How is Ayn Rand still a thing?

No kidding! How is Ayn Rand still a thing? Seriously!

Scott Clifton: metaphysical cherry-picking

This is Scott Clifton at the 2014 Reasonfest at the University of Kansas this past April.

If it sounds familiar, it's because I posted his video making pretty much the same points last November. I commented on that video, so I'll skip it this time. But I'd say he does an even better job here.

Stephen Fry narrates four short videos

You know, I think that Stephen Fry could read a shopping list and make it interesting,... and these aren't shopping lists. They're four short videos from the British Humanist Association. Excellent, aren't they?

I don't call myself a humanist, because every humanist seems to have a different idea of what it means. I'm not kidding. I've encountered both a communist humanist and a libertarian humanist, and they couldn't have been more different in what they thought humanism was. Any label which can be stretched that far doesn't seem to have much value as a label.

In general, though, I'm certainly sympathetic to humanists, and if this is a representative sample of the British Humanist Association, well, I'm impressed. Of course, it didn't hurt to have Stephen Fry narrating these. :)

The Kalam cosmological argument and the ethics of discourse

I'm still working my way through the archived videos of Scott Clifton, aka Theoretical Bullshit. (Don't worry, I'm almost caught up now.)

This is yet another video argument against William Lane Craig's Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God. Note that I've posted two of these already from Scott Clifton - here and here.

Mostly, that's because I think they're interesting, and because I really like how Clifton presents his arguments. But William Lane Craig might be the most prominent Christian apologist these days, despite the fact that his core value seems to be dishonesty. Plus, he's egotistical, condescending, and elitist, too.

Yet his arguments get a lot of attention - undeserved attention, to my mind. So I especially enjoy seeing him taken to task. I hope you do, too.

Saint Anselm's Proof

(Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

I thought this was great. But you already know what I think about philosophy, right? :)

Recently, I was having an online discussion - in my local newspaper -  with a guy who claimed to have "plenty of evidence" for the existence of God. But when I pressed him for the details, it turned out to be something he called "logical evidence," which was pretty much entirely an argument from ignorance (and its close corollary, the argument from personal incredulity).

So he wasn't just calling logic 'evidence,' he was calling known logical fallacies 'evidence.' But he continued to insist that he'd provided "plenty" of evidence that his god exists.

Well, these kinds of arguments are very common. (I've mentioned some of them in my Non-Belief series.) With professional religious apologists, it can be difficult for us laymen to point out the logical fallacies in their practiced, polished arguments. But using that same argument in a different context, as this cartoon demonstrates, can often show its complete absurdity.

And give us something to laugh about, too. :)

PS. If you really want a more boring argument, maybe we could look at the "best possible" human being.

Now, how you define "best" is hard to say, since we all have many good qualities. Intelligence is certainly better than stupidity. Health is better than illness. Strength is better than weakness, etc.

But it's hard to imagine that the strongest person in the world is also the smartest - and the fastest, the kindest, the most generous, etc.  Even if that person is the strongest human being who could possibly live, he wouldn't be the best in everything. So you could imagine a person who was just as strong, but perhaps slightly more intelligent or slightly faster.

That would be a "better" human being, by our definitions, but he still wouldn't exist. So it seems pretty clear that the "best possible" human being does not exist. Does the "best possible being"? Not if humans are the only beings, certainly.

Show me evidence that a god exists and we'll talk again.

Non-Belief, Pt. 12: Proving God through Philosophy

I commonly ask religious believers if they have a good reason to believe that their god - or any god - actually exists. I'm a skeptic, so by "reason," I normally mean evidence. And by "evidence," I mean something which can't easily be explained as delusion or wishful-thinking.

So far, the answer has been "no." But I keep asking, because I'm always interested in the replies I get.

Frequently, I'll get an argument from ignorance: "Well, where did everything come from, if not from God?" But just because we don't know everything, that doesn't mean you can just make up your own explanation.

Centuries ago, we didn't know what the Sun was, so people decided that it must be a god - perhaps driving a golden chariot across the skies. The big theological question back then was, "Where does the Sun go at night?" Yes, that was a... burning theological question (if you'll excuse the pun) for centuries.

Well, if the Sun wasn't a god, what was it, then? Proto-scientists couldn't explain it, therefore it must be a god, right? Wrong. That's an argument from ignorance.

Often, I'll get 'evidence' that's not really evidence at all. The Bible, for example, isn't evidence. Nor is the Koran, or any other 'holy book.' If you think that one of them is evidence, do you think that all of them are evidence? I doubt it.

Feelings aren't evidence, either. Feelings exist, certainly, but they can be easily explained as delusion or wishful-thinking (and simply as human nature, since believers of all religions feel that their religion must be true).

Unusual events aren't necessarily evidence, either, even if they can be documented and independently verified (which is rare). In a world of 7 billion people, with uncounted numbers of events happening every second, unusual events are the norm. Learn statistics.

So if you can't use evidence - because you don't have any - to back up your beliefs, what can you use? Well, there's always philosophy, right?

(Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

OK, you can probably see what I think about philosophy. :)  I tend to agree with PZ Myers when he says this:

What’s missing in philosophy is that anvil of reality — that something to push against that allows us to test our conclusions against something other than internal consistency. It means philosophy is excellent at solving imaginary problems (which may be essential for understanding more mundane concerns), while science is excellent at solving the narrower domain of real problems. Science has something philosophy lacks: a solid foundation in empiricism. That’s a strength, not a weakness.

Science is evidence-based, which keeps it grounded in the real world. That's why science advances. That's why we've seen such incredible progress in science, because each step is built on a firm foundation of evidence.

Philosophy doesn't have that. Philosophy can build an imposing logical structure, but if it's all built on sand, it's just imaginary, not real. Sure, if you want to admit that your god is just imaginary, you'll get no argument from me. But if you want to claim that he's real, that's different.

I'll admit right from the start that I don't know much about philosophy, so that's not going to be my main argument here. However, when people tell you that they can prove God exists, they're normally talking about philosophical proofs.

Science is about evidence, not proof. In science, nothing can be "proved" to the extent that contrary evidence would be disregarded. In science, everything is open to further investigation.

I go further and claim that we can't actually "prove" anything when it comes to the real world. Can we prove that the Earth is round? How do you know that the Earth exists at all? We could all be living in a computer simulation. Or you could be a brain in a bottle, just hallucinating all this.

And if you accept the possibility of an omniscient, omnipotent god, he could do anything - by definition - including convincing all of humanity that the Earth is round, rather than flat. (Maybe God just has a weird sense of humor? At any rate, "God works in mysterious ways.")

No matter how much evidence we have, there are always other explanations which could be true. It's very unlike that they are true, though. And as a practical matter, if you expect to live any kind of rational life, we really need to go with the evidence.

So when religious apologists claim they can "prove" that their god exists, they're usually talking about philosophical proofs. Professional apologists produce slick videos and use clever patter in practiced debates, where they use arguments which sound very impressive to the uninformed. Well, how many of us know much about philosophy? Not me.

You can research the most common arguments - the ontological argument, the cosmological argument (and a variant, the Kalam cosmological argument), the transcendental argument, etc. - if you find that sort of thing interesting. Iron Chariots.org is a good resource for this.

As these arguments are refuted, they tend to get revised by apologists who simply believe what they believe and are desperate to convince you, too. If their arguments are proven wrong, they'll just find new arguments. But the old arguments never go away, because they remain useful to convince the ignorant. (They still sound impressive if you don't know where the logical fallacies lie.)

And believers - including anonymous commenters here - will often cut and paste arguments which they, themselves, don't understand. They've seen it elsewhere, and it sounded impressive. More to the point, it seemed to back up what they want to believe (almost always, what they were raised to believe).

Sure, you can check out Iron Chariots.org for reasons why a particular philosophical argument is wrong. You can even study philosophy yourself, if that's what you want. But I'm not particularly interested in philosophy, and it seems to me that there are easier ways to refute such nonsense.

As I noted, I prefer science, rather than philosophy, because science is evidence-based, and that keeps scientists grounded in the real world. One of the big results of that is that scientists regularly come to a consensus on scientific issues.

We don't see different conclusions depending on whether a scientist was born in India, in Italy, in Russia, or in Mississippi, but rather a consensus among scientists worldwide who've all been convinced by the evidence.

This doesn't mean that every single 'scientist' agrees (they're still human), and there's not a consensus on everything (if there were, we'd already know everything, so there'd be no need for further scientific research). But scientists do come to a consensus, because they're evidence-based.

So when it comes to questions of science, I don't have to be an expert in everything (which is impossible, anyway). I just have to understand the scientific method well enough to accept the scientific consensus, if there is one. (If there isn't, I simply reserve judgment.)

But what about questions of philosophy? Philosophy isn't evidence-based, so it's not grounded in the real world. And the result? Look at this poll of philosophers. Do you see a consensus on anything? They can't even get a simple majority to agree on many of those issues, and rarely much more than that.

So if you're going to 'prove' something using philosophy, you first need to explain why philosophers can't even agree among themselves, don't you think? Philosophers are the experts when it comes to philosophy. So what does it tell you when they can't even convince other philosophers?

And the really funny thing, when it comes to using philosophy to 'prove' God, is that one of the biggest areas of agreement among philosophers is that gods don't exist. That poll indicates that nearly 73% of philosophers are atheists (a very high percentage, compared to the lack of agreement among most other issues, don't you think?) versus only 15% who are theists. (Those theists, of course, include believers in all sorts of different gods, not just the Christian one, let alone the particular god of a particular Christian sect.)

So when a Christian apologist claims to be able to prove that God exists - his own god, of course - using a philosophical 'proof,' do you really need to refute that argument? Or can you just ask why, if what he's saying is true, that philosophers themselves overwhelmingly disagree?

Similarly, I'll frequently hear Creationists claim that they can disprove evolution. And if you don't know much about evolution yourself, maybe you'll believe them. But biologists - the experts in that particular field of expertise - overwhelmingly disagree.

When the people who know the most about a particular scientific issue are the least likely to agree with you, what are the rest of us to think? When you can mostly convince people who don't have a clue - people with little education and no background in that particular field - what does that say about your argument?

Well, this is the same way. Philosophers don't come to a consensus the way scientists do, and that's one reason to be wary of philosophical 'proofs' in the first place. But when you can supposedly 'prove' that God exists using philosophy, please explain why philosophers overwhelmingly disagree with you.

What you'll find is that these Christian apologists only convince the ignorant. Rather, they only convince people who already believe in that particular god. None of those people have been convinced by the argument itself, because they already believe for other reasons (normally, because they were raised to believe it, so they really, really want to believe it).

For the rest of us, it's hard to take a philosophical argument seriously when philosophers themselves overwhelmingly disagree. Until you can explain that, there's really no reason to investigate further, don't you think?

___
Note: the rest of my Non-Belief series is here.

Demolishing the Kalam Cosmological Argument

I thought this was excellent. It's a mirror, though, so if you'd prefer to watch it in the original four separate videos, see this.

Also, here's more about my own views, if you're completely new here.

Christian morality

This is yesterday's episode of the Atheist Experience TV show (episode #795) with Matt Dillahunty and Tracie Harris. (Yes, I know that Phoenix is misspelled. Distracting, isn't it?)

I didn't watch it until just now, so it's simply coincidence that my blog post earlier today mentioned objective morality (if briefly). Actually, it's not much of a coincidence, I suppose, since these bad arguments by Christian apologists tend to be widely adopted and repeated by other believers.

But I wanted to post this, because almost the entire show (starting at 11:47) is taken up by one caller who attempts to prove God by the fact that we human beings have a moral sense (which was a big part of Matt's debate with Jay Lucas, too).

Tracie just tears him apart! Oh, she's very respectful, very pleasant, very nice. She just demonstrates how confused this guy really is. By the end of it, he's nearly speechless, since she's so completely demolished his argument.

"You know what they say, screw one sheep, right?" I almost fell out of my chair when Tracie said that!

At the very end, he actually claims that a child rape victim deserves to be raped: "You portray that little girl as innocent; she's just as evil as you." It's the most incredible thing in the world! But his religious faith leads him to that - and, I suspect, his frustration at being proven wrong here.

If you're at all interested in the morality argument for God, I recommend this video (starting, as I say, at 11:47). It's long, but it's quite good. Matt and Tracie are probably my favorite hosts of this television show.

But if you really don't have the time for that, here's the last minute and a half:



Incredible, isn't it? This is where faith-based thinking can take you. There must be a reason why a good God allows child rape, therefore the victims must have deserved it. Ah, Christian morality.

The transcendental argument for God

The transcendental argument for God (TAG) seems to be very popular with Christian apologists these days, mostly as a tactic of just baffling with bullshit, I suspect. I've heard it myself, from people who apparently don't understand it themselves, but are just parroting what they've heard elsewhere.

This video clip is a compilation of four different videos debunking the TAG argument. (There are links to the individual videos on YouTube here.) I thought it was excellent.

At that same link, in the description of the video, there is also a brief summary of two variations of the TAG argument, as well as a link to the Iron Chariots page which goes into the same thing in more detail.

But my fundamental problem with the TAG argument - and similar arguments for the existence of 'God' - is that these aren't the reasons why proponents of such arguments believe in God themselves. No, they already believed in God - almost always because they were raised in a particular religious tradition - and the TAG argument is just an attempt to convince other people.

Hey, why not tell me what convinced you to believe in your 'God'? If you actually had a good reason to believe, why not tell me what that reason was? Is it because you didn't have a good reason? Is it because you only believe because you want to believe what you were raised to believe? (And no, a "good reason" needs to be something you can clearly distinguish from delusion and wishful-thinking.)

As I noted, I've heard people using the TAG argument who don't understand it themselves. Ask them a question and they can't answer it, because they're just parroting back what someone else told them. It's something they wanted to believe, because they already believed in their god, already believed in the religion they were (almost always) raised to believe.

But that's why the TAG argument is so popular with believers. It really is baffling with bullshit, and they're eager to be baffled. Furthermore, it's easy to baffle other people with the same bullshit, if they haven't encountered this stuff before.

Now, I'm not a philosopher. I'm not an expert in any of this. I'm just trying to understand it myself, by writing about my understanding here. (Note that the following quotes are taken from the summary of the video.) I could easily be wrong, but that's the whole point. If I am wrong, I want to be corrected.

There are several versions of TAG. For example:

Version 1:

There are some objective logical absolutes.
We can have concepts of these logical absolutes.
These logical absolutes are not physical (you can't find them within the natural world).
These logical absolutes are therefore conceptual.
Concepts require a mind.
Since the logical absolutes are true everywhere they must exist within an infinite mind.
That mind is God.
God exists.

Frankly, I have no idea if "objective logical absolutes" exist at all. (If I understand correctly, that terminology is only used in Christian apologetics, not in philosophy.) But we do have "concepts" of them. And it's those concepts which are conceptual and require a mind (ours).

Philosophy is a human concept. Logic is a human concept. Mathematics is a human concept. Those concepts attempt to describe and model what exists in the real universe, but that existence is not dependent on our understanding of it. A rock would still be what it is, even if we weren't around to label it "rock."

So the fact that we can conceive of a rock, that we have a mental construct of what "rock" means, does indeed require a mind, but only ours. The rock itself does not. At least, there's no good evidence that it does. And this is the same way with other concepts. Our concepts require our mind to exist, but what those concepts refer to might not.

Version 2:

Logic is rational, but atheism presupposes that everything comes from material sources.
Logic isn't material, so atheism lacks any objective source for logic.
Without an objective source for logic, atheism cannot employ logic.
Therefore atheism is self refuting.
Since atheism is refuted, theism must be true.
God exists.

I think I'd disagree that atheism presupposes anything, since atheism is just the disbelief in god claims. I don't have to know, myself, in order to say that you haven't made your case for a god (let alone for 'God'). I don't believe any of the claims I've heard, though I certainly haven't heard them all. But I don't believe that I "presuppose" anything, really.

Sure, I have certain beliefs of my own. I believe that I exist, for example. I believe that the universe exists, even though my understanding of it might be imperfect. And in order to have a useful debate, we both have to agree on certain basics (like the fact that we both exist). But I would be willing to change my mind if there were good evidence that I don't exist. :)

I mean, let's not confuse what we might both accept in order to have a practical discussion with what we're dogmatically demanding. I don't believe that a god exists, even a very simple, undemanding kind of deistic god, because I haven't been shown any good evidence of that. But if you've got the evidence, I'm always open to changing my mind.

Still, the main reason that "Version 2" fails is this: Logic isn't material, because it's a human concept from human minds. We've created logic. We've tried to make our rules of logic conform, as closely as possible, to what we see in the real world. That's the whole point of logic, right? But the world is there, whether we understand logic, and whether we use logic to try to make sense of it, or not.

Logic wouldn't exist independently of our minds - independently of any minds, at least. But the universe which we try to understand with logic would still exist. Or, at least, we have no evidence otherwise. (You can argue that it wouldn't, but you can't expect us to just accept what you're claiming without evidence.)

This video's summary concludes with just that point:

The video points out some of the main problems with the different versions of TAG. All versions equivocate between the consistent behavior of nature (facts of reality), and the language that humans have developed to describe it (laws of logic). The language of logic simply represents and points to what exists objectively, in the same way a map represents a real location in space without actually being a location itself.

TAG proponents are essentially trying to claim that the symbolic representation of reality (logical statements made with language, math, etc) are "things" that exist in their own right and must be accounted for, but this is simply false. All that actually exists is matter, energy, and forces that interact in consistent ways. Human logic is merely a verbal DESCRIPTION of what nature is doing, and does not need to exist for nature to behave the way it behaves.

Iron Chariots goes into this in much more detail, and discusses Matt Slick's particular version of TAG, too. (Here's another detailed refutation of Matt Slick's version of the argument.) Note this brief summary of the basic problem:

To summarize, a simple analogy to the logical absolutes would be abstract mathematics. The number 4 is “transcendent” by the TAG definition. It isn't a 'thing' that 'exists'. It cannot be photographed, frozen, weighed, or measured. It is always the number 4. It always remains the same. It always remains true.

However, if there were no minds in existence to conceive of the number 4, the shape we currently call a square would still have the same number of sides it has now. It would not physically gain or lose any sides. The abstraction of the number 4 is conceptual, but the concept isn't dependent on a transcendent mind for the real world underpinning of the concept to remain true.

Here is another critically important point (note that I cleaned it up, slightly, and added paragraphs to make it easier to read):

It should always be remembered that theists are in the same position as non-theists once enough layers are peeled back. The goal of TAG and other presuppositionalist arguments is to stay on the offensive and keep asking "why" and "how do you account for" questions until you hit bedrock at "The universe just exists and behaves consistently".

This is a brute fact and it makes no sense to ask for "why" beyond this point, however the TAG proponent will declare victory if you don't have an answer, then baldly assert that they do (God did it). This usually trips up atheists because they don't realize that they are being asked an impossible question that equally applies to ANY worldview, including the theistic one. Your goal should be to mirror the questions they ask you and go on the offensive yourself until you expose that they also don't have answers to the "why" question at the bottom of their worldview.

You will find that TAG proponents are trying to account for the consistent behavior of nature by appealing to the consistent mind of a god that can't be accounted for! They can't account for why god exists instead of not existing. He "just exists" for no reason and no cause, and just has the properties he has for no reason and no cause. His will is effective rather than ineffective, for no reason and no cause. In other words they cannot account for the existence or capabilities of the being they are appealing to as the foundation of logic! So they have actually accounted for nothing. They've just pushed the question back a level.

If 'God' just is, then why couldn't that apply to the universe itself - or to some multiverse, perhaps? 'God' as an explanation simply doesn't solve anything.

But there's one more thing to take away from this. If you don't understand an argument, then don't accept it. If you don't understand something, ask questions. And if you still don't understand it, don't let it convince you just because it sounds impressive. Many people baffle with bullshit for the same reason that scam-artists confuse their victims. If you don't understand it, don't believe it - and that includes what you read here, too.

Don't accept an argument you don't understand even if you really want to believe it - maybe even especially if you want to believe it. If a person can't be clear about what he's claiming, either he doesn't understand it himself or he's just trying to convince you of something that isn't so. Unfortunately, we tend to be very, very gullible when it's something we really want to believe.

Read all this, and then we'll talk

(Jesus and Mo)

Coincidentally, I received a similar response in my local newspaper recently, so I thought that was funny enough to post this cartoon.

Sure, there are plenty of books written about this stuff. You could probably spend your entire life trying to get through all of them. But how about just telling me in your own words what's so convincing about them?

If you understand them, you should be able to explain the argument well enough, don't you think? And if you don't understand them, then what made them so convincing to you? Was it just that they agreed with what you want to believe?

If you've got a book you think I'd like, then by all means let me know. I love books, I really do. But if you're trying to convince me of something, just tell me. After all, if you don't understand your own argument, I think I can safely dismiss it and save myself a whole bunch of time.

Wouldn't you agree?

God and the existence of evil

This is Clay Farris Naff, from here in Lincoln, Nebraska. (He's on a panel - the other panelists had a religious perspective - speaking to an ethics class at Doane College.)

I liked the lightning statistics, which is why I'm posting these two video clips. But there's a third clip to the series here, if you're interested.

The ultimate theological question

Here's a great post from Lance Parkin:

I may be wrong about this, but I think there is a theological issue that, when we consider the whole sweep of human history, troubled a far higher proportion of the human population from far earlier and for far longer than any single other question. It’s not a question we ask today. ...

The ultimate theological question is: ‘Where does the Sun go at night?’.

The answer that so many civilisations agreed for so long was: ‘The Sun is driven by one of the gods, and at night it goes under the Earth to fight a battle. There is at least some risk that the god will lose this battle, and so the Sun may not rise tomorrow’. It’s something the human race understood was a cast iron fact before they knew how to cast iron. It survived as the working model twenty-five times longer than the four hundred years we’ve understood the Earth goes around the Sun. It was understood to be the literal truth, not some metaphor or piece of symbolism. ...

This was a religious outlook held for far longer and by a far higher proportion of the human race then living than has ever believed ‘there is only one god’, ‘the god I worship created the universe’ or ‘God’s a paragon of virtue’. It’s a religious belief that can rightfully be said to have been ‘universal’, in the parochial sense human beings use the word. For thousands of years, it appears that all human beings believed it. ...

I can’t answer the question ‘when was the latest someone could suggest a god moves the Sun across the sky without everyone just laughing at them?’. In the West … well … here’s Bill O’Reilly, United States of America, 2011, and he’s not saying exactly the same thing … but he’s not saying something that’s all that different, either. Whether he knows it or not, he believes in Dyeusphaeter’s Solar Chariot, via Aristotle, via the Catholic Church. ...

We know where the Sun goes at night. It’s settled law, now. There will be people who say it doesn’t count as a theological question. But understanding that it was a theological question – for at least three, possibly five, times longer than we’ve had any Christian theology – is important to bear in mind. It’s easy to dismiss the Solar Chariot as primitive superstition borne from ignorance, and to say that it doesn’t need to be studied in any great depth … well, yes. But isn’t that what the Courtier’s Reply says about modern theology? ...

‘Life’ and ‘the divine purpose’ and ‘the greater good’ are so big and seem so confusing and inherently paradoxical that it’s impossible even to expect we might ever understand them. But we have to understand right from the outset that theologians in the past told us the same things about disease, harvests and the weather – equally vast, immensely important parts of our experience (and also all things attributed, for most of human history, solely to the capricious nature of the gods).

I think it’s an awkward fact for theology that, as far as I can see, a lot of theological issues have been conclusively solved, but all of them were solved outside the field. ...

As Bertrand Russell put it, ‘Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know’. Whenever we find ourselves concluding that a question is just too large to ever answer, I think it’s instructive to remind ourselves that we solved the biggest problem of them all: where the Sun’s hiding at night.

Great stuff, isn't it? Note that I slashed the original post pretty severely to condense it enough to put here. I recommend that you read the whole thing. But I think this still gives the gist of the argument.

It's easy to look back thousands of years and think of how ridiculous those people were for believing what we now know is pure fantasy. But we know that because of the slow accumulation of knowledge since then.

You don't think that it's silly believing that we live on the surface of a rapidly-spinning ball, floating in empty space. But that's because you've been taught it since infancy. When you think about it, that's a remarkable thing to believe. If you didn't already know it, that's not an explanation that would readily come to mind.

And I've read that, when Isaac Newton came up with his ideas about gravity, it seemed like spooky action-at-a-distance to most people, pretty much just magic. But we don't feel that way today, because we grew up with the idea of gravity. It was taught to us as settled fact, so we don't find it odd at all.

Most of us still leap to supernatural explanations when we don't know the real cause of something. It's that notorious "god of the gaps" argument. It's not valid, but it's still used by pretty much every theologian on Earth.

We skeptics don't like "I don't know" much, either, but sometimes it's the only true answer. And it's not in any way a bad one. "I don't know" just means that we've got a lot of work ahead of us to find out - and that we're not going to leap to a conclusion without good evidence backing it up.

"God did it" is not the default, or it shouldn't be. And this ancient theological question of where the sun goes at night should demonstrate why.

Philosophy and the Atheist Experience

Do you like philosophy? I don't, not really. And maybe this will demonstrate why.

This video clip is from the Atheist Experience TV show, episode #593, with hosts Matt Dillahunty and Tracie Harris. The whole show is available here, or you can watch it in nine 10-minute segments (the first of which is here).

It's all very interesting, but my purpose today is not to post the whole episode. So I'm starting with the above clip, segment #3, where their caller is Matt Slick of the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM).

This particular clip is just the beginning of the discussion, which goes on for several more clips (here, here, here, and here). But if you like philosophy, you might find them interesting.

Heck, I don't like philosophy, and I still find it interesting. But it demonstrates, I think, my biggest problem with philosophy. Science is grounded in evidence, but philosophy seems to be just words. And although the intention is admirable, no doubt, I have to wonder if philosophy ever actually accomplishes anything.

Do philosophers ever come to a consensus, the way scientists do? Philosophers ask the questions, but do they ever get any answers - at least, answers they can all agree on? If not, what good is it?

Now, I thought this discussion was very interesting,... but not especially useful. They started off in complete disagreement, and that's how they ended up, too.

Make no mistake, I think Matt Slick was wrong and Matt Dillahunty was right. Well, that's not a big surprise, is it? But I understood the point Dillahunty was making. (Note that I really like Tracie Harris, and if you watch the whole show, you might see why, but she didn't have a part in this particular discussion.)

But again, I don't think any of this is actually useful. Slick was trying to prove the existence of God through philosophy,... and he still is. Dillahunty's objections had no effect. Well, you might not be surprised at that. But do philosophers ever come to a consensus?

Because scientists do. Science is based on evidence, and when the evidence is there, scientists generally accept it. Oh, they won't change their minds easily, and they'll certainly search for alternative explanations, but evidence grounds scientists in reality.

As far as I can see, philosophers don't seem to be grounded in anything. It's all words. And yes, it might be logical, but logic by itself isn't necessarily valid. Many things throughout history have seemed logical to intelligent people, but were still wrong. Well, science can be wrong, too, but the scientific consensus has a much greater chance of being right.

And that's why I just can't get on board with philosophy. I thought this was a very interesting discussion, even an entertaining one, but was it useful?

But maybe I'm wrong about this. Do philosophers ever come to a consensus the way scientists do? If not, then I'd say that philosophy is not a good way to try to determine the truth. If philosophers can stick with what they believe, despite what other philosophers say - and it's all just competing arguments, right? - then who can say what the truth really is?

Science works. Does philosophy?

The straw Vulcan

I liked the question at the end of this. Did this kind of thinking create straw Vulcans on TV and in the movies? Or are straw Vulcans what made people think that this is what rationality really is?

This is the third presentation I've posted (see also here and here) from Skepticon IV, which was held at Missouri State University last month, and they've all been great. In fact, I created a new Skepticon tag for such posts, since I'm clearly going to have to watch more of these presentations.

I'm not sure how many of them I'll post - especially those from previous Skepticons - since they're longer than most of the clips I like to embed here. But I've been really impressed by what I've seen so far, from Rebecca Watson, Greta Christina, and now Julia Galef.

Ayn Rand's serial killer hero

There are a couple of things I find interesting about this. First, it surprises me that so many Republicans can idolize this woman, while completely ignoring the fact that she was a staunch atheist.

Oh, I can understand getting ideas from everyone, while not agreeing with them about everything. But so many people on the right really seem to worship Ayn Rand. That's a little different.

Now from my perspective, I think she gives atheists a bad name. But we atheists are a diverse bunch with diverse views. We have no dogma. In the latest video from The Atheist Experience, for example, one of the callers is an atheist opposed to gay marriage.

Yes, much of the opposition to gay rights is based on religion, but that doesn't mean that all atheists will automatically take the other side. Atheists don't believe that a god or gods exist. Period. Any other similarities are, at most, a side effect of that. (Since most of us base our non-belief on the lack of evidence, most of us probably use evidence and reason when it comes to our other opinions, too. But unfortunately, that's not inevitable.)

So the fact that Ayn Rand was an atheist makes no difference to me in evaluating her other positions. But at a time when pretty much any deviation from right-wing orthodoxy gets Republicans accused of being traitors - from others within their own party - I'm amazed that these people can completely ignore Rand's position on religion.

You know, I suspect that this shows the factionalism hidden in the seemingly-monolithic GOP. Many Republicans are religious fundamentalists, culture warriors determined to turn America into a Christian nation, as they imagine it. But many others are equally determined on turning America into an oligarchy, a nation of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy.

Many Republicans are eager supporters of both factions, no doubt - believers in that nonsensical prosperity theology (which would seem to contradict most of what the Bible says about wealth). But I suspect that most, on both sides, are simply willing to use the other side in order to gain political power.

Thus, the theocrats are willing to give tax cuts to the rich, because the rich fund the party. Ayn Rand supporters - the wealthy and their hangers-on - are willing to let the religious nuts rail against homosexuality and the separation of church and state, because those true believers are their the foot-soldiers. That's where the votes come from to get those tax cuts for the rich. It's an unholy alliance.

Well, that's my hypothesis, anyway. Of course, I don't think any of these people are too rational, so I wouldn't actually expect them to be consistent. In both cases, they're faith-based, so I suppose I shouldn't expect that holding contradictory beliefs would bother them much. Still, this distinction would explain why Rand's atheism hasn't been a problem for them.

The other point that interests me about this video is that it demonstrates perhaps my biggest problem with libertarians. As I've said before, I've never known a libertarian who didn't go completely off the deep end, following their philosophy to its most absurd conclusions. Well, Ayn Rand clearly seems to show this tendency, too.

Leaving aside the question of whether William Edward Hickman can really be considered a "serial killer" (the truth is plenty bad enough!), it's just absurd that Rand could have found anything admirable about him, let alone consider him a "superman." Hickman was a complete sociopath. That's not a good model for a human being. (I can't believe I even have to say that!)

But this is where Ayn Rand - and her libertarian followers - really get it wrong. Human beings are social animals. We evolved as social animals and we remain social animals. We live in groups. We survive as a group, not as individuals.

Our fundamental characteristic, speech, was the key development that made human societies wildly successful. Other animals use tools, but only human beings can talk to each other. Sociopaths aren't the ideal humans. They're aberrant individuals. They're sick. They're missing what's essential in normal human beings.

Even hermits are aberrant human beings, really. For better or worse, we are social animals. And our modern governments are only the latest manifestation of social organization that's been the key to human survival since humans first evolved (and even before that - look at chimpanzee societies, for example).

Ignoring all that for some theory of a selfish hero, striving only for himself, is completely nuts. But even crazier is following this thinking off a cliff, so that you consider a murdering sociopath - a man who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl and then, after the ransom had been paid, returned her dismembered and gutted body to her parents - a "superman," simply because he had no conscience!

Hickman was about as far from a "superman" as you can get. How did Rand go completely off the deep end like this? Well, that's one of the problems with using reason without evidence. Reason without evidence can end up in a complete flight of fancy. Rand was right about the value of reason, but it must be reason and evidence, together. That's the only way to stay grounded in reality.

Unfortunately, Rand's followers tend to suffer from that same flaw. All too often, they'll follow their "reason" into complete idiocy. (Just look at Paul Ryan's budget plan. Or Tim Pawlenty's tax proposals.)

Reason can become just as crazy as faith, if it's not kept restrained by evidence. That's been the gift of the modern scientific method. Even the ancients, often enough, recognized the value of reason. But by and large, they didn't match that with real-world evidence.

How "New Age" philosophy works

(Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

Shibboleths

An interesting post by John Quiggin at Crooked Timber has been getting quite a bit of notice:

A recent report on a poll finding that a majority of Republicans (that is, likely primary voters) are “birthers”, with only 28 per cent confident that Obama was born in the United States has raised, not for the first time, the question “how can they think that?” and “do they really believe that?”.

Such questions are the domain of agnotology, the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt. Agnotology is not, primarily, the study of ignorance in the ordinary sense of the term. So, for example, someone who shares the beliefs of their community, unaware that those beliefs might be subject to challenge, might be ignorant as a result of their cultural situation, but they are not subject to culturally-induced ignorance in the agnotological sense.

But this kind of ignorance is not at issue in the case of birtherism. Even in communities where birtherism is universal (or at least where any dissent is kept quiet), it must be obvious that not everyone in the US thinks that the elected president was born outside the US and therefore ineligible for office.

Rather, birtherism is a shibboleth, that is, an affirmation that marks the speaker as a member of their community or tribe. (The original shibboleth was a password chosen by the Gileadites because their Ephraimite enemies could not say “Sh”.) Asserting a belief that would be too absurd to countenance for anyone outside a given tribal/ideological group makes for a good political shibboleth.

That's interesting, don't you think? Here's Jonathan Chait with a slightly different perspective:

But I do think the concept of agnotology applies here. Quiggin's argument hinges on the fact that conservatives understand that some people do not believe President Obama was born outside the United States (or is a Muslim, or...) But what those conservatives believe is that they enjoy access to truth that is denied Americans who are brainwashed by the mainstream media. The believe that Fox News is not just a network that counteracts the biased liberal media, or even a network that reports the stories that the liberal media ignore, but the vehicle for Truth:

Incredible, isn't it? Whether or not this is a shibboleth, what's important is what it means for America. Here's Quiggin again:

Does all this hurt or help the Republicans? In short-run electoral terms, I think it helps. A base of loyal supporters who, for one or other of the reasons mentioned above, are immune to factual evidence has to help win elections. There are, however, two big costs

• First, people have noticed that Republicans have a problem with reality. That perception, which undermines the rationale for all sorts of thinking about policy, will take a while to sink in, but it will also be hard to erase once it is generally accepted. In the long run, this has to turn off a fair number of Republican-leaning independents and any remaining Republicans with a capacity for embarrassment.

• Double-think is very difficult, and people will start to act on the basis of their beliefs. If those beliefs are ludicrously false, trouble is likely to follow.

Hmm,... the second point is obvious, but what is that "trouble" likely to be? Yes, acting on the basis of ludicrous beliefs will likely cause problems. Duh!  Heh, heh. I guess I'd prefer some specifics.

But I'd really like to believe the first point. In fact, I've long been expecting a backlash against such lunacy. So far, however, I've seen little sign of it.

It's hard for me to understand why anyone is still a Republican these days. Yes, Republicans have a problem with reality. But that's been obvious for years. Has it hurt them? True, Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell might have cost them a couple of Senate seats in November, but it was still a huge Republican victory.

And the fact that I want to believe in an eventual backlash makes me all the more skeptical of it. I hope so, but... I'm not going to believe anything just because I want to believe it. This is where Chait's point seems particularly important. With Fox "News" and other far-right media sources pushing these shibboleths so determinedly, we just seem to get more and more people believing them all the time. Will there ever be a backlash? If so, when?

I'd also like to note one of the comments, by Chris Adams, on Quiggin's post:

One major problem related to your second conclusion is that the GOP has unusually trended heavily toward being the party of the elderly and rich for awhile and there are fair odds that many of their current voters will be dead before the consequences are obvious. Breaking the idea of concern for the future is in some ways worse than the actual problem.

Note that the average age of Fox "News" viewers is 65. Is this why we're seeing Republicans consistently favor short-term benefits like tax cuts, despite the disastrous long-term consequences? Is this why they seem to have completely abandoned the idea of investing for the future? Do the elderly not care about the future anymore, if they won't live to see it themselves?

And, of course, Republicans are not just older, on average, they're also overwhelmingly white. The GOP "southern strategy" of deliberately appealing to white racists has made certain of that. And these past few years, we've started seeing real hysterics from a Republican Party which finds itself on the wrong side of America's demographic changes.

So I wonder. Is another reason for Republicans abandoning that concern for the future simply because they see future Americans as browner (and perhaps less Christian)? It's a terrible thought, isn't it?

(I've heard that a lot of them expect to see Jesus return in their lifetime, which sounds pretty crazy in itself. And maybe that expectation of Armageddon also explains why they're not concerned about the future. But I wonder if that's not just an excuse for racist feelings they don't want to admit, maybe not even to themselves.)

Well, either way, Republicans are older and whiter than average. They do seem to be on the wrong side of demographic changes in this country. Yes, there will be plenty of elderly in the future, and elderly people tend to be more conservative (relatively-speaking) and more easily scared. But I also suspect that people might be reluctant to change political parties at the end of their lives - especially when the other party has a reputation for losing touch with reality.

But that's really long-term. I don't think we can wait that long before we start investing in America again, before we start addressing our many long-term problems, before we start using evidence-based, instead of faith-based, thinking.

QOTD: The potential for personhood

Quote of the Day:

Yes, Mr Barnard began as a zygote. That does not mean the zygote was Mr Barnard. My car began as a stack of metal ingots and barrels of plastics; that does not imply that an ingot of iron is a car. My house began as a set of blueprints and an idea in an architect's mind; nobody is going to pay the architect rent for living in his cranium or on a stack of paper in a cabinet. The zygote was not Justin Barnard, unless Justin Barnard is still a vegetating single-celled blob, in which case I'd like to know how he typed his essay.

Since Barnard claims to be a philosopher, I'll cite another, a guy named Aristotle. This is a quote I use in the classroom when I try to explain to them how epigenesis works, in contrast to preformation. Aristotle did some basic poking around in chicken eggs and in semen, and he noticed something rather obvious—there were no bones in there, nor blood, nor anything meatlike or gristly or brainy. So he made the simple suggestion that they weren't there.

Why not admit straight away that the semen…is such that out of it blood and flesh can be formed, instead of maintaining that semen is both blood and flesh?

Barnard is making the classic preformationist error of assuming that everything had to be there in the beginning: I am made of bones and blood and flesh and brains and guts and consciousness and self-identity, therefore the zygote must have contained bones and blood and flesh and brains and guts and consciousness and self-identity.

It didn't.

Why not admit straight away that the zygote is such that out of it selfhood may arise, rather than maintaining that the zygote is the self?

In that case we have to recognize that the person is not present instantaneously at one discrete moment, but emerges gradually over months to years of time, that there were moments when self was not present and other moments when self clearly was present, and moments in between where there is ambiguity or partial identity or otherwise blurry gray boundaries. This is a conclusion that makes conservative ideologues wince and shy away — I think it's too complicated for their brains, which may in some ways be equivalent to the gormless reflexive metabolic state of the zygote — but it is how science understands the process of development. - PZ Myers

A philosopher of religion calls it quits

From Jerry A. Coyne:

Philosopher Keith Parsons, from the University of Houston, has given up doing philosophy of religion.  According to Julia Galef, writing at Religious Dispatches, Parsons found the case for God to be insupportable.  As Parsons wrote on the website The Secular Outpost:

I have to confess that I now regard “the case for theism” as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. BTW, in saying that I now consider the case for theism to be a fraud, I do not mean to charge that the people making that case are frauds who aim to fool us with claims they know to be empty. No, theistic philosophers and apologists are almost painfully earnest and honest… I just cannot take their arguments seriously any more, and if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it.

Parsons later said he regretted using the word “fraud,” but of course the case for God is a fraud. He just can’t say that publicly.  But, as Galef reports:

Parsons’ background in the sciences (he obtained his doctorate in the history and philosophy of science at University of Pittsburgh) made him wary of unfettered reasoning. “There’s so little empirical grounding and constraint in philosophy. Even in paleontology, a so-called soft science, the bones are there,” Parsons says. “You can go measure them, look at them. You can’t say anything the bones won’t let you say.”

This is my problem with philosophy in general. "Unfettered reasoning" - thinking which isn't grounded in and constrained by evidence - is just too unreliable. Many things may make sense, without being true. And likewise, many true things don't make sense, not at first.

Does it really make sense that we're all living on the surface of a rapidly-spinning ball? We know it's true because of the evidence, and that evidence induced us to come up with an explanation - gravity - that now seems reasonable. Well, it does seem reasonable if you've been taught it all your life, doesn't it? But could you have thought your way to that conclusion, which seems to violate common sense, without any evidence at all?

On the other side of this, you can think your way to elaborate arguments about the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin. But without good evidence that angels exist at all, you're constructing your elaborate edifice on sand. Evidence is the solid foundation of real knowledge. Evidence-based thinking can be wrong, true. But such errors won't last long.

And apparently, the philosophy of religion has even bigger problems than the rest of philosophy. From Julia Galef:

His word choice ["fraud"] may have been the spark, but it landed on some particularly dry kindling: a general tension over the legitimacy of philosophy of religion in philosophy as a whole. Against the very nonreligious field of philosophy (73% of philosophers identify as atheist, according to one recent survey), the Christian-dominated subfield of philosophy of religion stands out.

“I think most philosophers basically agree with a book John Mackie wrote many years ago called The Miracle of Theism, the idea being that it was a miracle anybody could believe that,” Leiter says. To philosophers who feel like the case against God was settled hundreds of years ago, philosophy of religion often seems like apologetics, an effort to rationalize preexisting beliefs. ...

Compared to more esoteric subfields like philosophy of language or metaphysics, philosophy of religion is much more likely to attract people with deep-seated, lifelong beliefs about the topic. Because viewpoints in philosophy of religion are so emotionally fraught and bound up with a person’s lifestyle, values, and relationships, changing one’s mind is a daunting prospect. The central point of contention—the existence of God—is most fraught of all, not to mention starkly binary. “In philosophy of religion you do have this gap—either God exists or not. There’s no middle ground,” Parsons says.

It's very easy to believe what you want to believe. And in a society so overwhelmingly Christian, it's also easy for universities to give the philosophy of religion more respect than it deserves. Sometimes, wealthy Christians fund the entire program. And either way, it's usually popular with donors and with politicians.

But I'm sure it's not easy for a 58-year-old professor, highly respected in his field, to give up that field entirely. How many people could do that? How many people would do that? Last year, I posted about non-believing clergy - ministers and priests who'd lost their faith, but kept preaching, because giving up not just their job but their entire profession was just too hard to do. I sympathize, I really do.

But Parsons himself explained it this way:

Chiefly, though, I am motivated by a sense of ennui on the one hand and urgency on the other. A couple of years ago I was teaching a course in the philosophy of religion. We were using, among other works, C. Stephen Layman’s Letters to a Doubting Thomas: A Case for the Existence of God. In teaching class I try to present material that I find antithetical to my own views as fairly and in as unbiased a manner as possible. With the Layman book I was having a real struggle to do so. I found myself literally dreading having to go over this material in class—NOT, let me emphasize, because I was intimidated by the cogency of the arguments. On the contrary, I found the arguments so execrably awful and pointless that they bored and disgusted me (Layman is not a kook or an ignoramus; he is the author of a very useful logic textbook).

I have, myself, noticed this sort of thing. I enjoy debating with people who disagree with me. But many arguments for religion are so bad it's embarrassing. I find it's just not worth my time to bother with them, especially when I've heard them a million times.

Let me assure you that I don't mean all religious belief or all believers. Many believers simply rely on faith. And while I can certainly explain why I think faith-based thinking is a bad idea, it's hard to argue with someone who simply wants to believe what he wants to believe. And I can disagree with other arguments without being embarrassed at the level of the discussion.

But the people who promote so-called "intelligent design," for example, or "young earth" creationists, the people who try to pretend that their faith-based beliefs have evidence or reason behind them, their arguments tend to be just hopelessly bad, bringing up points that have been discredited over and over again.

So what would it be like if I actually had to teach those claims - not as fact, but even just as rational arguments due our respectful attention. Yes, this would be like having to teach "intelligent design" in a biology class. I can certainly understand the difficulty.

The dumbest libertarian quote ever

OK, I know there must be rational libertarians out there somewhere, but I never seem to encounter any who don't go completely off the deep end, following their political philosophy to its most absurd conclusion.

Take, for example, the following quote. Apparently, libertarians in New Hampshire are upset about an action by the state Division for Children, trying to protect an infant from an abusive father. Maybe they have reason, maybe they don't. I'll let the citizens of New Hampshire figure that out.

But check out this post by Tom Scocca at Slate. Here's an excerpt:

The ones who made it into the Concord Monitor, anyway, are sad crackpots. "The fact that there are documents about it is meaningless," one told the paper.

The most amazing voice from the anti-tyranny forces, though, belonged to a woman named Amanda Biondolillo, from Concord:

"The family should be left to resolve it on their own," Biondolillo said. "Or private enterprise - private companies can contact the family and say, 'We heard you were hitting your kids. Can you stop that?' "

Is Amanda Biondolillo a prankster who shows up at protests to say things to make libertarians look like morons? Her online presence looks sincere. But: really? Private enterprise! The solution to domestic violence is for there to be private companies that will go around telling people to please stop hitting their kids. Oh, the parents will say, we hadn't thought of that. We will stop hitting the children now.

Do you see why I have a hard time taking libertarians seriously? In moderation, they could probably contribute to our political discourse. But have you ever known a moderate libertarian? I haven't. Once they jump on the libertarian bandwagon, they always seem to ride it right over a cliff.

I don't care what your political philosophy might be - reasonable, rational people keep in touch with the real world. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice? Yes, it is. In the real world, when fanatics start talking like that, it's always more about extremism than it is about liberty.

Private property is good, in moderation. We still need laws. We still need government regulation. We still need a social safety net. Arguing about "capitalism" and "socialism" abandons reality for rhetoric. The fact is, we need both.

Our nation seems to be awash in extremism right now, with nothing too batshit crazy for the Tea Party types. And sadly, this kind of environment seems to draw libertarians out of the woodwork. True, the vast majority of Tea Partiers aren't libertarians. In fact, they're the same right-wing fundamentalists who brought us George W. Bush. But the crazy does seem to attract libertarians, doesn't it? Like a moth to a flame.