Chariots of Iron

Due to a recent decision by the UN, the atheist bloggers are in a bit of a stir. Pharyngula, of course, raised my attention to this article over on Ottawa Citizen. We covered this in the upcoming episode when the UN resolution was only being proposed… but now the damned thing has passed. Fortunately the resolution is non binding, but as the Canadian says it does provide international validity for governments imprisoning people for that heinous crime of blasphemy. I wonder if the American religious right will grab onto this?

This resoultion, even in its non-binding form is a major blow to freedom of speech and religion everywhere.

Blogging like a madman today, I wanted to point our readers to the latest On Faith column in The Washington Post. This one by CFI Chairman and Founder Paul Kurtz. He nicely summarizes just precisely how one can be moral without a religious foundation. As we plan out our future shows it’s a topic we intend to visit and revisit (hey, there’s a lot to it!).

Oh wait, that’s James Ensor… damn you They Might be Giants!

Well Micheal Egnor is actually one of those intellectually vacant members of the Discovery Institute. He wrote a sour-grapes piece complaining why he wasn’t invited to some evolutionary symposium attended by noted biologist and blogger PZ Myers.  You can read his inanity here. Now PZ Myers has the good sense to point it out over on his blog, which is where I got my exposure to this ridiculous piece. One statement in Mr. Egnor’s rant stuck out to me.

“Darwin’s positive legacy to real medical science is non-existent.”

Really Mr. Egnor? I hope you haven’t taken any moden antibiotics, got a flu shot, and I hope that no one you know or love is ever infected by the AIDS virus. Why? because evolutionary biology has been integral to humanity’s triumph over such ills. Of course you’d not know this from scientific papers of the last eight years…

So lately i’ve been going back and watching many old debates (mostly featuring two of my favorite people Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens) on the existence of god. More and more I find that the theologians who debate fall back on some common apologetic arguments, and ones that I feel are complete and total bunk. While much of this information may come out on the show I thought I’d give a brief on each of them and tell the readers why i personally feel these arguments are fundamentally flawed. These are my personal stances on these arguments and do not necessarily represent the views of my fellow charioteers, although if they’re willing and have the time I’d love for them to join in and have them post their takes on each of these arguments. The short summaries of these arguments are taken from wikipedia

• Cosmological argument – Argues that the existence of the universe demonstrates that God exists. Various ancillary arguments from science are often offered to support the cosmological argument.

The age old question “Why is there something, instead of nothing?”. The answer to this one is pretty basic, if there was nothing, we would not be here to ask why is there nothing. This argument is ridiculous on it’s face and it’s support usually falls into a “god of the gaps” argument with the theologian assuming that since science does not have an answer (yet), then the answer must be god.

• Teleological argument (argument from design) – Argues that there is an intricate design in the world around us, and a design requires a designer.

Another classic, and the refutation can be as simple as for the Cosmological argument. But I’ll give this one a little more credit than that, it’s a very interesting proposition. The scientific hypothesis on this one is an interesting one, a multiverse theory where alternate universes exist in which all of the possible “settings” for the physical laws are represented. But once again, I say If the laws of the universe were different enough that formation of life was not possible then we wouldn’t be here to ask such a question. The basis of this argument has gained some momentum as computer simulations have apparently been run where these laws are modified and it seems that the tolerances are extremely low when it comes to fiddling with the universal constants and getting anything we recognize as our present universe.

• Ontological argument – Argues that the very concept of God demands that there is an actual existent God.

More patently ridiculous, I can conceive of a wide range of things that do not exist, it in no way affects the existence of such things.

• Moral Argument – Argues that if there are any real morals, then there must be an absolute from which they are derived.

This one always grates on me as it is so patently obvious that the paradigms for moral behavior have shifted radically just within the bounds of recorded history. There is also incredibly strong evidence that instinctual behavior is something that evolved, and much of what we consider “moral” could fall into this category (a revulsion to killing our own young for example). I would easily argue that there are very few “absolute” morals and those that do exist could easily be explained by evolutionary instinctual behavior.

• Transcendental Argument – Argues that all our abilities to think and reason require the existence of God.

I’ve never got this argument, it’s incredibly anthropocentric. it is quite possible that a wide range of species can think and reason and that this is a mere evolutionary development shared by many creatures with advanced brains. The restriction is the bounds in which humans think and reason is incredibly wide, we’ve got the “giraffe’s neck” of brains.

• Presuppositional Arguments – Arguments that show basic beliefs of theists and nontheists require God as a necessary precondition.

I relate this one to the Ontological argument above, it’s flawed at it’s base. Beliefs in a condition do not require that condition to actually exist. People believe in Aliens and people do not believe in aliens does their actual existence affect this belief, is the belief dependent on either condition? What about the earth being flat? Or earthquakes being caused by the wrestling of giant Minotaurs beneath the earth, do the basic beliefs of Minotaurists and non-Minotaurists require the Minotaurs as a precondition?

I would also like to point out that not a single one of these arguments back up any single set of holy texts as an argument, at their very best they could only be used to support a deist-like claim of god’s existence. Of course most theologians will take any failed attempt to refute these arguments as a win for thier specific theology. For a theologian to have any credence for me you must not only win the debate that god exists, but that your particular scripture is the correct one, over and above any other religions scripture. This is where a lot of other arguments fall flat, the Argument in defense of Miracles falls flat when you consider that miracles have been reported as coming from people of a wide variety of faiths, most of which are dogmatically and scripturally incompatible with one another. in fact when this argument is brought up it tends to make me lean toward a polytheistic view as the only possible supernatural explanation.

Of course, the naturalistic explanation always wins out over any supernatural explanation, and “we don’t know” is another acceptable answer. One thing I’d like to see these theologians say is “I don’t know”, they usually tend to attribute things they don’t know to thier dieties in order to cover thier ignorance while attempting to bolster thier arguments.

it’s election day here in the united States of America, and like millions of other political junkies across this nation I’m glued to some form of media. In my case, the internet, refreshing fivethirtyeight.com cnn.com/politics and my various other news feeds just to know the split second any results are in at all. It’s exciting it’s a strange combination of hope and anxiety.

For those of you who listen to the podcast or read this regularly you’ve probably gotten the hint that I’m a supporter of Obama. I want him to win, but not only for the reasons I’ve espoused previously.

This campaign season has been quite long, and throughout the general election we’ve seen two very different styles of campaigns run. In this battle of campaign styles I want a message sent to campaign mangers everywhere. Campaigns which focus primarily on a negative message must stop. I have been highly disappointed in the campaign of a local candidate for U.S. Senator here in Oregon. The campaign of Jeff Merkley has focused almost entirely on a single message in its advertising, “Gordon Smith is bad”. The trend of politics since 2000 has not been to get you to vote for someone, but against someone. And frankly I’m sick of it.

The Obama campaign has focused primarily on a positive message, Obama has told me what he’s going to do and how he’s going to do it. Sure he’s also tried to link Senator McCain with the policies of the current administration, but his Half-hour spot last week had nary a mention of his opponent, and at least for the television ads here in Oregon, they’ve been light on attacks and strong on issues. I contrast this with the McCain and Merkley campaigns where nearly every ad i have seen has been a character-based ad-hominem on the opposition. Ayers and Rev. Wright and “Socialist” against Obama, and “Smith’s frozen food factory hires illegal immigrants” in the Senatorial race. Frankly if it were not for the local Senatorial debate and work by Merley surrogates like the CFL-AIO I’d have no clue as to where Merkley stands on the issues. Same goes for McCain, if I were to base what I know solely on the advertising.

I hope this election sends a refferendum to those who run political campaigns that negative doesn’t work. I hope the american people don’t fall for such tactics. I want the level of political discourse in this country to rise above such childish strategies. We’ve seen it backfire in the North Carolina race between Dole and Hagan, may this trend continue.

Until this election madness is over. I’ve got to say though that the latest round of attacks the GOP has been leveling on the democratic ticket is a level of hypocrisy that must make the religions of the world jealous. Sarah Palin rails against Barak’s Obama’s promotion of “socialist” progressive taxation (progressive taxation which was also promoted by Adam Smith, the founder of American capitalism, but that’s a whole other rant), while her state dolls out thousand+ dollar checks for the share of Alaska’s Oil Revenues. McCain’s Campaign bullies the L.A. Times to release a video of Barak Obama attending the going away party of fellow University of Chicago professor Rashid Khalidi, while McCain has shoveled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the same professor’s Palestinian Research Center.

But being the junkie that I am I’m starting to really get angry at journalists, not as individuals but as a profession. The method of journalism has always seemed to be to find “both sides” of every story. It seems that with the 24-hour news cycle that the cable news networks have to fill, they’ve got the time to do this for every single story. This often gives voice to radical fringe elements under the guise of “equal time”. A couple weeks ago I went to the CFI kickoff event here in Portland, OR. There Professor Krauss told us why he does not waste time debating creationists. It’s not because, as I’ve heard some say, the mere act of debating gives the appearance of weight to the creationist argument, but because the nature of a debate is, in itself, not an accurate representation of the “controversy”. To truly have a representative debate on creationism/intelligent design vs. evolution you would need to have three creationists on one side of the table and 997 scientists on the other. But again, the fact is that science isn’t decided in a debate or in a court-room, but by the evidence, and until the “opposition” can produce some to support their own claims then they’ve got no debate.

I feel that journalists need to also take this kind of measure when deciding on how much to weigh the sides of a story. Of course, they’ll never do this. News networks need controversy, they need people arguing, they need political contests to be close, because givens are boring, because, as I’ve said, facts themselves are boring. And here’s where I even out this article, that the public puts up with this is due in most part, to wishy-washy, touchy-feely liberals. Those folks who believe that all opinions are equally vaild, that everyone has a right to believe what they want and not have those beliefs questioned. Well I’m here to say that not all sides of an argument are equal, and sometimes people’s beliefs are just wrong.

In further election related news, further fall out from Governer Palin’s critisizm of “Fruit Fly Research”, the earmark in question was related to research around a species of fruitfly which menaces olive trees, the eramark was authored by a Californa represntative, a state which has a very large annual olive crop. The full details are here at ScienceNOW. This level of ignorance is dangerous, research earmarks made up 4.5 billion of federal spending for ’08. A large amountof this money goes to our Universtiy system, these research grants drive the advancement of science and keep schools like MIT and Harvard the envy of the academic world. Earmarks may be a problem, but not all earmarks are equal.

I’ve always had a biog problem with Pascal’s Wager, and I am surprised how often it seems to be used. Often this is just a first line of approach by evangelists trying to get me to come around to their side of the fence. Of course a common argument that people use against Pascal’s Wager is that any omniscient god could easily see through a “saying you believe just to get to the good place” type believer.  My issue is this, coming from the non-believer perspective, is that once you get someone over the god-hump how would you then convince them that you’ve got the right bead on the all-mighty? Considering that many religions like to lump those who in other religions in with non-believers (or do I go to a slightly more or less burney-pitchforky-kind of place? because I’m an atheist as opposed to a, for example, Buddhist?).

For the sake of my following, slightly math-related, rant I am going to actually give the faithful a *BIG* benefit of the doubt here and give a deity a 50-50 chance of existence (in all likelihood I’d say that given the total lack of and substantial evidence this chance is several orders of magnitude lower).

So 50% Chance there is a god and I better do what he/she/it says. 50% chance I’m already doing just fine enjoying the very real miracle that is intelligent life (thank you law-of-large-numbers!).

Now how am I to judge the likelihood that any of the “revealed truths” that humankind has ever believed in is the correct one? Once again giving the faithful a big leg-up in this example and ignore all the religions that no one follows anymore, although to be accurate I would have to include these, of course I’d also have to include the chance that some guy in west dumbfuckibad got the real revealed truth but was nailed to a tree by the first person he told… there’s really no way to count those. I’m also not including Scientology amongst the possible “correct” religions, nor small cults, tribalism, all the varieties of paganism, spiritualism, etc… But for the ease of the example I’m going to give those faiths that I do use all an equal chance of being “correct”.

• Christianity
• Judaism
• Hinduism
• Sikhism
• Islam
• Shintoism
• Jainism
• Zoroastrianism
• Cao Dai
• Confucianism
• Taoism

Now We also have to realize that amongst some of these religions there are sects who wholly believe that members of differing sects within the faith are also dammed, here I’m going to pick out some of the more major ones

• Mormonism – Christianity
• Catholicism – Christianity
• Protestantism – Christianity
• Sunni – Islam
• Shiite – Islam
• Orthodoxy – Christianity
• Orthodoxy – Judaism
• Reformed – Judaism
• Conservative – Judaism

And there are even sub-sects of the above… especially when it comes to Christianity, it’s ridiculous.

So we have a final of 18 faiths to pick from (in reality there are so much more and it’s why Pascal’s Wager is the biggest joke in evangelism) this gives you a 2.778% chance of having the “right” religion. Now let’s look at my 50% chance that atheists are right now we can add to that all the works based religions who pretty much don’t care that I don’t believe or who say belief is secondary to just generally being a good person as your key to the big eternal sky/reincarnation/whatevertheheck bliss. This gives us back 22.223% of the “Faith pie”, because as long as I’m not a total bastard I’m pretty much ok. So based on these very basic percentages If I choose whatever faith I’m being evangelized at about I’ve got ~3% chance for all that afterlife wonderfulness, a 22% that I choose your faith and it really didn’t matter, still get the cool afterlife stuff, a 25% chance of burning in hell, and a 50% chance that when I die it’ll pretty much be the same experience as I had before I was born. So instead of the 50-50 the faithful like to spout at you for the good ol’ wager, it’s more like 25%-75% and they’re asking you to take the 25%.

You’re asking me to play spiritual roulette… and every believer is betting. They’re sacrificing their time and money, they’re making other people’s lives miserable all because they think that 00 is where the marble is going to drop.

Sorry, I’m not playing your game.

In truth the chance that any single religious nutbag coming to your door is actually correct about any of these matters is as close to zero as makes no odds, to be fair we’d have to consider every religious belief held by anyone who has claimed the miraculous occurred because of their faith, because that’s all we have, claims.

I’ll take the evidence over the claims anyday.

I was reading an article the other day and renowned physicist Dr. Stephen Hawking stated that the Large Hadron Collider was essential to the advancement and long-tern survival of mankind. He goes on to reassure folks that it will not end the world, but I’m about sick of the fear-mongers surrounding this thing, it’s merely and anti-science agenda wrapped in a self-righteous cloak.

This all got me thinking though about just why I feel having discussions about scientific advancements and discoveries is valuable in an atheist podcast. in going over this I may say some things that make my fellow atheists wince, I may sound harsh and reveal some opinions that the more “religious friendly” atheists may not share. So be it.

If one looks at the history of religious thought one realized that the development of gods was a “first attempt” at scientific thought. What causes thunder? Well, I can make a loud noise by banging these two rocks together, so someone bigger and more powerful banging something even bigger than these rocks together would make a louder sound. Or perhaps, the roar of the great lion is the loudest sound I know, so some bigger beast, perhaps the roar of a dragon is the sound I am hearing. As an early hypothesis for events it’s a workable idea, however it would fail today’s more modern scientific scrutiny as it would either fail the first test or be found untestable. It’s a small step from this level of thinking to entreating these powerful forces for boons, to using “revealed knowledge” from these powerful beings as a tool of control (for good or ill).

The truth is that advancing our knowledge is what is removing the “god question” from the public conciousness. Human knowledge has certainly eliminated the possibility of a “god” or “gods” as presented in nearly every ancient scripture currently known. This is why creationists creationists fight so fiercely against science eduction (trust me, it’s not just evolution they have a problem with), it’s not that they have some problems with the science as performed, it’s that this knowledge contradicts directly the untestable and privately revealed knowledge that religion bases all claims upon. Their case is hurt more by recent studies breaking apart those testable claims they’ve made.

The knowledge provided to mankind through scientific study is more valuable than anything religion has proposed, it has cured diseases, fed millions of people, and vastly increased our quality of life. Religious thought however has been an easy tool of exploitation to make people happy with thier miserable lot in life. As I’ve studied more and more religions I find that most of them add up to the following statement “Do what we say, don’t worry about being miserable, because when you die you’ll get rewarded”. Science on the other hand is about advancing human knowledge so that our lives, and the lives of future generations are better ones. As an atheist I believe that this life here is all you get so I want to make sure it’s the best possible for me and my descendants.

I am sure that some people will point to the disasters of science in an attempt to detract form this view, nuclear bombs, lab-created anthrax and the like. While some atheists would try to counter with the atrocities of religion I intend to go another route. The line of research that brought about the atomic bomb also gave us solid state electronics and MRI imaging, cancer treatments and a host of other medical diagnostic tools. Bioengineering has cured far more diseases than those who have been infected, from the cheap and rapid production of vaccines to new breakthroughs in fighting cancer and degenerative genetic conditions. Religion and science can both be used for benefit and destruction however it is only through scientific research that suffering is alleviated, diseases cured and the overall quality of life for everyone on the planet is improved. In contrast religious thought that attempts to supersede or suspend scientific advance only gets people to accept suffering, disease and be content with their current quality of life. It is, simply those who wish to maintain the status-quo against those who would like to see progress.

I am, in this tirade, addressing a certain type of religious thought, and it is one that even the late Pope John Paul II expressed. This thought is that there are some questions that should not be asked because they are the dominion of “god”. If you follow a religious mindset that allows for questioning all aspects of reality, for searching deep into the “hows and whys” of the way this universe we live in operates then, of course, this criticism does not apply to you.

A common creationist ploy (and one that angers me to no end) is to apply the trait of atheism to Adolph Hitler, and try to link this with the atrocities he committed. The eugenics programs implemented by some of Hitler’s underlings was more akin to horse or dog breeding than any true evolutionary process. In fact the idea of “evolution” in general had been around for hundreds of years prior to Charles Darwin’s theory which merely gave this evolution a natural mechanism. The extermination of the Jewish people at the hands of Hitler’s regime was turned into a acceptable practice through an appeal to religion. Weather or not Hitler really believed or not may be open to debate, however any reading of Mein Kampf would lend one to believe that he did in fact believe in god as described in the New Testament.

Science is important because it provides reliable and truthful answers to the questions we all have in a way that cannot be used as a tool of control. No one can tell you you should kill X group of people because a subatomic particle reacting according to the laws of quantum mechanics tells him so. Anyone who proposed such an idea would be laughed at (and probably locked up), as we should laugh at, and lock away, religious tyrants who suggest we kill infidels, homosexuals or any other such group.

You may notice I’ve not touched on ethics or morals much in this post. The naturalistic rise of moral behavior is a subject that I have great interest in and I’ll be devoting a future post to the topic in addition to my thoughts about how a positive atheistc view of the world can drive a very high moral standard.

If you are a believer and you want to get me to believe you’re going to ask me to read a book. Given United States demographics,  that book most likely will be the Bible (in some version or another). And, I would have you know that I have already read it, however if you’d like for me to go over it again I’m going to have a corresponding book for you to read. This book is Breaking the Spell, by Daniel Dennett. In Breaking the Spell Professor Dennet tackles one subject above all others, the idea that it is not belief but “sacredness” that is the problem. The concept that one set of ideas cannot be questioned or criticized because of some special property inherent in the idea or belief itself.

Unlike the other Atheist “Four Horsemen”, Dennett seems to have a sincere appreciation for some aspects of religious thought. His book is far less condemning than those of Dawkins, Hitchens or Harris. The reason I choose this book as the primer I would have any person who wishes to proselyte to me read is that it best expresses my views on religion in general, and I want them to understand what they’re going to encounter if they come to me with their “truths”.

Unlike some of my fellow strong atheists, I am slow to condemn “religion” as a whole, however unlike some others I am very quick to criticize specific beliefs, it may be easy to construe this as myself condemning religion as a concept, when all I am saying is that, “belief X is obviously laughable”. Lamar is correct in season one, show two when he says, “religion does community extremely well”. I believe that it does, and I feel that it can be replicated in a wholly secular way. The problem is compounded in a “faith in a sacred truth”.

The faith in a supernatural supreme being of some sort or another without question is a huge problem for me, it is my nature to question and any idea that cannot be held to scrutiny is quick to fall from my favor. Combine this with the “sacred” concept, that these questions and criticism should not even be leveled and you’re stepping to the plate with two strikes already. The third of course is usually the tone in which the faithful like to preach to the non believer, it’s either condescending or dripping with pity.

I firmly believe that we should place our faith in each other, in those we can hold accountable when that faith is betrayed and in whom we can set realistic expectations of that faith. I have faith that my wife loves me, a faith built on evidence from past behavior and promises made for the future. I have faith that my garbage company will pick up the trash on a weekly basis, based on an agreed upon contract of payment for services and enforced by governmental agencies should that faith be broken. But none of these faith’s are held sacred, all can be held up for question and scrutiny.