Atheist Camp?

Our old friend Richard Dawkins is at it again:

The author of The God Delusion is helping to launch Britain’s first summer retreat for non-believers....

Budding atheists will be given lessons to arm themselves in the ways of rational scepticism. There will be sessions in moral philosophy and evolutionary biology along with more conventional pursuits such as trekking and tug-of-war. There will also be a £10 prize for the child who can disprove the existence of the mythical unicorn.

While I'm pretty firmly against the idea of mainstreaming atheism as a political force, this strikes me as actually a pretty good idea. Although I'm still somewhat conflicted about it.

One one hand, it would be nice to have a place where children can go to learn the value of rational thought, and have lessons in critical thinking, as an alternative to faith-based camps (some of which I was exposed to, despite coming from a relatively secular household). On the other hand, it's still indoctrination. It's an authoritative figure giving lessons on the "proper" way to look at the world. I think I might send my [hypothetical] kids for a week, but with a stern warning about the dangers of believing something just because an authority figure tells you it's true.

What do you think? Is this a good idea? Just another church? The end of the world?

Us and Them, and After All, We're Only Ordinary Men

It should be clear by now that a major driving force behind this blog is to point out the dangers inherent in faith-based, irrational thought. We've already covered cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias in depth. Today I'd like to talk about the third major issue that plagues people of faith, self-identification.

Self-identification is the idea that all people naturally associate themselves into larger groups as a means of establishing their own identities. We all have cultural, societal, political, and sexual groups with which we identify that make up the core of who we are. Unfortunately, for reasons I'll spell out below, most of us also have religious associations that form a portion of our identities. I feel it's vital to understand self-identification and why it can be a dangerous thing.

This process has at its root the original need for a socially organized species (us), to be able to distinguish between those who belonged to our group (family or tribe), and those who did not. This was vital, as being able to make those distinctions allowed our ancestors to identify potential threats as well as competition for food and mates. We needed a capacity to establish "us" and "them." The natural outgrowth of this is that the "them" group must be associated with fear as a means of preserving the "us" group. Were our ancestors unwary of strangers, they would have had a much higher chance of being destroyed or assimilated. Of course, the lack of a need for this ability in the modern world has yet to be rectified in our genes.

As a result, we see the outgrowth of this capability in unusual, and often detrimental, ways. The root of racism, when you get down to it, is the ability of the human brain to determine that another person is different. "They" are not "us" and are so to be treated with caution. When this natural instinct is not tempered by reason and experience, it can become hatred. Xenophobia is the exact same impulse with appearance replaced by geography. Continuing to more and more abstract concepts, you see the same difficulties between ages, genders, political parties, philosophies of all sorts, and especially religions.

Once the "us and them" mentality takes over any disputable area, we run into a major problem. That is, it is next to impossible to respect someone with whom you disagree to the level that you respect yourself. It's simple enough: if you think you're right, anyone who disagrees with you must be wrong. If they're wrong, then they must be inferior in some way. To use a rather obvious illustration, we need only look at politics. The majority of people simply identify themselves as part of a larger group. Most people choose a side like, "I'm a Republican," or, "I'm a Democrat," rather than working through all of the issues that those labels actually imply. As a result, the "other" side is simply wrong. This is why there is so little actual political discourse (anywhere, anytime -- I'm not trying to make a political point here) and so much mud-flinging. What is lost is the idea that we are all, regardless of party affiliation, worthy of the same respect and consideration.

But in politics there is at least some reasonable debate. There are those who are willing to consider other viewpoints, and there exists a framework in which to debate them. I can pick up a copy of The Wealth of Nations or The Communist Manifesto, as well as hundreds of other works of analysis on them. Because of this, there is at least a significant portion of those with political views who are willing to have them challenged, and who accept that their position is not sacrosanct. These people don't self-identify strongly enough to discredit others out of hand.

Now consider faith. When you get down to it, faith is what you believe because you believe it. It has no rational underpinnings, and therefore debate really isn't possible. Because faith is never challenged, it becomes a pillar of identity, and self-identification takes a firm hold. It is impossible to accept that another faith might be "correct" if you have already chosen one. The notion of "us" that follows includes only those who share that faith, and everyone else gets lumped into "them."

Do you see the danger in this? Faith creates a walled garden from which everyone who disagrees is excluded. And because it tells you that you are right, and more importantly righteous, because of this belief, you will never see those outside as equals. Some faiths teach pity for the unsaved, others hatred, but it all amounts to the same thing. The "us" group is better for their faith, and the "them" group is worse.

How much are you willing to miss by secluding yourself inside a comfortable faith? What other experiences, new friends, and fresh ideas are worth discounting? It is comfortable to seclude yourself in an "us," but we're all "us," and faith just drives us apart.

Be Well,
Chris.

I realize that this is another song lyric post, but it just seemed too appropriate not to use. If you're unfamiliar with Us and Them by Pink Floyd, it's a truly wonderful song, and makes the point of this post rather nicely. Empathy and the shared experience is a recurring theme throughout Floyd's middle years, and even today is a great reminder that, "we're only ordinary men."

Can Religion and Science Get Along?

Any fan of this blog should read this debate. Money quote:

All of this runs to the larger issue of intellectual honesty. Perhaps we can define “intellectual honesty” as the ratio between what a person has good reason to believe and what he will assert to be true. In the ideal case, this number would equal 1, and in science it approaches as near to 1 as it does anywhere in human discourse. It seems to me that most religions subsist, and even thrive, on values that can be brought arbitrarily close to zero for centuries on end—and, indeed, grow smaller the longer any religious authority speaks about content of the faith. This disparity between what counts for honesty in serious discourse, depending on the topic, is as strange as it is consequential.

As with all Sam Harris exchanges, it's very long. But worth it.

That's the Way I Like it Baby, I don't Wanna Live Forever

All religions, it seems, are preoccupied with death. In fact, it is an explanation for death that is the most common feature of all faiths. Almost as common is the idea of an afterlife, either a place you go or a state of existence wherein your essence persists after physical death.

Does anyone else find this idea horrible?

It's understandable that people naturally fear death. We're supposed to. It's how we've survived as a species. A healthy fear of death keeps us alive long enough pass on our genes. But when we start spawning fantasies of an afterlife, I think we're working against ourselves.

First of all, I think the notion of an afterlife cheapens actual life. If our century on this planet is just a test or a rehearsal, then our motivation can not be to live it to its fullest. At best, the afterlife becomes a fall-back for the unsuccessful; at worst, it becomes the motivation for life outright. You'll never live the best life possible if you're focused on the next one.

You'll also never view the world with the healthy awe that something so complex and beautiful deserves, because afterlife ideation (especially the heaven-type afterlives) also cheapens your perspective. The world must naturally be a horrid place when compared to a perfect heaven. Even worse, it must naturally be unfixable, or it would be heaven.

Lastly, consider why I would have chosen a Motorhead lyric for this post's title. Would you really want to live forever? Think about it. The law of large numbers states (roughly) that over an infinite time line, any event that can happen will. This implies that if you were to live forever, you would experience everything. It also implies that at some point, you would have experienced everything there is. Sounds awfully boring after a while, doesn't it?

It's that life has a deadline built in that gives it purpose. I will die someday. I have a few decades to accomplish what I want to -- to create, to love, and ultimately to leave. If I thought I'd go on forever in a more powerful form than my piddling human body, why would I bother? At that point, I might as well just follow the orders of my deity and wait for the "sweet release" of death. Death isn't a sweet release, because if it were, life would have no meaning.

Be well,
Chris.

The Dejected Atheist

I wrote my first post for DT about a month ago, choosing to call it The Happy Atheist. I chose that title very specifically, as the post was about my passion for reason and the joy that I find proselytizing it. Today, however, I want to look at the other side of the coin. There is one gigantic reason why being an atheist frankly sucks.

Religion will always, always have a better sales pitch.

The religious don't have to play by any rules but their own. As a result, they can promise (literally) the sun, moon, and stars to convince others to adopt their beliefs. Faith can promise prosperity, happiness, peace, eternal life, and a benevolent protector. Those of us on the "show me" side of the debate can not.

We're left with esoteric and difficult to convey arguments. While we might have taken the time to work through the implications of omnipotence on free will, or the contradiction inherent in first-cause cosmology, what can we offer the fence-sitters? Humanism? When the other side is offering an eternity in paradise, can "the advancement of the species as an expression of combined knowledge" really hold a candle?

This is why there are so few atheists. We all, as humans, want comforting answers. Choosing correct answers is a lot harder. The idea that we're alone in the universe without any overarching meaning is hardly comforting.

I have yet to find a good counter-argument for atheism in the face of the promises made by religion. It's easy enough to scoff at their claims or demand proof. But that's not enough. What the undecided person sees is a system in which they matter, in which someone cares, and in which they can be happy; and he sees none of these things in atheism.

It's rough, and it's unavoidable. We're the Washington Generals here, so we don't get to use the step ladders and buckets full of glitter that the Globe Trotters get. So we lose.

Be Well,
Chris.

Good and Evil in a Godless World

A while ago, I posted this:

I advocate logic & reason as the exclusive method to arrive at beliefs which have any chance of being objectively correct. Love & laughter are not beliefs; they are experiences. They should be enjoyed without worrying if such enjoyment is rational, like you would enjoy a good steak, or a piece of art. What makes you happy is a personal choice. We must simply recognize that it is not a way to discover objective truths.

I'd like to expand on that a bit. Specifically, I want to talk about values, and where they come from. When I say "values," I mean things that are good, regardless of context. For instance, most people do not value "money" on its own. They value it for its ability to buy things. The ability to buy things is good because they can keep us alive, make us happier, keep order, etc. You can always keep asking "why is that good" until you get to an ultimate value. These ultimate values are what I'm talking about. The ones that are good without reference to their utility.

For a person who believes in a god, this question is easy: our values come from god. God defines what is good & bad. Our personal choices and feelings do not enter into the equation. But for the faithless, how do we know what to value? If there is nobody greater than ourselves to dictate morality, where does it come from?

For those of us who do not believe in a higher intelligence, ultimate values must come from ourselves. The problem with this is that it is completely subjective. People can value anything they choose, and the choice is arbitrary. There is no logical reason why any one value is better than any other. People can value family, life, perpetuation of the species, material wealth, status, opinion, feeling, order, chaos, or anything else. If there is no intelligence higher than us, there is nobody to say which value is better.

The logical conclusion here is that there is no such thing as "good" or "evil," merely personal preference. Philosophers call this moral relativism or individual ethical subjectivism. It's a scary idea, because it means that our instinctive revulsion of a person or idea is merely our personal preference, and has no real rational support. Certain things intuitively seem right or wrong, but I would argue that these are merely a product of our own individual tastes.

This doesn't mean, of course, that we should be tolerant of values in opposition to our own. It just means that we should refrain from getting too high & mighty about our own morality, and take a more utilitarian, less retributionist view of how to handle people who do things that we consider "wrong."

It's easy to say "Hitler was evil." It's a lot less satisfying to say "Hitler had different values from me." But I believe that the latter is all we can reasonably say.

Nostradoofus

OK, this post is going to be a little shorter and a little snippier than usual.

I just got done reading yet another story about how Nostradamus predicted so many world events in amazing fashion -- this time trying to tie in his bad poetry with the 2012 nonsense.

Ordinarily, I would write a lengthy piece on skeptical evaluation, the errors of omission and re-contextualization committed by his followers, and the fallacious reasoning used to justify their conclusions. I feel that's unnecessary. Instead let me just say this:

You can only be considered a prophet if you actually predict something.

You know how after 9/11 people started saying that Nostradamus had predicted it? Where the hell were those people on 9/10? Oh, that's right, there was no prediction, just interpretation after the fact.

That's what every single one of Nostradamus's "successes" have been. There has never (not once!) been a world event predicted via a reading of his works. Afterward, though, there is always some credulous idiot willing to interpret two lines in his massive corpus to somehow apply.

Until anything he wrote is shown to have actual predictive ability, then all the Nostradamus hype is just wishful thinking, and I'm sick of it.

How to Argue: The Watchmaker

Hello again, it's time to argue.

This week's How to Argue entry is going to tackle the classic Watchmaker analogy, first posited by William Paley in 1802:


In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. (...) There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. (...) Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.

– William Paley, Natural Theology


As is the norm (because I said so), I will begin with the lesson, and then work through the argument.

Any argument by analogy must compare concepts that are intrinsically the same across the domain of comparison.

You've probably heard the expression, "That's like comparing apples to oranges." This is a common way of saying that a comparison is invalid because the items in question are so dissimilar. Likewise, an analogy fails if you're trying to draw a parallel between concepts where similarity isn't present.

So on to the watchmaker! Essentially what William Paley (and Teleologists since Aristotle) is saying is that complexity requires a creative force (in opposition to decay), that all complex objects require a more complex creator, and thus some being greater than the universe must naturally exist.

There are a couple of issues with this argument, and I could spend a great deal of time outlining them. There is the problem of assumptions that we discussed last time (Why assume complexity to be the result of external influence, rather than an implicit force? They're equally likely.) There's the issue of causation: all creative acts imply intent. If we are ascribing the human concept of creation to the physical world, must we not also ascribe intent? If so, why is there no clear intent to the universe as we see it? (This will be an upcoming topic).

The larger issue at hand here is that what Paley presents is actually a false analogy. He fails to distinguish between natural and artificial complexity, and then equates them. Because the analogy is then completely flawed, the conclusion that he reaches is invalid.

It takes a little understanding of chaos theory, but it is perfectly reasonable to expect random systems to exhibit complex behaviors. An excellent and very simple example is the phenomenon of ice circles. Ice circles are exactly what they sound like: perfectly circular discs of ice that form in flowing water in cold conditions. A circular formation of ice is unusual, as ice has a naturally hexagonal form (which is another example of natural complexity, but is a little more difficult to demonstrate). In addition, flowing water is one of the most chaotic systems that we can observe. There aren't even supercomputers powerful enough to model the interactions.

Yet complex formations like ice circles occur constantly in the natural world. The rings of Saturn, for example, or the great red spot of Jupiter, can be easily explained despite the fact that they are massively complex (and just plain massive!) systems. Likewise, the rock that Paley struck his foot against can be seen as the natural rise of a complex object from a chaotic system. A few million years of geology, vulcanism, sediment, and tectonics are all that are required.

But Paley's saying more than that, isn't he? Though he doesn't outright extend his argument to include life, it is clearly implied. The most visible aspects of the natural world are living things. Life is very, very complex, and obviously not the result of a single process. Here again we're switching domains without switching terminology. We went from artificial complexity (the watch, made by man), to natural complexity (the stone, the result of a chaotic system), to a complex system.

While there are chaotic aspects of the biosphere, it can not be considered a chaotic system because it includes a feedback mechanism, namely reproduction. Due to this, a higher order of complex expression is expected. This is not a post on the evolutionary process, though. For further reading, see Richard Dawkins' excellent The Blind Watchmaker, which tackles exactly this issue in some depth. I just wanted to point out that once the argument changes to include life, the analogy is now so incorrect as to be laughable.

All that is needed to dispel the Watchmaker argument is the destruction of a single false analogy. This is a pervasive kind of argument, though, and one that you should keep an eye out for, and one that you should try not to repeat. Keep your apples with your apples and your oranges alone.

Be Well,
Chris.

Not all Faiths are Created Equal

I'd like to say something that is really, really unpopular among atheists: sometimes faith and religion are helpful.

It is the intent of this blog to show, and it is my personal philosophy, that faith is dangerous and less useful than reason. This feeling is likely shared by most atheists reading this. There is a tendency, though, among the faithless to deride all faith equally -- to be so completely incapable of accepting others' faith that any potential benefit from it is ignored.

As an example, consider two faith-based organizations: The Salvation Army and the Church of Scientology. From an intellectual and philosophical perspective, I consider the underpinnings of both groups equally ridiculous. Xenu's DC-8's are about as likely as Christ's ascension. They are both groups of people operating under what I consider a delusion for a concerted goal.

This is where, unfortunately, a lot of atheists get tripped up. Atheism is a radical stance in this country, and generally those who identify themselves as atheists can (and do!) defend their position fiercely. As a result, anything belonging to the mystical, religious, or faith-based realm is often condemned out of hand -- the logical proposition is untenable, ergo the result is unsupported.

But is this wise? The Salvation Army does a lot of real, measurable good despite being one of the more hard-line charities around. Ought they be lumped together with more dangerous "faiths" like Scientology*? The common sense answer is of course not.

Again, I think we (I presume to speak for atheists here) ought to disagree with all faiths equally, but temper our responses in a pragmatic and reasonable way. For example, I support the Christian Children's Fund. I don't care for the fact that they attempt to convert the children they help in third-world countries, but I can't ignore the fact that they are the largest and most successful children's charity in the world. Were I interested in supporting critical reasoning outreach (and I am), I would support NASS or the JREF (and I do). When I want to help starving children, though, the CCF is the most reasonable choice.

That's all I'm advocating here. Use the same reason and logic that tells you that faith is a dangerous and misleading thing to figure out that sometimes it needs to be tolerated, sometimes debated, sometimes fought, and sometimes destroyed.

Much more importantly than which charities you choose to support is keeping this idea in mind when dealing with people of faith. As we've discussed before, it is nearly impossible to dissuade a person of faith via argument. Faith is a component of identity, and people do not change easily (if ever). Again, the temptation for the atheist is to write a believer off entirely. It is easy to look down your nose at someone with whom you so fundamentally disagree.

Just understand that for many religious people it is their beliefs that provide the framework for the person they wish to be. If a particular belief gives them their impetus to be good or kind, then there is at least something positive coming from it. You are much better served in these situations not by deriding them as stupid or ignorant, but with a tolerant, reasoned approach. Lead by example. Show that a kind, caring life is possible without faith. Talk to them about the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic morality (next week's post!).

But don't start banging on about the Crusades or the Inquisition. Biblical reductionism will start a fight. Highlighting the failures of Papal infallibility will not help your case.

Please, please try to keep clear the idea that this whole issue is more complicated than "faith = bad" and that being a good atheist and person means not missing the forest for the trees. If we're the reasonable ones, we should act like it; and rejecting anything religious outright is unreasonable.

Be well,
Chris.



* As an aside, it is currently very fashionable to hate Scientology. My point here relates only to the facts that CoS has done measurable harm -- intentionally brainwashing the defenseless, illegally detaining people, manipulating the tax code, etc. This is not an ideological position at all.