In Awe of Everything

I Think I Want to Write a Book

2013-01-09T15:32:00.001-08:00

I've had some ideas for books before, mostly fiction. Like many of my intended projects, they haven't gone far. But the atheist movement has captured my interest for quite awhile now, and I think I want to try again. A tentative title that I think captures the subject well: Digital Disbelief: Why the Internet is Where Religions Come to Die.

The Kindness Drug

2013-01-08T20:01:00.000-08:00

I'm going to propose a hypothetical situation here. Let's say that biochemists develop a drug which is intended to influence brain chemistry in such a way that people who take it become kinder, more loving, more generous. Now, of course, this drug wouldn't take away all the other good reasons to be kind and loving and generous. It would just provide another impetus for that behavior.

In initial trials, the drug works wonders. People who take it become paragons of virtue, clearly expressing the kinds of behavior that we wish were common throughout the world. First hypothetical question: Would it be a good idea toenforce the use of this drug? To make it mandatory, perhaps put it in the water supply, ensure that children are given this drug from an early age? Again, recall that we haven't eliminated any other reasons for kindness and generosity.

Now, let's go forward a bit. The drug comes into wide use, and it turns out there's an unexpected side effect. Many people, even most people, get the intended effect. But in some people, this drug turns them into bigots, hate-filled demagogues, rapists, murderers, even mass murderers. And there's no particular way to determine who, when given this drug, will end up wanting to chop peoples' hands off or burn them alive. Of course, not everyone ends up with this effect, but a significant fraction do. Second question: Would you argue that this drug is a force for good in the world, that it is reasonable to continue promoting the use of this drug?

Credit to +JT Eberhard for inspiring this idea. And yes, I realized after I wrote it up that this sounds similar to a plot element of Serenity. It wouldn't surprise me if Joss Whedon had a similar metaphor in mind.

Mystery and Awe

2012-05-30T06:58:00.000-07:00

If you give me the right man in any field, I can talk to him, I know what the condition is. That he did whatever he did as far as he can go. That he studied every aspect of it as far as he could stretch himself. He is not a dilettante in any way. And so he talked deep, as far as he can go, and therefore he is up against mysteries all the way around the edge, and awe. And we can talk about mystery and awe. That is what we have in common.

That's Richard Feynman, in a Yorkshire Television interview in 1973. It has struck me recently that this is the kind of thing that religion is supposed to have over science, and I just don't believe that for a second. From that same interview:

It is very much more exciting to discover that we are on a ball, half of us sticking upside down and spinning around in space. It is a mysterious force which holds us on. It's going around a great big glob of gas that is fed by a fire that is completely different from any fire that we can make (but now we can make that fire – nuclear fire.)

That is a much more exciting story to many people than the tales that other people used to make up about the universe – that we were living on the back of a turtle or something like that. They were wonderful stories, but the truth is so much more remarkable. So what's the pleasure in physics for me is that it is revealed that the truth is so remarkable, so amazing, and I have this disease – like many other people who have studied far enough to begin to understand a little of how things work. They are fascinated by it, and this fascination drives them on to such an extent that they have been able to convince governments and so on to keep supporting them in this investigation.

Of course, another of my heroes is Carl Sagan. The idea of approaching mystery and awe, the balance between the two key elements of skepticism and wonder, were a constant theme in his work. I of course recommend Cosmos and The Demon-Haunted World, but he reached perhaps his greatest crescendo on this topic in Pale Blue Dot.

Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, and plumb the fine structure of matter. We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star. We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth. We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our origins, and with some anguish better understand our nature and prospects. We invent and refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death. We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions. We communicate at the speed of light, and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half. We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars. We are right to rejoice in our accomplishments, to be proud that our species has been able to see so far, and to judge our merit in part by the very science that has so deflated our pretensions.

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.

Indeed, this seems to be a common theme among scientists. Here's Lawrence Krauss:

The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

I could go on for days, finding expression after expression of just how amazing and wonderful the universe is, how much finding things out brings us right up against the mystery and awe that mark the best in "spirituality". The Symphony of Science series presents this wonderfully, and the latest video speaks to just the most astounding thing about our origins that I think it's possible to say: We Are Stardust.

I think we can all agree on the importance of mystery and awe. No matter what your religious beliefs, odds are that such things are an inextricable part of them. But why, if it's eminently possible to achieve such things through contemplation of the universe through the methods of science, should we cling to religion so fiercely? I simply don't understand it. The discoveries made in the search for our actual circumstances are readily available to the general public, and I also don't buy the idea that some people "just can't live without religion", that they're somehow not able to "get" science; I have more respect for their intellect than that. Isn't it time we just let go?

What Is Spirituality?

2012-05-29T17:20:00.001-07:00

There seems to be a frustrating but unavoidable opinion in our culture that "spirituality" is associated with being good, and "materialism" (in the colloquial sense of "he who dies with the most toys wins") is associated with being wicked. I've encountered it several times recently in discussions here, usually in the context of saying that atheists just don't "get" religion, that we're "missing the point". Presumably, religion is supposed to deal with the "spiritual dimension" of human experience, and never mind all the times it ignores the supposed boundaries of its magisterium. Because atheists don't believe in god or the supernatural, they can't be spiritual, and thus can't really be good. The psychologist Nicholas Humphrey described it thus, when noting that all stories of psychic phenomena have self-righteous, "holy" elements:

...it originates with what is, arguably, one of the most remarkable confidence tricks our culture has played on us. This has been to persuade people that there is a deep connection between believing in the possibility of psychic forces and being a gracious, honest, upright, trustworthy member of society...

The majority of our culture seems to be convinced, across religious views, that humans have a "deep need" for "spirituality." But what does spirituality mean? I guess it's supposed to be obvious, because very rarely does anyone even try to explain it. It's not at all obvious. The typical answer, which I've also received here many times in similar contexts, is "If you have to ask, you'll never know; you have to live it." Which is singularly worthless as an explanation; it is indeed a refusal to explain. Dan Dennett parodies, rather accurately as all good parodies do, the typical explanation. To see how hard it is to explain what spirituality is, he challenges his readers to try to improve on this:

"Spirituality is, you know, like, it's like paying attention to your soul or having deep thoughts that really move you, and not just thinking about who's got nicer clothes and whether to buy a new car and what's for dinner and stuff like that. Spirituality is really caring and not being just, you know, materialistic."

And, of course, it's easy to make the jump from "only thinking about stuff" materialistic to "all phenomena are explicable without an appeal to immaterial things" materialistic. At which point, it's effortless to slide into thinking that atheists don't "really care", are shallow and selfish and overconfident know-it-alls, when they're "missing out" on this vague, poorly defined, and yet oh so important dimension of human experience, the spirit.

Dennett goes on to try to give better words to what spirituality is:

What those people have realized is one of the best secrets to life: let your self go. If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and all your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready to hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered, and engaged, you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person.

And then he gives the all-important point (emphasis mine):

That, I propose is the secret to spirituality, and it has nothing at all to do with believing in an immortal soul, or in anything supernatural.

There is absolutely nothing stopping an atheist from understanding that feeling, having that mindset of awe and wonder and proper scale and connectedness and humility. Indeed, most of the atheists I've talked to understand this quite deeply; how many upvotes are given to We Are Star Dust or The Story of Everything or This Remarkable Thing or A Universe Not Made For Us? If this is what spirituality means, then almost every atheist I know is deeply spiritual. If it's not what spirituality means, then what does it mean? I'd really love for someone to explain to me, clearly and understandably, what I'm "missing out on" by not being religious.

Contemporary Evangelical and Liberal Christianity is Too Easy

2012-05-09T10:46:00.000-07:00

Before I begin, I'd like to note that there's a significant difference between evangelical Christianity andfundamentalist Christianity. There are evangelical fundamentalist Christians, but the two are far from synonymous. Fundamentalism holds to Biblical inerrancy, and as I'll describe, that's hard. Evangelicalism is based in personal conversion, sharing the gospel, and Biblical authority. It does not require, as fundamentalism does, literal interpretations of scripture.

So, evangelical and liberal Christianity are too easy to persist. Religious belief, if it is to be transmitted consistently, relies on several factors. The one that I'm focusing on here is difficulty. The religions that have persisted for long periods of time are very hard to follow. On one hand, they require conspicuous and, critically, impractical behaviors as professions of faith. For example, the following from a Jewish rabbi:

That most of the Kashrut laws are divine ordinances without reason given is 100 percent the point. It is very easy not to murder people. Very easy. It is a little bit harder not to steal because one is tempted occasionally. So that is no great proof that I believe in God or am fulfilling His will. But, if He tells me not to have a cup of coffee with milk in it with my mincemeat and peas at lunchtime, that is a test. The only reason I am doing that is because I have been told to so do. It is something difficult.

Similarly, Islam requires that its followers stop what they are doing five times a day to pray, never mind how inconvenient or poorly timed or indeed dangerous doing so might be. Catholic ritual also fits the bill; it is very elaborate, very strict in form and slow to change over the years, and very definitely required. In Cardinal Ratzinger's Declaration "Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church", it is stated over and over the things that Catholics must "firmly believe" (and those italics are in the original), but it also switches several times to what "the Catholic faithful are required to profess". And these are merely examples we can find within the Abrahamic religions.

These actions are important precisely because they are hard to do. They allow the believer to feel that they areproving their faith, simply because they are choosing to follow commands that they, frankly, don't understand. There's no reason for it, there's no practical purpose, it is done because it is commanded, and thus demonstrates one's loyalty to the religion from which the commands issue.

On the other hand, they require people to believe in things that are incomprehensible. Again, this is hard to do, because it is a natural human tendency to try to figure things out. Dan Dennett calls this "credal athleticism", the boast that my faith is so strong that I can embrace a bigger paradox than you can. This serves much the same purpose as the conspicuous actions noted above; believing something that is patently ridiculous is hard to do, and getting to the point that you can do it feels like you're accomplishing something difficult in the service of your god. Indeed, it may even become one of those conspicuous actions when those beliefs are professed. When a fundamentalist Christian loudly and unwaveringly proclaims that no matter how much evidence you show him, he will continue to believe that the Bible is literally true, you may throw up your hands in exasperation, but he feels that has accomplished a very difficult and conspicuous task, that of blatantly professing paradoxical ideas, and that's a good feeling for him.

Incomprehensible doctrines have another benefit, as well; they must be passed down verbatim. Paraphrasing won't work, because to paraphrase you have to understand what is being said. For the incomprehensible, the only thing to do is directly quote the doctrine. This expresses itself in devotion to hearing, reading, and memorizing scripture, and in exposing ones self to theological tracts and doctrinal statements that are quite simply opaque and impenetrable ("I don't understand what the Pope meant, but here's what he said"). It even plays into the idea, common in many religions, that god is an ineffable, unknowable, profoundly apophatic entity. God is "the greatest conceivable being", "god is love", god is "the ground of all being", god is "ultimate reality"; trying to dig into what these statements actually mean is often a pointless exercise, and so they are just said because there's no deeper understanding of them to be had.

But liberal and evangelical Christianity is different. It places a focus on what the words of the Bible mean to you. There's an emphasis on personal revelation, personal conversion, personal experience of god. Services include PowerPoint presentations, contemporary music, a dress code of "whatever", and no mandatory attendance. Some churches refuse the word "sanctuary" because it's too religious. Churches spend time not on issuing doctrines, but providing daycare services for their members. We're all familiar with the signs: definitions of "god" that depart radically from classical theism, the "it's not a religion" language, consistently relating stories about personal experience of god, novel interpretations of scripture, cherry-picking, etc. The only thing that is demanded of such believers is that they spread the gospel, but they do so in whatever manner they see fit, often without quoting a single verse of scripture.

This is way too easy. Consistent transmission of religious beliefs depends very strongly on the formulas being passed down intact, or at least almost exactly so, and the limitations on mutation of ideas imposed by strict rules of behavior and incomprehensible doctrines are almost if not entirely lost in contemporary evangelical and liberal Christianity. I've argued before that in some cases, people who call themselves Christians, but who are part of these groups, are no longer following anything that can be reasonably defined as a religion. It has changed so quickly that only a few vestiges of the original forms are left, and the actual beliefs no longer resemble the model on which they were based. Thus, I think that such forms of Christianity cannot persist in the long term. Their only consistent basis is a reliance on the Bible as a source of wisdom, and for many it is rapidly becoming secondary to one's own personal experience of "what god wants". While I, as an atheist, most definitely disagree with the more rigidly structured religions in terms of whether or not they are true, I cannot deny that they have traits which give me more confidence in their "staying power".

On Aquinas and the Cosmological Argument

2012-04-23T20:45:00.001-07:00

In debating religion, I've run across a claim that has been made recently that the cosmological argument is the strongest argument out there for the existence of god. And not just any cosmological argument, the one put forward in Thomas Aquinas' First Way, part of his Quinquae viae. This may come as a surprise to those of you who thought that the cosmological argument had long since been soundly refuted. But, as I've been told, none of the refutations, not a single one, have ever dealt with the real argument that Aquinas made. Apparently, the way it's been interpreted for the past eight centuries is wrong. Ed Feser makes this claim, but I'm afraid I don't currently have access to his book on Aquinas. I intend to get to it in time, because I'm told it's very important. In the meantime, this blog has been presented to me as an example of how the argument is supposed to work. I've thought about it a good bit, and have decided to devote a little time to refuting it.

To sum up, here's the quick and simple version of the argument:

Some things are being actualized
Whatever is being actualized is being actualized by something else
An essentially ordered chain cannot be infinitely long
Therefore, there is something of pure actuality

Let's go ahead and take a look at the argument in detail. In the first two sections of the post, we simply get a history lesson, describing the problem of change presented by Parmenides, and the division of things that exist into actual and potential by Aristotle. It's simple, clear, and to the point, and I have no quibbles with how it begins. I may not agree with the way the Greeks set it out, but it does its job at framing the space in which the argument is being made.

Regarding point III, however, we come to my first objection. The distinction is made between an accidentally ordered series and an essentially ordered series. An accidentally ordered series is one in which the causes of the events in the series need not currently exist; in an essentially ordered series, the causes must exist in the present with the effects. But is this a meaningful distinction? The fact that we live in a universe where there is time makes the distinction between an accidentally ordered series and an essentially ordered series questionable. Let's start by defining the present, something that we can do today in terms far more accurate than Aquinas could in the 13th century. What we call "the present" can be divided into tinier and tinier slivers of seconds, down to (theoretically) Planck time. The Planck time is the time required for light, in a vacuum, to travel one Planck Length, which is really short: 1.616199(97)x 10⁻³⁵ meters. This makes the Planck time roughly 10⁻⁴³ seconds. And, critically, for events taking less than Planck time, no change can be detected; that's part of the definition of Planck time. For events taking more than Planck time, the information that the event has occurred can propagate no faster than the speed of light, and thus cannot actually cause any change until at least some time has passed. All causes, by our current understanding of the laws of physics, must be in the past; 10⁻⁴³ seconds in the past may not seem like a lot, but it is the past. In "the present", i.e. any given instant in which the Planck time has not elapsed, nothing is changing. Change is always measured over time. But the concept of an essentially ordered series depends on things changing in the present; if I push on an object, so the idea goes, the force that I am exerting on the object in the present is causing the change that moves the object. In reality, that's not how the world works; the force I exerted an instant ago is carried across the distance between my hand and the object at no faster than the finite speed of light and affects the object, and the force I'm exerting at this instant hasn't gotten there yet, because even if I'm only the Planck length away, the information that I'm exerting force cannot have yet traveled the distance. It appears that all series must be accidentally ordered series, and since this is admitted to not be proof of a god, the argument falls flat before we even finish the definitions. That's a pretty good refutation, I think. But I can do better than that.

Let's look at the three premises in the simplified argument above.

Premise 1: Some things are changing. This is fine, subject to the point I elucidated above.
Premise 2: Whatever is changing (whatever is a mix of potential & actual) is being changed by something else. This is the key point of contention, as it is in many modern refutations of the cosmological argument. It hinges, as many things do, on the fact that we've found out a lot since Aquinas' day. This premise isn't necessarily true, but that doesn't mean it isn't true in practice; it could have turned out to be the case, even if not logically necessary. However, the observation of uncaused phenomena in modern science does mean that it isn't true. Radioactive decay is a great example, and the most familiar that I can name. An unstable isotope of an element doesn't look unstable; it appears perfectly fine, acting just like any other atom, right up until the very instant that it decays. There are no precursor events, no warning signs that decay is about to occur; on the level of individual atoms, whether the atom decays at any given moment is a matter of probability, and is one of the processes that appear to be truly stochastic. We can say that, over a given period of time, about half of the atoms of a chunk of radioactive material will have decayed, but we can't say a thing about any given atom. Nothing actually causes the decay to happen; there are necessary conditions, but no causal event. Aquinas couldn't have known this in the 13th century, so he can't be blamed. But we should probably move on now that the universe has shown this premise to be false. I could stop here, too, but let's keep going
Premise 3: This chain cannot be infinitely long, because it is an essentially ordered series. Again, the question of whether the concept of an essentially ordered series makes sense comes into play. But even if we grant it, the unstated assumption is that there must be only one terminus to all chains. This point is addressed further on, though, and I'll come back to it. But it also ignores the possibility of cycles. If we have an essentially ordered series, where A is causing B, and B is causing C, and so on, what stops Z from causing A? If we have, say, a wheel of atoms, and one is moving (from an external push in the past, outside our EOS for this wheel), then it pushes the one ahead of it, which pushes the one ahead of it, and so on, but the one behind the first is then pushing the first. The chain may not have an infinite number of members, but it isn't clear that this means it needs to terminate in a pure actuality.

So, we've got serious problems in two of the three premises, with the second being the most problematic. The argument appears to be just as unsound as we'd expected. But I can still do better than that. The post then goes on to the attributes of "pure actuality". Even if we grant that we can get there from the argument, the attributes noted are either questionable or applicable to something that we would not call god. Of note is the property of unity. As the post says, "The only way to tell the difference between two things is if one thing has an attribute that another lacks." But that doesn't mean there couldn't be an infinite number of indistinguishable ends to the chains. And it doesn't mean that a pure actuality would necessarily have all attributes; there could be things that it might not be possible for it to be, in which case it couldn't potentially be those things, and would remain pure actuality. It also includes an odd Thomistic concept of "good"; goodness in the Thomist view is synonymous with existence. This is a concept that really doesn't seem to make sense; the pen sitting on my desk is good, but if I need a pen and don't have it, I'm suffering from evil? This seems to be a matter of equivocation more than reason.

But I have one more point to make, one that I think is particularly devastating. A common claim for the cosmological argument is that it provides a "first step", a way to get not to the full concept of god (although the traits noted here for pure actuality are pretty close), but to an acceptance that a god of some sort exists. But let's look at some of these traits, and see whether they describe a god or...something else:

Incorporeal: we can imagine a lot of things that are not matter or energy. Ideas, for example, or mathematical constructs, or the laws of physics...
Simple: Well, many things are simple, even more simple than matter and energy. Like the equation that describes matter and energy (E = mc²) or the Feynman path integral describing the likelihood that a particle will follow a given path through space...
Unity: Basically, something that is the same everywhere, where you don't have multiples, but rather a single unified description...
Eternal, Immutable: The same not only everywhere, but everywhen, constant at all points in time from the beginning of the universe (or even before) onward...
Impassable: Cannot be made to change, beyond the ability of anything to alter, like some sort of fixed natural law...
Omnipotent: The source of all change in the universe, and the source of all change that could possibly occur, the ultimate explanation for everything that occurs...

I'll be honest with you, I don't see god in that. "Conscious", "personal", those aren't implied. What do I see coming from these traits that pure actuality must have? A limited set of necessary properties of the universe (as Lawrence Krauss and some other physicists argue for) would be incorporeal, simple, eternal, unity, immutable, impassable, and (at least by the given definition of "the source of all change in the universe, and the source of any change that could ever logically occur") omnipotent. Thanks to the Pauli exclusion principle, noting that no two particles can ever be in exactly the quantum state simultaneously, and thus any change in, say, the energy state of an electron caused by rubbing your hands together might then affect every other electron in the universe (a really weird conclusion supported by some physicists like Brian Cox, but disputed by others), it could even be said that this basic set of principles is omniscient, probably in a more direct way than the roundabout "ground of all being, doesn't have knowledge but is knowledge" sense described. Since the definition of "good" being used is the weird Thomistic way of equating goodness with existence, then the Thomist would even have to conclude that the laws of physics, since they quite evidently exist, are indeed good. I wouldn't say so, but then, I think that's a wonky definition of good.

Congratulations, Thomists. If you accept the cosmological argument, as presented in Aquinas' First Way, as a valid argument, it would be perfectly reasonable for you to conclude that the "first cause" is not god, but a limited, simple set of logically necessary laws of physics. If you happen to be interested in what those logically necessary laws of physics might be, I recommend A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss or The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Both argue quite nicely that the universe did not need a god to get it started, or to keep it running currently, but rather that the laws of physics alone suffice.

Edit: Updated my brief diversion on the Pauli exclusion principle. The science isn't quite as conclusive as I'd originally presented it.

Isn't This Enough?

2012-03-17T14:31:00.000-07:00

A couple of things have recently hit my radar that just make my jaw drop. I've seen this picture several times in the past, and it underscores for me just a tiny piece of the scale of things:

You start to realize the incredible range in which things exist in our universe; when you then think that VY Canis Majoris is one star of the 400 billion or so stars in the Milky Way, and that the Milky Way is one of over 80 billion galaxies in the observable universe, you can't help but sit in awe of the immensity of the cosmos. But I just recently ran across the second iteration of The Scale of the Universe.

You can, with a single slider, move along the orders of magnitude in our universe. It begins on the 1-meter ring, a familiar scale for humans; we're approximately 1.7 meters tall, give or take. A slight zoom to the right takes you to the size of a house, a slight zoom to the left to the size of a penny. The limits of that zoom, the minuscule movement of the slider required to span what is, to us, such a wide range, is just the beginning of the experience. Moving to the right, you slide past the LHC, the Grand Canyon, and out to the scale of the Galilean moons almost without noticing it. To see that the Oort cloud, the grand extent of our solar system, is so large that not even the largest of stars is visible any longer is a testament to the power of gravity. At the top end, the scale of the entire universe, one has a sense as of peering down from a great height, a strange mix of fear and joy. And that is only half the journey. Moving to the left, down the decimal points, the smallest object visible to the human eye is met only a tiny fraction of the way along, next to a human egg, a human hair, and the thickness of a sheet of paper. It is amazing to me, as a computer scientist, that the transistor gates that make up our computers are too small to be resolved with an optical microscope, and only barely larger than a molecule of DNA. And then, perhaps most telling of all, we pass hydrogen atoms, then the lonely gamma rays, then nuclei, a few scattered subatomic particles, quarks and neutrinos floating almost entirely alone, and then nothing for order of magnitude after order of magnitude. The smallest things we know are so much smaller than their nearest neighbors that good portions of the slider are simply empty. It is astonishing to me, and the presentation is awe-inspiring to say the least.

There is, however, more than one vastness in our cosmos. The immensity of time is brought home by an ambitious and beautiful project called ChronoZoom. For a great write-up on the project, check out Ars Technica's coverage. Cataloging nearly 14 billion years of history, you can zoom again to numerous scales. Peppered along the way are "bubbles" that contain additional information about important features of the epoch at which you're looking. Videos are embedded in the bubbles, and can tell you about the origins of the universe, of stars, of life, of agriculture, and so on. It is rather graphically impressive to see that the history of the universe was 2/3 over before the Earth even formed. We, of course, occupy a tiny sliver at the far right, a fraction of a fraction of the UI of this amazing site. The range of topics covered goes from the vast reaches of the distant past to the advances made by Microsoft (which is a tiny sliver of the tiny sliver that is recorded human history, which is a tiny sliver of the lifetime of our species...). Intended to be a growing, open-source way for people to experience "Big History", the site is only in its earliest stages. Already, it is an impressive feat of technology (using HTML5 as I've not seen it used before), a triumph of mathematics (to get the smooth flow along the epochs working right), and a truly visionary look at history and time. "We envision a world where scientists, researchers, students, and teachers collaborate through ChronoZoom to share information via data, tours, and insight," the ChronoZoom team writes. "Imagine a world where the leading academics publish their findings to the world in a manner that can easily be accessed and compared to other data. We will be focusing on community development of features, capabilities, and content." I wish them well in their efforts, because they've already accomplished something amazing.

I Don't Even Know What To Say

2012-02-29T09:30:00.000-08:00

A recent post on Reddit in the r/DebateAChristian subreddit asked this question:

"Of all the arguments you've heard, which is the one that keeps cropping back up in your mind as a potential problem for your beliefs?"

The response from one user was perhaps the saddest thing I've ever read (emphasis mine):

"None. Before I was saved, there were many, but afterward, I couldn't disbelieve if I wanted to. The hardest thing to believe was that my very ability to reason was flawed. Once I got over that, the rest was very, very easy.I still have doubts, but they are doubts like "Am I sure that I am saved?" or "Am I certain that is what the Bible is saying there?" Also, there are times when, due to my skeptical past delving too far into philosophy, that I begin to doubt all existence as a whole, but I find even the nature of existence as less tangible and true than I do my faith."

I really don't know what to say to this. People are being taught this, apparently. They are being told that they cannot think. That their ability to reason, to make sense of the world, is simply wrong. And of course, once you abandon any trust in your ability to reason, once rationality and critical thought are left behind, everything else is ridiculously easy to swallow. You'll believe anything you're told once you've been convinced that you can't even make a reasonable objection. And this walls your mind off from any debate, any discussion; the things you've been told are right cannot be challenged, and nothing will shake your faith because, obviously, nobody else can reason either.

How did we come to this? How did fideism become so powerful? The only advantage that we have, the only thing that makes humans the most successful mammals on the planet, is our ability to think. That there are people who give that up, who willingly subjugate themselves to people who do their thinking for them, is depressing and frightening. This right here? This is why I fight against religion. No, not everyone believes this kind of thing. Not all religious people abandon reason. But this mind virus, this cancer of thought, this deep wound inflicted on the human psyche, is empowered by religion. It is the environment of faith that allows this disease to flourish. And it has evolved a powerful, nigh-unbeatable resistance to the only weapons we can use against it: skeptical inquiry, rational thought, and evidence-based reasoning. I don't really know what to do. Anything I can say to this person will simply sluice off, like water off a duck. What do you do when religion ends the conversation before it can start?

How I Know What I Know, Part I: Worldviews

2012-02-18T14:28:00.000-08:00

A while back, a friend of mine suggested that I look into the idea of a "worldview". I've since done so, and have seen the term used with increasing frequency in religious discussions. Put broadly, a worldview is the set of all things that a person accepts as true; it acts as a lens through which new information is filtered. The concept, originally put forward as Weltanschauung, is central to German philosophy; however, it has become fairly popular with the religious, as it allows them to put forward their religion as something other than a set of testable hypotheses. I've found this growing trend to be particularly troublesome for a couple of reasons.

First, there's a tendency for people to consider their worldview to somehow be sacred, and this is not so. Yes, I get the point; you're not arguing for the claims of your religion, you're arguing from them, because you simply assume them to be true. But this does not mean your worldview is not subject to being questioned; it just lets me tell you that you're making really stupid assumptions. The trouble, of course, is that someone who has decided to classify their beliefs as a worldview, and also decided that this puts their beliefs somehow above being questioned, will not be swayed by facts or reasoning. Many people who use the "worldview defense" in this way are simply closing their minds to dispute; they have decided that they are right by fiat, and nothing can prove them wrong. It is a fancy way of admitting to willful ignorance, and I think it's ridiculous. This puts me on the side of the philosophical realists. Just because someone makes certain assumptions about the way the world works, that doesn't mean that their assumptions cannot be questioned, because they could be incorrect assumptions.

Which leads me into my second point. The other way in which the "worldview defense" is used is to point out that I, too, have a worldview that is based on assumptions. Since everyone is assuming something, the claim is made that all such assumptions are equally valid, and thus the religious assumption that god exists is something I can't argue against. After all, there are things that I believe that I can't prove or disprove, so that makes their beliefs just as good as mine. Hogwash. I readily admit that I make certain assumptions about the way the world works, but mine are very limited. Just because some assumptions are necessary, and just because everyone makes assumptions to build their worldview, that doesn't mean that we can just assume whatever we want. The assumptions being defended by religious people when they make this claim of "well, it's my worldview" are not reasonable assumptions to make.

So, what assumptions are reasonable? This is the meat of this post; I am going to begin to describe my own personal philosophy, as I have been giving it significant thought as of late, and that must rest on the foundation that one might consider my worldview. What do I assume to be true about the world, and do the assumptions I make invalidate any of the arguments I make against religion? Let's dive into that.

My way of looking at the world is very strongly based in evidence. However, I must admit that there are things that cannot be shown to be true with evidence, hence the necessity of assumptions. But the question of what assumptions I need to make is a very important one. I think that we can successfully justify everything with only three assumptions, which is a pretty strong ratio of assumptions to explanations. To begin with, one must discard all beliefs; start from a blank slate, and try to reconstruct the knowledge that I had before. And since we have nothing on which to build, we have to start with assumptions. I think, however, that these are things that are universal; everyone assumes that these things are true, because if they didn't, they couldn't function as a human being. The first two assumptions are necessary to have any knowledge at all; not using them ends any epistemological discussion before it begins.

Contemplating the existence of my mind justifies my belief in the existence of my mind; "I think, therefore I am."
At least some of my sensory perceptions are accurate.

Arguing against these assumptions is difficult; do you not think that you exist? Do you never trust a single bit of sensory input? Such radical skepticism is pretty worthless, and I don't think anyone who really followed it would even be capable of engaging in a discussion anyway. The first assumption is fairly weak, but unavoidable. Simply stating "I think, therefore I am" assumes that there is an "I" to think. The second assumption is much stronger, in part because it is not a blanket assumption. I am not assuming that my senses are always accurate; indeed, I'm well aware that my senses can be fooled. I've misheard things, seen things that weren't really there, confused one physical sensation for another, etc. But overall, my senses report a consistent external reality, and assuming that they do sometimes report this reality accurately has not led to any irreconcilable contradictions over the past 20+ years of my use of that assumption. It is strictly not something that I can prove (how would I do so without appealing to sensory input?), but it is a strong assumption because if it were wrong, I would be very likely to have experienced something that seriously shook my faith in it. A third assumption is needed to describe how we gain knowledge:

Physical evidence is a valid means of justifying beliefs.

This assumption builds on the second, and thus works with it to form a strong foundation for the rest of my belief system, or worldview. Again, I think everyone makes use of this assumption. I believe, for instance, that I am typing on a keyboard. My senses are providing me with physical evidence that the keyboard exists, and that physical evidence justifies my belief. While this could, in theory, be argued against, I don't know of anyone who will honestly do so; how could they? Do they not believe in things for which they have physical evidence, such as the existence of a pen sitting on their desk? These three assumptions are the only ones that I make, or at least I ideally try to make only these assumptions. The assumptions themselves are, I think, rather uncontroversial; it is the claim that they are the only assumptions necessary where many people, not all of them religious but most of them, disagree with me. From this simple foundation, I think we can make an evidence-based argument for anything, including the thesis that evidence is the only valid means of justifying beliefs. This is the central thesis of evidentialist foundationalism. I highly recommend the following two videos for a remarkably lucid explanation of evidentialism, and a response to some common criticisms of it. They are from a user on YouTube known as Evid3nc3; his entire series on his deconversion from Christianity is of incredibly high quality.

I'm going to stop here for now, but I intend to go a bit further in a following post. There are numerous other positions that I hold, numerous other things that I believe in. But they all stem from this basis. This is a worldview that does make sense, that makes only reasonable assumptions. It is open to comment and criticism, and because the number of assumptions being made are so very few, it has the beautiful characteristic of admitting that I could be wrong about almost anything. You can, of course, disagree with me; my worldview is no more sacred than any other. I just happen to think that I can defend it on its own merits, rather than using its worldview status as a defense.

Bullshit from the White House, Take Two

2012-01-10T09:14:00.000-08:00

Well, we secularists have gotten another response from the White House regarding a petition. We asked that churches be removed from automatic tax exemption, and be required to apply for non-profit status like secular organizations. This seems like a reasonable request. And now, Joshua DuBois, the White House "god guy" has given us a response.

Thank you for signing this petition regarding the tax-exempt status of houses of worship.

The separation of church and state outlined in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution is an important founding principle of our Nation. Our Nation's Bill of Rights not only guarantees that the government cannot establish an official religion, but also guarantees citizens the right to practice the religion of their choosing or no religion at all. Internal Revenue Code section 501(c), which addresses tax exempt organizations (including religious organizations), and the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) "Tax Guide for Churches and Religious Organizations," reflect these principles.

In particular, the IRS Guide provides for an automatic exemption for churches and other houses of worship that meet the statutory requirements of section 501(c)(3). These requirements include, among others, that the organization be "organized and operated" exclusively for certain purposes (including religious and charitable purposes), that no part of net earnings inure to the benefit of any private individual or shareholder, and that the entity not involve itself in political campaigns.

Houses of worship, however, need not rely on the automatic exemption. As the IRS Guide observes, some houses of worship may consider it beneficial to obtain IRS recognition of their tax-exempt status: "such recognition assures church leaders, members, and contributors that the church is recognized as exempt and qualifies for related tax benefits. For example, contributors to a church that has been recognized as tax exempt would know that their contributions generally are tax-deductible." Accordingly, the IRS Guide states that, "[a]lthough there is no requirement to do so," houses of worship that seek recognition of their tax-exempt status may apply for a determination by the IRS.

The Administration recognizes that houses of worship--churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, and other institutions--are integral to their communities and often serve as community centers for charity and social service. And the Administration is committed to strengthening government interaction with faith-based organizations to the benefit of their communities, consistent with First Amendment protections.

When the President launched the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships,the White House noted:

As the priorities of this Office are carried out, it will be done in a way that upholds the Constitution--by ensuring that both existing programs and new proposals are consistent with American laws and values. The separation of church and state is a principle President Obama supports firmly--not only because it protects our democracy, but also because it protects the plurality of America's religious and civic life.

The President's Advisory Council for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships provided recommendations to the Administration on improving government partnerships with faith-based groups. Many of these recommendations have been acted upon, and all are under review by the Administration. You can find the Council's report here.

The President will continue to uphold the constitutional guarantee of separation of church and state in supporting faith-based and secular organizations alike in their efforts to do the most good for individuals and families in need.

It's a history lesson, which of course we already knew all about. And then it's a statement of the administration's current position, which we already knew all about. It links to a report from the President's Advisory Council for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which was released in March 2010, so it was already available to us. And then...nothing. As usual, the Pentecostal minister used his experience in both preaching and politics to spend a good number of words telling us nothing. So, basically, this was the exchange:

Secularists: "Please change this silly tax exemption!"

White House: "Here's some history you already knew, and a summary of what our current position is. We're not changing anything."

More bullshit, just like the last time. I notice there's no response yet to the petition to take the petitions seriously. Although I think it's pretty clear that the response to that one is also going to be "fuck you guys."

Update: There's been yet another response! Again from DuBois, this time to a petition on the national motto. Much like Bullshit 1.0, Bullshit 2.5 is a nice "fuck you" pointing out that apparently, separation of church and state is very important, it just doesn't mean that government and religion need to be separate. Wait, what? And in the vein of 2.0, we get a nice little history lesson to pad the response a bit, so it looks more like the administration actually cares what we have to say. Can we get someone else to write these up? Someone who isn't so obviously opposed to atheism and secularism?

Fun Calculations From The Bible

2012-01-04T17:56:00.000-08:00

I think I'm going to make this a standing, occasionally updated post. In the past, I've been accused of taking the Bible too literally. So here, I'm going to go ahead and set the bar as high as I can, so that when the accusation comes again, I can point here and say "look, it could be worse." We all know that math wasn't really the strong suit of most of the authors of the Bible. Clearly, they often just made up some numbers that they thought sounded right. Now, I'm not going to spend my time looking at whether 623 or 628 children of Bebai returned from Babylon; no, I'm going to see if I can find the truly ridiculous numbers.

If you ever doubted that Revelation was John on acid, I'm about to prove it to you. Revelation 14:17-20 is about a winepress. Except it isn't pressing grapes, really.

¹⁷ Another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. ¹⁸ Still another angel, who had charge of the fire, came from the altar and called in a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, “Take your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth’s vine, because its grapes are ripe.” ¹⁹ The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath. ²⁰ They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia.

That's a lot of blood. How much blood? Let's find out! One stades, in Rome at the time, is about 0.92 furlongs; a furlong is an eighth of a modern mile. So 1600 stadia was 200 Roman miles, but it works out to 183.93 modern miles. I'm going to interpret here, and say that when the blood flowed out for a distance of 1600 stadia, that means the distance the blood went out from the winepress John saw, i.e. that they're talking about the radius of the lake of blood. So we've got the radius of our cylinder (approximating here, of course, that the lake is circular and the depth is constant throughout); now we need the height in order to calculate the volume. Unfortunately, "as high as the horses' bridles" isn't an accurate measurement, but the bridle of a horse is typically between four and six feet from the ground. Call it 5 feet for simplicity.

So, we've got the height of our cylinder in feet. The radius, in feet so our units match, is 183.93 * 5280 = 971,150.4 feet. Now, we go ask a European high school student what the formula is for the volume of a cylinder, and we find out that it is pi * the radius squared * the height. So, pi * 971150.4^2 * 5 = 1.481470008 x 10^13 cubic feet. There are 28.3168466 liters in a cubic foot, giving us 4.195055897 x 10^14 liters of blood.

Now, let's turn this into people. I think we can safely assume that the winepress is only squeezing out blood; it is after all a divine winepress, so it should be able to discriminate. The human body contains approximately 5 liters of blood, so we can divide our total volume of blood by 5, and get 83,901,117,930,000 crushed ~~grapes~~ people required in order to create this lake of blood. This is about 11,800 times the current population of the planet Earth, by the way. Yes, I know John was totally tripping balls when he wrote this. Yes, I'm sure the number 1600 was just some fancy symbolic thing. But I think we can safely say that John hallucinated a truly horrific amount of blood here.

It's a Wonderful Life

2011-12-24T18:58:00.000-08:00

Over the next day or so, many people will be watching the classic Christmas film It's a Wonderful Life. From the wiki: "Released in 1946, the film stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a man whose imminent suicide on Christmas Eve brings about the intervention of his guardian angel,Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers). Clarence shows George all the lives he has touched and the contributions he has made to his community." I think it's important to remember just how much we touch the lives of others, that's true. But as an atheist, I am often asked "if you don't think there's a divine purpose to your life, why don't you just kill yourself?" The question is rather silly, and I'd like to take a little time to point out why. Because it is a wonderful life.

To begin with, life itself, the living things that fill our planet so abundantly, is wonderful. A recent video from the BBC brings several things together to show this: David Attenborough, some of the great footage from the BBC's nature documentaries, and a jazz classic.

We live in a world full of wonders, and far too many people miss out on just how amazing the presence of the 10 million or so species of life on Earth really is. In terms of geological time, life appears to be ridiculously easy to make; after the Earth cooled and the Late Heavy Bombardment ended (it wouldn't be fair to count before that), and it was possible for living things to survive, life arose almost an eyeblink later. Earth stopped being slammed by objects that would have sterilized the surface about 3.9 billion years ago, and the earliest fossils we have of microbe-like objects are 3.5 billion years old. It took less than half a billion years, probably significantly less, for life to arise once conditions were right. In fact, life may have arisen before the Late Heavy Bombardment; some scientists theorize that life may have survived deep in the oceans next to volcanic vents, or possibly arisen multiple times and just been wiped out over and over until things calmed down. Regardless, from the simple replicators that existed on the early Earth, diversification and natural selection immediately began to fill the niches in which life could exist. Nearly four billion years later, after the loss of 99% of the species that have ever lived, we come to the beautiful world we have today. Through the transition to an oxygenated atmosphere, ice ages, global warming events, meteorite impacts, and countless other trials, life has persisted. To believe that life as we know it today was simply "poofed" into existence is to miss out on a beautiful, sweeping story, one which I think Richard Dawkins rightly called The Greatest Show on Earth.

And then, there is our species. We humans have survived many of the same trials that all life has had to face, and our intelligence and ingenuity have seen us through. Its likely we've suffered two major population bottlenecks, in which the population could have been reduced to about 50,000 people, or 15,000 people, or even as low as 2,000. What caused these catastrophes is not entirely known; it could have been a global warming event, or whatever happened to the environment after the eruption of a supervolcano. But we lived, we moved to warmer or cooler latitudes as needed, we left our ancient home on the African savannah and spread across the globe. People who were functionally identical to you and me survived an ice age; our species overcame numerous other competing species, such as the Neanderthals, to become the only surviving hominids. And look at the things we've managed to accomplish. From a genetic standpoint, we are little more than singing, dancing, mostly hairless apes. And yet, we've peered back to a moment in time a few million years after the Big Bang. We've discovered the basic particles and forces that make up everything we see, and figured out that most of the universe, about 99% of the universe, is made of stuff we can't see. We've gone from rubbing two sticks together to smashing protons into each other at close to the speed of light. We have flung ourselves and our machines into interplanetary space, sent our robot emissaries to dozens of worlds, and created two spacecraft that are on their way to the stars. Just this past week, we've found evidence of worlds that may be much like our own, although they're too hot for life, orbiting a star 950 light years away. The things we've accomplished are truly extraordinary, and they seem to just keep getting better.

Of course, the discoveries we've made about life on Earth tell us that we're newcomers on the scene, that we are merely one species of the 10 million or so on the planet, and that those 10 million are a mere 1% of the species that have ever lived. Our discoveries about the universe have shown us that not only is our species not the center of everything on Earth, but Earth isn't the center of the Solar System. Our sun is just another star among 400 billion in our galaxy, tucked away in the boondocks of one of the spiral arms, nowhere near the center of the galaxy. Our galaxy is one of 100 billion galaxies, and it isn't exceptional in its placement in the universe, or in size, or in shape, or anything. And all of those galaxies, everything in the universe that we can see, despite its immensity, constitutes about a 1% bit of "pollution" in a universe that is about 30% dark matter and 70% dark energy. Wipe out not just us, but everything we can see in the universe, and the universe would remain virtually unchanged. This is not a universe made for us; this is not a universe that cares about us. This is a universe that wouldn't even notice if our entire species were gone, much less any one member of it. With that in mind, is there no point to living? Are the critics of atheism right?

No. They are not.

Just because we are tiny, that doesn't mean we aren't special. Just because we are not important to the cosmos, that doesn't mean we aren't important to each other. Without a "grand plan" into which we fit, we are not without purpose; we simply have only the meaning and purpose that we put into our lives. We are free to pursue our own goals, to do what we find valuable. Our species is young, but we show great promise. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will inevitably venture to the stars, and in so doing avoid the destruction of our planet (which is certain no matter what we do, given enough time; we need to preserve our environment as long as we can, but the sun will destroy us one day). The universe can probably support life for another 30 billion years; we can do a lot of good in that amount of time. And if the cosmos doesn't care, so what? We care. We are not simply "in" the cosmos, we are part of the cosmos. We are the universe, and we are a self-aware, intelligent, thinking, feeling part of it.

During the holidays, we often feel somehow more connected to other people, more aware of the wants and needs of others, their joys and pains. We do touch each others' lives in very deep, meaningful ways. We are a species that cares not just about ourselves, and not just about our close relatives, but about the whole species. We're the first to recognize that we are a species. We also care about other species, and about our planet, and indeed about the universe. Very importantly, we are more than our biology; with our ability to change ourselves, to be conscious and aware and intelligent, we have built a society unlike anything else on our planet. Not only do we have a society, we're getting better at having a society; no matter what anyone might tell you, the truth is that violence has declined, and our empathy, our reason, the "better angels of our nature" are winning out. But it only works if we keep trying, if we continue to fight for a better world, a decent world, a world where all people can live in freedom and harmony. In Luke 17:21, it is said "behold, the kingdom of god is within you." We have the power to bring about great goodness for each other, for everyone; that potential is within us all. That is what I have to live for, that is why I care, that is why I don't simply give up and die or submit. And so, with the love of humanity in my thoughts today, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a joyous holiday season.

The Unbelieving Theist

2011-12-21T14:48:00.000-08:00

A little while back, I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who I would consider a "sophisticated believer". This separates him quite widely from the kinds of people I often have to deal with when talking about religion with Christians; he has moved beyond this kind of thing:

I know I will be laughed at, and I don't care. I have spoken to god on many occasions, during Y2K, during the bombings in London (close to my hometown) and also during Harold Camping's predictions (Which are not far off by the way. Wait another 2 years, he was close but not right on the nose.)

You people make me sick. Do you believe in science because it frees you from the responsibility of loving a higher power? I don't understand, all you do is look for the flaws in everything. God has no flaws, everything that you find that is wrong is merely a manifestation of your own fears in God's existence.

I don't agree with people wanting to hurt or kill you, God will do that himself when it is your time as he will to everyone else. There is nothing saying that science is right and there is nothing saying that the universe wasn't created by god. Evolution is the biggest lie that there is to date, how do you know that some scientists aren't just covering up evidence of god? You don't. You are a hive-mind of lonely individuals that have to resort to destroying the beliefs of others in order to feel happy and feel loved by everyone else that is lonely and destroyers of belief.

For all of the posts on this site about mothers who stand up for their athiest daughters or sons... shame on you! You need to grow up and see that love comes from God as did everything else.

R/Atheism - You are an abomination to society and all that this great, God created world has to offer. Please get rid of this sub-reddit. Thank you.

And so his comments, unlike those of many others, often stick with me. One in particular has been floating around in my mind, and it took me a while to understand why. The reason this comment troubled me is because I think it reveals much about the way the sophisticated believer thinks. Here's what he said:

[T]he reality is that you are just as religious as I am. Your god is knowledge and you put your faith in the reason of man. Your hope is that man can deliver himself from his own evil, rise above his own failures on his own strength.

Now, part of what this entails is a difference of opinion on what religion is. I don't agree with the statement; I don't think that I am a religious person, because the word has too much baggage to accurately reflect my beliefs. Religion involves a unique armoring against criticism that only a supernatural authority can provide. But from certain sociological perspectives, even if I don't ascribe to them, one could consider me religious; of course, from those same perspectives, many sports fans are religious with regards to their favorite teams, and so are the people of North Korea with regards to their Dear Leader.

But as I considered the comment, I began to think about how my beliefs and his were similar. And that led to a realization that I'd like to focus on here. The sophisticated Christian, and the sophisticated theist in general, is just as much of an atheist as I am. There are several dimensions to this that I'd like to explore. I'll also point out that, again, this doesn't apply to the vast majority of believers. They would never make such a comment, thinking that I am as religious as they are, unless they were trying to insult me with accusations of scientism or "worship" of prominent atheists. This comment shows that the sophisticated believer has thought about what religion means, and that is a very key point.

The simplest and most obvious way in which the sophisticated theist is very much an atheist has a classic formulation. It comes from Stephen Roberts:

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

This is, of course, true of all believers, or at least almost all. A Christian in theory believes in the same god as a Jew or a Muslim, as they believe in his god, but none of the three follow the same religion; there are quite a few doctrines that separate them. And none of them believe in the same god as followers of the Bahá'í faith, or the gods of the Hindu pantheon. They certainly don't believe in Thor or Odin, in Zeus or Athena, in Ra or Isis, or in Xenu or Cthulhu. The sophisticated believer takes this a step further, because presumably he has at least been exposed to the study of comparative religion. He not only doesn't believe in these gods, he knows why he doesn't believe in them; he sees the flaws in the religions, he knows that Jainism, for example, hasn't really existed forever but rather has a distinct history, he can see how all of these other gods were created by men and not the other way around. This of course paves the way to applying the same analysis to his own faith, whether he follows that path or not.

Still, there is a deeper dimension to the sophisticated believer's unbelief. Very few people who I would consider to be sophisticated, well-educated persons are fundamentalists. They don't take their holy books literally; they tend to be moderates, and thus end up as "metaphorizers". This in itself doesn't show their lack of belief. No, that comes in the very selective decisions of what commands to follow in the holy books. Again, let us take the Christian example; its what I'm most familiar with. Many Christians already discard the majority of the divine commands in the Old Testament, although they keep those that suit them, most typically the Ten Commandments. I don't think there are many people who think that Deuteronomy 25:11-12 is particularly important, for example:

¹¹ If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, ¹² you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.

But the sophisticated theist, and indeed most believers, also refuse to follow some important commands given by Jesus. A key point of Jesus' teachings appears in Matthew 6:34 - "Take no thought for the morrow." Don't make plans, don't make investments, don't worry about anything else, just follow me right now. Obviously, this is not a path taken by most believers In Matthew 19:21-24, and again in Luke 14:33, Jesus makes it clear that one must sell all of his possessions in order to truly be a follower of Christ. Yet the vast majority of believers, and certainly the sophisticated ones, do not do this. More interesting still, if we look back to Luke 14:26-33, Jesus commands that his followers hate their family, their friends, and their own life. The only thing that matters is following him; the only way to do so is to abandon and hate everything else. The same sentiment appears in Matthew 19:28-29. Yet most of the Christians I know, and certainly the ones who are thoughtful and intelligent, do care about their families and their own lives. A more gruesome command comes in Matthew 5:27-30; Jesus commands self-mutilation.

²⁷ “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ ²⁸ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. ²⁹ If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. ³⁰ And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

Not only can people be condemned for thoughtcrime, but it is preferable to go without a hand, if that hand led you to sin, than to be stuck with a body part that will condemn you to hell. As I'm sure many Christians have used various body parts to commit sins, and I don't see them walking around with significant amputations, this command is not really being followed consistently.

So why do sophisticated believers, and indeed most believers in this case, not follow the clear commands of Jesus? Because those commands are insane, and a rational person would not follow them. The sophisticated Christian will no doubt have numerous rationalizations for why they don't follow these commands, but note the word "rationalization". I'm sure that most of them think that Jesus meant something other than what he actually said, but does that make sense when he was speaking to simple, illiterate peasants? Why wouldn't he be more clear, if nothing else to prevent his followers from being composed solely of destitute, hate-filled cripples? The point here is that intelligent, thinking people don't follow these commands, which are undoubtedly part of the doctrine of the religion, being found in the holy book and being the commands of Jesus. 1 John 2:3-4 makes it clear that following the commands of Jesus is of critical importance, and yet sophisticated Christians simply don't do these things.

There is, however, a deeper level still on which the sophisticated believer is very much an atheist. It is revealed in the statement itself, that I, an atheist, am religious. And it is this particular view of what it means to be religious that separates the sophisticated theist from the rest of the group. In studying his religion, the educated believer has come to see his faith as something other than merely belief in the words in the books, more than the pronouncements of the holy men. He sees religion as a practice, not a belief. If I, as an atheist, can have a religion that rejects the idea of god, rejects the idea of the supernatural, rejects anything that does not spring from the natural world, then religion isn't about god.

I suspect that very few sophisticated believers actually think about this; its a transformation in their thought processes that occurs stealthily, unconsciously. They still may think that god exists, but their religion isn't about that any more. Like most things, I think this is the product of education. Any credulous fool can engage in the practice of theology, but to study it, to have anyone else in the academic community give any credence to the letters behind his name, the advanced theologian must be trained in the methods of reason, of critical thinking. This is the basis behind apologetics; while nothing new has come out of the field in a long time, it stems from a desire to reconcile the claims made in the holy books, supposedly the word of god, with the inescapable results of actually thinking about those claims in a rational manner. What the sophisticated believer is left with, once the thinking has been done, are two simple things on which he bases his religion: faith and practice. And he knows, because he understands how reality works, that his faith consists of no better justification than "I just believe it". It is fragile, and cannot support much weight, although it may be similar to a pillow in that however hard you punch it, it just goes back to its original shape. So his religion must stand upon the practice, and does not in any way require the blessing, or even the existence of a god. This allows him, in all seriousness, to consider the pursuit of knowledge, skeptical inquiry of the universe, rejection of anything supernatural, and a belief merely that the universe acts in a consistent manner, to be just as much of a religion as his own. He simply fails to look at the other side of that coin: that his beliefs are just as much atheism as mine.

This, by the way supports Dan Dennett's proposition that comparative religion be added to the required curriculum in all schools. The more people know about religion, the less likely they are to be taken in by the stories and actually follow a religion. It is an odd thing, but I think that the institutions of higher learning that offer advanced degrees in theology may be some of the greatest allies of atheism. The graduates of such programs seem to be either atheists themselves, or else so close to atheists as to hardly make a difference.

Atheism DOES Matter

2011-12-20T10:12:00.000-08:00

A recent article in the Washington Post from Jacques Berlinerblau proposes to tell the atheist community "How to make atheism matter". Its pretty clear that Berlinerblau is part of a cadre of "academic atheists" who consider themselves the sole inheritors of a great tradition, and if only everyone would listen to the deep thoughts that they intone, everything would be wonderful. However, each word he puts down speaks to his vast ignorance of the world at large, and a complete misunderstanding of the fact that atheism already does matter. It is not, despite his labelling of R. Joseph Hoffmann's whinings as "important", a little idea; it is the god hypothesis that we are fighting against which is small.

First among the problems in this article is Berlinerblau's insistence that scholarly journals are where it's at for atheism.

As head atheist in charge I would first get my priorities straight: The intellectual crisis of atheism is actually far less severe than the political crisis. Pop atheists have certainly made atheism a small idea. Hoffmann himself emerges from the erudite and thoughtful Secular Humanist circle. Alongside that school there exists some truly excellent scholarly research about nonbelief.

In scholarly journals--where far too many religion reporters fear to tread--a completely different understanding of atheism is emerging. Those like Hoffmann who think seriously about their subject matter are routinely debunking popular misconceptions about atheism. Once the media turns its attention to this scholarship, produced by both believers and nonbelievers, atheism becomes a big idea again.

Yes, Jacques, we get it; you've got a serious bromance with Hoffmann. But you can talk all you want about how everyone keeps ignoring you, when you have deep things to say about the nature of atheism, the questions of how the term can be defined, the impermanence of the self-identification of atheists, etc. You still miss the biggest, most important point, the one which we here in the trenches have to deal with every day: There are a bunch of people who still believe in god! They don't have good reasons for doing so, and they don't care that all they have to go on is faith.

He then goes on to tell atheists what we "really" want, because obviously he knows this better than we do:

My guess, however, is that the majority of American nonbelievers are not bent on abolishing religion. Their (legitimate) gripe is only with the most power-mad and theocratically inclined forms of religion.

Actually, Jacques, if you'd take the time to talk to the majority of non-believers in the country, or even just spend some time hanging out around Reddit and seeing what atheists are talking about, you'd see that we do indeed have serious concerns about theocratic regimes. But we also see what you miss, namely that the problem is rooted in that god belief they all have. The focus must be on establishing rational thought, encouraging people not to simply take things on faith and defer to authority, because that is the only way to permanently deal with the problem. If we put down today's theocrats but leave the religious foundations upon which they draw in place, we will only see new theocrats spring up tomorrow like mushrooms after a rain.

Berlinerblau proceeds to point out that we should be pushing for freedom from religion, and that it is not exclusive with freedom of religion. This is the only point on which I agree with him, and yet even here he jabs at straw men:

A clever atheist leadership would spend its resources not on billboard advertisements devoted to making the point that your God is a doofus, but to demonstrating that these two freedoms can exist in symbiosis. The key word is freedom. Southern Baptists, after all, want no more to live under a Catholic establishment than Catholics wish to live under a Southern Baptist one.

Is he even aware of the actual billboards that are being put up? Because that's exactly the point that is typically being made with statements like "Don't believe in god? Neither do we." And maybe he's not familiar with one of the leading atheist organizations out there, the Freedom From Religion Foundation. It wouldn't surprise me if he hadn't heard of them; clearly, he doesn't exactly have his finger on the pulse of the atheist movement.

He then suggests we "widen the tent", accepting more people into the movement. Let's take a look at what he proposes.

Why must the admission price to American atheism be total nonbelief in God and hatred of all religion? Can’t the movement, at the very least, split the difference?

Why can’t those who have doubts about God but remain affiliated in some way with a religion be included in the big tent? Conversely, why can’t those who have no religion (see below) but some type of spiritual or faith commitment enter the Movement as well? Why can’t skeptics and agnostics join the club? What about heretics and apostates?

Two things come out of this statement, Jacques. First, you're not familiar with the fact that atheism and agnosticism often go together, and are addressing two different things entirely. Atheism is a statement about belief, while agnosticism is a statement about knowledge. I, and many of my fellow atheists, are agnostic atheists. We don't know with certainty that there is no god, but we lack a belief that the claim "god exists" is true. Again, something I'd expect an "academic" to be aware of, and evidence that you have no idea what's going on in the atheist community. We also have a number of skeptics among our ranks; this is because skepticism is also talking about something completely different. Skeptical inquiry is a way of looking at the world that requires evidence to support a proposition before a truth claim is believed. Many atheists come to their lack of belief because they are skeptics! I'm among them; I simply applied skeptical inquiry to the question of god.

Secondly, you're asking a truly ridiculous question here. Let me summarize what you just said: "Why can't you atheists accept into the atheist community people who still believe in god?" Because, Jacques, they aren't atheists! We're perfectly willing to talk to them, in fact we welcome it, but if you still believe in god, you aren't an atheist. Its kind of in the definition of the word. Now, we don't all hate religion; that isn't required, simply common. And we don't all reject the supernatural entirely, although again, its incredibly common, as its a way that people often come to be atheists. We aren't excluding most of the people you think we're excluding; the demographics just work out that the majority of us agree with each other. If you'd talk to people, you'd know all of this. For all your talk about debunking stereotypes, you seem to cling to yours quite firmly.

His next point, about knowing how many atheists there actually are, is in part a valid one. But it ignores the highly important issue of social stigma. Many people won't "come out" as atheists, even in an anonymous survey. Its very hard to know exactly how many people are truly atheists. The "nones" are indeed a growing group, and we do indeed have to acknowledge that the group is more diverse than people who self-identify as atheists. But Berlinerblau doesn't propose a solution to this issue, so I will: put "atheist" on the surveys. We're going off the only numbers we have; if those numbers aren't accurate, it isn't really something we can control, because we don't make the surveys!

Finally, we get to what we all probably suspected was coming: the accomodationist bullshit.

And while we are at it, why can’t atheists make common cause with religious moderates? In its first decade of operations new atheism has virtually assured its political irrelevance by acerbically shunning the very religious folks (think mainline Protestants, liberal Catholics, Reform Jews, etc) who are waging their own pitched battles with fundamentalists. “Even mild and moderate religion,” averred Richard Dawkins in the The God Delusion , “helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism naturally flourishes.”

Evangelicals, it bears noting, achieved many of their greatest political triumphs by entering into what Francis Schaeffer called “co-belligerency” with Roman Catholics and Mormons on issues like abortion, gay marriage, religion in public schools, etc. In other words, leadership put aside seething theological animosities in order to achieve pragmatic political goals.

In so doing, the Christian right successfully managed to curtail both freedom from religion and freedom of religion for countless Americans. The time has come for a strategic atheist defense of both these virtues.

So what you're saying, Jacques, is that we should make a "deal with the devil" because it would be politically expedient. Yeah, that would be a great idea for a movement that prides itself on honesty and neutral evaluation of the evidence. And the suggestion completely ignores the fact that the moderates have already for the most part made their alliances. They may not agree with the fundamentalists on a lot of things, but hey, they can all get together on hating atheists! Look, there's a pretty good reason we can't ally with the religious moderates; they all believe in god. They're waffling metaphorizers who cling to faith even when the evidence is against them, and struggle mightily to ensure that no matter what happens, their holy books will always be right.

And they refuse to speak out against the crazies. I have seen none of these "pitched battles" you mention between fundamentalists and moderates; the only people who get any press when they fight for separation of church and state, or argue against theocracy, or call out a fundamentalist church for their insanity, or insist that the Catholic church do something about their rampant corruption, are atheists. I'd happily accept a moderate Christian standing by my side denouncing the people trying to get creationism into a school science classroom, but they're never there. They don't want to be mean to their "fellow Christians", and they certainly don't want to be associated with us "godless heathens". So they give their tacit support to the crazies by not speaking up, and by continuing to promote the very same holy books from which the wackos draw their ideas. Dawkins, in the quote you provided, was 100% correct.

Lets face facts; Berlinerblau is writing an article about the atheism movement. He's ridiculously wrong on almost all points, but he is writing it. The "nones" are the fastest growing group on the religious surveys, and some of that growth comes from atheists. The r/atheism subreddit has passed 300,000 members, freethought conventions are growing in popularity and attendance numbers, and most importantly, people are talking about the growing atheist movement, even if only to criticize it as Jacques has done here. Atheism already does matter. Berlinerblau is just disappointed that he doesn't.

Why I Am An Atheist, or OMG, PZ Myers Knows My Name!

2011-12-10T12:21:00.001-08:00

For those of you who might not be aware, PZ Myers has been running a feature on his Pharyngula blog on "Why I Am An Atheist", made up of user submissions on the topic. Well, I sent him an e-mail a while back with my own reasoning, and it was posted today! I've already seen how powerful the Internet can be based on this; someone I knew in college sent me a message on Facebook asking if that was indeed me. He noted that he had considered submitting a response of his own, but had decided not to simply because PZ has received hundreds of entries for the feature. I had no idea this person was an atheist; having gone to a Lutheran college, I suspected that atheists were rather rare.

If you aren't yet following Pharyngula, I highly recommend it. PZ is an amazing writer, and his talks are also quite good. I'll admit that the first time I heard him, his voice wasn't nearly as gruff as I'd expected, but on further reflection, it just adds to the impact that such a nice guy can be so open and direct in his opposition to religion. With any luck, I'll get a bit of the "Pharyngula effect", and have a traffic bump to In Awe of Everything. :) Here's a copy of what I wrote, but go ahead and give PZ the traffic by going there to check out the comments.
________________________________________________________

Interestingly, one of my friends just pointed me to a question from a pastor he knows, who was asking “why are you not a Christian?” I wrote this up, and felt it would be good to send along.

If you’d like to know why I’m an atheist, its because I am also a skeptic. Atheism is in a way an application of skepticism; I only believe that which has convincing evidence, and there is no convincing evidence for the existence of a divine being. The god proposed by every major religion is a supernatural god; even religions like Buddhism that do not promote a god do promote the supernatural in various ways. But through science, the study of the world around us, the observation of reality, we see absolutely no evidence of the supernatural. Everything fits, everything follows the rules. There is no E that does not equal mc^2, no F that does not have an equivalent MA. The universe appears exactly as it should if the only forces at work were those of the elementary particles of matter responding to the laws of nature. Its possible that there is a god of some kind, but its highly unlikely, and there is no evidence that any god affects reality in any way.

Why I am not a Christian is a little more specific. I was raised as a Christian, going to church every Sunday at the United Church of Christ. But as I grew older, and learned more about the religion I was following, it simply stopped making sense. Every time the Bible, and therefore god, made verifiable statements about the nature of reality, and even most of the time when it made statements of historical fact, it got it wrong. And very importantly, the god being described didn’t actually seem very loving. He demands worship and obedience, he demands that we bow before him, and tells us that we’re sinful creatures that must beg his forgiveness for not being perfect, despite the fact that supposedly he created us. As Richard Dawkins put it in The God Delusion, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” He set the default state for the afterlife as eternal torture; how could a god who willingly sent most of his supposedly beloved children to hell be good? If there is a god, and an afterlife, and that god sits in judgement, then here is how I see it. If god is just and kind, then he will judge me on my works, not whether I believed in him. If god judges me on whether I believed in him without any evidence, then he is not just and kind, and thus isn’t worthy of worship anyway.

The Out Challenge for Theists

2011-11-09T09:14:00.000-08:00

I posted a version of this challenge earlier on r/atheism, and I decided I wanted to get it out to non-Redditors. This post is not addressed primarily to atheists, but I know that I may have several readers who believe in god. This idea has been floating around a bit, and I decided to formalize it a little. Its inspired at least in part by things like the We Are Atheism project and The Out Campaign.

For those of you who are theists, I think that many of you don't really realize what things are like for an atheist. Atheists are one of the most hated groups in America, and public distrust has been confirmed yet again in the 2011 Values Survey. The headlines are focusing on things like Mitt Romney's Mormonism and the overall support for a redistribution of wealth, but of interest to me is that 67% of voters would be "uncomfortable or very uncomfortable" with an atheist President. Being openly an atheist can threaten one's relationships with family and friends (as I've learned, although I've largely been lucky), one's livelihood, one's personal property, and in some cases one's physical safety or even life. And that's just in the United States. Even if you visit r/AtheismComingOut, the stories might not really hit home. So I'd like to propose a challenge.

Come out as an atheist, and pretend to be one for a month. Simply be an atheist as your public persona.

Now, I'm not asking you to pretend to be a raging, full-on Hitchens-style anti-theist. I'm not asking you to be "that guy", the one who angrily comments on all of his friends' posts containing the slightest reference to god. Indeed, that would probably be a bad idea, as it would too easily lend itself to caricature. Just be openly, unapologetically atheist. Post the occasional link from an atheist blog or website on your Facebook/G+ feed; don't go to church; tell your friends and family, but don't make a big deal about it.

Feel free to do some research first. The r/atheism community on Reddit is rapidly approaching 250,000 members, and can serve as a great resource. I'm proudly a member of that subreddit. There are a lot of us there who've helped others with coming out, so we know how to do so gently but firmly. We can help you with a reading list, great videos to watch, useful links, quotes that we like, and generally help you get and stay "in character". There are thousands of us there, so its not like there's a lack of information.

While you're going through the challenge, tell me about it, or post it to r/atheism. Let the atheist community know what kind of reaction you receive, how others treat you and if it changes, what consequences (good or bad) result from being an atheist. I think that both you, and we, may end up surprised at what happens. You could even turn it into a book deal, a la The Year of Living Biblically, or just become "Internet famous" like the atheist couple that became Mormons as an experiment.

At the end of the month, simply "find your way back to god". I'm not asking you to make a permanent life change, not unless you really want to. The point of the challenge isn't to make you question your faith. If it does end up that way, I wouldn't complain, but that isn't the goal. As a note, this challenge is not being extended to anyone who is still young and dependent on their family for support. I wouldn't counsel actual deconverted theists to come out in that situation; I'm certainly not going to recommend it for an experiment.

I'll be honest, I don't expect anyone to take me up on this challenge. Heck, most atheists wouldn't want to go through it again, and wouldn't wish it on anyone else. But I think we really need perspective, on both sides. And as a skeptic, I'm always looking for more data. The challenge is open.

The White House Responds to Secularists...With Bullshit

2011-10-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

I'm normally a quiet person. I'm not moved to profanity easily. I am largely in support of, though somewhat disappointed in, our current US administration. But I just got an e-mail from the White House, as did many other people in a community I share. And this makes the situation not a usual one. This comes from Joshua DuBois, Executive Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships:

The separation of church and state outlined in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution is an important founding principle of our nation. Our nation's Bill of Rights guarantees not only that the government cannot establish an official religion, but also guarantees citizens' rights to practice the religion of their choosing or no religion at all.

Throughout our history, people of all faiths – as well as secular Americans – have played an important role in public life. And a robust dialogue about the role of religion in public life is an important part of our public discourse.

While the President strongly supports every American's right to religious freedom and the separation of church and state, that does not mean there's no role for religion in the public square.

When he was a Senator from Illinois, President Obama gave a keynote address at the Call to Renewal conference where he spoke about the important role religion plays in politics and in public life.

"A sense of proportion should also guide those who police the boundaries between church and state. Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation - context matters."

That's why President Obama supports the use of the words "under God' in our Pledge of Allegiance and "In God we Trust' on our currency. These phrases represent the important role religion plays in American public life, while we continue to recognize and protect the rights of secular Americans. As the President said in his inaugural address, "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers." We're proud of that heritage, and the strength it brings to our great country.

Fuck this. Fuck everything about this. This is complete and total bullshit. The fact that an "Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships" exists is bullshit. This is antithetical to the principles upon which our nation was founded. We are NOT one nation under god. We do NOT trust in god.

That. Is. Not. America.

I am not unaware of the role that religion has played in our history. I am also, unlike most people, not unaware that that role has not always, and I would go so far as to say rarely, been a positive one.

The addition of "under god" to the pledge of allegiance took place under McCarthyism, not exactly a shining moment in our history. Putting "In God We Trust" on our money became law during the same period. "In God We Trust" became our national motto during the same period. Not only has this been "one nation under god" for only about 60 years, it became so only to differentiate ourselves from the communist USSR. Because some people were scared of "Ivan" in the 1950s, I have to live with blatant theism thrown in my face whenever I look at a piece of American currency or hear children being taught to love their country.

I find it hard to express just how much anger I am feeling right now. I am in no way proud to be American at this moment. My country, the leaders of my nation, have forgotten the words of Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and so many of the profoundly secular people who were instrumental in the founding of this country. I think that our leaders have forgotten the Treaty of Tripoli, signed in 1797:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

The petitions that led to this response from the White House were some of the most supported petitions on the site set up to allow them. The r/atheism forum of reddit.com just celebrated passing 200,000 members, a wonderful milestone for a single Internet forum representing any community. There are millions of atheists in the United States. Where is the government decree stating that every American has to look at something on a frequent basis stating "In Reason We Trust"? No god of any type has any part in my life, and no god of any type is supposed to have a part in the governance of my country. With one e-mail, one page on a website, the White House has let down the American people, and the Constitution of the United States. Today is a sad day.

Yahwists and the Sequel Hypothesis

2011-10-28T16:46:00.000-07:00

So, I'm going to be a little more lighthearted here, and also somewhat speculative. What can I say, I'm in a mood. I'm going to make some comparisons here involving the major Abrahamic religions of the world and television shows. For those of you who are atheists, particularly if you're also somewhat of a geek, you can probably already see where I'm going with this. Enjoy the ride. Oh, and warning, TVTropes will ruin your life, but I'm linking to it anyway. For the rest of you, let me lay this out as clearly as I can.

There are four major religious traditions that descend from the Abrahamic tradition: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism. Its possible to do serious studies of these traditions, and they've been very important to the history of the world. But stepping back for a moment, and viewing them as a whole, they follow a very familiar pattern.

Judaism is the "original series" of the Abrahamic religion. You can see clearly how it drew upon the influences of other religions of its time, but it had some new concepts that made it stand out from the pack. It took old stories and ideas and interpreted them in unique ways, creating something very new when all was said and done. Now, that's not to say it was always very high quality work. The characters weren't always consistent, the stories could get overblown or pedantic, and the editing control was obviously in dire straits. Occasionally, the moralizing got a little heavy-handed, and when you look at it from a modern perspective, it certainly shows its age; some of the things it includes may have made sense at the time, but today we just cringe at the unfortunate implications. And the special effects? Well, they were certainly big, and might have been cool for their time, but in hindsight they're definitely lacking, and the flaws tend to break one's suspension of disbelief. Still, it must be said that it has some good points, and even today it maintains a faithful following. It might even be called a cult classic.

Christianity seems to be the "next generation" of Abrahamic religion. It draws on the same roots as the original series, and takes place in roughly the same universe. But we've moved forward in time a good bit, and we've got a completely new cast of characters. The writing is more consistent, although there are a number of places where the sheer silliness of the premise shows through. The special effects remind us of the kind of things done in the original, often being explicit revisits of those old episodes, but they're more closely grounded to believability, if not entirely possible in the real world. Only on occasion do they get really cheesy, and even then, they at least are used to draw out strong emotional appeal. Most importantly, there's a more clear message to the series, one that feels a little more comfortable to modern sensibilities. It still has some things that make us wince, because it tries as hard as it can to remain true to the timeline of its universe, and some might criticize it for being too optimistic, expecting that the future will be all sunshine and rainbows and we'll all live in peace. But on close examination, it doesn't really flinch away from hard truths, and is overall a much higher quality work of fiction. It maintains a large group of fans today, and has spawned several spin-off series that try to interpret the material, with greater or lesser success.

Islam comes next chronologically, and seems to be the "gritty reboot" of the Abrahamic concept. It makes it clear how much of an influence the previous two series had on its writer, and it tries to remain consistent with the story previously set in place. But the special effects have been simultaneously amped up and strictly tied to reality, or so the series claims. Everything is supposed to be purely in the realm of plausibility, as long as you accept that you're living in a universe with rules just slightly different than our own. What really makes this story different, however, is the underlying message. It doesn't shy away from hard topics, and makes its stance on difficult modern issues very clear. This can get uncomfortable at times, because the old harsh morality of the original series is still very much in evidence. Islam strictly enforces the old rules, adds some more of its own, and deals very honestly with the implications. Now, to be fair, it made some amazing advances, particularly in the realm of technology. When it dealt with the universe, there's no denying that it made some brilliant insights, and inspired people who weren't even fans of the show to advance new ideas. But like so many of these shows, the fanbase got a little too serious about it, and insist that everyone should follow the show. They take a lot of offense at the suggestion that there might be some flaws in the writing or the effects, because they know that both the show itself and the writing staff are beyond reproach and deserve universal respect and adoration.

So, that covers it, right? Oh wait, I almost forgot one. Mormonism. The "wacky fanfiction" of Abrahamic faith. Rabid fans of the original series and the next generation, the writers decided that there was only one thing missing from the stories: themselves. And so the new, unofficial episodes began to be written, but without the reality checks of trained writers, the plotlines soon went way off the rails. There might be a few gems in there, some stuff that is really quite good, but its overwhelmed by Mary Sue characterization, ridiculous plots that make absolutely no sense, contradictions galore, and a return of the heavy-handed moralizing. Only now, its clear that the "morals" are designed so that the main characters can get away with pretty much anything they want. The stories obviously split the fan base; the majority just don't see the appeal, and think that there's no reason to add bad writing to a perfectly good story. But there's a very vocal, very loyal community who think that these fan fics are the best thing since sliced bread. They continue to tout its virtues, making excuses and coming up with new stuff all the time. The leaders of this group are obviously benefiting greatly from the fact that a lot of people like the stories, so there's no reason to accept any criticism. But they just want to be accepted by the mainline fans, so when they get into discussions with outsiders, they emphasize their similarities and do their best to shove the differences out of the spotlight. Easiest way to do that? Pick on the people who don't like any of the shows. Like me.

Stuff. All Of It. No, Really!

2011-10-19T20:16:00.000-07:00

In this post, I'm going to show you what I'm really made of.

Yep, that's it. In fact, that's what the universe is made of. Twelve particles of matter, four fundamental forces. This is what is called the Standard Model of particle physics. Everything, absolutely everything, with no exceptions, can be broken down at base into these things. The interactions of these twelve particles and four forces are the cause of absolutely all phenomena. We are very close to understanding these interactions to a very high degree of accuracy, and we are also close to being able to plug the numbers into a computer and have it start calculating, and have it end up predicting everything within certain levels of probability. But obviously, I'm more than just quarks and gluons. I'm a human being, a living thing, and a thing with a mind. As Carl Sagan put it, the beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. So, how did this stuff end up turning into me?

These elementary particles have to come together as composite particles before we can even start to build atoms, which are the smallest pieces of elements. The nucleus of an atom is made of protons and neutrons, and that nucleus is surrounded by a cloud of electrons. Yes, its a cloud even in a hydrogen atom, where there is one electron. Protons and neutrons are made of three quarks each; a proton is two up quarks and a down quark, while a neutron is two downs and an up. The quarks are held together by one of the four forces, the strong nuclear force (which is also gluons). The nucleus of a relatively large atom looks a little bit like this:

Now, that's only an approximation, because in reality, all of those particles are in many different places at the same time. When you look at them, they are only probably going to be in any given place. These particles are held together by the nuclear force, which is really just the residual bits of the strong force holding the quarks together. This nucleus, as I noted, is relatively large. All of the atoms of heavier elements, and by that I mean anything with an atomic number 3 and up, started out as much simpler atoms than this one. They all looked kind of like this:

That's hydrogen, specifically protium. It has one proton and one electron, and most of the stuff in the universe still looks like this. About 75% of the chemical matter in the universe is hydrogen, and about 99.98% of hydrogen is protium. At one point, you were this. I was this. Everything you see was this. These particles were formed when the universe was born, about 13.7 billion years ago. So in that sense, you are 13.7 billion years old. The particles that compose my body are as old as the cosmos. Obviously, I'm not made of hydrogen. A big part of me is, because the second most common molecule in the universe is a large percentage of my body. The most common molecule is of course hydrogen gas, H2. Helium doesn't form bonds. The next most common element is oxygen, and since there's a lot of hydrogen and oxygen, they combine to form H2O. Water. So I've got a lot of hydrogen in me, but I've got other stuff too. Obviously, I've just mentioned oxygen. There's also carbon, iron, and various other elements. Where did all that come from? Well, when you put a whole lot of hydrogen together, another force takes over: gravity. It starts pulling all of the hydrogen into a ball, and crushing it together in the center. It eventually looks like this:

That's a star, specifically our Sun. Its emitting a lot of energy, partly in the form of heat and light, because in the middle, gravity is pushing the hydrogen atoms together. Normally, they're held apart by the electromagnetic force, which is much weaker than the strong nuclear force, but holds up better over distance. Gravity is much weaker than the electromagnetic force, but its even better at working at a distance, and the more matter you have, the stronger it gets. When a proto-star gets big enough, the gravity pushes the nuclei close enough that the strong nuclear force beats out electromagnetism, and the atoms snap together in a process called thermonuclear fusion. The energy the particles release when they fuse is greater than the energy needed to push them together, and the star ignites. At its core, our Sun and every other star is fusing hydrogen into helium. Our Sun, amazingly enough, isn't big enough to go on to the next stage when it eventually runs out of hydrogen. Bigger stars start fusing hydrogen into carbon through the triple-alpha process when they near the end of their lives. Really big stars go on to fuse lighter elements into iron. But going any heavier than that stops releasing energy; it takes more energy to fuse the nuclei than they release when it happens. So what made all the elements heavier than iron? There are a lot of them. That process might look a little something like this:

The incredibly huge stars explode when they reach the end of their lives; they've fused everything they can into iron, and something has to give. Fusion isn't making more energy, but gravity just won't let up. They release truly apocalyptic amounts of energy in what is called a supernova. Such a destructive event would wipe out all life in every nearby solar system. Whole planets would be utterly destroyed, and even other stars might be swept up in the massive explosion. Supernovae observed from Earth can outshine the entire galaxy in which the star resides. One explosion outshining hundreds of billions of stars. But in the midst of all that energy being released, lots of atoms are being slammed together with tremendous force. And we get supernova nucleosynthesis. All the heavier elements, everything with an atomic number higher than 56, gets made when the biggest of stars die. Stars that burned billions of years ago and uncounted light years away died, so that you could be here today reading this article. On YouTube, philhellenes said it quite well: Stars must die so that I can live. I stepped out of a supernova.

And so did you.

So, what am I really made of? Energy. Quarks. Atoms. Molecules.

Stars.

I'm pretty awesome. You are, too.

Why We Believe: The Arsenal of Fear

2011-10-18T09:03:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a lot of thinking about why religious people believe the things they do. Having been religious in the past, I've of course looked at my own reasons for believing. I think there are two primary groups of believers: the indifferent believers and the conscious believers. Those who are indifferent are easily explained; they don't really think about their belief, it doesn't affect their lives at all, they just believe in god because they do. Perhaps they were brought up in a religious household, and indoctrinated into their belief system as children. But they don't really have reasons for their belief. What I'm interested in are the conscious believers, the ones who think about their beliefs and hold them for a reason. And I think I've puzzled out what that reason is, in pretty much all cases.

Fear.

Now, assuming I have some religious readers, they'll tell me that I'm wrong. They have all kinds of justification for their belief, plenty of support from their holy book, their own personal experience of the presence of a divine being, and of course for many of them the idea that "God is love." A loving god wouldn't make you believe out of fear! But I don't think I'm wrong; I think that as an outside observer, I can see the weapons of religion more clearly than those who have been defeated by those weapons. And that's what we're dealing with here: weapons. Religion uses fear as a weapon against the minds of human beings, and not just as a single weapon. Fear comes in many flavors, and religion has no qualms about using each and every one.

The opening salvo in the religious assault is the Fear of Hell. This is the initial barrage, it is a direct threat against the enemies of the religion in question. It tells people, believe what I say, or you will be burned forever. Now, the vast majority of us have been burned at some point in our lives. A burn hurts like no other wound. Even when you know that all of your pain receptors are on the surface of the skin, and thus it can't actually hurt anywhere else, a burn feels deeper than other pain. A bad burn feels like it goes to the bone. Even the mildest burn is quite painful. This alone should tell you why religions use fire as a threat, as their most extreme punishment. Imagine being in a fire, burning worse than you've ever burned, all over your body, forever. You'll never die, you'll never be released from the pain. What wouldn't you do to avoid that?

But some people don't fear torture; the religious know that, from the examples of their own martyrs. Many people, however, may be susceptible to the next weapon in their arsenal, the Fear of Death. Its a terrifying moment for a child when he or she first encounters death. Its often not until the teenage years, if not later, that a person truly confronts the idea of their own mortality. And it is very, very scary. I exist, and I'd like to put off not existing for as long as possible. Here, religion steps in and tells you that you don't have to stop existing. You can live forever; their god can grant you eternal life, if you believe in him and do what he says. Of course, they have to deal with the fact that their believers do actually die, so they promise you life after death. Something about you lives on, either in an eternal afterlife or in unending rebirths. The specifics vary, but all the major religions tell you that death is nothing to fear, because it never really happens.

The weaponry is far more extensive, though. Maybe an enemy doesn't fear their own death, maybe they have something they would die to protect. To deal with that, religion has learned to wield the Fear of Loss. Most people have others in their life that they love and care about, people that they like to be with, their friends and family. Knowing that we ourselves are going to die one day may not be quite as scary as the fact that our loved ones will also die. They are just as mortal, just as subject to death, and being without them is something we don't like to contemplate. Here is where the attack from religion becomes insidious. If your loved ones were believers before their death, then they have eternal life already; if you believe too, you can see them again, and be with them for all eternity. If they are still alive, but they don't believe, then even if you live forever, you'll still lose them. Shouldn't you try to convert them, too? From pets to parents, we all want to be with our loved ones forever, and religion promises to help with the fear that we can't, and in doing so uses that fear against us.

What about right now, though? All of these weapons have had to do with the future. Religion can deal with the fears you have today, and the next thing it draws from the armory is the Fear of the Unknown. We humans, even if we accept that we are amazing creatures, must also accept that we are limited. We do not know everything about the universe, and for that matter we don't always know what's around the next corner, or what's going to happen in the next five minutes. Uncertainty scares a lot of people. Who knows what dangers are lurking in the tall grass? And we have lots of questions, which can be overwhelming at times. What am I? Where did I come from? Where did everything come from? Is there a reason I'm here? Religion offers a balm against these fears; for the dangers of the world that we aren't aware of and can't control, there is at least one all-powerful, all-knowing god looking out for us and protecting us. And all of those questions can be answered, most likely from the holy book, and by a priest if the book is somehow lacking. Religion claims to be able to make the unknown known, if not to you, then at least to god.

Finally, religion has one deadly weapon, one final blow against the human mind. It wields, almost paradoxically, Fear of the Known. This weapon is a two-pronged attack in itself. The first part is targeted at those who know a little, and it is based on heaven. Religion promises us that if we believe, there is an afterlife waiting for us that is glorious, wonderful, perfect. There is no pain, no suffering, no strife, just pure happiness and contentment. Heaven is a beautiful place, even if they can't give you specifics. In comparison, we can look at the real world, and see that it is dull, boring, and most importantly frightening. Compared to heaven, the real world is a very scary place; religion wants you to yearn for heaven as an escape from this fearful world. Secondly, for those who know a lot, there's an additional element of fear. When you see how incredibly big the universe is, or even just the Earth, you feel insignificant and pointless. Your life will be short compared to the grand sweep of time, and in comparison even to a planet like ours, an individual human almost disappears. The mind recoils from the vastness, and in that moment, religion springs its trap. God made all of it, and he made it just for us. You are important, you are loved, you are special, because god says you are. You're afraid for good reason, but god can comfort you.

I think that these weapons, the Arsenal of Fear, are at the root of why every single conscious believer follows the dictates of a religion. Whether they fell to one attack or many, when you dig deep enough, you'll find that religion is based on some form of fear. Its an impressive armory, a nearly insurmountable force. Humans are fearful creatures; whether you believe we were created that way or evolved that way, the truth is that today, we are often filled to the brim with fear. And religion knows that, and it uses that, and it conquers millions by attacking with that fear.

But we aren't always afraid.

We can defend ourselves against the attacks of religion. We have within us the power to overcome fear, to weather the blows and come out stronger than when the attacks began. The defense that works best, that is most effective against the Arsenal of Fear, is reason. Knowledge, rationality, skepticism, the amazing capabilities of our minds; these are what religion seeks to conquer, because religion fears them! So, how can you fight back against these fears?

First and foremost, look at the commonality among every single weapon. They all propose something beyond our reach, something that we cannot ever detect. For the Fear of Hell to work, you have to believe that you will live on after you die; you have to believe in hell. I'm not afraid of hell, because I know hell doesn't exist. Even if we assume that we live on after we die, wherever we go, we go there without our atoms. If I don't have atoms, how can I have nerves to feel fire? For that matter, how can there even be fire? Firelight is the light emitted from excited atoms as the electrons change energy states. If there is fire, then there is electricity, and atoms, and natural laws that we understand. If there's fire in hell, I can build a fireproof room, and an air conditioner. The religious will tell you that its not like real fire; it burns your soul (which can feel pain without nerves), and it doesn't need fuel, or oxygen, or atoms. In short, the fire in hell is magic fire. I don't believe in magic, so hell isn't scary.

The Fear of Death and the Fear of Loss also depend on an afterlife. Before religion can help you assuage those fears, it has to convince you that there is an afterlife. But there's no evidence of that; we can't detect a soul, we can't detect an afterlife, and the religious can't really even tell us what's so good about it. This also takes care of one half of the Fear of the Known. When someone promises you heaven, ask them for details. What am I going to like about it? Will there be great meals, good TV shows, amazing sex? Will I even have a body? Why should I look forward to simply praising god for all eternity? No one has ever reported back from heaven. All the evidence points to the fact that when we die, that's it. Yeah, its still scary. But it isn't noble to hide from that fear by believing in a reassuring lie. The best way to face these fears is to life our lives in ways that we enjoy, to make the most of the time we have. Tell your loved ones you love them, make memories with them and keep those memories as you see fit.

Most importantly, for the Fear of the Unknown and indeed every weapon, religion asks you to believe in god. Their god is a judge who can send you to hell, who demands your worship, who has infinite power and knowledge. But what can he actually do? If god has such power to judge me for my supposed sins, why has he not already struck me down? Why must he wait until an afterlife that we can't prove exists anyway? The best evidence most religions have for their supernatural god is the natural world, which is ridiculous. If god was really all-powerful, we would be able to see some manifestations of that power; things that should be totally impossible should actually happen, with no explanation. And yet, everything we see appears to follow the invariable laws of nature. There are no broken rules, no E that does not equal mc^2. If god is really all-knowing, then why does his book, supposedly either written by him or made at his direction, regardless of what holy book you're talking about, get so much stuff wrong? Every time the supposed creator of the universe says something that we can independently test, even most of the time when his book records historical fact, it is verifiably incorrect. The supernatural god proposed by every major religion not only has absolutely no evidence supporting his existence, he also appears to have none of the traits that he is claimed to have. Its far simpler to say that no such god exists at all.

Without an afterlife, and without a god, religion's Arsenal of Fear is broken. The weapons are duds, the swords are pitted and dull. There is nothing to fear from the threats of religion, and nothing religion can do to truly assuage our very real fears about the world. Fight for your mind, face your fears; you're armed to the teeth, and religion's armory is all flash and no substance.

Today Be A Holiday

2011-09-19T06:45:00.000-07:00

Today, the Pastafarians celebrate International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Its much more fun refuting creationists when you get to include the word "arrr".

Finding Meaning in the Universe

2011-09-10T13:44:00.000-07:00

I haven't found a lot of time lately to write, which is unfortunate. Thankfully, I've done some writing in the past, and I find myself referencing this particular piece a lot. I've been hanging out at r/atheism lately, and this question popped up recently:

"My entire teen years were spent on philosophical pondering and being REALLY stressed over what world view I could accept. I would form one, think critically on it until it collapsed, modify it, and repeat the process until I arrived at Atheist. I also did a fair amount of reading, most notably of Sophie’s World, which if you don’t know is a really easy primer for most major philosophers. This wide range of thinking has left me with a bit of a problem.

I am now a condescending bitch.

Now when I read things that have been hailed as “brilliant” or “profound” or “mindblowing” I am left with the reaction of “dude, I knew about this when I was 14.” For example,

-I finally read Watchman this year and was REALLY disappointed. I was hoping for something controversial, thought-inducing, worth all the hype it got. Instead I just responded with “this seems kinda trivial, and Ozymandias’ great fix wouldn’t work anyway because we have world disasters all the time and its never brought about world peace.”

-When my ex-bf had an existential crisis over the idea of what happens after death I wanted to punch him for being so immature because to me, duh, it’s the same as before you were born.

-I once heard someone I know to be a fairly devout Protestant say “man, Eastern religions will blow your mind, its stuff that I have never even thought about” and was appalled because when I first learned about Hinduism I was amazed at how much it lined up with conclusions I had drawn myself.

-When I hear theists agonizing over some ambiguous religious doctrine, or how a good diety could let bad things happen I am amazed that they didn’t resolve that question in their mind years ago because it seems so core to any belief in God.

Long story short, philosophy now seems really boring, and almost juvenile, to me largely because I learned so much about it when I was younger. Does anyone else have these side-effects from learning to think critically?"

I realized exactly how this person felt, and I wrote up a response. I thought I'd share it here.

It sounds like you took an evolutionary approach to your philosophy, which is awesome. You're finding yourself at a point many of us reach, and in which I was sitting myself until not long ago. Nothing looks remarkable any more, everything is dull and boring, because all you have is the real world. And what fun is there in just reality?

In college, I took classes in ethics and religion under Dr. David Belcastro, and I expressed to him the thought that the ultimate point of philosophy was to ask "why". He told me that religion, in all of its various forms, has an answer: "Yes." I've been trying to understand that for about 6 years now, and I think I finally do. Oddly, I found the answer outside of religion entirely.

Read some Carl Sagan, particularly Pale Blue Dot and The Demon-Haunted World, or watch Cosmos. Watch the Symphony of Science videos, or any interviews/lectures with Carl Sagan or Richard Feynman. The universe is a wonderful place, it is remarkable in its vastness and complexity, and is enough in itself to inspire awe and wonder. You're seeking spiritual fulfillment, but religion isn't going to help. That same fulfillment can be found in science, by coming to understand the way the world actually is.

We here on Earth think we're amazing beings. And we are, there's no question about that. But we're also tiny, virtually insignificant on a cosmic scale. Take a look at the Pale Blue Dot picture; really look at it. That tiny speck, a small part of one pixel, is us. All of us. A mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. Everyone you know, everyone you love, everyone who has ever lived, lived on that tiny point of blue light. That should give you the feeling of humility you need.

Then, look at yourself. Think about the things that are going on inside you, every moment. There are trillions of cells, each one made up of tiny molecular machines, inside every human being. Every cell was built through billions of years of evolution, and look at the amazing result: you. And then realize that as you're thinking this, you're using your brain; a three pound mass of jelly that you could hold in your hands, but that unappealing object is capable of contemplating the vastness of space, capable of contemplating infinity, and capable of contemplating itself contemplating infinity.

Finally, those molecules that make up your body are made of atoms of various types. Every single one that is heavier than hydrogen or helium was synthesized during the death of a star, billions of years ago and light-years away. You, and me, and everyone else, and everything you see, are made of stars. We are connected to the universe in the very deepest manner possible. Dr. Belcastro, in his Introduction to Religion class, focused on religion as reconnecting; that's the root of the word, in fact. Its the same root as "ligament." Religion seeks to connect us to the universe, to show us our place in the cosmos. But religions make up connections, they tell stories that have no evidence but that sound comforting until you see through them. Science has the evidence, and it tells us we really are connected. To each other and to every other living thing through biology, to the Earth through chemistry, and to the rest of the universe on an atomic level. For me, I don't need anything else to look at the world and finally, for the first time in years, really say "wow."

Discussions - How to have them

2011-09-06T07:31:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a new post about faith, fear, and doubt. In the meantime, I wanted to share a very nice chart that I think I'm going to be using rather extensively. I've recently been in a bit of an argument about climate change over on the Ars Technica forums, and this kind of thing would help a lot in that arena.

Backhanded Compliments

2011-09-02T06:40:00.000-07:00

Hemant Mehta, over on the Friendly Atheist, has a new article up as a response to an article on RELEVANT Magazine. C. R. Wiley sounds like he's trying to be a nice guy, but the "some of my best friends are atheists" thing doesn't really work. Particularly when he includes lines like these:

I can affirm an atheist's humanity in spite of his dehumanizing philosophy.

Recently, sociobiologists have made a measure of peace with belief in God by proposing that it must have a biological basis, and if so, it must have served a role in the survival of our species. This would mean that faith in God is somehow “hardwired” into us. This would also imply that atheism is a sort of deficiency, even a birth defect. On the other hand maybe it is the next leap in human evolution. How can we know? Sociobiology can't say.

I think one of the comments on Mehta's article hit the nail on the head:

Shorter C. R. Wiley:"Having atheist friends allows me to feel better about myself by comparing myself to those miserable, lost, amoral, subhuman defectives"

Like Mehta, I too have several Christian friends. At least one is making the study of Christianity his life's work, and yet he's probably the best friend I have. Like Mehta, I'm not friends with them because of their Christianity, nor am I friends with them in spite of their religion. I'm friends with them because they're wonderful people, who understand me well, who help keep me going in tough times, who share hopes and fears and laughter and sorrow. Several have moved away, and I miss them constantly, and I am always overjoyed at any chance I get to see them again.

And yes, we occasionally discuss religion. The discussions are always thought-provoking, and always honest. I don't get told I'm going to hell, because my friends don't threaten me. I don't get called amoral, because my friends know I'm a nice guy. And I don't call my friends idiots for believing in a god; for one, they're my friends, and that's not what friends do, and for another, I have much better things to call them thanks to long-standing jokes. :-) I have to wonder, what do C. R. Wiley's supposed atheist friends think of his article?

The Origins of Love

2011-08-31T19:10:00.000-07:00

In relation to my recent more open atheism, a Christian friend of mine suggested I think about where love comes from. I've experienced it, both loving and being loved, so I have my own observational evidence that it exists. But where it comes from is a much deeper question; is its source external to us, from a soul or a god, or is it something formed entirely out of the human mind, with its biological basis? On my friend's advice, before seeking out what others had said, I gave it some thought myself, in the context of my atheism and skeptical method of inquiry. Is there a reasonable explanation why humans would experience love, or is it something inexplicable by purely naturalistic means?

Love is an emotion, and it isn't uniquely human; other animals experience and express feelings, notably primates, and especially notably chimpanzees. This suggested to me that it is likely an evolved trait, something that is advantageous to us in some way. But in my experience of love, it isn't solely reproductive in nature; it isn't just lust. Its much broader; it encompasses affection for friends, family, even my country and humanity as a whole. Now, I'm not a biologist, or a sociologist, so this is very speculative, but it seems to me that love has to do with groups, with being interested in and caring about more than one's self. With that in mind, I took to the Internet, and started at my usual jumping-off point for research.

Here, I found some confirmation of my original thoughts. "Helen Fisher, a leading expert in the topic of love, divides the experience of love into three partly overlapping stages: lust, attraction, and attachment. Lust exposes people to others; romantic attraction encourages people to focus their energy on mating; and attachment involves tolerating the spouse (or indeed the child) long enough to rear a child into infancy." From that perspective, love provides a reproductive advantage; it promotes the creation of new generations, and it promotes protecting that new generation. We love our children, and because of that we're likely to keep them safe from harm.

Understanding biology far better than sociology, I still found the psychological arguments compelling. They spoke to the more expansive experience of love that I've had. Its about bonding with others, forming attachments. However, the recent concepts describing love as either both feeling and action or just as a series of actions rather than a feeling at all didn't really make sense to me. It was then that I recalled a couple of comments from Carl Sagan (Surprise! Get used to this from me.) that provided some additional illumination on the subject. Both are from his book Cosmos:

As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky. In our tenure on this planet we've accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage — propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders — all of which puts our survival in some doubt. But we've also acquired compassion for others, love for our children and desire to learn from history and experience, and a great soaring passionate intelligence — the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity. Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. But up there in the immensity of the Cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits us.

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together — surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing.

Humans are social creatures; we live in groups, and those groups are continually expanding. Perhaps love began as compassion for individual mates, and for our children. That makes sense, as I noted above. But what made humans so successful, at least in part, was our ability to extend that love to others. Social animals care about the larger group, but that group usually has a limited definition; chimpanzees only care about their own communities, which is very helpful, but they don't extend it to other, unknown members of their species. They certainly don't contemplate loving all of chimp-kind. We humans seem to have been able to take that beneficial caring, the drive to care about and thus protect the group, helping it to survive as a whole rather than as individuals or families, and extend it further than other animals. Love, in humans, can even be applied outside our species, or even to more abstract concepts. We can love our country, and work to protect it, and that provides us with an advantage. We can love humanity, and try to make life better for everyone, and that helps the species survive. And importantly, we can know that we are loved. That may not be uniquely human, but I know I've felt it, from family and friends, and from groups of people I don't even know. And there's something to be said for the strength we gain, the will to survive that rises up, when we know that someone else cares.

I'll probably keep looking into it, and I look forward to hearing what others may have to say. But I've pretty much come to the conclusion that love comes from within us, not without. It arises in us, at its most basic, from human consciousness and human essential drives, and the chemical and quantum effects that drive them. That may not sound as nifty as receiving love from God, at least on the surface; shouldn't there be something more to a concept as huge as love than chemicals and evolution? But I think its really pretty cool, and I think science can provide us with just as much exhilaration and wonder as anything else, if not more. One last quote from Sagan, because he got this one right, too:

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.