Saturday, July 25, 2009
While I'm away...
I've been on vacation all week, but while I'm away, I'd like to direct your attention to Andrew Sullivan's blog. Andrew has been away all week as well, but his stand-ins are having a great discussion about atheism. In predictable fashion, the bloggers are making all of the usual "atheists are irrational/impolite/need to get over themselves" arguments, but getting an incredible amount of pushback from readers. The latest installment is here. List of relevant posts here.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
The Law of Truly Large Numbers, or Why Miracles Have to Happen
One of the most persistent, and difficult, types of arguments that atheists tend to run into is the dreaded personal anecdote. This is the story that a person of faith tells you that sums up for them why they are absolutely certain that their faith is correct. It will be a story of some incredible coincidence or miraculous recovery. It "couldn't have just happened that way." There was clearly a "greater force at work". And nothing you could ever say will convince them otherwise.
It won't help to point out that personal experience is not the same thing as observation (in the rigorous sense). No matter how many times you say, "The plural of anecdote is not data," most people don't realize a simple, fundamental fact of existence:
The least likely outcome is the one in which nothing unlikely occurs.
Think about that for a moment. I don't intend to make this a post about probability theory or anything so complex. Simply put, what the Law of Truly Large Numbers states is that any system with many outcomes will inevitably produce the unlikely (less probable) outcomes and that, more importantly, they will be noticed more because they are unusual.
As an example, consider the Jesus on a tortilla / grilled cheese sandwich / potato "miracle" that seems to occur every three years or so. The markings on these objects are essentially random. This means that there is a slim, but non-zero, possibility that these markings will resemble a face*. Say that in a year a billion tortillas are fried (the actual number is much, much higher than that. The average Mexican consumes close to 150 lbs. of corn tortilla yearly). In this scenario, assuming there's a greater than one-in-a-billion chance of a "face-like" tortilla being fried then it is statistically likely to happen. Even more, it very unlikely to not happen. Of course, because it is an unusual outcome it gets noticed more than the remaining millions of banal, faceless tortillas.
This particular failing of the human intellect happens constantly. Consider all the stories you've heard of dreams literally coming true. Your friend dreams a particular event, and then it happens! Inexplicable! Take that, science!
Well, no. Of course not. First off, your dreams have a fairly narrow set of permutative elements -- the people you know, the places you've been, and things on your mind. Therefore, your dreams must be necessarily close to your actual life -- they're populated by the same concepts. If your dreams then combine these elements in different ways (and are affected by your desires, fears, hopes for the future, etc.) then it is an inevitability that you will dream an event that will occur at a later time. There's nothing magical going on, it's just math. Looked at from the reverse, it seems obvious. How many thousands upon thousands of dreams have you had that have not come true?
Strange, coincidental, and downright spooky things have to happen. There will, inevitably, be those times when lives are saved by freak accidents. Twins will die minutes apart. Taking a detour seen in a dream will save someone's life. These are not evidence of the supernatural or the paranormal, they are just the probabilities playing out exactly as we should expect them to.
* And by "face" I mean, "maybe if I squint and assume Jesus looked like Jeff Spicoli."
It won't help to point out that personal experience is not the same thing as observation (in the rigorous sense). No matter how many times you say, "The plural of anecdote is not data," most people don't realize a simple, fundamental fact of existence:
The least likely outcome is the one in which nothing unlikely occurs.
Think about that for a moment. I don't intend to make this a post about probability theory or anything so complex. Simply put, what the Law of Truly Large Numbers states is that any system with many outcomes will inevitably produce the unlikely (less probable) outcomes and that, more importantly, they will be noticed more because they are unusual.
As an example, consider the Jesus on a tortilla / grilled cheese sandwich / potato "miracle" that seems to occur every three years or so. The markings on these objects are essentially random. This means that there is a slim, but non-zero, possibility that these markings will resemble a face*. Say that in a year a billion tortillas are fried (the actual number is much, much higher than that. The average Mexican consumes close to 150 lbs. of corn tortilla yearly). In this scenario, assuming there's a greater than one-in-a-billion chance of a "face-like" tortilla being fried then it is statistically likely to happen. Even more, it very unlikely to not happen. Of course, because it is an unusual outcome it gets noticed more than the remaining millions of banal, faceless tortillas.
This particular failing of the human intellect happens constantly. Consider all the stories you've heard of dreams literally coming true. Your friend dreams a particular event, and then it happens! Inexplicable! Take that, science!
Well, no. Of course not. First off, your dreams have a fairly narrow set of permutative elements -- the people you know, the places you've been, and things on your mind. Therefore, your dreams must be necessarily close to your actual life -- they're populated by the same concepts. If your dreams then combine these elements in different ways (and are affected by your desires, fears, hopes for the future, etc.) then it is an inevitability that you will dream an event that will occur at a later time. There's nothing magical going on, it's just math. Looked at from the reverse, it seems obvious. How many thousands upon thousands of dreams have you had that have not come true?
Strange, coincidental, and downright spooky things have to happen. There will, inevitably, be those times when lives are saved by freak accidents. Twins will die minutes apart. Taking a detour seen in a dream will save someone's life. These are not evidence of the supernatural or the paranormal, they are just the probabilities playing out exactly as we should expect them to.
* And by "face" I mean, "maybe if I squint and assume Jesus looked like Jeff Spicoli."
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Self-Awareness and an All-Loving God
One of the most common defenses of religious belief is something along the lines of "if it makes people feel good, what's the problem?" See this, for an example of this argument (scroll to Day 5 - "I know plenty of religious people who believe because it helps them in life and makes them feel better. That seems a pretty good reason to me, even if I don’t share the view"). While there are many problems with this approach, I'd like to highlight one: it encourages people to have an inflated impression of themselves. Here's some science:
Part of the appeal of most religions is that they stress the cosmic importance of the individual. The fact that there's a higher power isn't really the significant part. The significant part is that this higher power cares about YOU! Most religions artificially elevate the importance of each individual as being part of "God's plan" or something analogous.
The problem with this is that people aren't that important. People's importance comes from themselves and other people (and sometimes pets). People can be massively important in the world, but they can never be as important as religion promises that they are. Evidence of this is everywhere. It doesn't take a lot of life experience to realize that every individual is not that important to any grand scheme of the universe.
When religious people encounter enough of this evidence, it's crushing. People get used to this idea of themselves an indispensable part of a perfect plan. Once enough evidence to the contrary is amassed, people generally go one of two directions. They either get really depressed, or they embrace full irrationality, ignore the evidence, and recommit themselves to their beliefs. Readers of this blog will probably recognize that neither of these is a positive outcome.
Of course, there are a lot of other problems with the "I believe it because it feels good" argument, but we'll save those for another day.
Thomaes found that people with unrealistically inflated opinions of themselves, far from proving more resilient in the face of social rebuffs, actually suffer more because of it. Some psychologists hold that "positive illusions" provide a mental shield that buffers its bearers from the threats of rejection or criticism. But according to Thomaes, realistic self-awareness is a much healthier state of mind.
Part of the appeal of most religions is that they stress the cosmic importance of the individual. The fact that there's a higher power isn't really the significant part. The significant part is that this higher power cares about YOU! Most religions artificially elevate the importance of each individual as being part of "God's plan" or something analogous.
The problem with this is that people aren't that important. People's importance comes from themselves and other people (and sometimes pets). People can be massively important in the world, but they can never be as important as religion promises that they are. Evidence of this is everywhere. It doesn't take a lot of life experience to realize that every individual is not that important to any grand scheme of the universe.
When religious people encounter enough of this evidence, it's crushing. People get used to this idea of themselves an indispensable part of a perfect plan. Once enough evidence to the contrary is amassed, people generally go one of two directions. They either get really depressed, or they embrace full irrationality, ignore the evidence, and recommit themselves to their beliefs. Readers of this blog will probably recognize that neither of these is a positive outcome.
Of course, there are a lot of other problems with the "I believe it because it feels good" argument, but we'll save those for another day.
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