Showing posts with label atheism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label atheism. Show all posts
Saturday, October 31, 2020
Monday, October 22, 2018
SJA #20 - 22 October 2018 - Sam Harris, Afrocentrism
Transcript
Sam Harris
Who is Sam Harris? From his website, samharris.com, quote:
Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times bestsellers and the host of the Waking Up Podcast. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.
Harris’s work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.
Sam Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.
Why bring this up? Well, I wrote this out months go, then shelved it, but currentaffairs.org recently published a long, well-written piece by Eli Massey and Nathan J. Robinson. They wrote a 11,000 word article that calmly and clearly takes Harris to pieces (with a further 9,000 words in endnotes to answer anticipated objections). It’s a long read, but well worth it. If nothing else, because Harris is so clearly a piece of shit, and so thoroughly representative of a lot of the problems facing the US today: a huge current in modern atheism, the failures of intellect on the right, and white people.
So, who is Sam Harris?
Harris was born to Hollywood producer Susan Harris (née Spivak) and actor Berkeley Harris in 1965. His parents divorced in 1969, and his mother remarried in 1983, to Paul Junger Witt, with whom she had been working since 1977. Witt and Harris were successful as writers and producers, mostly in television through the early 90s, with notable hits including The Golden Girls. All that is to say, Sam Harris grew up in a fairly wealthy home.
During his sophomore year at Stanford in 1986, Harris played around with 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, aka MDMA aka ecstasy, and he had what he has since described as spiritual experiences. This inspired him to try and find the same sorts of experiences without the drugs, so he dropped out of Stanford and spent time in India and Nepal studying meditation with Buddhist and Hindu teachers. You could be forgiven for thinking this sounds like the stereotype of a child of wealth going to the brown countries and engage in religious tourism. Because that’s exactly what it is.
Harris returned to Stanford in ‘97 (that’s ten years of bumming around, for those trying to keep up with the timeline) and finished his undergraduate degree in philosophy in 2000. He wrote his first book, The End of Faith, a year later, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. He eventually matriculated to UCLA for his doctorate, earning a PhD in cognitive neuroscience under advisor Michael S Cohen in 2009, with a thesis titled The moral landscape: How science could help determine human values.
Harris has not continued to contribute to neuroscience since earning his doctorate. He is listed as a contributor on one paper that I can find, and that appears to be based on work he did prior to earning his doctorate rather than ongoing contributions. That is to say, Harris doesn’t appear to be a researcher, nor in any way a scientist.
Rather than a dedication to scientific advancement, Harris appears to use his doctorate to advance his primary vocation: right-wing atheism. He gets to call himself Dr. Harris and an expert in what religion does to the brain. His work in neuroscience functions as a shield against criticism as he makes sweeping claims about unrelated fields, unsupported by evidence and dismissed by experts within those fields.
Harris’s willingness to be dramatically ignorant and dogmatically incorrect in the face of compelling argument and evidence is well documented. In 2012, he proposed racial profiling as a way to counteract extremist Muslim terror. Security expert Bruce Schneier weighed in, pointing out that 1) “Muslim” isn’t a race, 2) racial profiling doesn’t work (it generates too many false positives), 3) any system like that can easily be gamed by terrorists (generating false negatives), and 4) would be counterproductive (by pointlessly pissing off the 99.999999% [6 9s] of muslims who aren’t terrorists).
In spite of his conversation with Schneier, Harris has continued to support racial profiling, just as he ignores criticism from experts in the many other fields his essays touch on. He tends to view any criticism of his errors and inconsistencies as personal attacks. For example, following his discussion with Ezra Klein regarding Harris’s discussion with eugenics apologist Charles Murray, Harris’s response was so petulant that even his legion of fans, who ordinarily support him unconditionally, were taken aback.
Harris has defended other indefensible positions as well, including torturing suspects for information about terrorism and pre-emptive nuclear strikes against muslim nations. Are you noticing a trend? Because there’s a trend. It’s a trend against muslims, against Islam.
As I’ve said elsewhere, Harris was part of the surge in movement atheism that occurred in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. His first book was written and published after 9/11. He became famous as a blogger and speaker after that, and didn’t start his podcast until 2013.
Harris was something of an outlier among other prominents in the atheist and skeptic communities. He was far younger than the other “horsemen”, with no established career or credentials. He had no science background, and he was never particularly interested in skepticism. Instead, he talked far more about his practice of martial arts and meditation. And the need to eliminate Islam. He defended torturing muslims. He defended nuking muslims. For Sam Harris, muslims are the boogeyman.
He’ll attack other religions, to be sure. He debated William Lane Craig, and he’s no fan of catholicism. However, he’s the right’s darling for a reason, and it’s not because of his passionate defense of libertarian free will (which he doesn’t believe in).
It’s because Harris is a far right wing clown. Don’t make the mistake of thinking his love of eastern mysticism makes him a hippy. Harris is a right wing authoritarian, he’s deeply misogynistic, and he’s racist as hell. Look at some of the recent (as of writing) guests he’s had on his podcast:
- Tamler Sommers: author of “Why Honor Matters”, a “controversial call to put honor at the center of morality”
- Bart Ehrman: an atheist who defends Christianity
- Robin Hanson: economics professor at George Mason University (GMU was recently in the news because the Koch brothers have spent years turning its economics department into a far right wing super-PAC to give themselves legitimacy) (Oh, and this conversation was before Hanson made the news for arguing in favor of “redistribution of sex”, aka rape, in order to prevent more terrorist attacks by incels. But well after he asked whether a woman being non-violently raped, because the violence is what makes it really bad, is worse than infidelity).
- Niall Ferguson: a pro-imperialist writer of “controversial” history (“controversial” = politically motivated and false)
- David Frum & Andrew Sullivan: arch-conservative politicos
- Eric Weinstein & Ben Shapiro: arch-conservative economist and arch-conservative politico
- Bret Weinstein: Eric’s brother, former biology professor, paid to resign after being racist as hell.
- Tom Nichols: right wing academic
Yes, Harris has others on his show to discuss other topics, but there is a long and consistent theme of bringing in right wing or far right wing personalities (who Harris describes only as “controversial”) to defend right wing policies and beliefs. Harris then fails to play the devil’s advocate, which he’ll happily do against the liberals he brings on his show. Instead, Harris helps these right wing figures attack liberal positions, decrying identity politics and political correctness.
Harris brought Charles Murray on his show in April of 2017. In April of this year (2018), Harris described the interview thusly:
Almost exactly a year ago, I had Charles Murray on my podcast. Murray, as many of our listeners will know, is the author of the notorious book The Bell Curve. It has a chapter on raising IQ and differences between racial measures of IQ that was extremely controversial. Murray is a person who still gets protested on college campuses more than 20 years later.
While I have very little interest in IQ and actually zero interest in racial differences in IQ, I invited Murray on my podcast, because he had recently been de-platformed at Middlebury College. He and his host were actually assaulted as they left the auditorium. In my view, this seemed yet another instance of kind of a moral panic that we were seeing on college campuses. It caused me to take an interest in Murray that I hadn’t previously had. I had never read The Bell Curve, because I thought it was just ... It must be just racist trash, because I assumed that where there was all that smoke, there must be fire. I hadn’t paid attention to Murray. When I did read the book and did some more research on him, I came to think that he was probably the most unfairly maligned person in my lifetime. That doesn’t really run the risk of being much of an exaggeration there.
The most controversial passages in the book struck me as utterly mainstream with respect to the science at this point. They were mainstream at the time he wrote them and they’re even more mainstream today. I perceived a real problem here of free speech and a man’s shunning and I was very worried.
To describe Murray’s book as “controversial” is false. To describe it as “mainstream” is a contemptible lie. To say that Murray is unfairly maligned is wrong to the point of absurdity. Charles Murray is a nazi. Not even a neo-nazi, just a nazi.
Murray said he was surprised that people called his book racist when it was first published in the 90s. He has also said he was surprised people thought it was racist when he and some friends burned a cross on top of a hill when he was a teenager. Charles Murray is a disingenuous piece of shit, and a member, erstwhile if lapsed, of the klan. His book was funded by the Pioneer Fund, a non-profit established in 1937 to “advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences”. Did you catch the goal, there? It’s a eugenics organization intended to “breed the badness out of humanity”.
And because it was founded in 1937, when a whole lot of America was utterly charmed by the German Workers Party, it’s just a nazi organization, not a neo-nazi organization. They paid for the “research” that went into Murray’s book, and they paid Murray to write it. The purpose of the research and the purpose of the book was to push the fascist agenda here in the US that would end the few scraps of semi-socialism we managed to push through in the 1930s. Because fascists want poor people to be desperate and scared, and they fucking hate it that brown people were able to get on food stamps and social security.
Murray’s book is filled with terrible science conducted by godawful racists with the end goal of destroying the few safety nets we have left. The pseudoscience in the book was conducted in order to provide a smokescreen justification for the elimination of those safety nets, namely that poor people are poor because they’re genetically inferior, and keeping them alive just lets them breed to make more inferior people.
That’s what Harris describes as “controversial” and “mainstream”. That’s who Harris describes as “unfairly maligned”. In what way does Charles Murray, whose book’s central message has been adopted as central to the Republican party platform, need defense? In what way does he deserve defense?
And, side note, you may have noticed the right-wing talking point of attacking colleges and college campuses. Harris described Murray’s de-platforming as an instance of a “moral panic that we were seeing on college campuses”. The right has long been attacking colleges and universities, seeing them as hotbeds of communism, leftism, jewism, liberalism, and gayism. Of course, they can’t just come out and say that. Instead, they adopt the tactic of claiming to be defenders of a fundamental liberty, in this case free speech.
Fox News and the alt right have long been spreading the propaganda that our college campuses are shutting down free speech, that they prevent any conservative or right wing “truths” (heavy sarcasm quotes there) from being heard. This is a talking point you can hear being parroted by other exemplars of white mediocrity on college campuses, like Stephen Pinker, Brett Weinstein, and Jordan B. Peterson. In fact, far from stifling free speech, college students are the population most broadly in support of free speech in the United States.
Harris has also been openly misogynistic.
“There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree intrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said. “The atheist variable just has this—it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.”
Along with his essentialism toward muslims and brown people, Harris also believes in an essentialism toward gender. This is reflected not only by the above quote, but also by one of his conversations with Douglas Murray (another far right wing bigot, not related to Charles Murray), where D. Murray goes on a rant about trans people and Harris just chuckles along. In 6 minutes of conversation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04sSvofgWTg, an excerpt grabbed by a pro-Trump right winger calling themself Patriotic Populist), Murray whines about trans folk and throws in some anti-muslim bigotry for good measure.
Harris’s response? “That is hilarious.” He then goes on to… ask if Douglas Murray is more free to attack trans people because he is himself gay. He doesn’t open with criticism of Murray’s bigotry, but with criticism of Murray’s opponents for daring to criticise Murray. He then goes on to attack the left for “anti-intellectualism”. Why doesn’t he challenge Murray’s bigotries? Why is his ire instead immediately raised in defense of Murray against hypothetical criticism?
He’s also had Jordan Peterson on his podcast. Peterson rose to fame for criticizing a proposed law (which has since been passed) regarding trans people’s rights, declaring that he would happily go to prison for being a bigot to trans people (the law wouldn’t have done that, doesn’t do that), and that he would happily pay a fine (wouldn’t, doesn’t). Peterson now earns tens of thousands of dollars a month on patreon, and in return he routinely goes online, or gives talks, or gives interviews where he combines the most vacuous, empty truths he can think of with the most inane garbage he can think of, all so he can imply (he very carefully never states anything outright) that women belong in the kitchen, men belong in charge, and that everyone has to have a fixed role to play.
And instead of going over Peterson’s odious, false, and “controversial” beliefs, Harris spends an hour arguing about the nature of truth.
Who knows how Harris came to his atheism. It’s clear his approach to life isn’t built on compassion or understanding.
From what I can dig up on Harris’s past and life, he’s a child of wealth and privilege who’s never faced a challenge he didn’t personally select. He’s never had a boss or a job he could lose. He’s never had to work for shit. He had a weird trip in college, then fucked off to the India for a decade. He shared our collective trauma on 9/11 and wrote a book, which allowed him to coast for years as a public speaker. He spent a few years doing the minimum necessary to get a Ph.D., which work he abandoned entirely so so he could get back to earning royalties and start a podcast.
So who is Sam Harris? He’s a spoiled kid who’s spent the last 17 years defending the status quo and attacking whoever the hateful white kids thought it was cool to attack. Harris is yet another example of a mediocre white kid with rich parents who succeeded in spite of, or even due to, his faults rather than due to his merits.
Afrocentrism
Our next skeptic topic: Afrocentrism. This one caught my eye, because I wondered why the hell it was a topic in the Skeptic’s Dictionary. Then I read it and wondered if I was getting the whole story.
What skepdic.com presents is… not the whole story. According to the dictionary:
Afrocentrism is a pseudohistorical political movement that erroneously claims that African-Americans should trace their roots back to ancient Egypt because it was dominated by a race of black Africans. Some of Afrocentrism's other claims are: the ancient Greeks stole their main cultural achievements from black Egyptians; Jesus, Socrates and Cleopatra, among others, were black; and Jews created the slave trade of black Africans.
The main purpose of Afrocentrism is to encourage black nationalism and ethnic pride as a psychological weapon against the destructive and debilitating effects of universal racism.
Clearly, if this is what Afrocentrism is, then it’s a complete pile of crap and should be ignored when absent, scoffed at when present. Unfortunately, that’s not what Afrocentrism is. I went ahead and did a bit of googling to see if I could find other perspectives.
Let’s go ahead and start with wikipedia. No, it’s not a great source, but wikipedia’s bias is toward white, male, conservatives. It’s dominated by college bros, engineers, and programmers, except for the niche page that only ever gets edited by the two people who are the only two people in the world who will ever read that page. That is to say, wikipedia isn’t likely to be biased toward something called “Afrocentrism”. So here’s wikipedia’s summary:
Afrocentrism (also Afrocentricity) is an approach to the study of world history that focuses on the history of people of recent African descent. It is in some respects a response to global (Eurocentric) attitudes about African people and their historical contributions; it seeks to correct mistakes and ideas perpetuated by the racist philosophical underpinnings of western academic disciplines as they developed during and since Europe's Early Renaissance as justifying rationales for the enslavement of other peoples, in order to enable more accurate accounts of not only African but all people's contributions to world history. Afrocentricity deals primarily with self-determination and African agency and is a Pan-African point of view for the study of culture, philosophy, and history.
Afrocentrism is a scholarly movement that seeks to conduct research and education on global history subjects, from the perspective of historical African peoples and polities. It takes a critical stance on Euro-centric assumptions and myths about world history, in order to pursue methodological studies of the latter. Some of the critics of the movement believe that it often denies or minimizes European, Near Eastern and Asian cultural influences while exagerating certain aspects of historical African civilizations that independently accomplished a significant level of cultural and technological development. In general, Afrocentrism is usually manifested in a focus on the history of Africa and its role in contemporary African-American culture and Greek philosophy among others.
What is today broadly called Afrocentrism evolved out of the work of African-American intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but flowered into its modern form due to the activism of African-American intellectuals in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and in the development of African-American Studies programs in universities. However, following the development of universities in African colonies in the 1950s, African scholars became major contributors to African historiography.
Wow. That. Is. Different. Very different. Like, the difference between “Black Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter”? Maybe not that far.
I have heard a lot of things over the years that aren’t great about black nationalism, of course. To be honest, I don’t care for any form of nationalism. I have sympathy for any movement among oppressed peoples that attempts to fight back against oppression, but issues that carry strong emotional impact and that focus so strongly on something central to a person’s identity? That can lead to woowoo, myths, pseudoscience, and pseudohistory.
On the positive side, we can absolutely state that Afrocentrism has done good work, establishing departments for African American studies in universities, countering the racist assumptions built into decades or centuries of academic work coming out of those very, very white universities.
On the other hand, Afrocentrism also contributed to black nationalism and built up a lot of nonsense beliefs that are still present in a number of communities. Just as you’ll occasionally see nonsense about “How the Irish Saved Civilization”, you’ll see nonsense about how ancient Egyptians were black and were the heart of all civilization and so on.
Africa is a huge continent, with the largest amount of linguistic and racial diversity you’ll find anywhere on the planet. The black population of the United States came largely from a small region of western Africa, and represent only a fraction of the continent’s diversity and heritage. There many excellent reasons to celebrate what black people have done in the United States in surviving, overcoming, and battling the horrific conditions white people forced upon them and many excellent reasons to fight the deep currents of racism still built into American culture and academia, but this shouldn’t be used to foster false beliefs.
The Pan-African movement that forms part of Afrocentrism is probably an excellent and necessary thing in itself, as part of the effort to combat the neo-colonialism of the modern west. It would also be necessary to unite or ally that movement with a pan-Latin or pan-American movement which would allow (does allow?) Central and South American peoples to fight that same neo-colonialism.
But we can’t extend it in the past, and we can’t pretend that there’s some sort of genuine unity there. When I said that Africa is huge, I meant huge. It’s 20% of the Earth’s total land area and contains 16% of the world’s population. And it’s old. Remember, that’s where humanity started! That’s why you get more diversity in language and race in Africa than you do anywhere else. We shouldn’t really talk about Africa as a single place or people any more than we can for the Americas.
Just to maintain absolute clarity: I support Afrocentrism as a movement intended to fight back against racism in society and the academy. I support the study of black American culture and history, the contributions and developments and struggles of black people in the US. I also support an anti-colonial movement, a decolonization of Africa generally, and the study of African culture and history. But I urge all those involved in that project to not fall prey to black nationalism, or any nationalism, or any movement that ties identity so strongly to the field of study that they allow myths and falsehoods to creep into their work.
I also urge the Skeptic’s Dictionary to provide a little nuance to their article. I mean, damn. Afrocentrism was and is a large and vital movement that has grown and changed over the decades. To call the whole thing just the pseudohistory and pseudoscience of some portions (significant portions, I’ll admit) of the whole? That’s not good skepticism.
Links
Monday, March 05, 2018
I'm an Atheist
I'm an Atheist - English
I’m an atheist.
The bare minimum to be an atheist is that you aren’t convinced that some kind of god exists. That’s it. You don’t need any more than that. Theism means being convinced there is a god, atheism is the lack of that conviction.
I take it a step further. I believe no god exists. Every religion describes a being that is active, intercessory, involved, participatory. Every action requires a response action. Every act leaves evidence. All changes create history. Any of the gods described by the world religions should be evident, they should all be in some way visible.
And there is no evidence. That’s why we have religionS, and not just a religion.
There’s no Christian Chemistry, Buddhist Biology, Muslim Math, Hindu History. There’s just chemistry, biology, math, and history. In the pursuit of knowledge, we follow where the evidence leads and greater amounts of evidence lead to a single conviction. Our learning always proceeds from mystery to certainty, not the other way around.
Contrast all our fields of knowledge with all of our religions. Christianity began as a crowd of conflicting cults; one cult dominated only because it got lucky in latching on to the mother of an emperor. Even that dominance didn’t last; the church splintered as soon as the empire did. Today there are tens of thousands of branches of Christianity.
If there ever was a historical Muhammad, then his lifetime was the only time Islam was unified. Their own texts tell us that they split as soon as he died.
Judaism was just one of many polytheistic religions among the Canaanite tribes, and one particularly unpleasant cult came to dominate there. Even then, Judaism has never been a single, united religion. From the Maccabees to the orthodox Jews of today, from the Tabiades to the secular Jews of today, Judaism has been as splintered and factionalized as every other.
I’m an atheist.
The bare minimum to be an atheist is that you aren’t convinced that some kind of god exists. That’s it. You don’t need any more than that. Theism means being convinced there is a god, atheism is the lack of that conviction.
I take it a step further. I believe no god exists. Every religion describes a being that is active, intercessory, involved, participatory. Every action requires a response action. Every act leaves evidence. All changes create history. Any of the gods described by the world religions should be evident, they should all be in some way visible.
And there is no evidence. That’s why we have religionS, and not just a religion.
There’s no Christian Chemistry, Buddhist Biology, Muslim Math, Hindu History. There’s just chemistry, biology, math, and history. In the pursuit of knowledge, we follow where the evidence leads and greater amounts of evidence lead to a single conviction. Our learning always proceeds from mystery to certainty, not the other way around.
Contrast all our fields of knowledge with all of our religions. Christianity began as a crowd of conflicting cults; one cult dominated only because it got lucky in latching on to the mother of an emperor. Even that dominance didn’t last; the church splintered as soon as the empire did. Today there are tens of thousands of branches of Christianity.
If there ever was a historical Muhammad, then his lifetime was the only time Islam was unified. Their own texts tell us that they split as soon as he died.
Judaism was just one of many polytheistic religions among the Canaanite tribes, and one particularly unpleasant cult came to dominate there. Even then, Judaism has never been a single, united religion. From the Maccabees to the orthodox Jews of today, from the Tabiades to the secular Jews of today, Judaism has been as splintered and factionalized as every other.
Tuesday, October 09, 2012
Mainstream vs Average and Atheism Plus
I was part of an interesting discussion about the urge by creators to destroy their most awesome creations, which was dubbed the Lucas Principle1 and discussed with respect to Ridley Scott and his repeated attacks against Alien and Blade Runner, with a brief foray into the Card Effect2 and a very interesting discussion of gender neutral pronouns3.
At one point, Roberta Williams was brought up. This is because we were casting about for female creators to put alongside the likes of Lucas and Scott. Williams was (and apparently still is) a video game designer and co-founder of Sierra Entertainment. In the 90s she came under criticism of elitism for stating that she was creating games for more educated and affluent gamers, codified in '99 by the following:
The fact is that Williams was in part correct. Computers became mainstream just as video game consoles, telephones, and cars have all become mainstream. Her real mistake lay in calling it "average" and in assuming that this was in any way a bad thing. It's really not.
This brought to mind a speech given by Greta Christina as the keynote speaker for the Secular Student Alliance in 2010. The video (embedded below) is about an hour long and she discusses the similarities between today's atheist movement and the history of the gay movement, and what the former can learn from the latter. One of the many things she discusses is actually a warning: atheists should prepare to see themselves become less special.
Once upon a time, coming out of the closet was a guaranteed way to get yourself killed. Oscar Wilde was convicted of homosexuality and his time in prison was so injurious that he never fully recovered and died shortly after his release, spending the last few years of his life penniless and advocating penal reform. Alan Turing, hero of the second world war, was convicted of homosexuality half a century later and committed suicide following the loss of his career and chemical castration. The Stonewall Riots of 1969 were the nucleus around which the defiant Gay Rights Movement was formed.
Because coming out was still difficult, dangerous, and in some places illegal, out gays of the 70s and 80s were a very different group than today. Homosexuality has become mainstream, perhaps even seen as merely a "different kind of normal" rather than dangerous, sick, or criminal. The discussion today is whether gays can legally get married, not whether they should be in prison; and conservative steadfasts have admitted that opposing that is a losing proposition as young conservatives are coming into the fold who don't see homosexuality as a problem to solve.
Where once you had to be an incredibly strong, independent, and indeed fabulous person to withstand the withering hatred of daily life as a gay person, now you may be just another person who simply happens to be gay, who rolls their eyes and says "We're not all like Kurt Hummel." As gays have become mainstream and the mainstream has become more gay, being gay has become less special. Just another kind of normal. This is somewhat sad, but it's victory.
In the same way, Christina reasons, atheists will become less special as the mainstreaming already underway continues. Being an atheist in an overwhelmingly religious society such as that of the United states usually involves growing up in, understanding, thinking deeply about, and ultimately rejecting religion. It means facing abiding discrimination and hatred4, and facing the scorn of your community and even being kicked out of your home. It means being better informed about religion than the religious, and spending far more time thinking and arguing about matters of faith, history, and morality. It means being well-informed and articulate in a way that the population at large is not. In means, in short, being special.
Are atheists becoming not-special? Far from it! Rather, they're experiencing a different growing pain resulting from mainstreaming. They're experiencing a problem the gay community might wish it suffered from in 1975. The atheist community now has minorities. It has women, and blacks, and transgendered people, and disabled people, and all that other stuff. Christina points out that the gay movement still has trouble reaching out to the black community because, as is often the case, the gay movement was led by white men back in the day. As leaders, they were the public face, and that hurt them in reaching out to gays where were not white or not men.
This brings us to Atheism Plus. A number of women and minorities have been clamoring for greater inclusion in the atheism movement. They've also been holding leaders' feet to the fire to get them to be more outspoken about matters not traditionally part of the atheist wheelhouse5. They've been pushing for discussion of feminism, homosexuality, race relations, alternative genders, and other issues in progressive politics. This has received significant push-back from individuals who don't think that that's part of what it means to be an atheist. "The skeptical, fact-based worldview can be brought to bear on other issues." vs. "What we talk about as atheists is the god thing. Stop bugging us!"
About a year ago, atheist blogger Rebecca Watson accidentally set the internet on fire by saying she found it creepy when a guy hit on her in an elevator. What followed was an all-out troll-fest as the misogynists women always have to face when they speak in public piled on, clueless atheist men came in to defend elevator guy or ask what the problem was, other feminist atheists (male and female) spoke up in Watson's defense, and more trolls piled on, names were called, and discussions exploded everywhere6. This firestorm hasn't died down in the 15 months since it started. Other feminist atheists have become more outspoken about how the atheist community isn't and hasn't been friendly to female atheists. Minority atheists have spoken up saying much the same about the community's relationship with non-white atheists. And the whole time, the old guard, from their position of privilege, have argued that everyone needs to shut up, quit whining, and get back to not believing in god, dammit!
The latest development in this ongoing discussion has been Atheism+, atheism plus progressive social issues. A movement which seeks to bring skepticism and scientific methodological naturalism to bear on social issues. I've found it quite informative. I'm not exactly a lurker there, but I'm nowhere near as prolific as some of you might expect. Instead I mostly read and learn. Not all are so reticent to participate. Misogynist and MRA7 trolls have been a serious problem in the weeks since its genesis and it's proved very divisive within the atheist community. Even those who aren't misogynistic assholes8 don't necessarily see the need for a space to discuss these issues safely, don't see these issues as being part of atheism, or think the feminists are assholes themselves, particularly for calling them assholes for not agreeing with the first two points!
Things have been pretty rough over there, in case you're wondering. In addition to a lot of temporary bans to slap down people who've too insulting, hurtful, or hateful, there have also been a number of permanent bans. An average of nearly one a day. In my opinion, all have been justified.
Atheism+ is an outgrowth of the mainstreaming of atheism. It's no longer a club reserved for a very few people, a small, uniform community. It's reached the point where different people, with different interests want to join. Atheism should learn from the history of the gay rights movement and not be a movement just for white men. Avoid the problem by learning to be inclusive. Don't commit the ecological fallacy and assume that a community becoming more average means each member is becoming more average. The community is becoming more diverse, and this will bring in a variety of views, a variety of arguments, and it means there will be more ambassadors to different communities. Gay has become another kind of normal because everyone has come to realize that someone they love is gay. That the black community in America is less gay-friendly than mainstream America is a direct result of the gay movement's failure to be more racially inclusive back in the day. The atheist movement shouldn't make that mistake.
Just in case it's not clear, I'm fully in support of atheism+. My atheism isn't something I keep in a box, away from the rest of my beliefs. I like to believe that it's the result of the same skepticism and scientific worldview as the rest of my beliefs. I'm certain that my worldview isn't as cohesive and self-consistent as I would like, but I'll keep learning and growing and working on it, and I'll try to ensure consistency by not keeping each part in isolation from the others.
So where does that leave us with Roberta Williams? She was factually correct that computers and computer gaming had become more mainstream, more average, and that that meant the market for games had changed. Where she was wrong was in assuming that meant every computer owner was now average. That's the ecological fallacy. The market had become larger and more diverse. Her affluent, educated gamers were still there, still waiting for her kind of game, but there were other gamers as well with different tastes. There's room for Call of Duty, Batman, and Fallout on the shelves at the stores. There's room for heroes who are black, female, or disabled. There are people waiting to hear the stories that all of the creators have to tell. They don't all want the same stories or heroes, but that's okay. It takes all kinds.
Greta Christina's Talk at SSA
Footnotes
X - Seriously? That's a lot of footnotes!
At one point, Roberta Williams was brought up. This is because we were casting about for female creators to put alongside the likes of Lucas and Scott. Williams was (and apparently still is) a video game designer and co-founder of Sierra Entertainment. In the 90s she came under criticism of elitism for stating that she was creating games for more educated and affluent gamers, codified in '99 by the following:
Back when I got started, which sounds like ancient history, back then the demographics of people who were into computer games, was totally different, in my opinion, than they are today. Back then, computers were more expensive, which made them more exclusive to people who were maybe at a certain income level, or education level. So the people that played computer games 15 years ago were that type of person. They probably didn't watch television as much, and the instant gratification era hadn't quite grown the way it has lately. I think in the last 5 or 6 years, the demographics have really changed, now this is my opinion, because computers are less expensive so more people can afford them. More "average" people now feel they should own one.
The fact is that Williams was in part correct. Computers became mainstream just as video game consoles, telephones, and cars have all become mainstream. Her real mistake lay in calling it "average" and in assuming that this was in any way a bad thing. It's really not.
This brought to mind a speech given by Greta Christina as the keynote speaker for the Secular Student Alliance in 2010. The video (embedded below) is about an hour long and she discusses the similarities between today's atheist movement and the history of the gay movement, and what the former can learn from the latter. One of the many things she discusses is actually a warning: atheists should prepare to see themselves become less special.
Once upon a time, coming out of the closet was a guaranteed way to get yourself killed. Oscar Wilde was convicted of homosexuality and his time in prison was so injurious that he never fully recovered and died shortly after his release, spending the last few years of his life penniless and advocating penal reform. Alan Turing, hero of the second world war, was convicted of homosexuality half a century later and committed suicide following the loss of his career and chemical castration. The Stonewall Riots of 1969 were the nucleus around which the defiant Gay Rights Movement was formed.
Because coming out was still difficult, dangerous, and in some places illegal, out gays of the 70s and 80s were a very different group than today. Homosexuality has become mainstream, perhaps even seen as merely a "different kind of normal" rather than dangerous, sick, or criminal. The discussion today is whether gays can legally get married, not whether they should be in prison; and conservative steadfasts have admitted that opposing that is a losing proposition as young conservatives are coming into the fold who don't see homosexuality as a problem to solve.
Where once you had to be an incredibly strong, independent, and indeed fabulous person to withstand the withering hatred of daily life as a gay person, now you may be just another person who simply happens to be gay, who rolls their eyes and says "We're not all like Kurt Hummel." As gays have become mainstream and the mainstream has become more gay, being gay has become less special. Just another kind of normal. This is somewhat sad, but it's victory.
In the same way, Christina reasons, atheists will become less special as the mainstreaming already underway continues. Being an atheist in an overwhelmingly religious society such as that of the United states usually involves growing up in, understanding, thinking deeply about, and ultimately rejecting religion. It means facing abiding discrimination and hatred4, and facing the scorn of your community and even being kicked out of your home. It means being better informed about religion than the religious, and spending far more time thinking and arguing about matters of faith, history, and morality. It means being well-informed and articulate in a way that the population at large is not. In means, in short, being special.
Are atheists becoming not-special? Far from it! Rather, they're experiencing a different growing pain resulting from mainstreaming. They're experiencing a problem the gay community might wish it suffered from in 1975. The atheist community now has minorities. It has women, and blacks, and transgendered people, and disabled people, and all that other stuff. Christina points out that the gay movement still has trouble reaching out to the black community because, as is often the case, the gay movement was led by white men back in the day. As leaders, they were the public face, and that hurt them in reaching out to gays where were not white or not men.
This brings us to Atheism Plus. A number of women and minorities have been clamoring for greater inclusion in the atheism movement. They've also been holding leaders' feet to the fire to get them to be more outspoken about matters not traditionally part of the atheist wheelhouse5. They've been pushing for discussion of feminism, homosexuality, race relations, alternative genders, and other issues in progressive politics. This has received significant push-back from individuals who don't think that that's part of what it means to be an atheist. "The skeptical, fact-based worldview can be brought to bear on other issues." vs. "What we talk about as atheists is the god thing. Stop bugging us!"
About a year ago, atheist blogger Rebecca Watson accidentally set the internet on fire by saying she found it creepy when a guy hit on her in an elevator. What followed was an all-out troll-fest as the misogynists women always have to face when they speak in public piled on, clueless atheist men came in to defend elevator guy or ask what the problem was, other feminist atheists (male and female) spoke up in Watson's defense, and more trolls piled on, names were called, and discussions exploded everywhere6. This firestorm hasn't died down in the 15 months since it started. Other feminist atheists have become more outspoken about how the atheist community isn't and hasn't been friendly to female atheists. Minority atheists have spoken up saying much the same about the community's relationship with non-white atheists. And the whole time, the old guard, from their position of privilege, have argued that everyone needs to shut up, quit whining, and get back to not believing in god, dammit!
The latest development in this ongoing discussion has been Atheism+, atheism plus progressive social issues. A movement which seeks to bring skepticism and scientific methodological naturalism to bear on social issues. I've found it quite informative. I'm not exactly a lurker there, but I'm nowhere near as prolific as some of you might expect. Instead I mostly read and learn. Not all are so reticent to participate. Misogynist and MRA7 trolls have been a serious problem in the weeks since its genesis and it's proved very divisive within the atheist community. Even those who aren't misogynistic assholes8 don't necessarily see the need for a space to discuss these issues safely, don't see these issues as being part of atheism, or think the feminists are assholes themselves, particularly for calling them assholes for not agreeing with the first two points!
Things have been pretty rough over there, in case you're wondering. In addition to a lot of temporary bans to slap down people who've too insulting, hurtful, or hateful, there have also been a number of permanent bans. An average of nearly one a day. In my opinion, all have been justified.
Atheism+ is an outgrowth of the mainstreaming of atheism. It's no longer a club reserved for a very few people, a small, uniform community. It's reached the point where different people, with different interests want to join. Atheism should learn from the history of the gay rights movement and not be a movement just for white men. Avoid the problem by learning to be inclusive. Don't commit the ecological fallacy and assume that a community becoming more average means each member is becoming more average. The community is becoming more diverse, and this will bring in a variety of views, a variety of arguments, and it means there will be more ambassadors to different communities. Gay has become another kind of normal because everyone has come to realize that someone they love is gay. That the black community in America is less gay-friendly than mainstream America is a direct result of the gay movement's failure to be more racially inclusive back in the day. The atheist movement shouldn't make that mistake.
Just in case it's not clear, I'm fully in support of atheism+. My atheism isn't something I keep in a box, away from the rest of my beliefs. I like to believe that it's the result of the same skepticism and scientific worldview as the rest of my beliefs. I'm certain that my worldview isn't as cohesive and self-consistent as I would like, but I'll keep learning and growing and working on it, and I'll try to ensure consistency by not keeping each part in isolation from the others.
So where does that leave us with Roberta Williams? She was factually correct that computers and computer gaming had become more mainstream, more average, and that that meant the market for games had changed. Where she was wrong was in assuming that meant every computer owner was now average. That's the ecological fallacy. The market had become larger and more diverse. Her affluent, educated gamers were still there, still waiting for her kind of game, but there were other gamers as well with different tastes. There's room for Call of Duty, Batman, and Fallout on the shelves at the stores. There's room for heroes who are black, female, or disabled. There are people waiting to hear the stories that all of the creators have to tell. They don't all want the same stories or heroes, but that's okay. It takes all kinds.
Greta Christina's Talk at SSA
Footnotes
1 - Lucas isn't a good writer. He's not the greatest director. He is a man of enormous technical vision and a good producer. Unfortunately, he also thinks he's a writer and director. The Star Wars prequel trilogy isn't good. This is his fault.
2 - When knowledge of a creator's rampant bigotry spoils your enjoyment of earlier works where that bigotry's more subtle manifestations become more apparent. Orson Scott Card is a damn good writer. Unfortunately, he's also a devout member of the Church of Latter Day Saints (a Mormon) and is kind of a rampant bigot and climate change denialist. It makes it hard to read some of his earlier books. You read the Homecoming series and it's like "Oh. This is the book of Mormon but with a sentient computer and Russian astronauts." Or you read The Tales of Alvin Maker and you're like "Oh. This is the book of Mormon, only the guy's name is Alvin instead of John and he actually has magic powers rather than being a misogynist fraud." And his sympathetic homosexual characters become less so when you realize he honestly believes that if they just tried harder the gays could at least pretend to be straight and have families instead of living in sin and burning forever. Yay?
3 - I'm now fully on board with using they/their for the third-person singular when I wish to remain gender neutral rather than torturing my prose; turns out that's the way we originally used our language before yet another British busybody ruined it for everyone else.
4 - Studies have shown that atheists are the most despised group in the United States. Moreso even than Muslims. This surprised the authors because no atheists in living memory have murdered thousands of people in a single act of terrorism. Also unlike gays and minorities and "foreign" religions, bigotry against atheists has been resistant to change over time. How much does the US hate atheists? Half again as much as Muslims, the second most hated group. If America hates Muslims to the amount of 10, it has its atheist hate-meter set to 15.
5 - Traditionally in the atheist wheelhouse: how much god doesn't exist, how alt-medicine is stupid, the continued non-existence of god, how much religion sucks, why we wish people would doing that god thing, and how hard it is being an atheist. Not in the atheist wheelhouse: what it's like being something other than a financially secure, well educated, heterosexual white male, except insofar as being different from that may or may not make you more likely to believe in god.
6 - It didn't help when atheist celebrity Richard Dawkins threw fuel on the fire by posting as a commenter at PZ Myers's old Pharyngula blog at scienceblogs, saying that Watson shouldn't complain about the creepy guy because women have it worse elsewhere.
7 - Men's Rights Activists. They're misogynists but rather than calling you a cunt and telling you to get back in the kitchen, they come in and whine "What about teh menz?!", bitching that feminists ignore the problems men face (they don't) and that men have it worse than women (they don't). They make claims that are exaggerated at best and false at worst, rarely backing them up with links or statistics. In other words, they're like climate change denialists, only they complain about feminazis instead of treethuggers.
8X - Atheism+ isn't just about feminism, but that and gender issues are still the main focus of what I've seen on the fora. It's been branching out in its focus more in the last 10 days or so, I think. It's only about 5 weeks old.
X - Seriously? That's a lot of footnotes!
Monday, December 19, 2011
Whence Religion?
If there's no good evidence for the god hypothesis, then where did it come from? What purpose does it serve? Why do people keep believing it?
I'll answer these questions briefly and in order.
Whence religion?
I think religion is a by-product of two different drives. The first is general to all thinking creatures (ie. most animals), the second isn't specific to humans, but has definitely found, I suspect, its greatest expression in humans. The first is that we learn, the second is that we teach.
I don't know that all animals learn; sponges and other brainless animals certainly do not. At least one researcher believes the primary purpose of the brain is movement, and other purposes are all secondary. I'm not sure I agree, though he makes a compelling argument. However, one of the things our brain does is allow us, and many other species, to learn. We are pattern-seeking creatures, we seek to master our environment, we want nummy candies and to win in fights and to get laid and all the other things that will help see to it that we have grandchildren (which the first step to evolutionary success).
To that end, we can become addicted to gambling and coffee.
Actually, that's an unfortunate by-product of the learning process. If you know someone who loves his coffee in the morning, you may notice he has a certain way of doing things. It has to be a certain brand of coffee. A specific flavor, region, roast... He might grind it himself and prepare it in his own little French press. He definitely, no question, has his favorite coffee mug, and probably drinks it at a certain time of day; usually it's part of a larger set of "getting up in the morning" rituals.
One of the things caffeine does is short circuit the part of the brain that lets you know you've won. Whether it's a good grade on a test or solving a puzzle or getting a new iPhone, you know that feeling when part of you lights up and does a little happy dance. Of course, a week later that test is crumpled up on the floor of your locker, the puzzle is in the recycle bin, and your phone is no longer to be carefully placed on its own altar on your dresser, but to be thrown casually onto the bed with all the other crap in your pockets. That feeling goes away because you need to move on to the next challenge, figure out the next thing, master your environment more fully.
Caffeine cuts right to the chase and gives you that happy without having to actually solve, win, or buy anything. Your brain, trying to figure out what it's won at, just randomly attaches importance to whatever's going on when you get your buzz on. Over time, the importance accumulates on things that stay the same: the time of day, the kind of coffee, the coffee mug, the way you prepare it... All of these things become important to you not because they actually make the coffee better, but because your brain has been wired to say WRONG if any of that changes. What was a valuable learning tool has been totally screwed by chemistry.
And gambling? That learning process is meant to find patterns so that we can take advantage of them. Dice don't have patterns, so our system goes completely haywire and, again, starts attaching undeserved importance to meaningless rituals. That is to say, gamblers are superstitious because their brains are on their metaphorical knees, crying their metaphorical brain-hearts out. Okay, that's just why gamblers are superstitious. Addiction is more complex and has to do with the fact that losing feels much more bad than winning feels good. As with any other addiction, you do it not because it feels good but because it feels bad when you don't. How good does it feel? The more certain something is, the easier it is to figure out and the less incentive their is to master it. I'd venture a guess that the most popular games at casinos are very nearly 50/50 odds (played correctly, craps and blackjack are, I'd say that, in the long run, so are competitive games like poker).
Anyway, we aren't the only creatures to develop superstitions in the face of an uncontrollable and somewhat random universe. Psychologist B.F. Skinner discovered that pigeons, given food at regular intervals with no reference to the pigeons' behavior, quickly developed superstitions regarding what causes food to drop. Lest you think, "Well, pigeons, yeah, they're stupid. Terry Pratchett said so." and believe yourself immune, more or less the exact same thing has been observed in humans in Dungeons and Dragons Online. Players rapidly conceived the belief that using a certain skill absolutely improved the loot dropped from treasure chests and could not be dissuaded from that belief (note: they were wrong). When the developers made it impossible to use that skill on treasure chests, there were massive fan complaints that their skill had been rendered useless.
In the face of a large and uncaring world where small mistakes can cause massive dying, superstition was and is inevitable. We are all of us autodidacts to a degree, and we all develop these silly habits. Thus learning can make fools of us all.
What about teaching? Animals teaching their young has been observed in the wild, but nowhere to the degree that it's found in humans. Compared to pretty much any animal you care to name, we are weak, blind, and deaf. We might as well not have noses, and our teeth and claws are a joke. We are completely helpless for several years after birth, and our maturation process is an incredibly protracted part of our lives. How the hell do we manage in a dangerous world? By passing accumulated knowledge from one generation to the next. Far more than any other creature I know of, the human animal passes knowledge from one to another. Long story short, if our children didn't listen to us, credulous to a fault, it would be much, much more difficult for this to happen. And, yes, I mean that literally; children are credulous to a fault. They'll believe any damn thing you say.
What this means is that children, lacking critical thinking skills and, I believe, primed to believe everything they're told, absorb their parents superstitions as readily as their hunting skills, their knowledge of interpersonal relationships, and how not to poop in your food.
This notion has spawned the study of memetics, essentially a branch of information theory that might be considered an analog of biological evolution, where ideas and information travel through their space (inside our heads) and warp and mutate based on a much more loosely governed analog of genetic evolution. Think of it this way: a good idea, how to make a really awesome spear, say, maintains itself because deviations make the spear less effective and its demonstrable efficacy discourage deviations; a bad idea, like repeatedly stabbing yourself in the balls to control the urge to masturbate, weeds itself out because it's demonstrably not effective, and anyway masturbating's not actually a bad thing; a neutral idea, like turning around three times and spitting when you jinx something, can just hang around and mutate and warp because it doesn't have any impact one way or the other. After all, since there's no such thing as a jinx, whether you turn before or after you spit doesn't make much difference. Though the schism and five generations of bloody warfare between the preturners and the posturners were quite hard to watch, and let us not speak of the genocide of the widdershin turners by the sunwisers.
Thus it's quite easy to see religion as another superstition and the result of thousands of years of memetic evolution, an evolution that continues today as sects split and diverge and merge and mutate. Whereas most superstitions hang on just because and we don't necessarily attach much importance to them and really belong just to the individual (like the unfortunate ball-players who neither change nor wash their underpants...), religion is a collection of self-supporting memes. It piggybacks on the morality of sanctity by forbidding the questioning of ideas, on on in-group loyalty by providing visible markers of kinship. It produces an internally consistent structure with little or no external reference, nor much need for one. When it does impinge upon the outside world, it but co-opts other learning (societies that were originally pastoral show it in their myths wherein they hate farmers, see Cain and Abel. Societies in arid countries all hate pigs, which require lots of water. Populations prone to bee allergies learn to despise honey.).
In short, modern religions are crude amalgams, a cobbled together attempt to understand and explain the world consisting mostly of superstitions, the crude xenophobias of the world in which they were born, and occasionally useful rules of thumb from bronze age culture. Useful only in a bronze age culture, mind.
Okay, so much for talking briefly. That's where religion came from. Next, what's it for?
I'll answer these questions briefly and in order.
Whence religion?
I think religion is a by-product of two different drives. The first is general to all thinking creatures (ie. most animals), the second isn't specific to humans, but has definitely found, I suspect, its greatest expression in humans. The first is that we learn, the second is that we teach.
I don't know that all animals learn; sponges and other brainless animals certainly do not. At least one researcher believes the primary purpose of the brain is movement, and other purposes are all secondary. I'm not sure I agree, though he makes a compelling argument. However, one of the things our brain does is allow us, and many other species, to learn. We are pattern-seeking creatures, we seek to master our environment, we want nummy candies and to win in fights and to get laid and all the other things that will help see to it that we have grandchildren (which the first step to evolutionary success).
To that end, we can become addicted to gambling and coffee.
Actually, that's an unfortunate by-product of the learning process. If you know someone who loves his coffee in the morning, you may notice he has a certain way of doing things. It has to be a certain brand of coffee. A specific flavor, region, roast... He might grind it himself and prepare it in his own little French press. He definitely, no question, has his favorite coffee mug, and probably drinks it at a certain time of day; usually it's part of a larger set of "getting up in the morning" rituals.
One of the things caffeine does is short circuit the part of the brain that lets you know you've won. Whether it's a good grade on a test or solving a puzzle or getting a new iPhone, you know that feeling when part of you lights up and does a little happy dance. Of course, a week later that test is crumpled up on the floor of your locker, the puzzle is in the recycle bin, and your phone is no longer to be carefully placed on its own altar on your dresser, but to be thrown casually onto the bed with all the other crap in your pockets. That feeling goes away because you need to move on to the next challenge, figure out the next thing, master your environment more fully.
Caffeine cuts right to the chase and gives you that happy without having to actually solve, win, or buy anything. Your brain, trying to figure out what it's won at, just randomly attaches importance to whatever's going on when you get your buzz on. Over time, the importance accumulates on things that stay the same: the time of day, the kind of coffee, the coffee mug, the way you prepare it... All of these things become important to you not because they actually make the coffee better, but because your brain has been wired to say WRONG if any of that changes. What was a valuable learning tool has been totally screwed by chemistry.
And gambling? That learning process is meant to find patterns so that we can take advantage of them. Dice don't have patterns, so our system goes completely haywire and, again, starts attaching undeserved importance to meaningless rituals. That is to say, gamblers are superstitious because their brains are on their metaphorical knees, crying their metaphorical brain-hearts out. Okay, that's just why gamblers are superstitious. Addiction is more complex and has to do with the fact that losing feels much more bad than winning feels good. As with any other addiction, you do it not because it feels good but because it feels bad when you don't. How good does it feel? The more certain something is, the easier it is to figure out and the less incentive their is to master it. I'd venture a guess that the most popular games at casinos are very nearly 50/50 odds (played correctly, craps and blackjack are, I'd say that, in the long run, so are competitive games like poker).
Anyway, we aren't the only creatures to develop superstitions in the face of an uncontrollable and somewhat random universe. Psychologist B.F. Skinner discovered that pigeons, given food at regular intervals with no reference to the pigeons' behavior, quickly developed superstitions regarding what causes food to drop. Lest you think, "Well, pigeons, yeah, they're stupid. Terry Pratchett said so." and believe yourself immune, more or less the exact same thing has been observed in humans in Dungeons and Dragons Online. Players rapidly conceived the belief that using a certain skill absolutely improved the loot dropped from treasure chests and could not be dissuaded from that belief (note: they were wrong). When the developers made it impossible to use that skill on treasure chests, there were massive fan complaints that their skill had been rendered useless.
In the face of a large and uncaring world where small mistakes can cause massive dying, superstition was and is inevitable. We are all of us autodidacts to a degree, and we all develop these silly habits. Thus learning can make fools of us all.
What about teaching? Animals teaching their young has been observed in the wild, but nowhere to the degree that it's found in humans. Compared to pretty much any animal you care to name, we are weak, blind, and deaf. We might as well not have noses, and our teeth and claws are a joke. We are completely helpless for several years after birth, and our maturation process is an incredibly protracted part of our lives. How the hell do we manage in a dangerous world? By passing accumulated knowledge from one generation to the next. Far more than any other creature I know of, the human animal passes knowledge from one to another. Long story short, if our children didn't listen to us, credulous to a fault, it would be much, much more difficult for this to happen. And, yes, I mean that literally; children are credulous to a fault. They'll believe any damn thing you say.
What this means is that children, lacking critical thinking skills and, I believe, primed to believe everything they're told, absorb their parents superstitions as readily as their hunting skills, their knowledge of interpersonal relationships, and how not to poop in your food.
This notion has spawned the study of memetics, essentially a branch of information theory that might be considered an analog of biological evolution, where ideas and information travel through their space (inside our heads) and warp and mutate based on a much more loosely governed analog of genetic evolution. Think of it this way: a good idea, how to make a really awesome spear, say, maintains itself because deviations make the spear less effective and its demonstrable efficacy discourage deviations; a bad idea, like repeatedly stabbing yourself in the balls to control the urge to masturbate, weeds itself out because it's demonstrably not effective, and anyway masturbating's not actually a bad thing; a neutral idea, like turning around three times and spitting when you jinx something, can just hang around and mutate and warp because it doesn't have any impact one way or the other. After all, since there's no such thing as a jinx, whether you turn before or after you spit doesn't make much difference. Though the schism and five generations of bloody warfare between the preturners and the posturners were quite hard to watch, and let us not speak of the genocide of the widdershin turners by the sunwisers.
Thus it's quite easy to see religion as another superstition and the result of thousands of years of memetic evolution, an evolution that continues today as sects split and diverge and merge and mutate. Whereas most superstitions hang on just because and we don't necessarily attach much importance to them and really belong just to the individual (like the unfortunate ball-players who neither change nor wash their underpants...), religion is a collection of self-supporting memes. It piggybacks on the morality of sanctity by forbidding the questioning of ideas, on on in-group loyalty by providing visible markers of kinship. It produces an internally consistent structure with little or no external reference, nor much need for one. When it does impinge upon the outside world, it but co-opts other learning (societies that were originally pastoral show it in their myths wherein they hate farmers, see Cain and Abel. Societies in arid countries all hate pigs, which require lots of water. Populations prone to bee allergies learn to despise honey.).
In short, modern religions are crude amalgams, a cobbled together attempt to understand and explain the world consisting mostly of superstitions, the crude xenophobias of the world in which they were born, and occasionally useful rules of thumb from bronze age culture. Useful only in a bronze age culture, mind.
Okay, so much for talking briefly. That's where religion came from. Next, what's it for?
What Does It Take? (God Proof III)
What would it take to get me to accept the god hypothesis? Theists often accuse atheists of being as dogmatic as they are for rejecting all of their purported evidence, for being bound to refuse to believe, for being religiously faithful to our unbelief. So what evidence would convince me? Allow me to reason by analogy. What would it take to disprove evolution? What would it take to get me to stop believing in that scientific theory? Popular mythology has it that JBS Haldane once growled "rabbits in the Precambrian". That is, if fossil rabbits were found in Precambrian strata, that would disprove evolution, because a derived form cannot precede that from which it is derived. More complex forms do not precede less complex forms. Such a counterintuitive datum would require extraordinary explanation.
This is precisely why tetrannuative* fundamentalists have desperately sought things like that, have desperately sought little niggling things that would prove a chunk of the theory false. If something like the crocoduck were to show up, it wouldn't be proof of evolution, as the farcical Kirk Cameron claims, but rather proof of creation. Such a hippogriff or chimera would completely explode evolution.
Is that what it would take? No. I declare myself totally intransigent. I won't stop believing in evolution, because a century and a half of being pounded against the anvil of disbelief has not caused evolution to birth such a chimera. Mermaids and hippogriffs and all the rest have been frauds, some more creative than others. At this point, evolution is a theory so firmly grounded that to concede something might overturn it is as idiotic as conceding something might overturn gravity or physics.
Again, someone who hasn't read Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong" might be tempted to claim that physics was overturned. No it wasn't. Physics was supplemented. Updated. Improved. Aristotle's intuitive and non-scientific mechanics were indeed overturned by Newton's scientific and calculus-based mechanics, but Einstein supplemented Newton, he did not supplant. Newton's mechanics were not incorrect, they were incomplete. If something appears which challenges the current evolutionary model, it will not prove it wrong, but incomplete. It will supplement rather than supplant. Darwin's theory, crude and incomplete as it was, has not been overturned in more than 150 years despite rigorous scientific testing because, to the limits of that testing, it is entirely correct.
So what will it take to get me to accept the god hypothesis? Nothing I can imagine will convince me to do so. Alternative explanations will always be better because they always have been better, not least because the god hypothesis isn't even an explanation. In the infamous words of Pauli** "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!". "Not only is it not right, it is not even wrong!" The god hypothesis in most of its forms is wildly unscientific and flies in the face of all evidence. The most reduced forms are scientific (though very unsatisfying to believers. Seriously, who wants to be a deist?) but still wholly lacking in evidence and still face challenges from better supported hypotheses.
Perhaps a theist will surprise me and come up with a new argument, some new kind of apparent evidence. This would be a surprise because it's typically not a creative endeavor, relying instead on retreads from centuries in the past. However, new evidence always has to be considered and I always will. However, the evidence so far suggests that any new evidence will fall in one of the previous categories and will be at best evidence of nothing, or at worst more evidence for a stochastic universe with no god at all. The god hypothesis has always been an answer in search of a question, and science has been the rather kid coming in and saying, "Nope. That question's mine, too."
Does this make me different from a dogmatic theist? Absolutely. The theist refuses to look at evidence, claims it's a lie made by the devil to trick you (sometimes it's a test by god). I look at the evidence and realize it's irrelevant, fraudulent, or simply not even evidence of anything at all. I will always look at new evidence with as much open-mindedness as I can muster. I hope, however, you can forgive me for being a bit cynical. After all, how much open-mindedness could you bring to bear for a flying carpet, a magic crystal, or a fully functional Ouija board?
* Four years old. As in they close their eyes and plug their ears and scream until the thing they don't like goes away.
** I'm not claiming Pauli was an atheist, but he did leave the church in 1929.
This is precisely why tetrannuative* fundamentalists have desperately sought things like that, have desperately sought little niggling things that would prove a chunk of the theory false. If something like the crocoduck were to show up, it wouldn't be proof of evolution, as the farcical Kirk Cameron claims, but rather proof of creation. Such a hippogriff or chimera would completely explode evolution.
Is that what it would take? No. I declare myself totally intransigent. I won't stop believing in evolution, because a century and a half of being pounded against the anvil of disbelief has not caused evolution to birth such a chimera. Mermaids and hippogriffs and all the rest have been frauds, some more creative than others. At this point, evolution is a theory so firmly grounded that to concede something might overturn it is as idiotic as conceding something might overturn gravity or physics.
Again, someone who hasn't read Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong" might be tempted to claim that physics was overturned. No it wasn't. Physics was supplemented. Updated. Improved. Aristotle's intuitive and non-scientific mechanics were indeed overturned by Newton's scientific and calculus-based mechanics, but Einstein supplemented Newton, he did not supplant. Newton's mechanics were not incorrect, they were incomplete. If something appears which challenges the current evolutionary model, it will not prove it wrong, but incomplete. It will supplement rather than supplant. Darwin's theory, crude and incomplete as it was, has not been overturned in more than 150 years despite rigorous scientific testing because, to the limits of that testing, it is entirely correct.
So what will it take to get me to accept the god hypothesis? Nothing I can imagine will convince me to do so. Alternative explanations will always be better because they always have been better, not least because the god hypothesis isn't even an explanation. In the infamous words of Pauli** "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!". "Not only is it not right, it is not even wrong!" The god hypothesis in most of its forms is wildly unscientific and flies in the face of all evidence. The most reduced forms are scientific (though very unsatisfying to believers. Seriously, who wants to be a deist?) but still wholly lacking in evidence and still face challenges from better supported hypotheses.
Perhaps a theist will surprise me and come up with a new argument, some new kind of apparent evidence. This would be a surprise because it's typically not a creative endeavor, relying instead on retreads from centuries in the past. However, new evidence always has to be considered and I always will. However, the evidence so far suggests that any new evidence will fall in one of the previous categories and will be at best evidence of nothing, or at worst more evidence for a stochastic universe with no god at all. The god hypothesis has always been an answer in search of a question, and science has been the rather kid coming in and saying, "Nope. That question's mine, too."
Does this make me different from a dogmatic theist? Absolutely. The theist refuses to look at evidence, claims it's a lie made by the devil to trick you (sometimes it's a test by god). I look at the evidence and realize it's irrelevant, fraudulent, or simply not even evidence of anything at all. I will always look at new evidence with as much open-mindedness as I can muster. I hope, however, you can forgive me for being a bit cynical. After all, how much open-mindedness could you bring to bear for a flying carpet, a magic crystal, or a fully functional Ouija board?
* Four years old. As in they close their eyes and plug their ears and scream until the thing they don't like goes away.
** I'm not claiming Pauli was an atheist, but he did leave the church in 1929.
Absence is Absence (God Proof Part II)
Read part one, here.
I've said before that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but I want to expand on that a bit.
Once I decided to make a sandwich. As is my wont, I mused quietly to myself whilst I pulled items off of shelves and out of the fridge. I grabbed my bread, my turkey, my cheese, my mustard, and where the fuck is my mayonnaise? My mayo's gone! I just bought some at the grocery store yesterday! I checked the fridge again. No mayo. I checked a third time, carefully perusing the mostly empty shelves. No mayo. For about five seconds, I briefly considered the possibility that someone had broken into my apartment for the sole purpose of stealing my mayonnaise; a brief checked showed me that, yes, my TV and video games and whatnot were still there so that notion was beyond absurd. I turned and looked again and, it's a miracle! My mayo was sitting on the counter next to the mustard. I'd already gotten it out of the fridge and hadn't really noticed because when I talk to myself I tend to not pay attention to what I'm doing. This is how I've occasionally gotten lost on the way to the bathroom or driven to the wrong campus on my way to work.
No one, on hearing that story, would find it reasonable to ask, "But how did you know the mayonnaise wasn't in the refrigerator? Just because light failed to reflect off of a jar of mayonnaise and impinge on the cones and rods on the back of your eye doesn't mean that there wasn't any mayo in the fridge! Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, after all!" Unless, of course, they were philosophy majors. Twenty-year-old jackasses love to say things like that, mostly because they don't know how ignorant they are.
But the absence of evidence for something can be evidence against it. When you're talking about the abstruse realm of particle physics, in which you have to accelerate things nearly to the speed of light and smash them against each other and pick up the pieces (a method unfairly compared to hitting a watch with a hammer to learn how it's put together), not finding a particle doesn't mean it doesn't exist; unless you designed your experiment such that it would be unreasonable for it not to show up. When you're talking about a jar of mayo, arguing that just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there is just fatuous. I didn't see it in the fridge because it was on the counter.
So, what about god? I've already discussed why I dismiss the purported evidence (miracles, scripture, revelation) in favor of the god hypothesis. Most everyone who says they don't believe in god state that they lack belief because they haven't seen any evidence. It bothers me that they then go on to refuse to say the believe there is no god (the two aren't equivalent positions) because they claim science can't talk about god. Then why the hell don't you believe? Agnosticism because of a lack of evidence is a scientific position; it's the default scientific position. Why, then, do I go on from there to say that I believe there is no god? What is my evidence in the other direction? I feel that the god hypothesis, if true, would have a measurable impact on observable reality and the lack of that evidence is a compelling argument against the hypothesis.
For example, scripture. I've already stated that if there were a deity, there wouldn't be many mutually exclusive scriptures. There would be one, it would be definitely accurate and demonstrable true. It wouldn't contradict itself and there would be no pretenders purporting to give an alternative truth. A deity so moved as to provide a scripture would also be able to censor false competitors. The celestial dictatorship would have no trouble silencing opposition or critics.
Revelation, miracles, and scriptures, in the face of a true god hypothesis, would be so evidently and clearly true that there wouldn't be the need for the fatuous notion of faith. It wouldn't be received truth but perceived truth. I reject the god hypothesis as firmly as I reject the invisible jar of mayonnaise and as I immediately rejected the notion that someone had broken in and stolen my mayonnaise; the lack of evidence was obviously evidence against the hypothesis. I don't believe, at all, because when the universe is presented with the question, "Is there a god?" the response is a deafening silence.
Next: What would it take for me to believe?
I've said before that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but I want to expand on that a bit.
Once I decided to make a sandwich. As is my wont, I mused quietly to myself whilst I pulled items off of shelves and out of the fridge. I grabbed my bread, my turkey, my cheese, my mustard, and where the fuck is my mayonnaise? My mayo's gone! I just bought some at the grocery store yesterday! I checked the fridge again. No mayo. I checked a third time, carefully perusing the mostly empty shelves. No mayo. For about five seconds, I briefly considered the possibility that someone had broken into my apartment for the sole purpose of stealing my mayonnaise; a brief checked showed me that, yes, my TV and video games and whatnot were still there so that notion was beyond absurd. I turned and looked again and, it's a miracle! My mayo was sitting on the counter next to the mustard. I'd already gotten it out of the fridge and hadn't really noticed because when I talk to myself I tend to not pay attention to what I'm doing. This is how I've occasionally gotten lost on the way to the bathroom or driven to the wrong campus on my way to work.
No one, on hearing that story, would find it reasonable to ask, "But how did you know the mayonnaise wasn't in the refrigerator? Just because light failed to reflect off of a jar of mayonnaise and impinge on the cones and rods on the back of your eye doesn't mean that there wasn't any mayo in the fridge! Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, after all!" Unless, of course, they were philosophy majors. Twenty-year-old jackasses love to say things like that, mostly because they don't know how ignorant they are.
But the absence of evidence for something can be evidence against it. When you're talking about the abstruse realm of particle physics, in which you have to accelerate things nearly to the speed of light and smash them against each other and pick up the pieces (a method unfairly compared to hitting a watch with a hammer to learn how it's put together), not finding a particle doesn't mean it doesn't exist; unless you designed your experiment such that it would be unreasonable for it not to show up. When you're talking about a jar of mayo, arguing that just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there is just fatuous. I didn't see it in the fridge because it was on the counter.
So, what about god? I've already discussed why I dismiss the purported evidence (miracles, scripture, revelation) in favor of the god hypothesis. Most everyone who says they don't believe in god state that they lack belief because they haven't seen any evidence. It bothers me that they then go on to refuse to say the believe there is no god (the two aren't equivalent positions) because they claim science can't talk about god. Then why the hell don't you believe? Agnosticism because of a lack of evidence is a scientific position; it's the default scientific position. Why, then, do I go on from there to say that I believe there is no god? What is my evidence in the other direction? I feel that the god hypothesis, if true, would have a measurable impact on observable reality and the lack of that evidence is a compelling argument against the hypothesis.
For example, scripture. I've already stated that if there were a deity, there wouldn't be many mutually exclusive scriptures. There would be one, it would be definitely accurate and demonstrable true. It wouldn't contradict itself and there would be no pretenders purporting to give an alternative truth. A deity so moved as to provide a scripture would also be able to censor false competitors. The celestial dictatorship would have no trouble silencing opposition or critics.
Revelation, miracles, and scriptures, in the face of a true god hypothesis, would be so evidently and clearly true that there wouldn't be the need for the fatuous notion of faith. It wouldn't be received truth but perceived truth. I reject the god hypothesis as firmly as I reject the invisible jar of mayonnaise and as I immediately rejected the notion that someone had broken in and stolen my mayonnaise; the lack of evidence was obviously evidence against the hypothesis. I don't believe, at all, because when the universe is presented with the question, "Is there a god?" the response is a deafening silence.
Next: What would it take for me to believe?
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Is There Proof for God?
A friend asked me what I would view as evidence for God and it's a question I have to take seriously. I view the God hypothesis as falling within the realm of science. I don't view much of anything as falling outside the realm of science; she brought up the example of love as an unprovable, which I contend it isn't. Just because something cannot be perceived directly doesn't mean it doesn't leave evidence behind. I can't see UV light, but I can still get a sunburn. I can't see my friend's love, but I can see him doing lots of really stupid things and generally acting like a soppy asshole saying things like, "Don't you just love love, man?"
So, what would I view as evidence for the existence of a deity or other supernatural element? At this point: Nothing. There is no evidence for anything supernatural, that hypothesis has been rigorously tested for the last 200 thousand years by every human agent produced on this planet and the result has always been an astounding null. Every single supposedly supernatural phenomenon has been proven to have a natural causative agent, to in fact not have occurred, or to be a fraud practiced upon a credulous public.
First, why do I dismiss all the supposed evidence? As I understand, most supernatural claims come in three forms: anecdotes and miracles, revelation, and scripture.
I separate out anecdotes because I'm referring to things akin to cryptozoology. That is to say, big foot and the creature of Loch Ness. I lump these in with the supernatural because they have all the same foundations in personal experience and credulity and because skepticism deals with them in the same way. Amazing creatures still wait to be found and studied; living fossils are encountered all the time and extreme and distant environments are full of wonderful and surprising things that we don't know about because they're really damn hard to get to. Loch Ness and the mountains of the Pacific Northwest are neither distant nor extreme. To give one example: the Loch Ness monster and similar aquatic sightings is best attributed not to an illusive large animal, but to common smaller animals. Otters and other aquatic mammals behave in fashions that cause an optical illusion of a single large creature. The effect is said to be arresting and almost impossible to dismiss from a distance (basically, they like to play follow the leader). These and other types of things (when not fraudulent) are best ascribed to honest but mistaken reports of less fantastical phenomena. In other words, there is no yeti, no alien abductions, and no Nessie.
Miracles are of a category with the anecdotes of cryptozoology. When they're not outright frauds for deliberate profit, or a portion of the brain going hyperactive and seeing things that aren't there, like the face on Mars, they're either easily proven to be accidents and natural phenomena or completely impossible to track down. For example, the healing power of Lourdes is 67 (according to the Catholic Church) out of more than 200 million, and none of those are self-evidently miraculous, like the regrowth of a severed limb. As with most miracles, it's always in the realm of the nebulous, the distant, and the (at best) unimpeachable. In the face of better explanations (many diseases go into remission), frauds, and simple absence, why believe any miracle has occurred?
Perhaps you feel yourself to have been witness to or beneficiary of a miracle. Perhaps something astonishingly unlikely happened that you witnessed. This is not a miracle. Everything is coincidental. Any two things that happen at the same time, any two incidents, are co-incident. Some may appear to have connection, as when you are thinking of your grandmother as she calls; but you forget the thousands of people you think of who don't call. Everything is unlikely. A pin falling on any particular spot in a square meter of space is unlikely, it is one in five hundred thousand. And yet, it will land somewhere. No matter how unlikely, unlikely things happen. They are not miracles. Only if something is genuinely impossible could you call it miraculous. Even then... it probably isn't. What is not yet explained need not be called inexplicable. Not yet having an explanation doesn't mean it won't be explained in the future.
As an aside, part of what spurred this is a rash of other blogs considering this question. What it boils down to is this: if you witnessed a miracle, who's to say it's your god doing it? Even if A two hundred foot tall statue of Yeshua Bin Yusef appeared, floating two feet off the ground, what makes you think it's Yahweh rather than space aliens? Or Loki tricking everyone because that's what he does? Or Coyote just having fun with the pale-faced devils? In other words, it's bad enough that miracles either simply can't be tracked down or have better explanations such as fraud, but they aren't even proof of anything. A miracle doesn't explain anything. "Miracle" is as much a non-explanation as the god hypothesis. It enshrines ignorance in protective "DO NOT TOUCH" bubble. An explanation fits all the available data and makes predictions for the future. Miracle just says "Something happened and I don't know why." So does the god hypothesis. And what predictions can these non-explanations make? That tomorrow something else might happen that you will also fail to understand? That may be true, but it certainly doesn't enlighten.
Revelation might appear to be harder to dismiss. After all, can one prove that a supernatural entity didn't put voices in someone's head (a non-psychotic someone)? I think the argument can be made. Pop someone in a machine and scan his brain while asking him about morality. Ask him about the morality of others and a part of his brain lights up. Ask him about his own morality and a different part of his brain lights up. Ask him about the morality of his god and the same part of his brain lights up. A cynic is unsurprised to learn that a person claims his god's morality matches his own. The cynic is less surprised to learn that it's neurological in nature. It's not just god's morality, either, everything about god may be egocentric. And it's not just the penitent's relationship with his deity, but the very basis for believing an experience is numinous, since science has identified "the god spot", AKA the part of the brain that lights up during revelation. It's located in the temporal lobe, which is responsible for, among other things, processing speech and vision. In other words, you think you're hearing and seeing things that aren't there. Why ascribe this to a deity who happens to match your own opinions point for point when you can instead ascribe it to a misfiring of a portion of your brain and then an attribution of your own feelings to a wholly internal experience?
Scripture is perhaps the most pathetic of all possible evidence because it's the only so-called evidence that's actually evident. They contain factual errors and contradictions and the most horrific barbarity. If they were actually inspired by something more than human, you wouldn't expect errors or contradictions. If they were actually morally superior, you wouldn't expect barbarity. You would expect a morally superior being to say that rape is bad. The Christian bible, for example, never condemns rape. It condemns vandalism in the form of sex with someone else's property (daughter, wife), but not rape, because the Chrsitian bible never considers her consent an issue. After all, property can't consent, nor can it withhold consent; consent belongs to her owner, whether that be father or husband or eldest living male relative. That's why spousal rape wasn't legally a thing until the last decade or so. Now it is, because we're morally superior to the Christian bible. Rape, slavery, genocide, these are all things not merely condoned by the Christian bible, but all three were encouraged by the Christian bible against conquered peoples. Well, not "people". As far as the Christian bible and other holy texts are concerned, foreigners, heathens, and apostates are like women: not human, but property (at best) or dead (at worst).
The argument that a supposed miracle could be, rather than a sign from your deity, a trick from someone else could equally apply to these texts. While this diminishes some of the strength of the argument that the texts are wholly human creations, it also weakens the argument that any is divinely inspired or created. However, if you're arguing not for generic multiple supernatural entities with superior knowledge (from which true morality rises) but rather for a single entity, the multiplicity of holy texts is particularly damning. If there were one entity capable of inspiring a holy document, there would be only one document. When it comes to a cosmic dictatorship, there can be no more effective censor. One god, one book. No god, many books.
In the end, the holy texts are at best not evidence at all or evidence of maltheism (being the work of a trickster). Miracles are either nothing at all (being the unfortunate result of human predilection for seeing patterns), another bit of maltheism, or evidence of nothing in particular because, being a non-explanation, it cannot be connected to anything in particular. And again revelation is again no evidence at all or et cetera.
So there is at best absolutely no evidence for the god hypothesis. Next up, Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence.
So, what would I view as evidence for the existence of a deity or other supernatural element? At this point: Nothing. There is no evidence for anything supernatural, that hypothesis has been rigorously tested for the last 200 thousand years by every human agent produced on this planet and the result has always been an astounding null. Every single supposedly supernatural phenomenon has been proven to have a natural causative agent, to in fact not have occurred, or to be a fraud practiced upon a credulous public.
First, why do I dismiss all the supposed evidence? As I understand, most supernatural claims come in three forms: anecdotes and miracles, revelation, and scripture.
I separate out anecdotes because I'm referring to things akin to cryptozoology. That is to say, big foot and the creature of Loch Ness. I lump these in with the supernatural because they have all the same foundations in personal experience and credulity and because skepticism deals with them in the same way. Amazing creatures still wait to be found and studied; living fossils are encountered all the time and extreme and distant environments are full of wonderful and surprising things that we don't know about because they're really damn hard to get to. Loch Ness and the mountains of the Pacific Northwest are neither distant nor extreme. To give one example: the Loch Ness monster and similar aquatic sightings is best attributed not to an illusive large animal, but to common smaller animals. Otters and other aquatic mammals behave in fashions that cause an optical illusion of a single large creature. The effect is said to be arresting and almost impossible to dismiss from a distance (basically, they like to play follow the leader). These and other types of things (when not fraudulent) are best ascribed to honest but mistaken reports of less fantastical phenomena. In other words, there is no yeti, no alien abductions, and no Nessie.
Miracles are of a category with the anecdotes of cryptozoology. When they're not outright frauds for deliberate profit, or a portion of the brain going hyperactive and seeing things that aren't there, like the face on Mars, they're either easily proven to be accidents and natural phenomena or completely impossible to track down. For example, the healing power of Lourdes is 67 (according to the Catholic Church) out of more than 200 million, and none of those are self-evidently miraculous, like the regrowth of a severed limb. As with most miracles, it's always in the realm of the nebulous, the distant, and the (at best) unimpeachable. In the face of better explanations (many diseases go into remission), frauds, and simple absence, why believe any miracle has occurred?
Perhaps you feel yourself to have been witness to or beneficiary of a miracle. Perhaps something astonishingly unlikely happened that you witnessed. This is not a miracle. Everything is coincidental. Any two things that happen at the same time, any two incidents, are co-incident. Some may appear to have connection, as when you are thinking of your grandmother as she calls; but you forget the thousands of people you think of who don't call. Everything is unlikely. A pin falling on any particular spot in a square meter of space is unlikely, it is one in five hundred thousand. And yet, it will land somewhere. No matter how unlikely, unlikely things happen. They are not miracles. Only if something is genuinely impossible could you call it miraculous. Even then... it probably isn't. What is not yet explained need not be called inexplicable. Not yet having an explanation doesn't mean it won't be explained in the future.
As an aside, part of what spurred this is a rash of other blogs considering this question. What it boils down to is this: if you witnessed a miracle, who's to say it's your god doing it? Even if A two hundred foot tall statue of Yeshua Bin Yusef appeared, floating two feet off the ground, what makes you think it's Yahweh rather than space aliens? Or Loki tricking everyone because that's what he does? Or Coyote just having fun with the pale-faced devils? In other words, it's bad enough that miracles either simply can't be tracked down or have better explanations such as fraud, but they aren't even proof of anything. A miracle doesn't explain anything. "Miracle" is as much a non-explanation as the god hypothesis. It enshrines ignorance in protective "DO NOT TOUCH" bubble. An explanation fits all the available data and makes predictions for the future. Miracle just says "Something happened and I don't know why." So does the god hypothesis. And what predictions can these non-explanations make? That tomorrow something else might happen that you will also fail to understand? That may be true, but it certainly doesn't enlighten.
Revelation might appear to be harder to dismiss. After all, can one prove that a supernatural entity didn't put voices in someone's head (a non-psychotic someone)? I think the argument can be made. Pop someone in a machine and scan his brain while asking him about morality. Ask him about the morality of others and a part of his brain lights up. Ask him about his own morality and a different part of his brain lights up. Ask him about the morality of his god and the same part of his brain lights up. A cynic is unsurprised to learn that a person claims his god's morality matches his own. The cynic is less surprised to learn that it's neurological in nature. It's not just god's morality, either, everything about god may be egocentric. And it's not just the penitent's relationship with his deity, but the very basis for believing an experience is numinous, since science has identified "the god spot", AKA the part of the brain that lights up during revelation. It's located in the temporal lobe, which is responsible for, among other things, processing speech and vision. In other words, you think you're hearing and seeing things that aren't there. Why ascribe this to a deity who happens to match your own opinions point for point when you can instead ascribe it to a misfiring of a portion of your brain and then an attribution of your own feelings to a wholly internal experience?
Scripture is perhaps the most pathetic of all possible evidence because it's the only so-called evidence that's actually evident. They contain factual errors and contradictions and the most horrific barbarity. If they were actually inspired by something more than human, you wouldn't expect errors or contradictions. If they were actually morally superior, you wouldn't expect barbarity. You would expect a morally superior being to say that rape is bad. The Christian bible, for example, never condemns rape. It condemns vandalism in the form of sex with someone else's property (daughter, wife), but not rape, because the Chrsitian bible never considers her consent an issue. After all, property can't consent, nor can it withhold consent; consent belongs to her owner, whether that be father or husband or eldest living male relative. That's why spousal rape wasn't legally a thing until the last decade or so. Now it is, because we're morally superior to the Christian bible. Rape, slavery, genocide, these are all things not merely condoned by the Christian bible, but all three were encouraged by the Christian bible against conquered peoples. Well, not "people". As far as the Christian bible and other holy texts are concerned, foreigners, heathens, and apostates are like women: not human, but property (at best) or dead (at worst).
The argument that a supposed miracle could be, rather than a sign from your deity, a trick from someone else could equally apply to these texts. While this diminishes some of the strength of the argument that the texts are wholly human creations, it also weakens the argument that any is divinely inspired or created. However, if you're arguing not for generic multiple supernatural entities with superior knowledge (from which true morality rises) but rather for a single entity, the multiplicity of holy texts is particularly damning. If there were one entity capable of inspiring a holy document, there would be only one document. When it comes to a cosmic dictatorship, there can be no more effective censor. One god, one book. No god, many books.
In the end, the holy texts are at best not evidence at all or evidence of maltheism (being the work of a trickster). Miracles are either nothing at all (being the unfortunate result of human predilection for seeing patterns), another bit of maltheism, or evidence of nothing in particular because, being a non-explanation, it cannot be connected to anything in particular. And again revelation is again no evidence at all or et cetera.
So there is at best absolutely no evidence for the god hypothesis. Next up, Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence.
Monday, November 07, 2011
Knowledge vs Knowledge
A few comments in reply to my thesis on whether or not we can know that god exists were of the form, "You admitted at the start that you can't know god exists, but then you argue that you can. WTF?"
I should have made this distinction more clear then; I was speaking initially of mathematical certainty and arguing at the end for scientific knowledge.
Some things can be absolutely known within a mathematical framework. "If (if A then B) then (if not B then not A)" is a tautological truth within the framework of mathematical logic. On a different note, beginning with the assumption of "B" then it's trivially simple to prove "If A then B". Within mathematics, some things can be proven with absolute certainty. In that sense, we cannot be absolutely certain on the existence of god because it's not a mathematical question.
Scientific knowledge is a different matter. We begin with facts, build from there to laws, and thence to theories. At any time, a contradictory fact could bring the edifice crashing down. Biologist J.B.S. Haldane said, according to popular myth, that rabbits in the Precambrian would explode the theory of evolution. In a sense, scientific knowledge is a mass of supposition resting precariously on the admission that it hasn't been proven false yet. However, the longer a scientific theory lasts without being proven false, the more certain we can be that it is true.
At this point an English major might be tempted to butt in with, "But everything ends up getting proven false! We used to think the Earth was flat! Einstein proved Newton wrong! Neener neener!" At this point I gleefully crib from a delightful essay by Isaac Asimov. Yes, older models have been proven incorrect, but they weren't entirely incorrect and they weren't equally incorrect. The Flat Earth model breaks down after just a few miles when you disappear under a horizon it simply cannot predict. Nevertheless, I've taken advantage of the Flat Earth model on each of my dozen or so cross-country drives by referring to a book of maps, all of them printed on flat paper without losing my way (at least not because of the maps). It's wrong, yes, but it's not entirely wrong. And the spherical model that replaced the flat model is also wrong! The Earth is an oblate spheroid (flattened at the poles) thanks to Newtonian physics, a fact ably demonstrated by the much more oblate Jupiter. And yet the oblate model is incorrect as well because, thanks to odd internal geography, our planet is slightly larger on the southern hemisphere. However, to say that the oblate spheroid model is as incorrect as the spherical model and as incorrect as the flat model is just wrong. One model is more wrong, and none of them are entirely wrong.
Each model accounts for certain observed facts (the earth is apparently flat) and is replaced by a better model that accounts for those and for others (the shadow on the moon is round and we disappear over the horizon), which is replaced in turn by another that takes further facts into account (the laws of motion). In each case, our knowledge is never scrapped or replaced entire, but upgraded and patched. Einstein didn't replace Newton, for Newton's observations and mechanics are nearly perfect for the observations he was capable of making; rather, Einstein expanded upon Newton by developing a mechanic for observations made in the centuries that followed, and Quantum Mechanics did the same a few decades later in the other direction. In other words, scientific knowledge has never truly been one of scrapping a false system for a true system, but of replacing a system with a more accurate one. Lose the burlap sack and put on a prom dress, lose the prom dress and put on a tailored suit.
So why do I believe there is no god on the basis of scientific evidence? Because, after thousands of years of observation, there is no evidence. The old canard "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" can be discarded because absence of evidence, when one would reasonably expect to find evidence is evidence of absence. The longer we go with nothing more than feelings and hopes to confirm the alleged existence of a deity, the more firmly we can say, "Sorry, you've not only failed to convince me you're right, you've convinced me you're wrong." Yes, evolution could be toppled by a Precambrian bunny, but a century and a half of repeated attacks have failed to disprove it; we can say we know evolution is true, in spite of its precarious "not false yet" scientific status. After millenia of abject failure to provide proof or evidence for the existence of a god, or any supernatural phenomenon, why does religion still get a free pass in the opposite direction?
The alleged deity is such a large phenomenon that I feel safe saying I know there is no god because the evidence of such an overwhelming entity should be equally overwhelming. A natural high underwhelms those who don't experience it.
I should have made this distinction more clear then; I was speaking initially of mathematical certainty and arguing at the end for scientific knowledge.
Some things can be absolutely known within a mathematical framework. "If (if A then B) then (if not B then not A)" is a tautological truth within the framework of mathematical logic. On a different note, beginning with the assumption of "B" then it's trivially simple to prove "If A then B". Within mathematics, some things can be proven with absolute certainty. In that sense, we cannot be absolutely certain on the existence of god because it's not a mathematical question.
Scientific knowledge is a different matter. We begin with facts, build from there to laws, and thence to theories. At any time, a contradictory fact could bring the edifice crashing down. Biologist J.B.S. Haldane said, according to popular myth, that rabbits in the Precambrian would explode the theory of evolution. In a sense, scientific knowledge is a mass of supposition resting precariously on the admission that it hasn't been proven false yet. However, the longer a scientific theory lasts without being proven false, the more certain we can be that it is true.
At this point an English major might be tempted to butt in with, "But everything ends up getting proven false! We used to think the Earth was flat! Einstein proved Newton wrong! Neener neener!" At this point I gleefully crib from a delightful essay by Isaac Asimov. Yes, older models have been proven incorrect, but they weren't entirely incorrect and they weren't equally incorrect. The Flat Earth model breaks down after just a few miles when you disappear under a horizon it simply cannot predict. Nevertheless, I've taken advantage of the Flat Earth model on each of my dozen or so cross-country drives by referring to a book of maps, all of them printed on flat paper without losing my way (at least not because of the maps). It's wrong, yes, but it's not entirely wrong. And the spherical model that replaced the flat model is also wrong! The Earth is an oblate spheroid (flattened at the poles) thanks to Newtonian physics, a fact ably demonstrated by the much more oblate Jupiter. And yet the oblate model is incorrect as well because, thanks to odd internal geography, our planet is slightly larger on the southern hemisphere. However, to say that the oblate spheroid model is as incorrect as the spherical model and as incorrect as the flat model is just wrong. One model is more wrong, and none of them are entirely wrong.
Each model accounts for certain observed facts (the earth is apparently flat) and is replaced by a better model that accounts for those and for others (the shadow on the moon is round and we disappear over the horizon), which is replaced in turn by another that takes further facts into account (the laws of motion). In each case, our knowledge is never scrapped or replaced entire, but upgraded and patched. Einstein didn't replace Newton, for Newton's observations and mechanics are nearly perfect for the observations he was capable of making; rather, Einstein expanded upon Newton by developing a mechanic for observations made in the centuries that followed, and Quantum Mechanics did the same a few decades later in the other direction. In other words, scientific knowledge has never truly been one of scrapping a false system for a true system, but of replacing a system with a more accurate one. Lose the burlap sack and put on a prom dress, lose the prom dress and put on a tailored suit.
So why do I believe there is no god on the basis of scientific evidence? Because, after thousands of years of observation, there is no evidence. The old canard "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" can be discarded because absence of evidence, when one would reasonably expect to find evidence is evidence of absence. The longer we go with nothing more than feelings and hopes to confirm the alleged existence of a deity, the more firmly we can say, "Sorry, you've not only failed to convince me you're right, you've convinced me you're wrong." Yes, evolution could be toppled by a Precambrian bunny, but a century and a half of repeated attacks have failed to disprove it; we can say we know evolution is true, in spite of its precarious "not false yet" scientific status. After millenia of abject failure to provide proof or evidence for the existence of a god, or any supernatural phenomenon, why does religion still get a free pass in the opposite direction?
The alleged deity is such a large phenomenon that I feel safe saying I know there is no god because the evidence of such an overwhelming entity should be equally overwhelming. A natural high underwhelms those who don't experience it.
Tuesday, October 04, 2011
Evolution on Good and Evil
I've stated previously that I'm a moral relativist, a nihilist, et cetera. I believe that human morality stems not from some absolute command nor from god but from our biology.
Recall the Prisoner's Dilemma. At first glance it appears that there's no reason for the prisoner's not to inform on one another until you add the notion of history, memory. Once reputation appears as a reason not to squeal, the dilemma disappears and human behavior goes from inexplicably illogical to mathematically sound. This suggests that natural selection is a mathematician into game theory.
There have been competitions by computer programs playing the Prisoner's Dilemma over and over. Multiple times against each of multiple opponents. The winners have always been nice (don't start with betrayal), retaliatory (willing to pay evil unto evil), forgiving, and not envious (not trying to outscore the opponent). In other words, a moral being.
But then something else happened. People were allowed to enter multiple programs. They did so with multiple programs designed to take a dive and a designated winner; they recognized one another with a complex handshake. The result? The designated winner won. Not only is cooperation favored by game theory for one on one interactions, so are complex cartels. This result shouldn't be surprising, each and every human being is not merely an agent, but a complex cartel. We are each of us the result of billions of living individuals cooperating for mutual benefit. Each of us is, quite literally, a corporation*.
It's not just humans and other animals that cooperate. Even single-celled organisms cooperate. At least one species of unicellular heterotrophs come together in cooperation (using the same gene that allows the cells of multicellular organisms to recognize one another and cooperate) in a fashion that makes eating and locomotion easier.
Morality isn't just cooperation though, is it? It's about not killing people or robbery or rape, et cetera. The work of Dr. Jonathan Haidt has elucidated certain universal moral truths that all humans hold in common.
1. Fairness/Equity
2. Injury/Harm
3. In-Group Loyalty
4. Respect for Authority/Respect for Elders
5. Sanctity/Purity
The first two obviously function as aids to cooperation. Interpersonal interactions mediated by these two moral rules foster cooperation by requiring first that each partner receive, not equal, but commensurate gains from cooperation. Further, a prohibition against injury that prevents simple physical betrayal. Individuals living together will come into conflict and that prohibition means that, even when things go bad, they can continue to function as a group. In fact, the first two, with the addition of the third, comprise the basic set that define success for the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.
But why is that necessary? Compare us to our closest cousins, our fellow apes. Our distant cousin, the orangutan, is non-tribal. Males live in non-overlapping territories and females live in non-overlapping territories, while the territory of a male overlaps with those of several females. A closer cousin, the gorilla, lives in troops, generally with only one adult male, but occasionally multiple.
Closer still, the chimpanzees, which live in tribes with multiple males and females, often quite cooperative. The common chimp is more aggressive (males from one tribe are hostile to strange males and even band together to hunt them down) whereas bonobos are more peaceful. Both groups are highly sexual, using sex to "make love, not war" even pansexual**. Generally, their behavior shows a cooperative nature similar to our own. They're fair, they avoid injury... and they're loyal to those of their own tribe, sometimes at the expense of those from others.
The upshot of this is first that our closest cousins have a social structure that mirrors our own, thus necessitating the same moral rules that we have; and not just the first three. The common chimp has a strict hierarchy with male A in charge, then male B, then C... Bonobos are less hierarchical, but are matriarchal and 'less' doesn't mean 'not at all'.
Further, the apes aren't the only animals with hierarchies. Horses are likewise hierarchical, following the lead of a head mare and head stallion. Even small birds have hierarchies. Chickadees take the risk of sitting high in a tree and looking for threats. Their name comes from their characteristic cry of "chick - a - dee dee dee" when they see a threat. The more "dee"s, the greater the threat. They vie for this position, with birds of higher social position acquiring, literally, higher positions as look-outs. Other small birds determine and acquire social status through aggressive altruism; giving gifts is a sign of, as it were, virility and a sign that the giver is so awesome he can afford to give away food.
This is another argument in favor of evolution loving altruism; not merely as a means of maintaining genetic code by helping a relative, but also as a means of reinforcing hierarchy.
I will continue my discussion of moral pillars 3, 4, and 5 in my next post.
* From Latin, for "physical make up".
** Get it? The genus Pan? I am so clever.
Recall the Prisoner's Dilemma. At first glance it appears that there's no reason for the prisoner's not to inform on one another until you add the notion of history, memory. Once reputation appears as a reason not to squeal, the dilemma disappears and human behavior goes from inexplicably illogical to mathematically sound. This suggests that natural selection is a mathematician into game theory.
There have been competitions by computer programs playing the Prisoner's Dilemma over and over. Multiple times against each of multiple opponents. The winners have always been nice (don't start with betrayal), retaliatory (willing to pay evil unto evil), forgiving, and not envious (not trying to outscore the opponent). In other words, a moral being.
But then something else happened. People were allowed to enter multiple programs. They did so with multiple programs designed to take a dive and a designated winner; they recognized one another with a complex handshake. The result? The designated winner won. Not only is cooperation favored by game theory for one on one interactions, so are complex cartels. This result shouldn't be surprising, each and every human being is not merely an agent, but a complex cartel. We are each of us the result of billions of living individuals cooperating for mutual benefit. Each of us is, quite literally, a corporation*.
It's not just humans and other animals that cooperate. Even single-celled organisms cooperate. At least one species of unicellular heterotrophs come together in cooperation (using the same gene that allows the cells of multicellular organisms to recognize one another and cooperate) in a fashion that makes eating and locomotion easier.
Morality isn't just cooperation though, is it? It's about not killing people or robbery or rape, et cetera. The work of Dr. Jonathan Haidt has elucidated certain universal moral truths that all humans hold in common.
1. Fairness/Equity
2. Injury/Harm
3. In-Group Loyalty
4. Respect for Authority/Respect for Elders
5. Sanctity/Purity
The first two obviously function as aids to cooperation. Interpersonal interactions mediated by these two moral rules foster cooperation by requiring first that each partner receive, not equal, but commensurate gains from cooperation. Further, a prohibition against injury that prevents simple physical betrayal. Individuals living together will come into conflict and that prohibition means that, even when things go bad, they can continue to function as a group. In fact, the first two, with the addition of the third, comprise the basic set that define success for the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.
But why is that necessary? Compare us to our closest cousins, our fellow apes. Our distant cousin, the orangutan, is non-tribal. Males live in non-overlapping territories and females live in non-overlapping territories, while the territory of a male overlaps with those of several females. A closer cousin, the gorilla, lives in troops, generally with only one adult male, but occasionally multiple.
Closer still, the chimpanzees, which live in tribes with multiple males and females, often quite cooperative. The common chimp is more aggressive (males from one tribe are hostile to strange males and even band together to hunt them down) whereas bonobos are more peaceful. Both groups are highly sexual, using sex to "make love, not war" even pansexual**. Generally, their behavior shows a cooperative nature similar to our own. They're fair, they avoid injury... and they're loyal to those of their own tribe, sometimes at the expense of those from others.
The upshot of this is first that our closest cousins have a social structure that mirrors our own, thus necessitating the same moral rules that we have; and not just the first three. The common chimp has a strict hierarchy with male A in charge, then male B, then C... Bonobos are less hierarchical, but are matriarchal and 'less' doesn't mean 'not at all'.
Further, the apes aren't the only animals with hierarchies. Horses are likewise hierarchical, following the lead of a head mare and head stallion. Even small birds have hierarchies. Chickadees take the risk of sitting high in a tree and looking for threats. Their name comes from their characteristic cry of "chick - a - dee dee dee" when they see a threat. The more "dee"s, the greater the threat. They vie for this position, with birds of higher social position acquiring, literally, higher positions as look-outs. Other small birds determine and acquire social status through aggressive altruism; giving gifts is a sign of, as it were, virility and a sign that the giver is so awesome he can afford to give away food.
This is another argument in favor of evolution loving altruism; not merely as a means of maintaining genetic code by helping a relative, but also as a means of reinforcing hierarchy.
I will continue my discussion of moral pillars 3, 4, and 5 in my next post.
* From Latin, for "physical make up".
** Get it? The genus Pan? I am so clever.
Monday, October 03, 2011
Strong vs Weak Theism
My last post covered the agnostic and gnostic positions. It also covered the differences between the two atheist positions. However, there's also a distinction between two theistic positions. Just as there are strong and weak atheist positions, there are also strong and weak theist positions.
The strong theist position is "I believe god exists." It is so common that it is unjustly given the privilege of the default position. The default position should be either weak position, "I do not believe...".
Alternatively, we have the weak position "I do not believe that god does not exist." This seems to be so pathetically weak and negative that no one could ever hold it, but I suspect that many, perhaps even most, theists are in fact weak theists.
I offer into evidence the Biblical verse, "Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief." In context, it's the desperate cry of a father that his son receive miraculous healing, because only believers could get that (*cough*blackmail*cough*). But more generally, many believers wrestle with a lack of faith. They pray for help with their faith and their doubts. The correspondence between Mother Theresa and the Vatican showed that she had her doubts, had wrestled long and hard, and faith had lost. If so venerated a figure (sainted, even) can have doubts, why not Joe the plumber or even Joe the pastor?
More tellingly, some people, when questioned about their faith, reply "I don't want it to not be true", "I don't want to believe their is not heaven." Theirs is not a positive affirmation of belief, but a desperate fear of the unknown. They maintain their faith because they cannot bear the consequences of its falsity.
Of course, when asked if they believe, theists will reply with the affirmative "I do believe that god exists", but how many of them are secretly weak theists? How many of them, plagued by doubt, in fact hold only the position that they don't want to believe in nothing? How many of them fear that the alternative to god is nothing, that without theism, all that is left is nihilism?
In truth, there are many godless alternatives. Creative humanity has built a great many houses of non-worship, ways to find truth and beauty and meaning even in the absence of a creator.
Unfortunately, nihilism gets a bad rap. There are two positions there, as well. More on that later.
The strong theist position is "I believe god exists." It is so common that it is unjustly given the privilege of the default position. The default position should be either weak position, "I do not believe...".
Alternatively, we have the weak position "I do not believe that god does not exist." This seems to be so pathetically weak and negative that no one could ever hold it, but I suspect that many, perhaps even most, theists are in fact weak theists.
I offer into evidence the Biblical verse, "Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief." In context, it's the desperate cry of a father that his son receive miraculous healing, because only believers could get that (*cough*blackmail*cough*). But more generally, many believers wrestle with a lack of faith. They pray for help with their faith and their doubts. The correspondence between Mother Theresa and the Vatican showed that she had her doubts, had wrestled long and hard, and faith had lost. If so venerated a figure (sainted, even) can have doubts, why not Joe the plumber or even Joe the pastor?
More tellingly, some people, when questioned about their faith, reply "I don't want it to not be true", "I don't want to believe their is not heaven." Theirs is not a positive affirmation of belief, but a desperate fear of the unknown. They maintain their faith because they cannot bear the consequences of its falsity.
Of course, when asked if they believe, theists will reply with the affirmative "I do believe that god exists", but how many of them are secretly weak theists? How many of them, plagued by doubt, in fact hold only the position that they don't want to believe in nothing? How many of them fear that the alternative to god is nothing, that without theism, all that is left is nihilism?
In truth, there are many godless alternatives. Creative humanity has built a great many houses of non-worship, ways to find truth and beauty and meaning even in the absence of a creator.
Unfortunately, nihilism gets a bad rap. There are two positions there, as well. More on that later.
The Eight Positions on God
I was inspired to ponder the eight positions as a result of watching this series of videos by Aron Ra. He talks about belief and knowledge about god, but I think his presentation was incomplete, and this was the cause of some confusion in the Q&A session at the end.
"Does god exist?" I won't be trying to answer that question here. Instead I'm going to talk about answers. Whether we can answer the question is not the focus, but there are two classes of statement that should be addressed. They are the four positions on knowledge, and the four positions on belief.
Knowledge:
I know god exists.
I know god does not exist.
I do not know that god exists.
I do not know that god does not exist.
Whether or not something can be known is the province of epistemology. Stating that something is known is that gnostic position. Stating that something is unknown is the agnostic position. I agree, for the moment, with the agnostic position that nothing can be known about god.
First, what is knowledge? Knowledge is distinct from belief in that we can all agree that a thing can be believed without being true. Many people pay good money for homeopathic potions, content in the belief that they are purchasing genuine cures. They are incorrect; they've purchased expensive water. They will be somewhat better hydrated, but they won't be taking medicine. For all that their belief in the efficacity of their nostrum is sincere, and for all that they believe they have evidence to that end, they are incorrect. Their certain belief does not rise to the level of knowledge.
The position of the strict agnostics, that nothing can be known about the existence of god, should be the default position, only abandoned in the face of evidence, or very good argument, to the contrary. Most theists, when pressed, will admit to agnosticism. "There's a reason it's called faith." Even the most ardent atheists will usually also admit to being agnostics.
So on the question of knowledge, the four positions are divided into two categories: gnoticism and agnosticism. I know, one way or the other, or I do not know, one way or the other. Regardless of what they believe, most people will admit to being agnostic.
Belief:
I believe god exists.
I do not believe god exists.
I believe god does not exist.
I do not believe that god does not exist.
These four positions are divided into two categories: theism and atheism. The split is not the same as that of the gnostic/agnostic divide.
The two atheist positions are "I do not believe god exists." and "I believe that god does not exist." These are called weak and strong atheism respectively. The terms are not intended to be pejorative by definition, though they are sometimes used that way. Rather, weak atheism is so called because the statement is fundamentally negative on the part of the user.
The statement "I do not believe that god exists" places the negative aspect in the belief of the atheist. It is a responsive position. The theists posits that god exists and the atheist responds "I don't believe that". It's not a positive statement about the existence of god one way or another. This is in contrast with the strong position.
"I believe that god does not exist" is a positive, descriptive statement. It's a positive position on the part of the declarer about the existence or non-existence of god. Just as the theist is declarative when he says that he believes that god does exist.
Aron Ra, in his video, stated that the correct position is the weak position. I agree that it should be the default position and absent further argument or evidence, it cannot be abandoned. However, I disagree with him that there is no further argument or evidence. The various gods posited by theistic beliefs are all interventionist, with an impact on the world. Anything that alters the world can be tested by the scientific method. Further, supernatural hypotheses all necessarily suppose either that the deity is deceptive, acting to mask their intervention, or that the deity's intervention can be detected due to the violation of otherwise natural causality. As no evidence exists of supernatural intervention, the deity is deceptive, non-interventive or non-existent.
As for intervention, scientific studies have been performed on the efficacy of prayer. Not only did the studies find no positive benefit, it was determined that, when the patient is aware of the prayer, it has a negative placebo effect; they do worse. In this light, a deity is either non-intervening or non-existent.
We now come to the position that the non-intervening deity is functionally equivalent to the deist's position: the creator who then does nothing. However, our study of the cosmos gives us an alternative hypothesis for the origin of everything. We know the universe is closed, open, or flat; regardless, each one gives us an explanation for the existence of everything (the "problem" of why anything exists rather than nothing is usually advanced as a strong argument for a deity). There is no theory of the cosmos that cannot explain existence. The god hypothesis is superfluous. Worse, it's not even an explanation! The god proposed is even more inexplicable than the thing it's being proposed to explain! It takes the thorny problem of existence up to eleven!
The confusion I mentioned above was over the difference between the strong and weak atheist positions. Because Aron Ra hadn't clearly explicated the difference as the position of the negative. The querent queried, in essence, "Why do you believe their is no god?", mister Ra and, I believe, Matt Dillahunty, replied "I don't believe there is a god" The discussion went back and forth with the querent asking the same question and receiving, essentially, the same reply.
Next: Strong versus Weak Theists.
"Does god exist?" I won't be trying to answer that question here. Instead I'm going to talk about answers. Whether we can answer the question is not the focus, but there are two classes of statement that should be addressed. They are the four positions on knowledge, and the four positions on belief.
Knowledge:
I know god exists.
I know god does not exist.
I do not know that god exists.
I do not know that god does not exist.
Whether or not something can be known is the province of epistemology. Stating that something is known is that gnostic position. Stating that something is unknown is the agnostic position. I agree, for the moment, with the agnostic position that nothing can be known about god.
First, what is knowledge? Knowledge is distinct from belief in that we can all agree that a thing can be believed without being true. Many people pay good money for homeopathic potions, content in the belief that they are purchasing genuine cures. They are incorrect; they've purchased expensive water. They will be somewhat better hydrated, but they won't be taking medicine. For all that their belief in the efficacity of their nostrum is sincere, and for all that they believe they have evidence to that end, they are incorrect. Their certain belief does not rise to the level of knowledge.
The position of the strict agnostics, that nothing can be known about the existence of god, should be the default position, only abandoned in the face of evidence, or very good argument, to the contrary. Most theists, when pressed, will admit to agnosticism. "There's a reason it's called faith." Even the most ardent atheists will usually also admit to being agnostics.
So on the question of knowledge, the four positions are divided into two categories: gnoticism and agnosticism. I know, one way or the other, or I do not know, one way or the other. Regardless of what they believe, most people will admit to being agnostic.
Belief:
I believe god exists.
I do not believe god exists.
I believe god does not exist.
I do not believe that god does not exist.
These four positions are divided into two categories: theism and atheism. The split is not the same as that of the gnostic/agnostic divide.
The two atheist positions are "I do not believe god exists." and "I believe that god does not exist." These are called weak and strong atheism respectively. The terms are not intended to be pejorative by definition, though they are sometimes used that way. Rather, weak atheism is so called because the statement is fundamentally negative on the part of the user.
The statement "I do not believe that god exists" places the negative aspect in the belief of the atheist. It is a responsive position. The theists posits that god exists and the atheist responds "I don't believe that". It's not a positive statement about the existence of god one way or another. This is in contrast with the strong position.
"I believe that god does not exist" is a positive, descriptive statement. It's a positive position on the part of the declarer about the existence or non-existence of god. Just as the theist is declarative when he says that he believes that god does exist.
Aron Ra, in his video, stated that the correct position is the weak position. I agree that it should be the default position and absent further argument or evidence, it cannot be abandoned. However, I disagree with him that there is no further argument or evidence. The various gods posited by theistic beliefs are all interventionist, with an impact on the world. Anything that alters the world can be tested by the scientific method. Further, supernatural hypotheses all necessarily suppose either that the deity is deceptive, acting to mask their intervention, or that the deity's intervention can be detected due to the violation of otherwise natural causality. As no evidence exists of supernatural intervention, the deity is deceptive, non-interventive or non-existent.
As for intervention, scientific studies have been performed on the efficacy of prayer. Not only did the studies find no positive benefit, it was determined that, when the patient is aware of the prayer, it has a negative placebo effect; they do worse. In this light, a deity is either non-intervening or non-existent.
We now come to the position that the non-intervening deity is functionally equivalent to the deist's position: the creator who then does nothing. However, our study of the cosmos gives us an alternative hypothesis for the origin of everything. We know the universe is closed, open, or flat; regardless, each one gives us an explanation for the existence of everything (the "problem" of why anything exists rather than nothing is usually advanced as a strong argument for a deity). There is no theory of the cosmos that cannot explain existence. The god hypothesis is superfluous. Worse, it's not even an explanation! The god proposed is even more inexplicable than the thing it's being proposed to explain! It takes the thorny problem of existence up to eleven!
The confusion I mentioned above was over the difference between the strong and weak atheist positions. Because Aron Ra hadn't clearly explicated the difference as the position of the negative. The querent queried, in essence, "Why do you believe their is no god?", mister Ra and, I believe, Matt Dillahunty, replied "I don't believe there is a god" The discussion went back and forth with the querent asking the same question and receiving, essentially, the same reply.
Next: Strong versus Weak Theists.
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