situations.

Dale Neumann told investigators that "given the same set of circumstances with another child, he would not waiver in his faith and confidence in the healing power of prayer," according to the interview statement.

Police also said an e-mail Dale Neumann sent at 4:58 p.m. on March 22, the day before Kara's death, showed that the parents were aware their daughter was very ill.

The subject line of the email was: "Help our daughter needs emergency prayer!!!!" The e-mail was send to AmericasLastDays, an online ministry run by David Eells.

The man has three other children, and he likely cares about them very much. His ability to do so has simply been hindered (one may think it has been stripped from him entirely) by his failure to hold good reasons for what he believes.

So often, it is implied that people like myself accuse religious people of being wicked - most of them aren't. What all of them do have in common though, is that all of them fail in their epistemological responsibilities. Part of what strikes us as dangerous about faith is that it is not merely a vehicle for bad people, but that it allows otherwise good and sane people to embrace malicious acts and consider them holy.

Many people will respond to this by saying that religion also makes people do good things. While this notion is often true, it restrains the potential of peoples' good will and, as Sam Harris puts it, gives people bad reasons to be good when good reasons are perfectly available. We are talking about reasons that do not come dragging a heap of metaphysical baggage, that often corrupts the intentions of the kind and the minds of the good.

Faith as an Influence on Charity

Often, we are confronted with claims that religious people, like Christians, are far more generous charitably than their atheistic counterparts. This point is advanced as though it were without question. While this is certainly debatable, I find that it is less important than what gets done with the charitable money once it is donated.

Here's the basic gist, as a commenter on Richarddawkins.net once put it:

If you are going to evaluate the religious organizations on their contribution to society, it needs to be done in terms of "the return on investment" - ie. people in society invest X and they get Y.

Money that has been spent on building beautiful churches that are functionally derelict, or money spent promoting and defending a religious belief, could have been spent on human beings, not in honor of an invisible deity. As an example, in 2006, Gideons International received $115 million from 'Gods people' as they put it, and $105.7 million of this was directly contributed for the purchase and placement of Bibles and New Testaments. Was that a good use of peoples' donations?

If everyone in the UK gave the church £1 per year (ie. the church gets £55 million a year) and they setup a charity in each major town of the UK to help the needy at a total cost of £10 million per year, have the people in the UK got a good return on their investment? The people may be pleased with their soup kitchen or whatever, and feel that the church is indeed a great organization for helping, because each person has only given a small donation of a £1. But when they see the bigger picture and realize that the remaining £45 million is being used to put bibles in hotel rooms, fund faith schools, campaign against gay rights, etc, they may start to wonder whether the church really is a good investment. That £45 million per year could certainly be put to better use."

An argument that charitable work may be seriously reduced without the church and without religion is easily countered. Secular charities already exist that put as much of their donations as possible into the causes they support, keeping only enough to pay the bills and promote the charity. If there was no church, encouraging people to donate funds to demonstrate their love of Jesus, these people would give to these other charities, enabling them to be stronger and do more good for society. If a secular charity spent a huge amount of money creating and distributing a book that simply says how wonderful the charity is, people may stop donating to that charity. They donate to the church in the knowledge of this, as charitable work is not the driver for the donation. What donation would you make for a chance of eternal life?

The fact is that when you give money to charity, you're going to give it towards something you feel does the most good. The problem is that faith, and holding bad reasons for what you believe, prompts people to believe that there are loftier goals for charity than actually alleviating human suffering.

Most religious people consider tithing to be a charitable act, but think about what those dollars accomplish. They go to hire on an entire staff, to build elaborate buildings replete with the latest in visual and audio technologies, to vehicles and the fuel to operate them, to insurance on the building, land, and vehicles - the list goes on. How much of their tithe actually gets used to help the world? Compare that to a fiercely secular charity like Americares, which dedicates 99% of its income to its programs.

Other donations deemed "charitable" by the faithful go to oppose things like gay marriage, where no perceivable harm is at stake. Think for a moment how much energy and resources get wasted on this issue while starvation and genocide go unnoticed elsewhere in the world.

It's not that charities contaminated by bad ideas, such as religion, do not manage to do some good, it's just that the formula of bad ideas plus good intentions limits the good we can do by causing these people to squander a harrowing amount of the money they receive, even while children starve.

Faith as an Influence on Philanthropy

If you really had the key to eternal life and happiness, then there would be no question as to whether or not you should try and promulgate that belief in a region where you will be killed for accepting it.

This is precisely what many religious people do.

Sam Harris, in all his eloquence, puts it more beautifully than I could:

The worst problem with religious morality is that it often causes good people to act immorally, even while they attempt to alleviate the suffering of others. In Africa, for instance, certain Christians preach against condom use in villages where AIDS is epidemic, and where the only information about condoms comes from the ministry. They also preach the necessity of believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ in places where religious conflict between Christians and Muslims has led to the deaths of millions. Secular volunteers don’t spread ignorance and death in this way. A person need not be evil to preach against condom use in a village decimated by AIDS; he or she need only believe a specific faith-based moral dogma. In such cases we can see that religion can cause good people to be much less good than they might otherwise be.

Even I could concede that what they were doing would be the best thing, despite all the death they cause, if they had a single good reason to believe they were right. Of course, they have no such reason, so like the parents that pray to god while watching their children slowly die, the missionaries in these circumstances rush in to become murderers - always with the best intentions.

Where is the Soul?

2008-06-28T14:08:00.000-07:00

What if you had a stroke that damaged your visual cortex-where would your faculty of sight be thereafter? If a priest said that your visual self had gone on to heaven before you, would you believe him? What if another stroke caused you to lose your ability to speak and to understand language-do you think that your eloquence must survive in some immaterial form? There is simply no question that brain damage can cause any of us to lose the specific faculties that constitute our conscious selves. Why is it so hard to imagine that we can lose all these faculties at once?

~ Sam Harris

Amber, a fellow blogger over at Teh Juggernauts, has penned an excellent piece about how the brain works to produce the process of cognizance, and how we require no appeal to magic or souls in order to get there. I have assimilated a portion of it for my Essay on the Evidences for Evolution.

Here it is:

Where is the Soul?

If we have a soul, in which part of the brain would it reside? The part that loves? The part that thinks? That stares in wonder at a night sky?

All the permanent matter in your brain consists of two types of cells: neurons and glial cells. Neurons are what allow us to move, breathe, think, eat, love, and play. Glial cells provide physical support to neurons.

When somebody talks about consciousness, they are usually referring to your ability to think and consider your role in the world around you. Those abilities are located in the frontal lobes.

The frontal lobes are the portions of the brain that have developed most recently. We know this through our understanding of the similarities and differences between our brains and the brains of other species, both mammalian and non-mammalian.

The brain is separated into three main chunks, if you will. The oldest portion is referred to as the reptilian brain, or brain stem. This is our original brain. It takes care of many of the functions which are unconscious. For example, every time you breathe, every heartbeat, is a result of this portion of your brain. Basic sexual encounters, aka the physiology behind rudimentary desire, are also located here.

Most animals have a brain VERY similar to this. In 9th grade, in Honors biology, I dissected a crayfish, and examined a brain that looked and acted very similar to the reptilian brain. It gave the crayfish the ability to swim, drink, eat, and reproduce. Everything a good little lifeform needs.

Next, on top of the reptilian brain, is the mammalian brain, aka the cortex. This first appears as animals evolved from reptiles into mammals (see the section above on the fossil record). There are several improvements that the mammalian brain brings, with arguably the best being the hippocampus. The hippocampus gives us memory, and with that, intelligence was given the ability to flourish. Suddenly we could remember where we hid nuts, where the best hunting spots were, or which events seemed to precipitate others. Toss in the amygdala for good measure, and suddenly we have conscious feeling about events. This is important, because it gives us fear of the bigger, toothier animals.

We know that the mammalian brain came after the reptilian brain because many tasks of the reptilian brain were replaced with the mammalian brain. Parts of the reptilian brain are now ignored, overridden by the newer mammalian brain.

Now, on to the seat of consciousness: the neocortex. A lot of mammals have a neocortex, although they are not as advanced as the human neocortex. The neocortex, which houses the frontal lobes, is key to understanding consciousness. This part of your brain controls... well... everything else: your ability to reason, to plan ahead,to use language, to speak, to write, and your ability to imagine.

Take Shakespeare. The man, I will assume you agree, had a consciousness about him? We see this through his works, through his writing. But what are we really seeing?

He experiences the world. Information comes in through the eyes, is tossed into the occipital lobe, where our visions of the world are evaluated. His hippocampus records anything noticeable. His amygdala applies emotional tags to those memories. Now, Shakespeare goes through life like this... taking in information, and storing it away.

He goes through school, and learns language. The areas of the neocortex, referred to as Broca's area and Wernicke's area, that deal with language, combined with a strong memory allow him to read and store experiences.

Then, using the basic motor skills, he is able to convey the language describing his experiences back onto paper. But the entire process would be stopped short without the frontal lobes of the neocortex. It is the part of the brain that allows us to plan a story, to tell a story. It is the part that lets us imagine scenarios, and then convey them to others. It is what gives us the ability to imagine how another will respond, based on memories and emotions.

Each of these abilities is mapped. We can see what parts give us what responses.

We can look at any aspect of the human "soul", and point to the parts of the brain that create that experience.

For example... let's look at the amygdala. This is the basic little box of human emotion. What makes you feel basic fear, happiness, joy, or sadness. If you take that out, or damage it accidentally, suddenly you don't experience those emotions. Does this mean you've lost your "soul"?

Love is an emotional attachment formed through our amygdala, in combination with the neocortex. Damage to the frontal lobes can cause a lack of empathy, a lack of attachment. If you hurt part of it in a car accident, have you suddenly lost your "soul"?

Of course not. What this means is that the human experience of consciousness is created through millions of neurons working together. Specialized groups of neurons work to give us the ability to perceive and understand certain aspects of the world. We have nothing to indicate we are anything more, or anything less, than matter.

More importantly, our understanding of the human brain shows us that we truly are only a stepping stone for survival of the fittest. We have kept the most valuable brain mechanisms, and tossed, or disabled those we did not find useful.

Laundry List of Theological Talking Points

2008-06-24T07:51:00.000-07:00

This will be an ever-growing document that will be updated first at its home over at Teh Juggernauts. If you have an argument or an answer you wish to contribute, please either comment or e-mail me at john454@missouristate.edu.

I will also post recommended reading for some sections. These pieces will be located online whenever I can manage it. For starters though, Sam Harris has done a similar post to this titled 10 Myths and 10 Truths About Atheism.

1. "You can't prove god doesn't exist."

This is true. However, I cannot prove that leprechauns do not exist either. We both acknowledge that the absence of any evidence is completely predictive of non-existence in the case of leprechauns. Indeed, if something didn't exist, what more evidence could you have than the lack of any evidence for its existence?

The fact that I cannot prove god exists by no means indicates that you have a good reason to believe he exists. This argument is bested completely by Bertrand Russell's famous teapot argument:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

For those making claims in any other discipline, they are immediately compelled to provide their reasons for believing as they do - and their reasons (or lack thereof) would be the ultimate indicator of how likely their beliefs are to be true. If somebody believes the moon landing was a hoax, they will immediately begin spouting off their (bad) reasons. Even those people would never be tempted for a moment to say they believe the moon landing was a hoax, despite all the evidence that it happened, simply because they have faith that the moon landing never happened. Furthermore, if they did decide to use such terrible arguments, they would be immediately and rightly dismissed.

We should do the same with people evincing these arguments in defense of what they "know" about god.

Suggested reading: Proving a Negative by Richard Carrier.

2. Kalam Cosmological argument (everything that exists needs a creator).

People using this argument already believe in a god that exists without a creator. So, as long as they believe that something can exist without a creator, it doesn't necessarily follow that whatever exists without a creator has a mind or a conscience. In fact, we already have matter and the laws of physics, which means that adding the additional variable of god violates Occam's Razor and favors a universe that has always existed.

Suggested reading: Creation ex Nihilo - Without God by Mark Vuletic, Causation and the Logical Impossibility of a Divine Cause by Quentin Smith, and The Kalam Cosmological Argument Yet Again: The Question of the Metaphysical Possibility of an Infinite Temporal Series by Arnold T. Guminski.

3. Teleological argument or "argument from design" (look around you, you think all this just happened?).

In 1802, William Paley authored an argument in his book Natural Theology that would come to be used by Christians and other religious people up to this day; the watchmaker analogy:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there.

The idea of the watchmaker argument is that order is resultant of a designer. This argument falls flat on its face when you realize that nature produces extremely complex order on its own. The solar system in which we now live is the product of matter - that's it. Matter bends space time and produces the effect we call gravity, which forms big enough chunks of matter into round objects called planets, moons, or stars. It also causes those objects to orbit larger objects. If you have enough matter, a highly ordered system like ours is the inevitable result, with no appeal to god being required. The physical properties of matter, and nothing more, take care of all of it.

So what religious people invoking the argument from design will do, assuming they care enough to modify a defeated argument rather than falling back on faith, is to say that order that stands out from the order around it requires a designer. Of course, they have no reason to believe this, but some will try it anyway. What they do not realize is that the argument does not make any allowance for order created by nature - it claims that natural order was created by god, which we know it is not.

Suggested reading: The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.

4. Religion serves a useful purpose (it's comforting, makes people better, etc). In this, I'll also tackle "My faith doesn't hurt anybody" and "Atheism makes people do bad things too!"

It should first be noted that this is not an argument supporting the truth of a religious claim. Even if Christianity were the only stabilizing influence we had, that would only mean that we required the belief - it would have no bearing on whether or not the belief were true. Santa Clause is a stabilizing influence on the behavior of children, but that does not make it even a little true.

However, there is no useful purpose scripture serves that cannot be found within reason. Atheists are moral people. What's more, a non-believer is compassionate out of sheer empathy, rather than a fear of punishment or a lust for reward. On the other hand, consider the implications of the claim that we need belief in god to be moral. Who could possibly say this other than people who would be raping, lying, or stealing pornography without the belief that they will be punished for doing so? In this, it seems atheists are at a higher stage of moral development than people making the argument that morality requires god.

Another version of this claim is that belief in god gives people hope. Of course, this does not make it true - in fact, consider how other people invoking this argument would sound. What if somebody told you that they believed that faeries will one day emerge from their garden and give them eternal life, if only they enrich the soil by burying a $20 bill every week? This belief would offer a tremendous amount of hope, but who else but an idiot or an insane person would actually believe it on those grounds? In our hypothetical gardner's case, they're only losing $20 a week, but similarly crazy beliefs in scripture come with more significant behavior resulting of the necessary divorce from common sense these religions require. As Sam Harris puts it:

There are, at this very moment, perfectly ordinary Shia and Sunni Muslims drilling holes into each other's brains with power tools in the suburbs of Baghdad. What are the chances they would be doing this without the "benefit" of their incompatible religious identities?

It is at this time that a believer may be tempted to say that atheism also makes people bad, such as Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot (it should be noted that Hitler was a Roman Catholic, but religious people will still include his name in this list). While we should be eager to admit that some bad people do reject the idea of god, one can only wonder how this actually was responsible for their evil. For instance, Hitler and Stalin both had mustaches - how do we know it was not their mustaches that turned them into monsters? All three of these men rejected the existence of Zeus, could this have been the fount from which their malice poured? What about unicorns? I'm sure they all deny the existence of such mythical beasts. In the cases of Stalin and Pol Pot, was their disbelief that Jesus truly rose from the dead really the mother of their wickedness? It seems clear that their deeds were resultant of bad reasoning rather than skepticism.

To be an atheist, one must only believe that there is no god. That's it. There are no doctrinal beliefs or prescribed behaviors associated with the word. The behavior of atheists is bound by what is reasonable and, since many people are unreasonable, there are some unreasonable atheists in the world. That is the primary problem with faith: how much it encourages unreason. In fact faith, being the defense for a belief when one has no tangible explanation for why they believe it, is fully dependent on abandoning good reasoning. Any sensible man condemns irrationality whether it comes from non-believers like Stalin and Pol Pot or believers like Hitler and George W. Bush - irrationality is bad no matter who embraces it.

So the best you could do with trying to tie people like Stalin to atheism is to say that their actions were particularly reasonable and therefore represented the end game of skeptical thinking or incredulity. Clearly, their actions were unreasonable and cruel, and virtually every atheist will join you in in adopting that fact.

Suggested reading: The Problem with Atheism by Sam Harris.

5. "Science/reason is just another faith!"

First, this attempts to assert that all beliefs are equally likely to be true, which is clearly ridiculous. While the claims made by science are certainly beliefs, they are beliefs that are supported by observation, reason, and evidence and, therefore, more likely to be true than other beliefs. As an example, consider the "faith" that a dropped stone will fall to the Earth versus the faith that a dropped stone will soar into the stratosphere. One of these beliefs is in-keeping with everything we know, while the other is not. Because of this, any intelligent person must accept the former as being true until other evidence arises to make us think otherwise.

Science works under only one assumption: that the universe obeys a set of rules. If this assumption is true, then we should be able to observe the behavior resultant of these rules, such as the stone falling to the Earth.

But we can do so much more with science! When we observe our stone falling, we notice that it falls more quickly as it approaches the Earth. After making this observation, we can generate equations to explain this phenomenon and use them in the future to predict how objects will fall. It works so well that our current understanding of gravitation allows us to fire objects with uncanny accuracy to certain points even beyond our solar system. This confirms our assumption and very, very strongly suggests that reality is following a set of rules. Moreover, it indicates that we can deduce them.

Take a moment and just think of a few of the things we have acquired by affirming that the universe follows a set of discernable rules: cars, planes, the mouse on your computer. The monitor you're currently looking at represents our understanding of electromagnetism. Science has given you your cell phone, your mp3 player, plumbing, light bulbs - the list goes on and on.

Now, if your computer breaks, how will you fix it? Will you pray it back into operation? You could try, but I'll bet dollars to donuts that eventually even the Pope would break down and call somebody who understands the rules of the universe operant in making a computer function. All around us is a harmony spun by the fruits of science - we are literally drowning in the proof of its truth. We do not need faith.

These are the kind of demands we make of science - it must make predictions that work, it must explain things. We have been trying to scientifically confirm miracles for hundreds of years now, and have never managed to do so once (though we've exposed an ever-growing number of frauds). We would love to confirm an instance where prayer healed an amputee or where we could observe something distinctly god-like, but it has simply never happened.

So science is not in any way a matter of faith. In all actuality, faith is nothing more than failed science. The claim that a man can walk on water is a claim about physics; the claim that a man rose from the dead is a claim about biology - they are just claims that have never met the scientific requisites of evidence. We would be open to them, but if god exists he has given us more evidence that the universe is obscenely old by human standards than prayer is effective. In fact, Christians revel in believing claims that contradict the rules of the universe, calling these unsupported claims "miracles." It worries me to note that if believing events occurred in which the rules that govern reality were broken, with no good reason for doing so, is thought to be a magnificent glory, then what could possibly convince somebody that Christianity is complete and utter bullshit?

Suggested reading: Science is NOT Another Kind of Faith and Science is Definitely NOT Faith-Based.

6. "You are just caricaturing faith!"

According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, there are over 34,000 different sects of Christianity in existence. Even if I were trying to caricature Christianity, how could I possibly do it with so many different voices claiming to have a deeper claim to truth than all the others?

I think it's fair to say that almost all Christians believe that Jesus was the son of God and that, at the very least, he rose from the dead. These claims are not more or less accurate depending on the nuances of the people believing it. All Christian sects are equally lacking of any reason to believe their core claims. Moreover, no Christian sect uses a bible that makes sense - which could be a very good reason why there is so much disagreement within the Christian community about what god's will truly is.

This statement also ignores the vast number of people who DO read the bible and take it word for word. Read the exit polls of relevant votes (here are just a few: Link 1, Link2, Link 3, Link 4, Link 5) if you doubt their numbers. So while moderates will cry that extremists are only a handful - a minority that gets all the press; they are apparently a minority that also casts all the votes.

Ultimately though, we should be focused on determining whether or not Christianity is true, and a religious moderate has just as much reason to believe that Jesus is the son of god as the most strident fundamentalist: zero. The only reason it would matter that I was caricaturing faith is when I point out the blatant evil that practitioners of the doctrine enact out of faith, which I cover in point #4. Moreover, if the claims that all Christians subscribe to are false (which all evidence would suggest they are), then what does it matter if I did happen to be wrong about how much damage faith does?

7. "How is my faith your business?"

Because we all have a responsibility to have good reasons for what we believe. Beliefs are the gatekeepers of our actions, and your actions affect those around you. If we do not have good reasons for believing the things we do, our good intentions can become terrifying.

Instances of religious people failing in the epistemological responsibility are everywhere, from parents denying their children medical assistance out of deference to faith to people flying planes into buildings because they believe it is the best thing possible.

We all acknowledge that it is alright to criticize this failure when we criticize peoples views on politics and policy. In every other situation, it is acceptable (even sensible) to criticize people for failing to hold good reasons for their beliefs, as we realize that people vote and act on those beliefs. For some reason, religion has earned a free pass on this that it does not deserve. In fact, because religions tend to encourage us to ignore evidence (they call this "faith"), it seems obvious that religion should be criticized more than other subjects.

Many religious people will say that their personal faith doesn't harm anybody, and most of them are right (although, they still voted based on what god supposedly does or doesn't like). However, while not all religious people are equally dangerous, all religious people equally fail in their responsibility to have good reasons for what they believe, which results in the instances of horror driven by unreason that do so often emerge from the faith community.

There is no reason to believe in things on bad or no evidence. It gets us nothing good that can't be found (easily) in rationality, while it produces the unreason that results in good people often doing bad things.

Coming up:

8. "What about moderates and Christians who are rational in all but their belief in god?"

9. "God exists because I feel him."

10. "We can't be moral without god."

11. "This nation was founded on Christianity."

12. "Without God, life has no meaning/purpose."

13. "God does not exist in our plane of existence."

Music Theory with Video Games!

2008-06-04T12:33:00.001-07:00

"The musical modes differ essentially from one another, and those who hear them are differently affected by each. Some of them make men sad and grave, like the so called Mixolydian; others enfeeble the mind, like the relaxed modes; another, again, produces a moderate or settled temper, which appears to be the peculiar effect of the Dorian; and the Phrygian inspires enthusiasm." ~ Aristotle, Politics

I love Dorian mode - it's just kick ass. "What is Dorian mode?" you may be asking yourself (unless you're Carly Ann). Well, let me explain. Listen to this:

It's the Temple of Time theme from the The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It has its unique sound because the melody is written in one of the Church Modes - Dorian. Dorian is a diatonic scale (diatonic = using only the white keys on the piano, think of it as a racist scale ) that, during medieval times, used "D" as a tonic note (a tonic note is the note that sounds like the "home" note in the scale). Nowadays though, we sometimes use other notes as the tonic. For instance, Zero's Theme from the Mega Man X series uses C# Dorian:

Where you notice the difference between Dorian mode and the standard natural minor scale (the Aeolian mode, which was derived from what medieval theorists called Hypodorian), is on the sixth scale degree.

What is a scale degree? Simply, it's a numbering of the notes in a scale. Consider C Major (I have each scale degree typed to the right of its corresponding note):

C - 1
D - 2
E - 3
F - 4
G - 5
A - 6
B - 7
C - 1

The home note of the key "C" is, you guessed it, "C". In "C" Major it would be "C", in "D" would be "D", etc. Therefore, if you were in C Major, the sixth scale degree would be "A" ("C" would be the first or "tonic", D would be the second, "E" the third, etc.). To lower that scale degree, you would make it an Ab, and to raise it, you would make it an A#.

If you were in D minor, the sixth scale degree would be Bb.

D - 1
E - 2
F - 3
G - 4
A - 5
Bb - 6
C - 7
D - 1

However, rather than a Bb in the Dorian mode we have a raised sixth, which would raise it up to a B natural. In the Temple of Time Theme, it is the ninth note in the melody, but you may be able to best hear it in this piece from Final Fantasy X:

This is the Song of Prayer, as heard in Ixion's Temple. To hear the raised sixth, follow the lyrics:

Ieyui
Nobomenu
Renmiri
Yojuyogo

On the second note of the highlighted syllable, you have the raised sixth.

Several philosophers and scholars have written about the emotional and psychological effects of the various modes (this entry begins with such an excerpt from Aristotle). Strangely, perhaps because of its ambiguous nature, many of them could not agree on what emotional state Dorian mode was supposed to induce (I think it sounds mystical or reverent). D'Arezzo said it made people serious, while Espinoza said it made people happy. Perhaps Fulda had it right when he said that Dorian could be used to produce any emotion.

I used video games because modal music is all over the place in old video games which, in my humble opinion, had much better music! Think about it, everybody knows the Mario Brothers' Theme, or the Legend of Zelda Theme. Can you even hum a song from a recent game? Oh, you want some specific examples of old video game music written in modes? Fine...

Phrygian mode was used to write Magus' Theme in Chrono Trigger, and the Brinstar Theme from the Metroid games:

Lydian mode is used frequently in video game music, usually for space themed music (the Star Trek theme is in Lydian mode). Here's an example just for David Drake from Mario Galaxy :

Another mode that often appears in video games (as well as Elton John's music) is Mixolydian. Mixolydian just tends to sound really happy, I think. An example is Home Termina from Chrono Cross:

Next is Aeolian mode (which many of you know as just the "minor" key). Songs in this mode are everywhere, as are songs in Ionian mode (the "major" key). The fact that the vast majority of songs are written in major and minor is what set all these other modes and the songs written in them apart!

And now, you know.

Why We Must Oppose the Intelligent Design Movement

2008-05-08T09:28:00.001-07:00

We Must Oppose the Intelligent Design Movement

Due to the unwillingness of the propagators of Intelligent Design to conform to the scientific process, as well as their history of intentional dishonesty in attempting to propagandize their movement, not only should Intelligent Design not be taught as science, but it should also be actively opposed by the scientific community. In this essay I will establish how the Intelligent Design Movement is not a scientific, but rather a religious idea that cannot legally be taught in a public school without violating our Constitution, and how its success is predicated on lies. I will also argue that the Intelligent Design Movement is dangerous due to its ability to keep people ignorant of science (moreover, its dependence on doing so).

The truth of the matter behind Intelligent Design is that it is truly “cannot uncouple itself from its Creationist roots” (04cv2688) and that teaching Creationism as science is a violation of the Establishment Clause in the United States Constitution. Several court cases have ruled that Creationism cannot be taught in science classes in public schools, the most famous of which being the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board in Dover, PA. Other landmark rulings on the subject include Epperson v. Arkansas, Daniel v Waters, and McLean v Arkansas. These rulings draw heavily from the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution which prohibits a mixture of religion and state. That is why this new permutation, Intelligent Design, attempts to paint themselves as entirely scientific, with as much claim to being a legitimate scientific theory as the theory of Evolution.

In order to determine whether an idea is a scientific theory, we must first know what makes an idea scientific and how scientists utilize the term “theory”. While I may have a theory regarding what two cards my opponent is holding at the poker table, this is not the way scientists use the word. A scientific theory “summarizes a hypothesis or group of hypotheses that have been supported with repeated testing” and is “valid as long as there is no evidence to dispute it” (Helmenstine). This is a far cry from the anthems that Evolution is “just a theory” we hear from a nation of non-biologists wishing to have a deciding hand in an issue they admit their ignorance of by invoking that phrase.

“For a theory to be "scientific," it must provide the basis for testable hypotheses” (Olmstead). When scientists like Eugenie Scott say “you can't build a science on a negative argument” (Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial), they are referring to science’s power to explain things. Scientific theories should be able to make verifiable predictions, much like germ theory makes predictions which allow a person to get a flu shot every year. According to Scott, Intelligent Design fails at this in the most complete fashion:

“The fundamental problem with intelligent design is that you can't use it to explain the natural world. It's essentially a negative argument. It says, "Evolution doesn't work, therefore the designer did it. Evolution doesn't work, therefore we win by default." (Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial)

When discussing what should be taught in a science class, it seems that the basic requirement of an idea should be that it aligns with what constitutes science. It is abundantly clear that Intelligent Design does not do this.

However, the critique of Evolution offered by Intelligent Design proponents may even be fitting (though not enough to establish Intelligent Design as a legitimate scientific theory) if it were not entrenched in the lies of those spreading it. Virtually every credible scientific body in the civilized world, as well as a myriad of federal judges, recognizes the dishonesty of the propagators of Intelligent Design. In his conclusion of the 2005 trial Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board, judge John E. Jones said of those attempting to sneak Intelligent Design into the classroom that it was “ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy” (137).

This illustrates another failure on the part of Intelligent Design to conform to what is science. Scientific theory is determined by the long process of peer-review, in which scientists from the relevant field critique a tested hypothesis at length. Only by surviving the brutal scrutiny of peer-review does a hypothesis transition to being an accepted theory. This is why, in science, if you lie or pretend to know things you do not, you will be caught, the news of it will spread rapidly, and you will pay the price for the transgression with your credibility.

Even though the results of scientific experiments, as well as the peer-review work done on them, are readily available to everybody, science is a very complex discipline. For this reason, it makes perfect sense that scientific experts are the ones who get to decide what is science and what isn’t, much the same way that historians are shouldered with deciding the historical consensus. Science is not a matter of democracy, where whichever idea gets the most votes becomes truth. Indeed, it is only when “Intelligent Design has been rejected by virtually every scientist and science organization, and has never once passed the muster of a peer-reviewed journal paper” (Biever) that those behind the Intelligent Design Movement began to propagandize their ideas to a population of non-experts.

The fact that Intelligent Design proponents are actively disseminating these ideas, which have been eviscerated by the scientific community, as though they were science, is where the real harm comes in. The self-correcting process of science, governed by the scientific method, has given us the very means by which we understand reality and thus advance ourselves as a race. Iterations of the scientific method are all around you. The computer I typed this essay on is the product of hundreds of years dedicated to ascertaining the nature of electricity. It could not function if not for an understanding of how certain particles operate on a macroscopic level. This knowledge has been revealed only through observation and the predictability of living in a universe bound by rules, and by applying the scientific method to reveal those rules.

Just take a moment, walk outside (actually, just stay in whatever room you're in) and look around you. Cars, planes, and the mouse on your computer; they are all testimonies to our willingness to defer to experts on what is science, and the wealth that is our reward for doing so. Look some more, consider your cell phone, your mp3 player, plumbing, light bulbs; the list goes on and on. To treat science as a propaganda game promulgates scientific ignorance. The best that this could accomplish is to hamstring the progress of scientists who must take time away from their work to fight battles that need not be waged in the first place.

However, I would argue that the consequences are far more worrisome. We live in a universe that is almost entirely antithetical to fostering life. Almost every region of our galaxy consists of conditions that would kill any living thing almost immediately. Even our own planet is not that safe – roughly every one-hundred million years, a mere moment by astronomical standards, a meteor the size of a mountain crashes into the Earth (Arnett), which is sufficient to eliminate almost every living thing. It’s estimated that “more than 99 per cent of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct” (Taylor). Clearly, our race, and even life itself, has survived despite nature’s indifference.

Intelligent Design is clearly a religious idea, rather than a scientific one. This new brand of Creationism also has also been wholly decimated by the scientific community and summarily rejected. As such, it is not only unreasonable to teach this non-scientific idea in a science class, but it is patently illegal to do so. While these reasons alone are more than sufficient to preclude us from introducing Intelligent Design to our children, there is a far more harrowing reason that should encourage those with the relevant knowledge to oppose this movement wherever they can.

Ideas, and the ability to map out reality, have been the tools by which we have endured as one of the millions of competing races to ever grace the Earth. Even today we are ill-equipped to battle certain diseases and other natural phenomenon like hurricane Katrina. We have so much work left to do, and we cannot afford to be poisoning the minds that will be faced with the challenge of securing our continued survival in the future. For this reason, more than any other, it is vital that the scientific community begin partitioning an appreciable fraction of its time to combating Creationism in its current configuration in order to prevent them from gaining any ground in this battle for our most precious resource: humanity’s ability to comprehend the world.

Works Cited

Arnett, Bill. "Meteors, Meteorites, and Impacts." Nineplanets.Org. 3 Apr. 2005. 5 May 2008 .

Biever, Celeste. "Astrology is Scientific Theory, Courtroom Told." New Scientist 19 Oct. 2005. 5 May 2008.

Helmenstine, Anne Marie. "Scientific Hypothesis, Theory, Law Definitions." About.Com. 5 May 2008.

Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial. Dir. Gary Johnstone. Perf. Eugenie Scott, Ken Miller. PBS, 2007.

Kitzmiller V. Dover Area School Board. No. 04cv2688. The United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. 20 Dec. 2005. 5 Mar. 2008.

Olmstead, Richard. "Intelligent Design Not Science." SeattlePI 17 Aug. 2005. 5 May 2008.
Taylor, Paul D. Extinctions in the History of Life. Cambridge: The Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 2004. 5 May 2008.

Mega Blog on Evolution

2008-05-01T00:51:00.000-07:00

This post is housed on Teh Juggernauts blog.

Greetings. The following is my best attempt to assemble a concise refutation of most of the religiously-based (as though there were any other kind) assaults on the theory of Evolution. This is a work in progress, and there will be several additions from myself and other contributors in the coming weeks. As of right now, it even lacks a conclusion. :P

It should be noted that the contents of this post represent only a very, very small portion of the evidence for Biological Evolution - as Daniel Dennett put it, most people do not realize that Evolution is as firmly established as the fact that water is made up of two Hydrogen atoms and one Oxygen. There is much, much more evidence than I could ever fit into hundreds of books. Fortunately, it is all out there for the reading. Google and your local library are your best friends here if you really want to familiarize yourself with this, the fundamental principle of Biology. Scientists have no qualms with making their experiments, research, and conclusions available for everybody and anybody to read and critique. Such is the confidence one can draw from basing their ideas about the way reality works on logic and evidence.

~ JT

What is science?

“All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct.”
~ George Bernard Shaw

Science works under only one assumption: that the universe obeys a set of rules. If this assumption is true, then we should be able to observe the behavior resultant of these rules.

Here's an example: we observe something falling, and we notice that it falls more quickly as it approaches the Earth. After making this observation we can generate equations to explain these motions and use them in the future to predict how objects will fall. Guess what: it works! As a matter of fact, it works so well that our current understanding of gravitation allows us to fire objects with uncanny accuracy to certain points even beyond our solar system. This confirms our assumption and very, very strongly suggests that reality is following a set of rules. Moreover, it indicates that we can deduce them.

That is a very simple example, but I'm sure you're aware that more complex iterations of the scientific method are all around you. The computer you're reading this on right now is the product of hundreds of years dedicated to ascertaining the nature of electricity. It could not function if not for an understanding of how certain particles operate on a macroscopic level. Both of these are revealed only through observation and the predictability of living in a universe bound by rules. When his computer breaks, I'd wager that even the Pope will likely call somebody who understands the rules operant in making his computer function. Any business peddling their ability to pray computers back into working order will find themselves declaring bankruptcy in short order.

In science, it is never noble to pretend to know things you do not know, while religion depends on such self-deception. While you will receive a fair amount of praise in a church for claiming to have knowledge about the origin of the cosmos that no cosmologist has, science plays by considerably higher standards. If, in the course of an experiment or in the process of peer-review, you purport to have knowledge you do not have, you will be caught and swiftly penalized. Science depends on what you can establish; it is interested in seeing the world how it truly is, not how we wish it was.

What Evolution is not.

If, at any time, somebody insinuates that Evolution posits where life came from, then they have just exposed their lack of knowledge surrounding the theory. The theory of Evolution deals only with how life arrived at the point it has, and it makes no claims about the origins of life.

That is not to say that we have no science regarding abiogenetic chemistry - we do. We have several models explaining how the first self-replicating molecule could have arisen and catalyzed Evolution, all of which are compliant with known science (the most widely accepted model is called the RNA World model). Abiogenesis is just a question that Evolution does not tackle (though it does necessitate abiogenesis).

Is Evolution disprovable?

Yes. If we were to find a fossilized rabbit in soil from the Triassic, that would disprove Evolution. Every time we uncover some new science, or uncover a new fossil, Evolution faces a potential challenge. For instance, when we discovered genetics, if genetics contradicted Evolution, the theory would have failed. However, every new discovery we have made, such as genetics, has corroborated the theory of Evolution, not contradicted it.

Distinctions in Terminology.

Macroevolution

Those who reject Evolution in favor of religion often say they accept "Microevolution" but deny "Macroevolution." Such a distinction is like saying that one believes in inches but not miles. Small changes over enough time become big changes. While there are some notable differences between the two, it does not detract from the fact that the main difference between the two is how much time they have had in which to work.

The key point in this debate seems to be whether or not Evolution can produce new species, so a sizable portion of this essay will deal primarily with the idea of Speciation.

There are several books and peer-reviewed articles on the subject of Speciation (often hiding behind misdirecting titles, like Speciation). Beyond that, all of the later information is, and always has been, easily found on the internet. Those who reject Evolution because they believe there is no evidence for it have failed to take the 10 seconds necessary to google it.

Theory

While I may have a theory regarding what two cards my opponent is holding at the poker table, this is not the way scientists use the word. A theory is a hypothesis or collection of hypotheses, which has stood up to repeated rigorous testing and passed the test. A theory explains all relevant facts and is contradicted by none.

The difference between a scientific theory and a scientific law is not their degree of acceptance nor their explanatory power. It is typically (there are a few exceptions) whether or not they include an equation explaining the phenomenon in question. That's it.

For instance, on one hand we have theories like germ theory or the theory of gravity. On the other hand, we have something like Newton's Second Law of Motion:

The relationship between an object's mass m, its acceleration a, and the applied force F is F = ma.

See the difference? Is germ theory really more or less accepted than Newton's Laws of Motion? Not at all.

Christians and other religious people determined to see their personal creation myths of choice stand unopposed, even by reality, will continue to assert that Evolution is "just a theory." However, all of them are unlikely to walk off the top of a skyscraper any time soon because gravity is "just a theory."

Should we defer to experts?

The following argument originated with philosopher and scientist Daniel Dennett, mine is only a variation. It is a very key aspect to this argument that is often overlooked.

Consider the following proposition:

"Трава типично зелена"

I believe the above statement is true. I also confess that I have no idea what it means. Frankly, I don't even know how to pronounce it.

So why do I believe it? I believe it because I asked a Russian-speaking friend of mine to give me a sentence of Russian. I told her not to tell me what it means, and I said that no matter what the sentence is, it has to be true. So even though I have no clue what it says, I believe it - and I would be willing to bet a tremendous amount of money that it is true. I am willing to place my "faith" in an expert.

Let's consider another proposition:

"e=mc^2"

Do you believe it's true?
Do you understand it?

I'd wager that most people would answer "yes" to the former and "no" to the latter - which is fine. In the case of both this example and in the Russian proposition, it doesn't matter if we understand it - it only matters that the experts do. This is very useful - even scientists utilize equations they couldn't personally extract any meaning from in their work.

We all do this. By taking a ride in an airplane, you are deferring to the expertise of physicists; by eating a cheeseburger, you are laying your well-being at the feet of people who understand bacteria; and every time you get a flu shot, you are eagerly embracing our understanding of how germs evolve - otherwise, you would not need a new shot every year for the same diseases.

The point is that you should not worry about deferring to the consensus opinions of experts - particularly in a field such as science. The universe is so vast that one cannot even imagine its size without invoking logarithmic scales, let alone even begin to imagine all of the stuff within it. Every human being who has ever lived, myself included, is ignorant of almost everything there is to know. It is through our dependence on experts in various fields that mankind, as a whole, can begin to construct a map of reality that is in-keeping with all of the facts we have revealed.

However, in this one lone instance when discussing the scientific concept of Evolution, we have people, virtually all of whom are non-experts, denying the breadth of our understanding of a subject. This is done exclusively out of deference to a myth that carries none of the evidential weight its followers demand of science (and which science happily provides in every case for which it makes claims to truth). While science, as always, is up to the challenge, this is an unfair fight in which many of those denying Evolution have not arrived at their particular world view through objectivity or consideration of tangible evidence - and you cannot reason somebody out of a position they did not reason their way into.

What drives Evolution?

Evolution is engineered by the same key forces that generate new order everywhere in our universe without the need for any appeal to god. They are:

1. Mutation.
2. Reproduction.
3. Competition.

That's it. If you have these three catalysts in place working over time, order and often improved functionality, are the end result. This goes for life on this planet and for the evolution of stellar bodies in galaxies light years beyond it.

While it is clear that human beings enjoy (or suffer through) reproduction and competition, as does almost every other animal, many people do not understand how mutation works. Mutations in DNA are actually more common than you might think, as Larry Moran explains:

"The haploid human genome is about 3 × 109 base pairs in size. Every time this genome is replicated about 0.3 mutations, on average, will be passed on to one of the daughter cells. We are interested in knowing how many mutations are passed on to the fertilized egg (zygote) from its parents. In order to calculate this number we need to know how many DNA replications there are between the time that one parental zygote was formed and the time that the egg or sperm cell that unite to form the progeny zygote are produced.

In the case of females, this number is about 30, which means that each of a females eggs is the product of 30 cell divisions from the time the zygote was formed (Vogel and Rathenberg, 1975). Human females have about 500 eggs. In males, the number of cell divisions leading to mature sperm in a 30 year old male is about 400 (Vogel and Motulsky, 1997). This means that about 9 mutations (0.3 × 30) accumulate in the egg and about 120 mutations (0.3 × 400) accumulate in a sperm cell. Thus, each newly formed human zygote has approximately 129 new spontaneous mutations."

The long and short of it is that each of us are trotting around with well over 100 "birth defects." While most of them are completely neutral, you must remember that we are spreading these mutations out over a vast population, which means we can expect Microevolutional changes in every generation, with speciation and other Macroevolutional changes over many generations.

Testable Hypothesis and other Evidences for Evolution.

The fossil record

Which transition are you interested in? Let's start with early reptiles to mammals (this is going to be very long - we have a lot of transitional fossils including Human transitional fossils); later in this essay, Amber will discuss how we can view this piece of the fossil record in the human brain.

Anyway, we'll start with Paleothyris, and every subsequent transitional fossil will transition to the next transitional fossil. Most of these were found using predictions such as those used by Dr. Neil Shubin (more on him in the next section), we knew the age that such creatures must have existed in, went to places with dirt that old, and 'lo and behold we found them. It should be noted that this is only a tiny fraction of the fossil record, and that the fossil record is only a fraction of the overall evidence for evolution.

Paleothyris
Protoclepsydrops
Clepsydrops
Archaeothyrisy
Varanops
Haptodus
Dimetrodon
Sphenacodon
Biarmosuchia
Procynosuchus
Dvinia
Thrinaxodon
Cynognathus
Diademodon (of the group Eucynodontia)
Probelesodon (of the Chiniquodon group)
Probainognathus
Exaeretodon
Oligokyphus
Kayentatherium
Pachygenelus (1)
Diarthrognathus (2)
Adelobasileus
Sinoconodon
Kuehneotherium (an example of a Haramiyidan)
Eozostrodon
Morganucodon
Haldanodon (Very similar to Castorocauda similis)
Peramus
Endotherium
Kielantherium
Aegialodon
Steropodon
Vincelestes
Pariadens (the first known marsupial, but only by the skin of his teeth - literally)
Kennalestes
Cimolestes
Procerberus
Gypsonictops

This list is just a drop in the transitional fossil bucket. We have plenty to peruse.

Tiktallik, a testable hypothesis in Evolutionary theory

Tiktallik is a transitional species that is part of the fossil record between early amphibians from bony fish. It is the link between Eusthenopteron (which arguably precedes Sterropterygion) and Panderichthys.

Tiktallik was discovered by a team led by paleontologist Neil Shubin of the Univesity of Chicago. Shubin describes how evolution was used to predict the location of Tiktallik this way:

"What evolution enables us to do is to make specific predictions about what we should find in the fossil record. The prediction in this case is clear-cut. That is, if we go to rocks of the right age, and the rocks of the right type, we should find transitions between two great forms of life, between fish and amphibian."

And that transition is precisely what they found.

Observed instances of speciation and the creation of new features

Speciation is a very lengthy process, which is likely why Creationists often employ statements such as:

"What we haven't seen is any species evolve to become an entire new species that can't reproduce with the former species."

Of course, when was the last time you saw any of the steps of stellar evolution occur (these tend to run in the millions and billions of years)? Do you deny their validity on the basis that they take a lot of time to complete? Of course not. We can see evidence of all the different stages and can extract a plethora of other evidences for how they function. The evidence that such stages occur in stars is so vast as to be undeniable by anybody who has studied the subject. The same is true with speciation. (It should also be noted that most people in America who deny Evolution on the supposed lack of evidence also believe that a man lived inside the belly of a fish for three days without being consumed by the beast's stomach acids. One cannot help but wonder what can be done to change somebody's mind at that point.)

Thankfully, we have several instances of observed speciation to fall back on. The most recent is the controlled experiment in evolution with the lizard species Podarcis sicula, in which the species developed a new feature not present in the ancestral population - the Cecal Valve. The old population of Podarcis sicula was still around and breeding, yet they had branched off to create a new animal that, though still a lizard, were a new species with adapted behaviors and features.

A few other noted instances of Macroevolution include: Culex pipiens, Rhagoletis pomonella, and Mimulus.

Genetic evidence

One of the early arguments against the fact that mankind has evolved from earlier primates was the fact that we have 23 pairs of chromosomes - all great apes have 24. If we evolved from apes, we should expect to have at least 24 pairs. Acknowledging that such a fact would contradict all relevant facts about biology, scientists began to imagine where the 24th chromosome went. Their first hypothesis (notice how the hypothesis flows from what we already know) was that somewhere along the line a pair of chromosomes fused. So how can we tell whether or not this happened?

On the end of all chromosomes reside features called "telomeres." Telomeres function as a kind of genetic marker, indicating that the chromosome has ended. In the middle of chromosomes, there is another genetic marker called a "centromere." That means a simplified version of a chromosome would look like this (T=Telomere, C=Centromere):

T -------- C -------- T

However, the second chromosome is unique in that it looks like this:

T -------- C -------- T -------- C -------- T

What this indicates is that at one point two of our predecessor's twenty-four chromosomes fused to create our second. Science created a hypothesis, tested it, and came up with a confirmation. What was an argument against Evolution quickly became another brick in the wall of evidence for the theory.

Additionally, PZ Myers does a brilliant job of explaining the basics of synteny, one of the many types of genetic evidence, here.

Things that Evolution explains elegantly

And what comedian designer configured the region between our legs-an entertainment complex built around a sewage system?
~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist

There are many things that fit into Evolutionary theory succinctly, but that make absolutely no sense if a god designed the universe. This includes things like why men have nipples, why we see in color like most lizards do (though most mammals do not), and why we have 32 teeth rather than the 36 of most great apes.

Conversely, the presence of literally millions of engineering flaws simple enough for humans to notice helps to refute the idea that a designer more observant than human beings had a hand in producing them. Here are just a few of the big ones.

DNA:

The DNA molecule is prone to a very high number of errors due to its awkward nature. The numerous flaws in DNA replication result in cancer, down syndrome, and a host of other conditions far too lengthy to list. It is hard to imagine an intelligent designer utilizing such an unstable system, let alone a flawless one.

The presence of the appendix:

The appendix is a very useful organ in many animals. However, humans are not one of those animals. In human beings, the appendix has no useful application whatsoever. It produces an insignificant amount of white blood cells, but we can do just fine without them, since other organs produce more than enough. Otherwise, the appendix makes us vulnerable to several types of infections, some of them fatal. It also poses the threat of rupturing which, according to those who have suffered a ruptured appendix, really, really hurts.

If a designer did include the appendix in the human design, he is most assuredly not a loving god, but rather a malicious one. On the other hand, a vestigial remnant like the appendix makes perfect sense within the evolutionary model.

Vestigial appendages:

Did you know that many snakes, such as pythons and boa constrictors, have hind leg bones? It's true:

See the bump where the bones are? Many whales also have them.

Speaking of sea life, did you know that many deep sea life forms like the Cave-dwelling tetra fish (Astyanax mexicanus) are blind? They have eyes, the eyes just do not work. Why would an intelligent designer provide them with those organs? Evolution though, can explain them succinctly.

"Genetic mutations that hamper eye development also may increase the number of taste buds. Thus, mutations that happened to give the fish an advantage in tasting and smelling—a huge benefit in a dark environment—might also have inadvertently, and harmlessly, caused the degeneration of their eyes."

PZ Myers explains it in greater detail:

"What's actually going on is that there is an increased expression of a gene called Sonic hedgehog, which causes an expansion of jaw tissue, including both the bones of the jaw and the array of sensory structures on the ventral surface — this is an adaptation that produces stronger jaws and more sensitive skin, what the fish finds useful when rooting about in the dark at the bottom of underground rivers to find food. The expansion of Shh has a side effect of inhibiting expression of another gene, Pax-6, which is the master regulator of eye development. Loss of eyes is a harmless (if you're living in the dark) consequence of selection for better tactile reception."

As explained above, humans have an appendix, which is a vestigial appendage. We also have the Coccyx (human beings have leftover tails), Erectores Pilorum (the muscles that cause goose bumps), and Wisdom Teeth. All of these make no sense if human beings were designed, but they make perfect sense if we evolved.

Useful Predictions Produced by Evolution

Evolution of Specific Features

The contents of this section, like the evidence listed in this whole entry, is just a very, very small part of the whole. Our knowledge of how various parts of the body evolved is more extensive than most of us can imagine, and any curiosity about it requires only google to be sated.

The Brain

(This section was authored by Amber)

If we have a soul, in which part of the brain would it reside? The part that loves? The part that thinks? That stares in wonder at a night sky?

All the permanent matter in your brain consists of two types of cells: neurons and glial cells. Neurons are what allow us to move, breathe, think, eat, love, and play. Glial cells provide physical support to neurons.

When somebody talks about consciousness, they are usually referring to your ability to think and consider your role in the world around you. Those abilities are located in the frontal lobes.

Review of EXPELLED or "Win Ben Stein's Career"

2008-04-21T20:37:00.000-07:00

"When we did not know how the bumble-bee flew, was that an adequate ground for positing god as the answer, or was it instead cause for further scientific investigation aimed at finding out the natural explanation? All of science is the result of choosing the latter approach. Once there was a time when nothing was explained. Since then, everything which has been explained has been found to have a natural, not a divine, explanation. Although this does not prove that all future explanations will be of like kind, it shows that it is not at all unreasonable to expect this--and it is not a very reliable bet to expect the opposite."

~ Richard C. Carrier

I recall a while back that Gabe (and likely several other less bold religious folks) kept repeating lines like "I can't wait 'til the new EXPELLED movie comes out" insinuating that it would be an overpowering piece of science, history, and logic that would leave us quivering in our freshly soiled shorts scrambling for a refutation. In fact, according the the EXPELLED blog, "“Expelled will be hotter than Farenheit 9/11." For the record, Farenheith 9/11 hauled in $23.9 million using 868 theaters in its opening weekend - EXPELLED managed to come in at a little over $3 million using 1,000 theaters. Whoops.

Well, last Saturday I went to see Ben Stein championing the Intelligent Design cause. Of course, we paid to see another film and just walked into the EXPELLED theater so as not to support the charlatans who produced the film (don't worry, the other ten people in the audience didn't seem to mind). I cannot remember the last time I laughed so hard. In discussing this movie, I feel kind of like a fly in a nudist colony - I'm not sure where to start. My review is bound to be long and somewhat disjointed, simply because there is so much bullshit to carve through.

Pre-Release Problems with the Movie:

Let's start with some of the interviewees from the atheistic/scientific side of things, most notably Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers.

All of them, from Michael Shermer to Dawkins to Myers to Eugenie Scott, were filmed for the movie under false pretenses. Yes, the producers flat out lied to them. They would later say that Crossroads was the working title for the movie, but the domain name for Expelled was purchased months before the interviews took place. This is becoming a habit with the liars for Jesus who made this movie, and we're not even through a fraction of their lies.

As if that weren't enough, Dr. Myers was later expelled from a screening of the movie, in which he was given thanks for in the credits. Yes, a movie lamenting how some voices are not being heard expressly for their questioning nature removed a conflicting voice from the theater after he had gone through all the motions required of other viewers. The big laugh here, is that they missed removing his guest who was standing right beside him - Richard Dawkins.

Problems with the Actual Movie:

First, the movie is very, very poorly made, with logical holes big enough to fly the Milennium Falcon through literally ever few seconds. If not for the circus of inaccuracy or assured annoyance that many people will lack the capacity to see through the transparant lies of this propaganda piece, it would have been a real snore.

The movie begins by cycling through a group of Ph D-holders (and non-Ph D holders) who claimed they were fired or otherwise mistreated for their views on Creationism. Here are the Ph D'd "victims" and a collection of the claims they made in the movie:

Richard Sternberg (Stein: "Dr. Sternberg found himself the object of a massive campaign that smeared his reputation and came close to destroying his career." ...right.)
Guillermo Gonzalez
Caroline Crocker
Robert Marks
Michael Egnor

In reality, it's a host of people who demonstrated deep inadequacy, usually in multiple ways completely unreleated to the inadequacy of helping promulgate anti-science, and immediately went into martyr mode. What more accepting body of non-skepticism could they cry to than fellow IDers?

It's amazing what happens when you lie in public, what's more when you lie to researchers and academics. They will catch you, even if a religiously charged public wants to believe your bullshit (though apparently, they didn't want to believe it as much as I or some others would have thought.)

The movie also began with several exclamations of how evidence was the most important thing. During the movie, we kept a running 10-minute watch on how far we had gone into the movie without it providing any evidence for Intelligent Design/Creationism. At the end of the movie, after an hour and a half of watching, the movie still had not provided any (none, zero, zilch) evidence for why ID would be true.

However, there was an avalanche of lies contained within the movie itself. These are simply the ones I remember between fits of raucous laughter.

1. In one scene, Stein arrives at the Discovery Institute. Upon walking in, you can see an extremely large cross hanging on the wall behind the secretary. Stein proceeds to conduct an interview in one of the back rooms, where his interviewee assures him that religion does not play a part in Intelligent Design.

Too easy.

2. The Miller-Urey experiment was a failure.

At this point I shot forward and exclaimed "what!?" I also resisted the urge to turn around to the more credulous section of the audience and explain to them that this is a straight-up lie.

For those of you who don't know, in 1953 Dr. Stanley Miller and Dr. Harold C. Urey created an environment that simulated the early Earth, and subjected several non-organic molecules to it. This produced organic compounds such as amino acids, which are the building blocks for proteins, which are the building blocks for (you guessed it) DNA.

The experiment was a monumental success. The fact that they call it a failure is appallingly untrue.

3. The odds of assembling...something. We heard Creationists saying things like "Billions and billions!" and "Trillions and trillions!" Of course, they never so much as mentioned what they were referring to. It was likely the odds of assembling some arbitrary organism's DNA, but as Richard Dawkins lays upon Stein's deaf ears later in the movie, all we need is the assembly of a self-replicating molecule. Whatever they are using to figure this, it is likely a reiteration of one of the figures found here.

First off, the number is high, but that high number is negated by the element of time. Consider this, if one person buys a lottery ticket and wins, that would be incredible and we should rightly examine whether or not there was foul play involved. However, people win the lottery all the time, even though the odds of buying a winning lottery ticket are insanely low. That is because if the odds of buying such a ticket are one in a million and one million people buy tickets, probability dictates that more often than not you will have a winning ticket.

Well, the universe is a big place, and there is a lot of stuff in it - there are over a trillion galaxies, all containing countless similar specs of galactic dust like Earth. Even if the odds of a localized collection of amino acids assembling a polymer chain are low, you can spread this out all over the Earth - did I say all over just the Earth? I meant the entire cosmos.

Furthermore, the odds rack up a lot faster than you'd think.

I will add more to this section as time allows, for now though I need to move on.

I will add more to the above section as well, but let me hit on the primary message of the movie, and one that should outrage the Jewish community and shame Ben Stein, himself a Jew:

DARWINISTS CAUSED THE HOLOCAUST OMGOMGOMG!!!

Apparently, by acknowledging that in nature those with the advantages necessary to survive actually manage to live while those with hinderances tend to die, you sign a contract obligating you to cull the weak yourself (/sarcasm). It's kind of like if you acknowledge that every 100 million or so years a meteor of appreciable size strikes the Earth and eliminates most of the life, that you in turn must find a way to emulate said meteor. That's honestly the implication the movie makes. The fact is that mother nature has come up with a literal storm of facts that are antithetical to everybody's survival (malaria, cancer, hurricanes, etc), acknowledging the truth of them by no means forces us to immitate them as a matter of policy, and in conflict with basic human compassion. Of course, Stein finds somebody who will parrot that evolution nudged a nation into genocide and follows them around Germany looking floored by the overwhelming "truth" of it all.

The movie makes a magnificent glory of how genocide supposedly represents the end-game of science and atheism. I recall at one point Stein asks (paraphrased) "If Darwinism can cause the Holocaust, what else could it cause in the future?" I immediately shat my pants out of fear, before giving a *cough cough, The Crusades, *cough*. It should be noted that even if noting that species have developed over time did cause the Nazis to genocide the Jews, it would not make evolution untrue. It is a starkly religious idea that suggests to us that truth must be consoling, and that even unpleasant facts are cast into suspicion for that reason.

It is undeniably clear that anti-semitism was around far before Nazi Germany, and that its roots are clearly religious. From Martin Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies to the blood libel (itself an admitted facet of the Vatican in its own papers up until 1914), baseless hatred of the Jews was around long before Darwin took to the seas.

For evolution being such a fount of atheistic evil, the behavior of certain members of Nazi Germany (itself predominantly Catholic, more on that later) is somewhat confusing. Why would the majority of German soldiers wear the following belt buckle?

"Gott mit Uns" translates indubitably to "God with us." This was also the battle cry of the majority of German units. This is unsurprising in an overtly Catholic nation (more on that still coming later) where its leader gave speeches like this one to garner support for his madness:

"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited."

~ Adolf Hitler in his speech in Munich on 12 April 1922

It should be noted that while the Catholic Church found the time to excommunicate several people during the 20th century such as Joe DiMagio, Sinead O'Connor, and Juan Peron, it has yet to excommunicate a single member of the Third Reich, including Hitler himself. It is clear that the Vatican assisted with the deportation of the Jews of Nazi Germany, and the Vatican has refused to release papers from the era as a result. Is this the blossoming of evil we can truly expect from denying institutions that make foolish distinctions based on fairy tales? Are we to believe that the Catholic Church was likewise afflicted with atheism?

Given all this, it seems like one could sum up the entire movie like this:

When interviewing the advocates of science, it was clear that the movie makers had cut their interviews to be in the most unappealing light possible and put some scary music behind them. The thing is, they attempted to make Dawkins look like an idiot, but even cheating they could not accomplish this. The best they could do was for Stein to ask Dawkins "How sure are you that god does not exist?" to which Dawkins says he couldn't really put an accurate number on it. Stein pushes the question and Dawkins eventually says 99%. Stein then begins hammering him on it with questions like "Why wouldn't it be 95%?" He asked an unquantifiable question, pushed Dawkins to quantify it, and then thought he had a "gotcha" when he tried.

He then asks if Dawkins can envision a situation where Intelligent Design could have occurred, to which Dawkins says that perhaps if aliens, who had evolved elsewhere in the universe, had wanted to foster a new race, then he could see it occurring that way. Stein proceeded to mock Dawkins as if that were his actual belief. I confess, up until this moment I had thought that Ben Stein was at least remotely intelligent.

There are, of course, plenty more examples of flagrant dishonesty or outright incorrections to address, but I think this should do for now.

Before I finish, I want to put this up. After the movie, I was speaking to somebody we saw the movie with who is a believer. She told me that most genetic mutations are harmful, a point I conceded and then explained its irrelevance to the theory. It turns out I was wrong:

"The haploid human genome is about 3 × 10⁹ base pairs in size. Every time this genome is replicated about 0.3 mutations, on average, will be passed on to one of the daughter cells. We are interested in knowing how many mutations are passed on to the fertilized egg (zygote) from its parents. In order to calculate this number we need to know how many DNA replications there are between the time that one parental zygote was formed and the time that the egg or sperm cell that unite to form the progeny zygote are produced.

In the case of females, this number is about 30, which means that each of a females eggs is the product of 30 cell divisions from the time the zygote was formed (Vogel and Rathenberg, 1975). Human females have about 500 eggs. In males, the number of cell divisions leading to mature sperm in a 30 year old male is about 400 (Vogel and Motulsky, 1997). This means that about 9 mutations (0.3 × 30) accumulate in the egg and about 120 mutations (0.3 × 400) accumulate in a sperm cell. Thus, each newly formed human zygote has approximately 129 new spontaneous mutations."

From Larry Moran.

The long and short of it is that each of us are trotting around with well over 100 "birth defects."

I will likely add more later. Until then, enjoy.

Letter to the editor 4-19

2008-04-19T07:06:00.001-07:00

I'm certain that I will invite criticism from some of my peers for saying this, but outside of a collegiate setting I oppose gun control laws.

However, there is a myriad of reasons to oppose such laws within academic grounds. The Ivory Tower is one of the last areas where ideas are exchanged freely – one can trespass on any taboo they so wish in the interest of advancing the conversation. For this reason, it is from within these halls that we produce solutions to world problems, new philosophies, and the ideas that advance us as a race. I believe allowing students to carry concealed weapons will be antithetical to this economy of ideas.

Consider religious beliefs. Elsewhere in the world if you openly criticize the peoples' religious beliefs, you have likely taken your life into your hands. People become emotionally attached to their ideas – this fact is punctuated on a daily basis by gunfire and bomb blasts, and is far more common than school shootings. This is why if I knew a religious person may be able to brandish the means to end my life, I would be reticent to examine their beliefs to the extent I was able. Similarly, I know I would have second thoughts of handing a failed assignment to a student if I was aware that they could be concealing a firearm. Whether a weapon is meant to be a negotiation tool or not, they very quickly become such simply by virtue of their presence. This type of pollution of thought cannot be permitted in this environment.

Shootings can happen anywhere – a college is simply another congregation of people, like the Omaha Mall was last year. On the occasions when somebody wishes to slaughter the innocent, they will find a place. The idea that their victims may be armed, which Mr. Simpson/Foreign Born Patriot/Whatever alias he's using this week says will prevent such events, will actually do little to dissuade such maniacs – they almost always turn their guns on themselves. Will the existence of a gun free zone really be more appealing to somebody who plans to execute himself anyway? Fortunately, we find comfort in the fact that such events are rare, and are very unlikely to occur on the Missouri State campus.

In closing, I will note that the letters to the standard advocating concealed-carry laws (thank you for making your voices heard, whether we agree or not) are rich with personal anecdotes about how people they know personally are very responsible. Allow me a few personal anecdotes of my own. As a result of my constant and public criticism of religion, I have received many threats over the last three years. These include prayers for my death, promises to run me over should they ever see me walking on campus, and a host of other happy fantasies of visiting their personal brand of justice on me for what I have said. I would wager that most of these people have clean records and, due to the high correlation between religiosity and support of concealed-carry laws in various exit polls, I'd say they likely would love to carry a firearm on campus.

The attempt has been made to suggest we need armed civilians on the exceptionally small chance that somebody decides to go on a murderous rampage on our campus. Conversely, all we need is for one person like those above to go through the motions, and suddenly you have an emotionally unbalanced person who can carry a gun with them legally. I'm certain you can imagine how this would make me uneasy.

Ideas are our business in the college setting, and we cannot jeopardize that quite yet.

4,000 bodies demonstration

2008-03-23T19:42:00.000-07:00

Today the 4,000th US soldier was killed in the Iraq War. On Sunday, March 30th, a large group will be chalking 4,000 outlines of dead soldiers on the MSU campus to increase awareness to the gravity of the cost of life in this war.

We will meet in the PSU next to the Wok & Roll at 10:00 am. The organizers will be wearing orange tops, so they should be fairly easy to spot. If this is a cause you can get behind, please lend us whatever time you're able. In addition to your much needed labor you can bring donations of chalk, outlines of bodies cut into cardboard or other materials to use as templates, bottled water, and/or easy snack foods. Anything time you can give, whether it's 10 minutes or 10 hours (hopefully it won't take nearly that long) will help.

Also, please help spread the word. Write notes on your blogs, harass friends, tell strangers...change doesn't happen until enough people begin to care.

Thanks everybody.

JT