Correlation vs Causation (2015 edition, Part 3)

Alternate title: Nietzsche’s Problems with Scientific Racist Nazis

The third section of this article starts off with a bang leveling so many unfounded claims that the Bullshit Per Sentence ratio in that first paragraph reaches Fox News levels.

The problem with having the answer to a question asked is that so often you are ignored. I am not the first to posit a morality based on mutually assured survival (one would think the acronym MAS would resonate a little with the religious crowd, no?). Given Evolution seeks survival, and people working together survive best, I can’t see why I should have so much trouble selling this as a sort of prevailing morality.

Anyway, this author is stuck to the idea that saying you do something “Because Science,” is some sort of binding holy oath, and if one person happens to say “Science shows racism is the cool thing to do,” all other scientists are now (for some reason) obligated to agree.

I don’t understand the thought process here. As I’ve mentioned before, saying you’ve done something in the name of science does not indicate that any science has, in fact, been done. (Yes, I will use science as a verb. You can’t stop me.) While Nazis may have claimed their racism has roots in science, no data was shown. Where were the experiments? The predictive capabilities? Oh, the Nazis did plenty of experiments, but very little data was found regarding racism. We did learn a TON about the human body, and you are welcome to throw that out if moral grounds require it of you — I don’t condone what the Nazis did, but it cannot be undone, and their actions (ironically) have probably saved or improved more lives than World War II ended. That, dear author, was done in the name of science. Science gone mad, science gone wrong, but that is science — experiments were done, data was collected, predictions made, and treatments for a huge variety of diseases or conditions were created.

And in all of that, nothing data-wise to show that the Aryan Race was genetically anything other than “A bunch of white guys.”

Another issue I take with this author is his use of “liberal morality” as some sort of talisman, as if it is liberals only who have a different idea of morality, as compared to conservatives. Please allow me to paint a picture, using only a few words, and you can tell me why it is liberal or conservative, or why my version of morality is in some way skewed.

Evolution has a goal of continued survival -> Survival is easier in groups -> Larger groups survive better -> To have a large group, you must get along (more or less) -> To get along, you must help each other.

The terminating point there is more important than I can probably ever describe. What I do, to make others happy, to try to get along, to empathize and help, to love and like and assist, all of that moves towards a goal of social cohesion, of group survival. But it doesn’t have to end here — if we accepted those of other nationalities, of other creeds, of other social groups, we could ensure the survival of not just our group but of our planet. If the Russians and Americans and Chinese would just treat each other with due respect, give each other the benefit of human decency, we wouldn’t have to be afraid of any wars — a year from now, ten, one hundred, one thousand. That is why I will try to press my morality against yours, against those who would quote Leviticus and hate gays, over those in all centuries up to and including the 21st, who quote the Bible as supporting their right to own foreign slaves, to those who enforce border guarding with force–that force extending to murder.

Is there really anything so futile as killing people because of invisible lines that someone several hundred years ago drew? This isn’t purely about religious morality, this extends beyond it, to being a kind human to those even if the Bible doesn’t tell you that you have to.

And there’s the rub; people will be nice to those they grew up with, hate those that the Bible tells them to hate (As the WBC has informed me), and then treat with general indifference, to the worsening of our entire planet, anyone outside of the above two groups.

And my “liberal morality” is “highly questionable” as per the article. I can’t even describe how sad that thought process makes me.

The author then makes a claim that the New Atheists wish for a world where religion never existed, but this is purely academic. It doesn’t matter if they want that or not, they can’t have it, so let’s not even waste breath and distract each other with talking about it. I don’t want a world where religion never existed–I don’t even care for a world in which religion doesn’t exist going forward… All I want is a world where all humans are just decent to each other, regardless of race, religion, creed, nationality, gender, sexual orientation… How about we treat each other decently based on the highest order thing we all share; species. We are all humans, and as far as your God is concerned, I think we are all equally human and equally culpable for our own actions.

The problem I have is that too many people rely on religion for their horrible motivations. Oh, I realize that saying “I do this for God,” is just as vacuous to you as “I do this because science,” is to me. The problem is that while science has strict codes of conduct regarding what actually counts as science, the Bible is a mess, a hodgepodge of conflicting language and ideas–it makes it easy for you to quote a Bible verse regarding your own morality while I can counter with a Bible verse supporting my own version. As far as Biblical morality, perhaps it is you who will settle the ages old argument that Jesus and Paul had as to whether or not Christians should follow Jewish law. (And for those who have not read the Bible recently, Jesus unequivocally says during the Sermon on the Mount that, and I am quoting here, “¹⁷“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. ¹⁸For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.¹⁹Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. ²⁰For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:17-21)) Now, some have claimed that “until all is accomplished” means “Until Jesus died and was resurrected,” but that point was clarified with “Until Heaven and Earth disappear,” which has obviously not happened. Some people even like to quote Matthew 5:17,18.5, completely ignoring the part about Heaven and Earth.

So until I see you sacrificing Doves every day you are ill, we can both agree that what counts as righteous and even moral in the Bible is no more immune to scrutiny than my own version.

And here, speaking directly of Nietzsche’s atheism, there is another correlation/causation fallacy. To go one level deeper, it is a chicken first or egg first debate. Did modern moral ideals come from religion, or did religion merely codify existing modes of thought? I know I don’t know the answer, but it has been a very long time since an evangelical elephant preached to me, but I know that an elephant sacrificed himself for the goodness of his herd in 1894, and there is not one iota of evidence to show that he was Christian. If morals come universally from religious texts, I would challenge the religious apologetic to tell me by what method birds were taught the methods of reciprocal altruism. One may say that they were put in birds by God during creation, but then I have to raise the same point as I did in part 2; how did God select which species got morals that humans would identify with, and which species are morally bankrupt? Again, evolution ties this ribbon beautifully, but I am certainly open to your making an attempt at it.

“The idea that the human species is striving to achieve any purpose or goal – a universal state of freedom or justice, say – presupposes a pre-Darwinian, teleological way of thinking that has no place in science.”

I don’t even know where to start with this sentence. Religion does not exist in a bubble, free from scientific principles–evolution existed before Darwin wrote of it, and whether religious adherents recognized it or not, they were agents of that overarching idea through all of history. Remember how I mentioned that evolution favors group survival tactics in many species? What is religion if not a group of like-minded individuals. Also, this sentence tries to place some sort of overarching goal on us of the author’s devising, despite the fact that a master goal already exists: To Survive.

Below that overarching master goal there are group goals and personal goals, but there is no other species-wide goal save to survive and pass our genes on to the next generation of survivors.

Since the goal of which he speaks doesn’t exist, one can brush away his assertion of presupposing a pre-Darwinian way of thinking. To quote Ron Swanson “Everything I do is what an award winner would do, for I have won an award.” Religion has a huge place in evolution, a place without which the human species may have fractured and died — but that does not forgive the Crusades, or the Inquisition. That does not forgive 9/11, or any of the subsequent bombings. That does not forgive the 2011 Norwegian Massacre. And just because we did need religion does not mean we do need religion.

Please permit me a metaphor:

When learning to swim, I needed water wings. Later in my life, I did not require water wings.

Religion is our moral water wings, but now we are racing against people who are good at swimming. Anyone wearing a flotation device can tell you that swimming at speed is almost impossible while wearing it–it may have helped before, but relying on the Bible for morals has been holding us back in recent decades. I am not saying abolish religion, but perhaps you can take off the water wings for a lap and see how moral you can be without the Book of Leviticus and its many Abominations.

It is at this point that I have to point out why my version of morality is so likely to succeed and make predictions based on that assertion. In a racist morality based on “science”, it can be predicted that only one race should survive, and that requires the death of many other humans, not of your selected race. How do you prove that those humans are less deserving of life than you? You cannot, therefore you reach a brick wall, a place where no amount of posturing and rhetoric can unstick you.

With an evolutionary morality based on mutually assured survival, and strong group cohesion within the entire human species, where is the brick wall? Where do I have to make an unfounded assertion requiring the rhetoric of a salesman to break through? As the group of morally bound people slowly grows, eventually all are members of the group, cared for and appreciated by every other member of the group. Mutual care and appreciate leading to mutual happiness. Eventually, the happiness of all members, in a perfect world.

I realize the world isn’t perfect, but in the morality of group happiness, I think malefactors will be punished very similarly to how they are today. There will still be racism, I know I can’t stamp that out with flowery optimism. But without set boundaries (you can only live with us if you accept our God(s)), I think the global community could grow much more quickly than it is today.

That being said, religion (despite its strict dogmas and threats of hell) has been unable, over 10000 years or more of human history, to curb our tribal instincts and desire to kill — and I doubt my way would have any greater success. The only thing that would be gained by eliminating religion would be to remove one more reason fanatics use to kill each other. And that is my pessimistic thought for the day.

Correlation vs Causation (2015 edition, Part 2)

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

My continuing response to this article telling me what New Atheists fear.

My last piece of commentary on this article was related to the notion that the very things Christians accuse Atheists of, they, too, are guilty of. That is a double edged sword, I am happy to admit — a realistic self appraisal should note one’s own weaknesses. Often, atheists are equally in breach of what they accuse Christians of doing.

But that’s… That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Why can’t our moral breaches be “because we are human,” rather than “because of what we believe about what happens after we die”?

Of course, I’d like to expand that thought and leave the reader an exercise in the process. The Catholic Priests who have been accused (and those whose victims produced tangible proofs)–did they engage in latent homosexual pedophilia because they were Catholic? (Protestants, your vote may carry less weight here… Also, that was a joke.) Did Hitler kill the Jews because he was a Catholic? Even if you want to argue against his religiosity, he claimed religion as his motive, his basis — if you are going to hold Stalin as an example of “A man who outright said he did these things because he was Atheist,” you actually open the door for the Hitler counterpoint, because Hitler said in a speech regarding culling the Jewish population, “As a Christian, I Feel that My Lord and Savior was a Fighter” . Let’s look at the individuals is what I am saying here — no one would accuse Hitler or Stalin of being particularly sane or reasonable.

Perhaps it was a weakness of my Christianity that had me drift almost inexorably away from the Church, but I never understood the pervading thought that God need be at the center of all parts of your life. I think politics is where this shines both most brightly, and yet appears black as pitch.

People are easily sold when an idea is framed well — I think the Republican promise to terminate the Estate Tax during the 2012 election cycle is a particularly disturbing example. Mitt Romney was speaking to a group of people that ranged from fairly poor to upper middle class, and he exclaimed to great applause “Tax was already paid on that estate! The government shouldn’t take money for something already paid for!” What he did not mention is that the Estate Tax only comes into play for inheritance greater than $5.4 million, and that this change would affect literally zero of the people cheering for it, while presumably reducing the available tax revenue for critical services such as maintenance of highways, federal infrastructure spending, federal spending on health and education — all things so incredibly important, and already over burdened and over budget. This was a bit of an aside, but it just goes to show that things can be packaged and sold easily.

Where this gets particularly difficult is with cardinal sins. Many Christians are staunchly pro-life (the no exceptions type, such as in the case of rape or incest), so any politician can slide in a great deal of otherwise incredibly negative (or outright sinful) legislation under the very wide shadow created by their pro-life stance. I am not so ignorant as to say all religious people are single issue voters, but I know for a fact that many are — I have a family member who could hear “I will vote pro-life in every case!” And then vote for that person in every election, even if that was followed up with “And to do it, I will cut food aid for starving countries, cut spending on education, cut spending on healthcare (thus causing far more deaths than ‘abortion in the case of rape’ could possibly account for), and then kick a puppy!”

You may think I am being overly cynical, but I’ve spoken to this family member, using very similar language, and she stands by abortion as the definitive portion of the previous scenario.

In much the same way, Republicans have framed the political landscape to be “We are the party of Christ, look how pro-life we are! And look how much the democrats ignore the Bible!” The United States are still overwhelmingly Christian, and given various lawsuits that have been raised in various places in the States it can be inferred that “Separation of Church and State” only applies to non-Christian (read: heathen) religions in many cases. Note, please, the wording; I did not say all, and I did not say most, but definitely religion is enshrined in the current political landscape.

But under the shadow of Pro-Life, they have cut what they call “Entitlement” spending, because a single mother working three jobs and still needing food stamps can obviously be described using the exact same words as a 16 year old who gets a Porsche for her birthday instead of the Ferrari she asked for. The first is spending that protects those in need. The second is, much more clearly, “entitlement”. But that’s not the package all of this is being sold under.

This is a personal question, but I have always wondered (given the liberal use of “Entitlement spending” to describe things such as food stamps and universal healthcare) where the line can be drawn. Where do entitlement and charity cross? I mean, if the government gave money to Iraq, that is considered “Charity” and “Foreign Aid,” but where they give it to their own people it becomes “Entitlement”? Is that the line, people within the borders are worse? Why is it Charity when a Church sends missionaries to third world countries to improve infrastructure, but when a government does that same thing, it is considered a waste in so many cases? And a flagrant abuse of taxpayer dollars when done within the country’s borders?

Why did I go on that political rant? Because the author states: “It’s inconceivable that a professed unbeliever could become president of the United States.” I would say that statement is too passive; “It is inconceivable that anyone not professing a strong Christian doctrine could become president of the United States,” would be more accurate I think. But why?

If candidate A proposed the exact same legislation of candidate B, why should a belief in God tip the scales? If you say a belief in God gives you a stronger core morality, why have so many republicans who profess Christianity been caught in extramarital homosexual sex scandals? Or, to quote again the Catholic priests who are now convicted pedophiles, would one of them going into politics poll favorably? A pedophile versus an atheist?

Again I say, look to the actions of a man, and his words, not his private beliefs about an afterlife. As nearly as I can tell, my morals are very near to Christian values, yet I have no belief in an afterlife, and that discredits my place in public discourse in the United States. Why is that? I can’t say I understand it. And I haven’t even had a sex scandal yet!

The author calls into question the shifting moral zeitgeist, stating that atheists in the 19th and early 20th century believes some obviously illiberal things, therefore who’s to say that what we believe now won’t be irrelevant in 70 years more?

Here’s the thing, Christianity is (again) prey to the same foibles; slave owners used the Bible as justification. The Golden Rule, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, has been called timeless… But my own personal statement, “to bring more happiness into the world than I take out of it,” and to attempt to minimize any negative impact I may have on others in my life, can be expanded universally. If we all cared for each other as much as we professed to, the world would be an amazing place.

I am about to give you two statements. See if you can spot the difference:

“It’s probably just as well that the current generation of atheists seems to know so little of the longer history of atheist movements. When they assert that science can bridge fact and value, they overlook the many incompatible value-systems that have been defended in this way.”

“It’s probably just as well that the current generation of Christians seems to know so little of the longer history of Christian movements. When they assert that religion can bridge fact and value, they overlook the many incompatible value-systems that have been defended in this way.”

I’d like to think that point makes itself, but Christianity defended slavery, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition. Hitler framed the Holocaust using his own personal Catholic belief.

His own personal belief. Now here’s the fun question: How do you know your beliefs are the right ones? Hitler thought his were. They were evil. Stalin thought his were. They were evil.

So here’s an idea, you may find it crazy, but I came up with this idea, where we get people together, we don’t even ask what their religion is, and talk about how we can increase the happiness of the entire populace. And then see what happens! (Pro tip: half the people will be racist, the rest sexist. Because humans are generally pretty terrible. If you don’t fully believe me, allow the people to attend anonymously, see how they act when no one knows their name.)

“How could any increase in scientific knowledge validate values such as human equality and personal autonomy? The source of these values is not science. In fact, as the most widely-read atheist thinker of all time argued, these quintessential liberal values have their origins in monotheism.”

I, too, can make unfounded claims and then say “I have a source!” and then not tell you what that source is!

Mocking aside, altruism and reciprocal altruism has been observed in many species outside of the human race. Various primates and some birds (everyone needs to learn more about Crows!!!) have what appears to be a sense of justice, or at least a propensity to shame members who break certain rules that we would generally link to morality. If you are sticking with “God given morals,” I would ask “Why would God have given the same moral set to about half of a percent of species?”

I can explain group dynamics to a degree using science. Explain to me your side, and I will direct you (again) to various works of biologists. I am most familiar with the works of Dawkins, are are many–and I don’t mean The God Delusion, that is an offshoot. He is a professional biologist, and most of his published works are related directly to the science of biology, and too many people forget that. I seem to recall a saying that could explain it: “A man can raise sheep for 20 years, and be a shepherd… But if he speaks once against religion, he is now only an atheist.”

I’ve raised several questions, and summarized the first half of the top linked article exactly. I think that is a good place to end this part. Obviously, there’s more to come.

Correlation vs Causation (2015 edition, Part 1)

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

I think I may have used this title for a blog post before, but I’ll bet I spelled it differently, thus it is COMPLETELY UNIQUE.

In any case, this specific post is in relation to this article, whose author claims to know what has New Atheists all up in a tizzy. I — it is difficult to know where to start. Going through the article from top to bottom has proven surprisingly lacking in usefulness. I am going to start with a line that the author got amazingly correct, and I assure you, by reading context it was obviously accidental.

“In fact there are no reliable connections – whether in logic or history – between atheism, science and liberal values.” That is perfectly correct. I am an atheist. I am also a liberal. Further to that, I also believe science holds the answers to many questions over which religion attempts to claim absolute dominion. That being the case, and all of that being true, I would still never say my atheism led me to science, that my science led me to being liberal, or any other iterations of that web. These are independent areas of my life.

What led me to losing God was the inability of Christians to answer my questions. For my long time readers, you will remember (I hope) that I am still open to returning to the fold, should I receive satisfactory answers to so many of my questions. If you want to bring me back to the Light, I’d recommend starting with my blog post from yesterday, and answering what it is that would allow for men and women to be born with psychopathy; a complete lack of empathy, and almost no morals to speak of built into them. It’s ok, I’ll wait.

Back to the core point, though; why should my atheism ever be brought into the conversation when we are talking about human rights, or politics, or anything else? I do not support human rights because I am atheist, in the same way I hope your religion is not the only reason you support human rights. Were I to show incontrovertible proof that God did not exist, would you immediately support torture programs? To flip that, if you were to show me incontrovertible proof that God does exist, it would not affect my life. I like to live a good life, give to charities where I can afford it, show empathy to those in pain. That would not change, God or no, and even I would not accuse the average person, saying thus: “You are only moral because of God!”

So why is it so easy for so many Evangelical Christians to say “You support eugenics because you are an Atheist?”

That brings me, then, to the title. Atheists have done some awful things in the past. They have said some awful things. So have Christians. For some reason, many Evangelical Christians are oddly comfortable with saying “Stalin was an atheist, and look at what he did,” but will completely reverse their stance when you say “The Pope was a Christian, and look at the Spanish Inquisition!”

“Obviously,” they reply, “That Pope was a bad Christian.” Or, another tack, “We’ve made mistakes, but we’re better now!” They are allowed to say this, but when I say “I am in no way related to Stalin, I do not support Stalin’s views and methods, and I do not follow some core doctrine of atheism,” I am accused of at least one of several things. The first is the odd accusation of “If you don’t believe in God, how can you believe in anything! If you don’t believe in anything, you will believe everything!” (I think that is one of Eric Hovind’s favorite quotes.) I am accused of being some kind of passive atheist, that if I don’t have some kind of leadership in my beliefs, I can, again, believe in anything. That I am subject to my own whims. That my violent, baser nature can be curbed only by God, and that (this next one is a little bit hyperbole) I am a murderer waiting to happen because I don’t have God in my life to stop me.

I will concede that, as an atheist, there is no higher power to stop me from killing a hundred people then myself. There is no afterlife, no eternity in hell. That being said, what about Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre? In the name of God those men and women died. Oh, a corrupted version of God, not any recognizable form of Christianity, but that leads me to my next point.

People have been good in the past without God, and people have been evil in the past with God. Going into the future, people will do good in the name of God, and in the future people will do good in the name of humanity.

But that’s the rub; if someone supports eugenics, there seems to be some press to put a religious spin on it. But it can exist completely independent of religion. While you may have a block that prevents this thought from occurring to you, I would like to walk you through a thought experiment.

Imagine a world where there is no cancer. We never found a treatment for it, it just went away. There is no ALS, there is no Huntington’s disease. Not one person is born with Down’s Syndrome, not one person born with a deformity. The average life expectancy is pushing 100 years, and in the later stages of life a 95 year old is easily as spry and active as a 55 year old today.

This is all easily achievable in two generations, by my own layman’s estimation. All it requires is some light selective breeding on the part of humans. Maybe a taste of Eugenics.

Do I support eugenics? No, not personally. That being said, independent of religion, I understand that the benefits of it could be vast.

So why does an article like the above linked exist? Why is it that anyone today is allowed to say “Well, Haekel was an atheist, therefore everything he said and did was done and said because of his atheism”?

The author continues, hitting another accidental mark if only because of phrasing, “When organised as a movement and backed by the power of the state, atheist ideologies have been an integral part of despotic regimes that also claimed to be based in science, such as the former Soviet Union.” (Emphasis mine.)

I can say “I am murdering you for science!” I could say that, and it would be meaningless. Equally meaningless were Stalin’s plans, his policies, where he tried to back them with science. Where Haekel claimed that “… Other races are inferior scientifically,” he produced no evidence. He had no scientific standing.

His statement held as much water under scrutiny, an EQUAL AMOUNT, to when Jim Jones said “I do this because God told me to.” There is no evidence, no backing. No reason to take that statement as anything other than the idle personal speculations of a man who did not have the data he required (or had a surplus of crazy, as the case may be). Was Haekel an atheist? Yes. Were there racist atheists? Yes. But, and this may surprise you, there were also racist Christians. Please, keep yourself calm, these types of revelations can change your world–but it’s OK, everything will settle down with time.

The funny thing is that while Haekel baselessly claimed his racism had scientific backing, the Christian racists backed their racism in various Old Testament verses. Some of them believe that skin color (specifically, darker skin color) may even be the Mark of Cain! (And before you tell me that it is only Mormons who believe that, my Catholic Grandfather will preach the same idea to his death, I am sure.) And yet, so many seem blind to the apparent blatant cognitive dissonance.

The article linked is very long, and there is a lot to cover yet — and I will, again, put Part 1 up and then never follow up. There is much more to be said, and I hope I find time to say it all.

The Way Things Are

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

“Don’t worry, guys! I am writing a series! I won’t take a 1 week break!” And it wasn’t even a lie, because I accidentally took 2.5 weeks off. Goood times.

Some days, my head is in worse condition than others, and while this blog has generally been my own personal self-therapy, I just couldn’t make myself write. It isn’t even that I haven’t been writing, I have just been so unsatisfied with what I was writing that I couldn’t bear to publish it. Also, I hate that WordPress moved the settings and options to the left when it used to be on the right.

As Facebook has proven, the smallest changes cause the most irrational anger, for at least a week or two, then everything is ok again. Well, theoretically–I’ve been using the left side bar for a few weeks now, and I still hate it.

My complaining aside, I couldn’t actually publish a post without content, and Creation Today hosted a blog post that was everything I have been talking about since I started this blog, but inverted. I tried to find the original version of that post (pingbacks are the heart of blogging) but it seems to be hidden somewhere.

Onto the meat, though, in that this is a very intelligent writer who, unfortunately, seems very prone to literal application of rhetoric. The part that irked me so was his understanding of morality, and his literal application of “Stardust shooting holes in stardust.” If you’ve not read it, I believe he is referencing the legendary quote by Carl Sagan that “We are all star stuff,” so shooting each other should have no bounds in morality–but this shows a complete lack of understanding in evolutionary morality. I really wanted to link to the source article because I had hoped that it would give my article even the smallest chance of being read by the original author–I think he is capable of critical thought, the switch is just stuck in the off position.

Again, in the off chance that he may read this post some day, I will explain morality from a purely scientific standpoint (though Sam Harris has done it better, in his own militant New Atheist kind of way). Dawkins has also tackled the issue more indirectly, though it is a vein of silver that runs through all of his books and ideas.

The short version is this: evolution is about survival. Our world is complicated and difficult to survive in. Therefore, to maximize chance for survival, we must live in groups. To live in groups, we must have something akin to a ruleset of morality. Throughout the over 3 billion year history of evolution, most, but not all, immorality has been thrown out. That being said, there are some glaring oversights in evolution’s wide scope, and I think they prove evolution rather than prove morals inscribed upon our soul by an Almighty God.

The first is sexual infidelity. Males are generally more susceptible to this, and evolution explains it very well where “morals placed upon our soul by God” does not. If God put these morals in our soul, why are so many so quick to violate them? Why are clergymen prey to them so easily? Why would God write such a power of lust into us that it overrides the morals He put into us?

Evolution explains it well, and it even explains why males tend to be more susceptible. Women are susceptible, too, but to a lesser extent. Women are only capable of reproduction during a certain percentage of the time, a relatively small percentage–and once successful reproduction has occurred, they are unable to reproduce continually while pregnant. For a woman, instinctually, it is preferable to have a male counterpart who will remain present to assist in the upbringing of a child. Males, however, are capable of almost constant reproduction from the time they hit puberty until the time they die, and evolution wants them to. If they could impregnate 1000 women, their progeny would almost guarantee the survival of his genes. For a man, successful reproduction is less about caring for a single offspring as is it is about having enough offspring that (to quote an American colloquialism) their genes are “Too big to fail.”

To that end, men’s eyes wander, searching for more potential mates.

It is not a romantic notion, I have to agree. That being said, it explains why men and women must fight with their own sexual urges, rather than merely relying on God given morality. Science explains our sins, if sins they be, where religion just raises at least one further question: Why did God do such a hack job of making moral humans?

Oh, you can quote The Fall, the Curse of Sin all you want–the reason that argument does not hold water for long is simple: if God is omniscient, He knew humans would eat of the tree before He created humans… And yet He created us in the Garden, by the Tree anyway? That is a parent leaving a 15 year old at home alone, saying “Don’t go into the liquor cabinet, which we’ve left unlocked, and that you can reach easily!” And, of course, with similarly predictable results.

Now we move on to the Monkeysphere. For those not familiar with it, it is currently the modern distillation of Dunbar’s Number, which describes the number of people in your life that you are capable of truly caring about. Before you get up in arms, saying I can’t put a number on such a thing, describe to me your reaction to the thought (or, if it has happened, the event) of your mother dying. Now describe to me your thought of, say, Bill O’Reilly dying. I’ll bet one is outright anguish, and the other is… Well, I suppose that depends on your political leanings. The point is this; if our morals are universal, granted by God, what is it that should cause me to care more about my dogs than, say, cousin Chuck who lives in Albuquerque? (Oh yes, I know about your cousin Chuck!)

The answer, again, lies in evolution. As before, we are programmed to survive in groups by our survival instincts, but we evolved only to live in groups about 100 large. In a world of universal love impressed upon my soul by God, why should I cry more for the death of my cat than I did for the 200,000 who died in the Indonesian Tsunami of 2005? Cry more for the ills felt by my dog than for the 800,000 who were left homeless and starving? And before you call me callous or cruel, did you cry? What was your reaction to 9/11, if you were old enough to have truly been aware of it? I am sure it was a bit of stunned shock, but not nearly so much as the stunned shock you felt when your first pet died. If you never had a pet, then the death of a beloved family member. If you have never felt either of those losses, wait–they will come, and you will realize that love is not universal, it cannot be, by the limits set upon our human brains by evolution.

I think I’ve covered this in implication, but I’d like to cover it explicitly. The author writes “Some will then go on to argue that right and wrong is just what is beneficial to society. But why is benefiting society right?”

The reason is this: the entire goal of evolution is survival of the species. Through 3 billion years of mixing genetic code (FOR SCIENCE!) evolution has come to the conclusion that survival depends on more than just you and your monkeysphere. Protecting the survival of the gene is the highest order goal of evolution, therefore evolution has programmed into us a sense of empathy. The thing about evolution is that while it is masterful at what it does, genetics is complicated enough that other things slip through the cracks; psychopathy, sociopathy, people simply lacking in empathy, a callous disregard for the well being of other humans independent of the above conditions… I can explain those, using both recessive genes and large numbers, allowing for undesirable traits to continue to replicate. The most unfortunate part is how our empathy does not just allow for replication of undesirable traits, but how our empathy enables it. I am not here to preach for the application of Eugenics, my own personal sense of empathy would never allow for it, but the coldly logical part of my brain does realize that the human race could be drastically improved by … Well, if I complete that sentence I know it will be held against me, despite my not agreeing with it.

The funny thing is how much evolution is often in conflict with the teachings of the Bible. Homosexuality is an easy one, a low hanging fruit for me to grasp, and wow–that sentence got weird quickly. In any case, there is evidence that homosexuality may exist at the gene level. This next part is hilarious to me; the stance of the Church that homosexuality is a choice, and the idea that they can be forced to be heterosexual, is basically allowing the homosexual gene to not just propagate in the species, but spread and grow. I’d be willing to bet the percentage of the homosexual population in the Church is a growing statistic, though I don’t have that number.

Man, if it turns out definitively that homosexuality is genetic, and the Church has been forcing homosexuals to reproduce against their instincts… Man, the Church will have so much egg on its face.

“There is no logic behind this, because there is no explanation as to why benefiting society is the correct thing to do.” No, Mr Writer, that is not true — and even a cursory reading of only the most popular books on evolution (A great place to start, as always, is “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins. It is a book purely on science, lacking most of his later vitriol) will show you that even in the 1970s we had an idea of why benefiting society is a personal benefit to the survival of the entire species. We don’t just know, at this point, we’ve plumbed those depths at length.

“But what about the atheist? If it was simply stardust blowing holes in stardust, then what reason is there to cry? What reason is there to demand justice?” Oh dear, we are getting deep into the rabbit hole now, aren’t we, Alice? Most atheists witnessing a random murder will not cry, I will give you that, but shock and horror, disgust, and empathy for the victim? Those, certainly, we will feel at witnessing this–for we have empathy as well as you do. The only difference is that varying strengths of empathy, various emotional dispositions are easily explained by evolution, where I have never heard of a good reason why a psychopath should exist in a world where morals and emotions are impressed upon our soul by God.

To clarify, a psychopath will often have no empathy at all, their actions have no mental repercussions. They are not someone who made poor choices and ended up doing something awful–they were born without the ability to understand why what they do is awful. Did God just miss them? Forget to give them morals? Some serial killers who turned out to be psychopaths, who killed 10 people, each of those with 50 friends and family to mourn their losses… God just forgot to give them morals like the rest of us, and because of that a rough guess at 500 lives being ruined? Explain that.

I can explain it through evolution, but can you explain it through God?

Passive Christianity, Part 1

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

There is an eternal war within Christianity, one that will never end so long as rich people want to stay rich, so long as the government exists, so long as Christianity exists. It is a war about the message of Jesus, a war with intelligent men and women on all sides, and a war I cannot fully comprehend.

Does Christianity teach socialism?

As those on my facebook are likely aware, I tripped upon Libertarian Christian Doctrine yesterday, and I simply don’t understand their reading of the Bible at a surface level. I am trying to remedy that by reading their primer. The very first thing they say, the starting point for their Christian foundations, is the war I just mentioned, whether or not Socialism was on Jesus’ radar.

To be fair, a very literal, very strict, very passive reading of Jesus’ words allows for this. Oh, you don’t think I should be using literal, strict, and passive to describe the same thing? Please allow me to justify myself.

The core of their argument rests upon whether Jesus preached mandatory or optional charity, and as all things on this topic, references Acts chapter 4 as a passage in the Bible that they consider to be misleading unless read with the correct frame of mind (as opposed to those who think God is not a God of confusion, of course). Acts 4 speaks of the early Christian Church charitably selling their possessions, a la Jonestown (negative connotations obviously intended), to support the group. They didn’t do this because they had to (as a function of a command, I suppose, as obviously they did this out of necessity), but because of the charitable spirit of Christianity.

I think the thing that people forget is that we use the term Charity far differently than they would back in the day. To them, the closest thing they could understand in our modern world to charity would likely have been a soup kitchen; aside from various religious sects, you didn’t just hand your money over to anyone and expect then that they would care for the people you wanted them to care for. At least, I have no historical knowledge of the “Save the Lepers” foundation around the turn of the first millennium, but that is obviously open to dispute by someone who knows of such a charity. The thing is, prior to Jesus, the Church was a form of government where God was merely analogous to President or Emperor, or your chosen title. God laid down laws, and while many may believe that the Ten Commandments are those laws, they have likely never read Leviticus or Deuteronomy. Those two books have laws so strict and so in violation of the idea of liberty that I can’t believe any Libertarian ever made it through them to the New Testament (if you are of the opinion that “I should be able to drink and drive if I want, and the consequences be upon my shoulders,” I wonder if you recall how strict Jewish Law was in how drinking was performed, or what they are allowed to dress in, or how sick people are to be “handled.”).

This brings us to the next battleground, whether the Old Testament law matters at all, whether we should be talking about it. Everyone seems to agree that the Ten Commandments apply, but Leviticus and Deuteronomy are traditionally (though not historically) attributed to the same man who wrote the Ten Commandments, the person of Moses. There is some argument over the meaning and context of Matthew 5:18, for example. What does that mean, “until all is accomplished”? Well, if you take it out of context, people obviously assume that means “Until Jesus rises to heaven,” and thus done is done, all is accomplished, and we don’t have to follow the Law! Huzzah! But wait, what’s that other part in the same verse?

“Until heaven and earth pass away”? That is harder to explain away, and it seems Jesus (and certainly James his Brother), both agreed that the Old Testament should be adhered to in every tenet. Well damn, this is awkward, right? And, can you believe it, this is a line during the Sermon on the Mount. Tough to ignore that kind of gravitas.

There is a retreat of sorts used by most people who are trying to argue The Law out modern discourse, in that St Paul wrote (Romans 7:1-6), in stark, almost perfect contrast to Jesus, that we are freed from the law (Galatians 3:13). Now, I would challenge a person to find where Jesus even so much as implied this sentiment? And why we take it as Gospel truth despite literally not appearing in the Gospels? And why Paul is allowed to create doctrine that has no previous basis? In word-for-word contrast to Jesus’ teaching that the Law is to be adhered to, even so much as the Pharisees, to exceed them in Righteousness, on pain of Hell?

But this is where the intersection gets very interesting, and I could talk about this for days, for years. I can quote Jesus, and my general modern Christian opposition can quote Paul, and they are both incredibly potent quotes. The side you take depends on the baggage you bring to the table. Reading it and wanting to believe purely in the loving message of Jesus, one will obviously side with Paul. Those who are truly Christian fundamentalists should understand that the Early Christian Church practiced Jewish Tradition. These were Christians, in the earliest sense of the word, who had a schism with Jews, but still believed Jewish law was binding.

So long as the Bible is in conflict with itself, there is no end to the war, for both sides have the greatest soldier on their side, fighting the other side… The soldier of God’s word. What I want to know is how God’s word is considered a sharp, potent weapon when it cuts both ways so equally.

I’ve only gone two levels deep in this discussion, and I already have a blog length post going on here. I am going to read more into this Libertarian Christian movement, see if I can find anything more in alignment with my own interpretation of the Bible, and then post my thoughts for all both of my readers to ponder.

This is obviously not a conclusion, which means I can make a series to this effect. This should be fun! I will write more about it, because I need to lay a lot more ground work before I can write a proper conclusion, before I can touch all the points I’ve brought up with some sort of finality of explanation. I hope you don’t mind, especially since this basically means I won’t be having any one week breaks in the near future!

Anyway, see you next time.

To Tweak the Design

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

The below is a plea for help in understanding … something. I don’t even know what it is I could understand. I would like to understand your belief, theoretical Christian reader. It may help me return to the Church. I want to understand the mind of God, but I know all I generally get is platitudes about no one understanding His plan, so I guess that is off the table. I want to understand the Bible better, but my questions are difficult, they are hard, they are pointed, they are directed. Please help me answer them, if you can, it would help me return to the Church, if such a thing is even remotely possible any more…

“Everything according to His plan,” a refrain often stated when worst meets worse to comfort those affected. I don’t want to take away the comfort you feel, but I do want to know what it is about this that gives you comfort. What is God’s design?

I’ve written about my opinions on this several times in the past, but I thought I’d take another crack at it. I think my writing is getting better, that I am able to more clearly articulate what I want to say, and maybe I can pour something of my soul onto this page as a sort of continued self-therapy. And maybe you’ll enjoy it? I guess?

I have never understood the justice of God, I am comfortable saying that. He has always seemed to have a stunning parity with an abusive parent; giving commands He knows you won’t follow, and punishing you horribly when you do not. You don’t have to go very deeply into the Bible to see what I mean, this is exactly how He treated Adam and Eve.

Step back and think about the story; God put a tree that they were not allowed to eat from in the middle of their home, put a serpent in there that was obviously evil (if Sin didn’t exist before Eve ate the apple, I guess the serpent did nothing wrong), and then let everything play out. But it is worse than that, isn’t it? He made these humans, with all of the foresight available to a being who can apparently see the future as though it were this very moment.

So think about that; He made Adam and Eve knowing that they would almost immediately disobey him, and if the modern understanding is to be believed, every human ever born until Jesus died was sent to the pit, or purgatory, or hell, or some kind of stasis. But why? How is that justice? I need one of the faithful to explain it to me, because I (in my limited experience and understanding) cannot make sense of the story, and a huge portion of my peers seem to take it without a second glance that it was the human’s fault, not God’s. As though the humans had the tools to even properly follow the rules?

God did not write them down, did not tell Adam and Eve the details. He just said, in His infinite wisdom and ability to see the future, “Don’t eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” Think about that, though; if they did not know good from evil, how would they even have known what they were doing was wrong? Like a child who is told not to stick a fork in the wall socket; a good parent will cover the wall sockets because they do not want the child to electrocute themselves to death. But God did not cover the tree of good and evil with a socket cover; he put it in the middle of the garden, apparently in plain sight, with nothing stopping the very young and inexperienced Adam and Eve from eating of it aside from telling them not to. You have to remember, given the Young Earth ages presented, Adam and Eve could not have been more than a few years old at the time, and whether they were given adult bodies or not, they likely didn’t have any real world experience built into them.

Regardless of what Adam and Eve did, even God shows some restraint in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, in that He claims that He will only punish a child unto the fourth (maaaayyybbbeeee tenth) generation for the sins of his or her parents, and yet here we are (what is this, the 27th generation?) apparently being punished specifically for Adam’s sin. Apparently in the Bible writer’s mind, women were so inconsequential that we are not even punished for her sin, only all females for all time, what with the monthly bleeding and birthing pains (God’s justice is so level handed).

But we go even deeper, in that God created everything and (we are told) it was Good. But He could see the future. When He created humans, He knew (before ever saying a single word) that we would almost instantly break His commands, and the (again) very even handed punishment is an eternity of torment in hell for all humans save for a select few who number fewer than my available digits. Well, at least until Jesus, but again showing all that love and foresight God is known for, He decided to wait another 4000 years before sending His only begotten Son to redeem our sins. And He only sent this son after threatening to kill all of his chosen people several times.

Given that we disobeyed Him almost instantly (one source seems to think we did it within 45 minutes of creation, and at that point I can do nothing but respect the speed at which the Serpent operates), one would think that God (in His infinite wisdom) could have tweaked the design of free will just a hair? Maybe give us a few thousand years of paradise? The thing is, God gave only two humans paradise, and even then only for a very short amount of time (and given the staggering numbers of humans who have lived, one finds that God seems to have a very limited sense of fair play).

I’ve made numerous analogies and metaphors in regards to how I view God as operating towards His people, but I think some need to be restated for emphasis.

I stand by what I said; God is a worse parent than the mother who puts plug stops on the electrical outlets. I’d liken God’s sense of parenting to keeping the liquor under the sink, and not having any child locks. Probably keeps Drano under there, too–not even because He needs to use Drano, but because He wants to see if we’ll drink it. Given what I know about people (and the fact that I have a friend whose brother downed a bottle of isopropyl alcohol…), my own guess would be that yes, yes there are many who would drink that Drano.

Even worse, even before becoming a parent, God is a child who demands a puppy, gets it, and lets it run around the house — but when it pees on the carpet, the carpet He never trained it not to pee on, He beats it. Not just once, either. He ties it to a beating post for the rest of its life, for that single incident. Not only that, but He breeds it. He breeds it, then beats His dog’s puppies, because his dog peed on the carpet He never trained it not to pee on.

I may sound angry and bitter, but really I am not. What I truly am is confused. I am confused how someone can believe there is a loving God at work. If you believe there is a loving God at work, I am confused as to how. I am confused as to how God’s justice is supposed to work, and I am confused as to how you call it justice. When I ask those faithful in my life this question, generally the response I receive is along the lines of “God makes the rules, therefore everything He does is just.”

That just raises the eternal question: Are moral actions moral because God said they are moral, or did God just tell us what was moral? If God told you to rape a small child, would that be considered moral because God said so? These are theoreticals, and often ignored by anyone who still has the patience to talk to me; “Well, obviously God wouldn’t tell me to do that.” That doesn’t answer the question.

How about God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac? If Abraham had gone through with it, would that have been moral? Again, many who have spoken to me have raised the fact that God did not let Abraham do the killing, and while I am not angry at God, per se, I do get angry with the excuses. These are blind excuses, excuses designed to give God an out in whichever situation He finds Himself written into.

How about the tale of Jephthah? He said if he won the upcoming battle, he’d sacrifice the first thing that came out of his house. Now, barring the fact that this is possibly the most short sighted thing anyone could say (what was going to come out of his house to greet him upon his return? Not his wife or daughter, obviously!), God sits back and lets this all happen. And God does not stop Jephthah from sacrificing his daughter. Does God’s tacit approval make this sacrifice moral? God could have let that battle go the other way, or told Jephthah not to bother with the daughter sacrifice (He did intervene on Isaac’s behalf, one must remember).

All of this has just been a brain dump, because too few people will talk about this subject with me. They feel attacked, and I suppose it could come off that way (in fact, of course it would come across that way), but if you can’t answer the hard questions how can I find my way back to the fold? I have hard questions, questions I need answered before I could ever consider returning to the Church, and the best I seem to get is that I shouldn’t ask these questions.

Are the people I talk to afraid of them? Is Christianity built on the principles of “Don’t ask questions!”? Is God too fragile for my hard questions? No, I would never think that, but I am afraid that my questions are a plague in the mind of the believer; once they really start to consider the story, they have very few options. They can answer my questions, though no one has taken this option. They can ignore the questions (a perennial favorite). They can just say they trust in God (to my own mind, this adds up to the coward’s way out, for the person and for God). But if I am to return to the Church, I need these answers, and every day that passes, every person I ask who gives me uncomfortable shrugs or tells me that I am disrespecting them by even asking these questions, or ignores me, or gives me words that they use to comfort themselves, I drift further and further from God.

What advice is there for one like me? Go read the Bible? Oh, I have been reading the Bible, and all I can find is more questions and few answers. The Bible is great, if you are willing to believe the words “I love all my people!” But if you read the actions as much as the words (communication is 80% nonverbal, or whatever the number is), the actions that follow God’s professions of love are often “Man, I am going to kill like… a TON of people. Lots of them will be Israelites.” Those are the exact actions of a man who beats his wife under the umbrella of “I hit you because I love you, and you made me do this.”

What is it that humans have forced God to do? Is that what it is? We have forced God to hit us? Seems odd for us to force God to do anything.

Help me. I am asking for help here. Help me understand God’s… “love.” Help me understand God’s… “justice.” Help me understand how God is anything but the father with a belt, a strong strapping arm, a lot of time, and maybe some boredom. I really am asking for your help, as much as my words make that difficult to believe.

I can’t see you so I’m invisible

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

Perhaps it was just something that happened in my small corner of the world, but there was a time when small children would cover their own eyes and then declare themselves invisible. I suppose it is a weakness of myself as a writer that I had to explain my own title for clarity, but that title was far too appropriate to this topic to just let it slide by.

This may surprise you, but I was reading more AiG this weekend, and this article really helped me clarify some things. The first is that even the people of the highest education at AiG are completely blind and/or lacking awareness of way too much of the world. The second is that apparently adults are just as happy to scream the title of this blog post with all apparent earnestness.

The above linked article is about the five senses and how they fit into the world view of science versus how they fit into the world view of Christian theology. At several points, the (and I am quoting here, he calls himself this) “Ph.D. scientist” claims that trusting your five senses means you believe in the Bible, and any atheist who trusts their senses has inadvertently admitted to being a closet Christian. How is this wild leap of logic attained?

I will quote directly, I do not want to paraphrase and miss the meaning. “… It makes sense in the Christian worldview that our senses would be basically reliable. An all-knowing God designed and created both the universe and our senses, so it makes sense that those two things would “go together”—that our senses can reliably probe the universe… You want to reject my reason, but unfortunately, you don’t have a good reason to reject my reason, and you have no alternative. The evolutionist has no rational reason to trust his senses based on his professed worldview. Evolutionists believe things with absolutely no good reason.”

I have, in a past post, given my reason for trusting my senses–but I cannot recall exactly which post contained that bit of logic so I’ll present it here in direct contrast to the opposing view. I think that better, and probably more fair.

The above statement could be true, if all atheists existed in a vacuum–and by that I mean that we all existed and never talked to each other. Even science has told us to not trust our eyes, not nearly with the depth and clarity of what this Ph.D. scientist has expressed, anyway. In fact, even something that should be our most reliable sense, touch, can be very easily fooled. So for my first point of rebuttal, I think I’ve stated clearly (if quickly) that our senses are not granted by a great omniscient deity–or if they were, he did a very poor job of it (another example would be how the human eye is upside down, backwards, and prone to failure–not to mention has a blind spot that is not present in octopuses.). To address the points in parentheses previous, Creationists have frequently argued that the eye is not poorly designed, that everything works as it should — but to that I have always asked this: Why is the octopus eye so much better than ours, in terms of blind spot? Or why is the eagle eye (and actually most bird eyes) so much better than ours, in terms of overall clarity and focus? For God’s own chosen species (taking racism up one level to specism), we really got the short end of the stick. How about sense of smell? Well, we have always relied on dogs to scent things, so obviously we have shortcomings there. Hearing? I think it is well known that bats, dolphins, and many other species have us beat quite badly on that sense.

OK, I think I’ve covered that part sufficiently, and that wasn’t even my goal here. The second part has to do not with why I believe we are not created, but why I trust my senses with any respectable surety.

Now, as I’ve discussed the fact that eyewitness testimony is terribly unreliable, I have indirectly admitted that my own sense of sight is unreliable. How can I trust it, then? Well, as listed above, my sense of sight is not unreliable all the time, which leaves me a window through which to escape; I can trust my sight through the timeless art of speaking with others. If there are three of us in a room, and two of us see the same thing but the third sees a seemingly fantastic room, we can generally assume that the two are more likely correct — though the margin for error is high, and I’ve just left a glaring hole for the creationist to attack. How about we shore up our defenses a little.

In the United States, there are some 330 million people. For the sake of argument, I usually say that I trust my eyes at least 80% of the time, with the remaining 20% being times where I have to rely on those around me for confirmation (“Man, are you seeing this right now?!”). Whether we agree on the interpretation or not (where I see science you see God), we both generally see the same thing, as made clear by our ability to describe what we see intelligently to each other. So taking that load, the 330 million person load, and dividing it to help us confirm whether what we see is trustworthy, we come to an astonishingly low margin for error. The math gets a little complicated, to the point where there are numbers the human mind is ill equipped to handle, so let’s settle for ten people in a room, all of whom trust their sight 80% of the time, and all of whom are seeing the same thing. The chance that all are wrong is given by this very rough equation of 10*0.2*0.2*0.2*0.2*0.2*0.2*0.2*0.2*0.2*0.2, which gives us the chance they are all hallucinating the same thing as something in the area of 0.0001%. These numbers are obviously not binding but they paint a picture; by this method, the scientific mind can reasonably assert that what the ten people present are seeing is a true representation of the world. (Group psychology throws some of my math out the window then pees on it, very clearly demonstrated by the Fatima incident. I’ve added that for fairness.)

I think a more easily digestible example would be that of the sense of smell. Say you have forty people in a room, because we are at a social gathering. Some time into the night, one particular patron comments that they smell toast, and someone has burned it badly–what is your first reaction? I would imagine for some number north of 99% of the readers, this would not seem as though God’s designed senses are working as intended; you’d be calling 911, because someone in the room is suffering from a stroke, because not one of the other 39 people smell said toast. Why would God give us such a sense that so easily misfires?

To extend that example of using others to confirm your senses, what about the rubber hand experiment linked above? The premise of the experiment (and it is one of my favorite experiments of all time) is that you convince your brain (or the brain of some unsuspecting friend) that a rubber hand is, in fact, their hand. After you do this, you smash the rubber hand with a mallet, and the person upon whom the experiment is being performed will feel that mallet smashing their own hand, because our brain is easily tricked. It is only through realizing that your own hand has not been hit, or through further experimental means of tricking your brain back into believing that your hand is perfectly safe that the pain will instantly (and MAGICALLY!) subside–and one way of doing this is by using the others in the room as reference material.

We as atheists are not so quick to trust ourselves, either, but this is not a game of chicken–something I fear that many YEC adherents forget. It is not the first person to admit fault (jump out of the way of the train) who loses; in this analogy, actually, the atheist jumping out of the way of the train is far more likely to live a long and productive life. Anyone who grew up in a town with train tracks has heard of someone getting killed by a train playing chicken. No, this is real life, not a game — and in the fullness of time, as Sam Harris so succinctly stated, “One side will really win, and one side will really lose.”

Just because you do not understand how an atheist would see the world does not mean the atheist is completely blind. We just see through a different set of glasses. The problem is, your glasses seem to have this odd feature where it makes you shout that anyone wearing any other glasses is wrong (and probably a heathen), and then we have to spend valuable time defending our own vision. I mean, look at me; I just spent over 1500 words defending my own side. Tell me that this isn’t a waste of valuable internet space!

It’s funny, though — I wouldn’t even feel the need to defend myself if your logic didn’t seem so convincing to so many people. It wounds my own sense of the power of the human mind to admit that your side is claiming as many members as my side is (though, thankfully, it seems we’re headed towards a reversal).

I don’t feel like I really have a choice; I either have to defend science, or allow irrational belief to sweep this world I cherish, and tear it to the ground.

Speaking of, this gentleman felt the need to say his beliefs were rational and those of the atheist irrational. He believes these things because of something implied by a book written starting 3000 years ago, by hundreds of different hands. His whole idea of rationality is that “This religious document says that there is a God, and that is the entire basis for my rationality.”

Please, you have a PhD, give me some reason that is better than that. I respect the effort that it took you to get that PhD, but I do not respect the intellectual dishonesty you show, and the shame you bring to the very title. I respect your religion, but only insofar as it does not negatively impact the world — and too often it does just that.

You are in a position of power; show some decorum is what I am saying here. If you are going to call me (indirectly) irrational and wrong, please give me a better reason than that a 3000 year old book told you to insult me. I think I’ve given you good reasons defending my side, I’ll patiently await your rebuttal.

Missing the Mark

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

More AiG reading, in response to yesterday’s celebrations of Charles Darwin’s 206th birthday, and I find myself again reading too much into things and then writing stuff about those thinkings.

You see, in response to the scientific world celebrating the venerable scientist’s birthday, AiG published this article, declaring that February 12th be celebrated by the Church as Darwin was Wrong Day. Never mind the fact that I can find nothing of the Biblical teachings of love and tolerance in this proclamation from the great prophet Ken Ham (PBUH), the article itself makes so many cringe-worthy statements that it actually blew my mind a little. There were gems like “The evolutionary worldview is an attempt to explain the universe and life without God.” I think that misses the mark; it assumes that evolution started with the intent to write God out of science, which is just patently untrue; evolution was stumbled upon while trying to understand how the world works, and understand our place in it. The fact that we were looking and could not find God is not our problem, because our goal never had the word God in it in the positive or negative. How about the fact that we understand things like antibiotic resistant bacteria through the lens of evolution? I know it is your opinion, theoretical young earth creationist, that genetic information cannot be created — so how is it, then, that MRSA has become so resistant. Did it always have the ability to resist bacteria? Did it just have to believe in itself? Is it the plucky nerd in the 1980s romantic comedy that science clearly represents? Or did its actual genetic makeup change to allow it to resist the killing influence of traditional antibiotics?

Accidental self awareness is one of my favorite forms of comedy, and this statement made me laugh ruefully: “Sadly, many Christians buy into this religion and simply squeeze God into the gaps somewhere.” As though you don’t squeeze God into the gaps everywhere? When science says it doesn’t know something yet, you completely ignore the word “yet” and scream victory from the top of mountains, declaring that science doesn’t know so God did it. And that doesn’t constitute using God as some kind of mortar in the brick wall of knowledge? (If that metaphor missed the mark, as many of my own tend to, I was using the gaps between bricks as the gaps God fills.)

I do appreciate the journalistic integrity in this sentence, as the word “known” could have been left out to solidify his beliefs, but it plays nicely into my own narrative as written: “There are no known exceptions to this law.” The law in question is the law of Biogenesis, where life comes from; and they claim that life and only come from life. But as I’ve mentioned, we haven’t found the way life originates from non-life conclusively yet, though we are making strides. Richard Dawkins has a very good theory, I think, it’s just too bad we don’t live for 100,000 years to test it — we may never see it happen in nature or in a lab, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look.

“Yet, according to evolution, the law of biogenesis had to have been broken at least once when the first single-celled life emerged from non-living matter.” Therein lies the rub, friend; how many particles are there in the earth? How many atoms, how many molecules, how many bacteria — and, forgive me for my limited ability to observe, but you’d be hard pressed to watch every molecule in the Earth all the time every day. Who is to say that there are not new forms of single-celled organisms popping up in the deepest craters of the Earth every day? Just because we haven’t seen it yet doesn’t mean it can’t happen, and given the statistical numbers at play here, the chance of it happening could be very remote, and yet the law of large numbers need only account for one of them.

I don’t want to spend a whole paragraph on this one: “There never was a time when life arose from non-life because life came directly from the Life-giver, our Creator God, just as it says in Genesis. And that’s what observational science confirms!” Where did God come from? What evidence have you that He Himself never had a beginning. I mean, an infinite life form raises some serious concerns, like what was He doing before creation? Why did He choose to Create when He did? He was just randomly strolling through chaos for infinity quadrillion years, then created us?

“There is no known mechanism that can change one kind of animal into a totally different kind.” That one is false, and can be proven so using their own definition of kind without a great effort. This article explains it more thoroughly than I could, but suffice it to say that if a kind is an animal that can interbreed, then we have observed kinds changing into other kinds, and it happens all the time. Long story short, while a reptile may still be a reptile, it cannot breed with other reptiles that its parents can breed with, therefore it is a different kind. Perhaps I have misunderstood your definition of “kinds”, but I was under the impression that “kinds” can always interbreed.

“However, most mutations are negative or neutral to the organism.” This author is fighting their own conscience, I fear. Read that sentence over and over again, it is the greatest he has written, and possibly the most accidental. “Most”. That single word changes the sentence, ruins the picture, spills ink all over it. His admission that “most” mutations are neutral or negative leaves the door wide open for those very few, those rare, those amazing mutations that allow evolution to function. Yes, 99,999,999,999/100,000,000,000 mutations may be bad — but given the population of our wonderful planet, that still leaves the door wide open for beneficial mutations to function on an evolutionary level. Even in your 6,000 year old Earth, denying evolution based on the “most mutations are bad” argument is incredibly facile.

Now, this quote is going to be a long one, but bear with me for just a moment. “Evolution predicts that the human body should be filled with vestigial organs. These are supposed to be largely useless leftovers from our evolutionary past that have either lost their function or have reduced functionality. Over the years, around 180 organs have been labelled as vestigial, such as our appendix, coccyx, and pineal gland. This label hindered research into the actual function of these organs because, well, why bother researching a leftover of evolution?” (Emphasis mine)

That is the ultimate argument for our side, and I have no idea what level of cognitive dissonance allowed the writer to make that argument in favor of the YEC side. Their entire stance is predicated upon the idea that “The Earth is 6,000 years old, so why would you even want to research ways to tell its age?” That is the exact argument they just accused scientists of making, and then they made it for their side and I don’t even wblwblwblbwlwblbwlbwlwb. Woah, sorry. My brain went into a reboot condition there, the amount of willpower it takes to hold up that level of cognitive dissonance doesn’t fit into my mind’s calculation space.

Now I’ll give you a pair of quotes from that article, make of them what you will.

First: “God created the original kinds in Genesis and placed within each one the genetic information needed to survive in a changing environment. God knew that the Fall and the earth-changing global Flood of Noah’s day would come and, in His wisdom, He designed organisms with the genetic variability to be able to survive.”

Second: “Of course, because of the Curse and the Fall, things do not work quite the way God designed them to.”

Allow me to make one point of my own in this rebuttal, if you would indulge me. How do you account for things such as Cancer and Down’s Syndrome, in a world crafted by your loving God? These come not from some outside influence, not from some sin, but from our own genetics rebelling against us. Even accounting for mutations, why does the genetic information required to create cancer exist, if no new information can be generated by mutations? Are you saying God wrote cancer into our DNA?

Just a thought.

Shortsighted Science

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

Due to my proximity with at least one other person crazier than I am, I have started to read the subtext into what a lot of people say. Honestly, it may not be entirely fair of me to do so; inferring subtext is more of an art than it is a science, but when you stop scraping the surface and actually dig into what people say, you can find some surprising things. I was reading AiG again (SURPRISE!) and something clicked into my head that was always there, but that I personally had not considered.

AiG likes to press the issue of Historical versus Observational science like a dealer pushes his best product at twice its going price. I know this has never sat well with scientists, a false dichotomy that lowers the level of discourse in the scientific field, but in a country where some 47% of the populace responds that they believe the universe is at most 10,000 years old we do have to address their concerns head on, or allow them to swell their numbers based on a tacit assumption that our lack of fighting back means we can’t. Ah, but there’s another rub, isn’t there? Very intelligent, rational people are like “Ignore them and walk away; they’ll burn themselves out.” What we have seen based on that is a groundswell of support for their ideas, and I think people like Bill Nye, who have taken the fight back to them, are becoming more in the right. Even the famous quote “If I were to debate you, it would look great on your CV, not so much on mine,” is adding to the problem–because they will go to a populace who do not follow the behind the scenes of these things, and tell them that “Oh, these atheists are afraid to debate us because they know we’d win.”

Read the above, and try to tell me that isn’t a grade school logic… And yet here we are. So let’s talk about historical and observational science. What I seem to understand, reading young earth arguments, is that they believe “historical science” (herein referred to as “science” for obvious reasons) is hand waving and sleight of hand, and that we cannot test these things, and that they have no predictive power, and that they are functionally useless lies. I think that is an accurate encapsulation, anyway; my response will be built upon this framework, anyway.

Geology may seem like low hanging fruit, but let’s start there; certainly geological aging techniques and studies are a huge point of contention for the YEC, so let’s talk about their short shortsightedness, and see how they draw their lines in the sand. No one will argue the study of plate tectonics, nor their application in predicting areas prone to earthquakes; certainly, if they did, they would be the only ones surprised when an earthquake hits San Francisco. Now, here’s the rub; the study of plate tectonics have allowed us to give a general idea of the age of the Earth based on the movement of the continents and on the geographic formations based on (again) the movement of tectonic plates (Reference). These aren’t perfect numbers, but they allow us to make predictions (such as the formation of mountain ranges, changes in the sea level of land masses, movement speed of continents, etc). If our future predictions are correct, then we can make inferences on the past. Are these inferences absolutely, definitely correct? No, nothing is, but we make statistical analyses, and use other methods of science to form a picture.

Given that we use the same science to predict future movements and general age of the earth, young earth geologists have to draw a line in the sand. This line is fairly arbitrary, and I would call it very shortsighted; we can use it to predict, and it will show us an accurate picture back 6000 years without breaking a sweat. It will give us a picture of what things looked like 100,000 years ago, 1,000,000 years ago, 65,000,000 years ago… All using the exact same system. But here’s the funny thing; the YEC geologist will say “Yeah, geology is accurate as to what the Earth would have looked like 6,000 years ago, but taking it any further than that is BLASPHEMY (for some reason),” despite the fact that it uses the exact same system. In fact, their arbitrary line in the sand may actually be even more recent, as recent as 4400 years ago — since the face of the Earth was catastrophically rearranged at that time (even though we have unbroken histories of… Say… The Egyptians right through that time…).

So how does your historical science and observational science differ, in this case? We are using the same math to predict forward as we are to go backwards, so why does the math just magically stop working some arbitrary number of years ago?

There is also the much more egregious issue in the field of cosmology, for which the YEC cannot even supply any scientific reason for their belief in certain things. For example, the speed of light is universally accepted to be the rate limiting factor in all cosmological events and transfer of information, and based on that we can look into the night sky and see back further than 6000 years with our naked eye. Give me a weak telescope and I can see one or two billion years into the past, and easily make predictions based on that (This is one of my favorites). Again, we have to draw a line in the sand, but while the YEC will have spurious scientific reasons for doing so in respect to geology (respect? Pah, poor choice of words) they don’t even have spurious reasons in the cosmological field. You don’t have a flood story that would have thrown the universe around, and the Hubble UDF (Warning: that link takes you to the full size, 60MB picture. You may need a few minutes while it loads, and to prepare to weep at the beauty of space) makes it easy enough to see that there is nothing that would happen on an Earth-level scale that could account for what we see.

Now, as I’ve pointed out, we make observational predictions using this data; the Milky Way-Andromeda collision. So how is it that we have untestable historical something something not science here? Well, this is where we see the true hole, the true flaw in the reasoning; when asked about it, YECs reply simply with “God formed the Galaxies with their light en route to Earth. Duh.” This is the lowest level of special pleading, a type of special pleading that raises no evidence, and is in absolutely no way testable. I mean, I can’t… I can’t understand how strong the cognitive dissonance is, where you can say “You make claims that aren’t testable! But our God made the universe with light en route to Earth that just happens to align with your theories of how old the universe is. Which is totally testable, somehow?”

By that very logic, everything could have come into existence 5 seconds ago, with all the everything in place and memories fabricated, and God just wants to watch us fight for his own amusement. In any case, why would you God who wants everyone to realize that He exists and worship Him put so much evidence in place that points to an old universe? Why would he have put the light en route? Just think of the beauty of the sky had he not; every day, every year, every decade, the night sky would be lighting up for our wonder and amazement. We would see stars seemingly wink into existence, if the universe was 6000 years old and light only started to travel when it was created. I mean, Adam would have had a very boring universe for the first few years, but there are stars only four years away from us. Just imagine the wonder he could have felt, had he seen the very first star wink into existence one night.

In any case, we can successfully predict the future to an extent, and use that confidence to successfully predict the past. Your arbitrary sand line, without so much as any support outside of special pleading, does not help anyone.

Now, let’s talk about your observational/operational science. You rightly say that certain sciences do not rely on other branches of science to function, and it is by this that creation scientists such as Newton made their strides, or by this that the MRI was invented. I won’t take that from you, I have never been one to say that no creationist can do science; perhaps it is even admirable what you have accomplished despite your hamstring in certain fields. But again, we end up with strange lines drawn arbitrarily in the sand. For example, we’ll call translation a science for the purposes of this; certainly hermeneutics is a scientific field (basically the science of understanding what people with old languages meant to say), but why is it observational rather than historical in your mind? I mean, you weren’t there to see the original Hebrew scriptures written, it is only through non repeatable tests that you are able to guess at their meaning in English. Certainly, that scientific field does not let us make predictions about the future. So why does that science count?

There is another odd thing about observational and historical science in your world. We don’t try to discover the age of the Earth specifically to make you angry; we do so to test our scientific theories, see how well they can predict things, refine them, and use them to understand what is coming in the future. When you tell us that you have discovered through Geology that the Earth is 6000 years old, what does that help us? It seems almost like you don’t want to prove anything except that you believe science is wrong, which, as per the title of this post, seems shortsighted. We don’t do science out of some arbitrary feeling of wanting to know, we do science so that we can understand and predict the universe we live in, thus allowing us to better prepare ourselves for what is coming. Does shouting that the world is 6000 years old prepare us for discovering an asteroid on a collision course with Earth? Orbital mechanics also allow us to date certain objects; why do you want to shout that they are only valid up until your arbitrary 6000 year date? Even if you were to use orbital mechanics to discover said oncoming asteroid, how do you justify the fact that this asteroid’s theoretical trajectory could place its origin in the Mars/Jupiter asteroid belt some 150,000 years ago? (I chose those arbitrary numbers to prove a point; I am afraid I am not astrophysicist). Perhaps, tracing the orbit of said body of mass we find that 6000 years ago it was in the middle of nowhere, on a collision course to Earth. Did God create that giant space rock at the beginning, on a path to Earth, just to mess with us? (And, incidentally, ruin our day?)

Please remember, when you are trying to argue historical science, that science goes forwards and backwards, and that historical science (which is a distinction most scientists would not make) is really just a branch of observational science that looks backwards instead of forwards. If you think we can look forwards with observational science, at what hasn’t happened yet, what is it that makes it so hard for you to believe that we can’t look at what has happened? We have even more evidence for what has happened than we do for what will happen, so I cannot resolve your cognitive dissonance.

And here we are, with me ranting about it.

Slightly too Complicated for Children

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

More reading down the anti-science hole, I came across a blog post by Ken Ham (PBUH), prophet of the Young Earth Movement. I didn’t find it overly offensive for the most part, it mostly was just him reiterating the Young Earth Script–but eventually I came across a line that kind of caught my attention: “… Children can easily see that complicated life can’t be built up on the basis of mistakes…” Yes, but can they see why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch?!

The reason that line jumped out at me is that it is so disingenuous it hurts, as though Ken Ham is trying to imply that all complicated science should be understood by children. I would argue this isn’t the case. An example, perhaps: Spacex is launching a rocket with a probe on it, and I am sure kids don’t understand the physics that go into that. You know what that means, right? It means God did it. God launched that rocket. The thousands upon thousands of man hours that went into it? NASA just made those man hours up. Kids could launch a rocket, if they just something something GOD.

Or how about the drastic oversimplification of the theory of evolution? I know how they do love to stand on the crutches of “Observational Science,” but there are some deep flaws in their idea of what constitutes this version of science that they themselves created. First, they seem to be of the mind that since we have never seen it, it can’t happen. Life from non-life? That’s crazy. Life from the word of the mouth of an eternal being? Totally a more viable solution. Again, though, the subtext is important; “We have the answer so YOU HAVE TO STOP LOOKING FOR AN ANSWER.”

They are right, we haven’t managed to create life in the lab yet. We don’t necessarily know how it started. But ignorance is both the best friend of science, and its worst enemy; ignorance lets us know where we have to look to find new knowledge, but it is also something to be eradicated over time. Science has been a powerful force for only 150 years; in the grand scheme of cosmic evolution, I would need to invoke a LOT of leading zeroes to give you the percentage of history that covers. Even in your 6000 year cosmology, we have only really been using science (as we’d understand it in the modern era) for only 2.5% of history, and you expect us to have all of the answers? And of course, if we admit even once that we don’t have the answer, you claim some sort of victory, as though the sum of all human discourse has all of the maturity and gravity of some middle school playground.

The funny thing, the thing that makes me laugh, is the petulance on display. If they would just sit back and let us “do science,” as the common parlance goes, maybe we’d discover that they were right all along. Obviously, I think that is (at best) very unlikely, but if they are so overwhelmingly confident, why do they act like they are being pushed around so badly? Theirs is the type of confidence (arrogance) that should be able to step aside, a knowing glint in their eye, as the children find all the answers on their own. Surely, with that level of confidence, they could trust that we would all arrive at their conclusion eventually.

And there’s the rub, there’s the whole thing, they know (deep in their hearts) that science is coming closer and closer, inexorably, from invalidating their world view. Of course, the confidence they have will not be pricked by evidence (that is already clear), and they will believe as they do in full opposition of irrefutable evidence. That’s ok, I just think it is ironically hilarious that I could so easily employ a simple word replace and make Romans 1:18-21 say exactly what is happening.

¹⁸The wrath of [science] is being revealed from [humans] against all the [ignorance] of people, who suppress the truth by their [ignorance], ¹⁹since what may be known about [science] is plain to them, because [humans have] made it plain to them. ²⁰For since the creation of the world [science has] been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

You know what? I actually like that set of verses. I might actually print them off, because I think they say a lot about the human condition, our ability to stand by our beliefs in the face of evidence, of statistics, of physics, of history. I am not immune to it, though I do try to step back and validate my beliefs regularly. Like any human, I know I fail to recognize all of my failings, but dammit, I give it a strong effort.

Young Earth Creationists do not give an effort to find their failings, but that is not to take away from the fact that they put a huge amount of effort; the amount of man hours they put into creation science is stunning… And almost admirable. The only problem is that the only way they manage to keep their ship floating is through disingenuity. One major example is the formation of fossils and stalagmites; they have created it rapidly under a rigidly defined set of conditions, and reproduced that in the lab. They are right, of course, calcification can be a rapid process, in some conditions–you’d be hard pressed to disprove that. But then they make a huge leap; they have decided since it could happen quickly that it did happen quickly.

I think a far more egregious example is that of the discovery of dinosaur soft tissue. As soon as it was discovered, it was hailed as the final piece of the puzzle proving recent dinosaur life by young earth creationists. Why, how could you have soft tissue surviving for 65 million years? That is just absurd. And then scientists tried to explain it! THE GAUL OF THEM! Can’t they clearly see the answer? There is no process that could possibly make this happen, and even by looking the scientists are showing that they are stupidheads, and anti-religion, and scientifically ignorant!

Except in a short order, they discovered a function of high iron content that could have allowed this to happen. Quietly, the YECs stopped trumpeting that discovery, though it still has a place (as last I heard) in the Creation Museum in Kentucky, there to deceive the ignorant. Of course, that isn’t an insult; they are ignorant because people have a vested interest in keeping their blindfold on, and the fact that soft tissue is still in the Young Earth playbook, despite its having been explained by science, is proof of that.

So let’s stop pretending you are doing science. You are accusing scientists of viewing evidence with a presupposition of the age of the Universe, while you grab evidence, look at it through a magnifying glass that has mirrors and dials in it that read “6000 years old” then interpret that evidence accordingly.

The fewer mirrors you put in the way, the fewer assumptions you make about the evidence, the more you realize that 10,000 different threads in the weave of time paint a similar picture — and it is only through your smoke and mirrors, young earth creationist, that you are able to even create the illusion of a 6000 year old world.

So let’s not kid ourselves (heh… Kid) into saying evolution is silly because a child could say it is wrong. That’s not even an argument. That’s not even a thought.

Let’s all go back to the scientific lab of our choice, make as few assumptions as possible, and do some science.

Blog42: My Stream of (semi)Consciousness

Rants about life, the universe, and everything

Christianity

Correlation vs Causation (2015 edition, Part 3)

Correlation vs Causation (2015 edition, Part 2)

Correlation vs Causation (2015 edition, Part 1)

The Way Things Are

To Tweak the Design

I can’t see you so I’m invisible

Missing the Mark

Shortsighted Science

Slightly too Complicated for Children