VuLu

Infallible, part 1: Starting the Gish Gallop

Sat, 04 May 2013 02:34:43 GMT

Over the past few weeks, I had an interesting discussion on Facebook with Michael, a militant Catholic, about the Catholic Church’s claim that it is infallible. Like many arguments with believers, this has rapidly morphed from a single simple problem into a full-blown Gish Gallop. I should know better, but I bit. This series of posts is a compilation of my answers to his claims.

When the discussion started, and after trying unsuccessfully to drive home the point that consistency wasn’t sufficient to prove infallibility, I asked Michael to provide an example of a statement that qualified as infallible and that was also falsifiable: after all, it wouldn’t be very impressive to be infallible and only offer inconsequential and unverifiable claims. I offered an example of what it could look like (knowing, I must confess, that the Church had been claiming exactly that):

For example, if the Church were to claim ex-cathedra that Adam and Eve really existed and were once the only two human beings in existence. That's a factual and falsifiable claim.

I got the standard answer that I was expecting:

[…] the church has taught that Adam and Eve were real people. And science has verified Eve: look up 'mitochondrial eve'.

Mitochondrial Eve is a concept that is only describing a first common matrilineal ancestor, not a first ancestor or a unique member of a species. It's a useful concept in evolutionary biology, but not especially relevant in this case, especially as her male analog, Y-chromosomal Adam, was not living at the same time as her (missing her by a few dozen or hundred thousand years). We also know that there has never been less than about 1,200 members in the population we descend from. That's pretty much eliminating all possibility of anything remotely comparable to what's in Genesis, and of the Church’s claim being true.

Michael answered this with a long bullet point answer that you can read here: http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/…/Infallible_Church

In the next few posts, I’ll respond to that, and to the inevitable response to the response.

The tyranny of liberty

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 21:19:05 GMT

Last night, I watched one of Glenn Beck’s shows, and it surprised me: it actually had bits of thought in it, instead of the distilled lib’ral hating I was expecting. Sure, Beck is unnervingly arrogant and assumes everyone disagreeing with him is an idiot, but, maybe under the influence of his guest Penn Jillette, he followed a coherent train of thoughts and actually was interesting. I’m disagreeing vehemently with most of what both said in the show, but I also understood something.

It seems to be a trivial observation that Libertarians would care first and foremost about liberty, but for some reason it had escaped me that it is in fact the only value that they recognize. They seem to be oblivious to any virtue that doesn’t have a simple mapping on an axis of freedom that spans from anarchy to totalitarianism, that Beck shows on his trademark blackboard at the beginning of the show. This axis, of course, exists, and the multi-dimensional complexity of reality does project on it. That’s what makes the whole worldview consistent and appealing.

Its problem is not that it’s wrong. Its problem is that it’s incomplete and simplistic. That also is, however, its greatest strength.

Penn Jillette illustrates that very well when he enumerates a bunch of complex issues and gives each a seemingly simple resolution by expressing them in exclusive terms of individual freedom, excluding any considerations of fairness, justice, or the greater good.

At 28:50, he stands with the pharmacist who would refuse to fill a doctor’s prescription that he morally objects to, and with the Catholic hospital that refuses to perform a life-saving procedure that goes against Church dogma. He also stands behind the Boy Scouts of America against gays and defends private discrimination at large. He’s “totally OK with that”.

He thus ignores the duty of the pharmacist and the hospital to his patient’s health (which is the defining virtue of the health sector), and he ignores the right of all human beings to be treated fairly, not just by the government, but by anybody who holds any kind of power, such as an employer or the holder of a monopoly.

Simplistic ideologies are dangerous because they are so seductive. They offer simple explanations to a complex world. They make everything look clear-cut and leave no place for ambiguity. By doing so, they don’t just ignore most of reality, they also exclude it from consideration, creating moral issues bigger than the few they superficially solve.

Refuse simplistic worldviews. Instead, broaden your horizons, embrace complexity and ambiguity. Consider all points of view, in every issue, before you judge. Not because they are all true, but because they all contribute to weaving the tapestry of humanity.

Objective, Transcendent, or Absolute?

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 05:50:00 GMT

The number one cliché I hear about atheism is that lacking an objective / transcendent / absolute morality, everything is permitted, and surely we must be eating babies for breakfast. Religious people seem to be very insistent on this point, and all but attempt to push us to be immoral, telling us that we are being inconsistent if we aren’t, and that ours is a self-defeating position.

There are quite a few parts to deconstruct in those assertions. First, can the religious point(s) of view really claim objectivity, transcendence or absoluteness? Second, are the only games in town really religion and extreme relativism?

Claims to objectivity are the most bizarre to me. Objectivity is supposed to be the quality of something that is based on facts rather than thoughts or opinions. A system based on a single old book of myths then hardly seems objective. Furthermore, philosophers are insistent that one can’t derive an “ought” from an “is”, values from facts, so how can any system of ethics be fully objective? There is of course Rand’s perverse Objectivism, but that is more rationalization for selfishness than moral system, and it’s only objective by name. That is not to say that facts can’t inform moral decisions: they have to. But they can’t on their own be their foundation.

The claim of transcendence is that morality is somehow from out of the material world. This is of course entirely unconvincing to atheists who tend to find the supernatural to be an ill-defined, if not outright impossible notion. Kant objected to the notion of transcendence that something that exceeds the limits of experience is only hypothetically knowable. Real knowledge requires a tie to objective reality, and that seems to exclude the supernatural.

Transcendence is a rather hand-wavy way out from the problem of understanding morality: proposing an unknowable origin doesn’t explain anything.

Most of all, it’s a claim that falls to the Euthyphro dilemma: by declaring morality transcendent, you take the “it’s moral because it’s God’s command” option, which makes morality arbitrary. Which god are we supposed to believe, given that they give contradictory commands, and that their followers all claim, with similar arguments, that they hold the One True Faith? As a consequence, anything goes.

Believers usually reject the dilemma by declaring that goodness is God’s essence, that He is one with goodness. Of course, that’s more hand-waving, circular reasoning, and nothing more than a deepity. Their own argument actually forces them to answer the problems of evil and hell. If there is an omnibenevolent and omnipotent being, why are there earthquakes and tornadoes that indiscriminately kill and cause suffering for innocent people?

Then there is the absolutism vs. relativism debate. The main problem with this one, I think, is one of false dichotomy. It is hard to argue that there aren't moral issues that are relative, and others that are absolute.

For example, you would have to be out of your mind to argue against the fact that all things being equal, we ought not to harm other sentient beings. That’s an absolute, and there is no need of a God for that to be true. It does require the existence of sentient beings to make sense, but that’s another matter.

Reversely, most people nowadays would consider it morally harmless for an adult person to get a tattoo. However, Judaism has a commandment against it, and they are forbidden in Sunni Islam (but ok in Shia Islam). They are virtuous in Hinduism, as well as in certain forms of Christianity.

That not everything is absolute doesn’t imply that everything is relative. Reversely, that not everything is relative doesn’t mean that everything is absolute.

It should be clear at this point that there are other choices of moral philosophy besides Divine Command and an absolute relativism leading to nihilism. There are actually many other options. If you are interested in a great exposition and discussion of modern ethics, Massimo Pigliucci has a series of articles on the topic, of which this is the conclusion: http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-ethics-part-vii-full-picture.html

Even without understanding all this about the underpinnings of so-called objective, transcendent or absolute morality, we can empirically evaluate the initial claim, which boils down, really to “religious people are more moral than atheists”. Does it work? Well, not very well.

If morality came from God, since the US doesn’t imprison people for their religious affiliation, you would expect their prisons to be filled with atheists and almost empty of believers. You should even be able to tell which one is The One True Religion: it should be the one with the lowest crime rates. Quite the reverse is true. Atheists are dramatically under-represented in prisons, with 0.2% of the population (Denise Golumbaski, Research Analyst, Federal Bureau of Prisons, compiled from up-to-the-day figures on March 5th, 1997), against 4% in the general US population. This is often discounted as more of a correlation between level of education (with which Atheism is correlated) and delinquency, but one should see a massively opposite difference nonetheless if morality really came from God. If education was the only factor in this, you would expect to see the ratio between populations with higher education diplomas out and in prisons to be higher than the same ratio for atheists. The opposite is true.

This is just one example, the more general point being that the argument, if true, should be empirically verifiable, and it is actually verified that it’s false.

Whenever statistical data is published on a morally loaded behavior and its correlation with religious affiliation, religious people act at best the same as the nones, and at worst measurably worse. If religion is efficient at one thing, it may be in inducing guilt, but statistically not a change of behavior.

One last thing... When discussing those topics with religious people, I’ve often had the impression that they were committing a category mistake, confusing goodness with some kind of conserved quantity, like a substance. As if God created a finite quantity of moral stuff and injected that into people’s souls. This is also true of love, compassion, faith and many other things.

In the end, it does look like those arguments really are designed to de-humanize atheists, to justify a sense of moral superiority and to rationalize the adherence to a flawed system. After all, if one can really be good without God, what is God good for?

The outlaw and the sheriff

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 17:32:00 GMT

The little town in a remote corner of Arizona had been living in fear since Jim Coldhands and his band of outlaws had decided to stop here on their way to nowhere. They had taken the biggest house in town at gunpoint and were robbing the bank every week, leaving the townsfolk only the bare minimum to survive. They had the guns, and according to them, it was generous on their part to let anyone live. The sheriff was just as frightened as anybody else.

So what did the people do to make their lives a little easier? Why, they elected Jim as their new sheriff.

Don’t be those guys. Go out and vote against the bully.

Not a house of cards

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 06:35:28 GMT

Religious positions are often compared to a house of cards, meaning that they are elaborate but extremely fragile edifices that can be brought down by the merest gust of wind. They are, however, nothing but. A house of cards has more foundation than substance, whereas religion only has unfounded matter. Blow all you want, it won’t come down so easily. No, there are more apt metaphors to produce on the subject.

I was discussing that with my friend Fabien the other day over an unreasonable amount of Mac & Jack’s, when he made the excellent point that smart people tend to defend their faith as one defends the king in a game of chess.

Chess is all about pieces protecting each other. The queen protects a knight, protects a pawn, protects a bishop. In a religious argument, views are strategically advanced and defend each other in a very similar manner. What makes the strength of the argumentation is how well the different positions defend each other, how they form a strong and consistent whole that is very well thought out to work together. The relationship between the pieces is more important than their identities or what they represent. Circularity is far from being a weakness. Only the ultimate goal counts: defending the king, and defeating the opponent. The end justifies the means.

When two chess players of equal strength face each other, they will win half the time if they don’t end in a stalemate. It doesn’t matter who has the best-looking pieces or the ones that look the most real. It’s all black and white, and they’re interchangeable. The whites may have a small advantage as the first mover, but you only get that half the time.

Are we interested, however, in chess, or are we interested in truth? Winning an argument is utterly pointless in itself.

If it’s not the game we want to win, why play by those rules? Why not discard the rules altogether and expose the pieces for what they really are? This is not a stone tower in your hand, it’s a carved piece of wood. Towers don’t move anyways.

Only by always coming back to reality, by refusing to enter the game, can we hope to tear down religion’s stronghold on minds.

My heroes are all dead: 1. DNA

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 06:50:00 GMT

And by DNA I don’t mean deoxyribonucleic acid, I mean Douglas Noel Adams, whom you probably know as the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

There are only two people that I didn’t know, whose death made me cry: Pierre Desproges and Douglas Adams. Both wrote prodigious comedy with surprising depth, but Adams was also an outspoken Atheist, and used science as a foundation of his storytelling. Preferably weird science, like quantum mechanics.

The Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency series for example can be read as relying on the interconnectedness of the universe’s wave function, quantum uncertainty, and spooky action at a distance.

The Total Perspective Vortex from the Hitchhiker’s Guide series can drive anyone insane by showing them their insignificance. It does so based on the principle that boundary conditions, any boundary conditions, such as the surface of a piece of fruit cake, could contain all the information you need about the rest of the universe. Enough to show it all in its glorious infinity, with you in it, “a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."”

One of my favorite passages shows the futility of all arguments based on “pure logic” for or against the existence of God:

`I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.
`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Or on fine-tuning arguments, when a puddle thinks:

This is […] an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!"

And finally, this nugget on the role of science:

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions.

I miss you, Mr. Adams.

Elections are not democratic

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 05:45:02 GMT

It’s becoming increasingly clear that our so-called democracies really are plutocracies and always have been. But, I hear you ask, aren’t elections the guarantee that we the people are getting represented properly? Of course not.

To get elected, you need to be a candidate. To be a candidate, you had to belong to a very specific category of individuals who actually desire power. It’s very easy to see how this can result in elected assemblies that are constituted exclusively of rich people: they are the ones who desire power and can afford to spend the money to get there. And like it or not, the rich are not necessarily the most caring of people. After all, how many of your own caring, decent low or middle-class friends want to become politicians? My bet, which coincides with my personal experience, is precisely zero.

How is that representative? Doesn’t this show clearly that elections result in precisely the opposite of democracy? More importantly, what would work better than that? Isn’t democracy the least bad of all systems?

Democracy means power by the people. Part of the problem is that we the people let that term get hijacked by a system that is anything but. When a system results in the exact opposite of representation, assemblies that are statistical aberrations with no correlation whatsoever with the general population, that cannot possibly be called a democracy. When the people in power are systematically the rich -elected or not- that is the definition of a plutocracy.

I understand that some are perfectly fine with a plutocracy, but can we at least call things by their names and stop pretending to live in a democracy?

So what would be a real democracy then, you may ask? Well, that’s easy, the Greek had it all figured out (except for the part about women and slaves of course, but come on it was 2,500 years ago).

The only truly democratic system is one where the assembly is not elected but randomly selected. Only chance can select a sample of the population that is truly representative.

Think about it.

More on this later. This text was inspired by a TEDx talk by Etienne Chouard, unfortunately in French, but nonetheless one of the most inspiring things I’ve heard in years.

Arguments from authority?

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 23:23:13 GMT

Despite appearances, there is a fundamental difference between arguments from authority (or from majority) and scientific knowledge. That fundamental difference is that attacks, independent verification and repeatability are not only expected but necessary to the whole process.

To dumb it down in the extreme, I know that Thailand exists although I've never been there. Not just because people say so, but because I could go there and verify. I don't need to go there, just being able to is enough.

A fallout of it is that democratization of that knowledge, its diffusion to people who may feel they don't have access to it, is possible. There are good authors out there who can explain scientific theories in ways that you will not only understand but that will give you the keys that you need to trust that it's actual solid knowledge and not just speculations. If you need more than that, there is nothing that is ever inaccessible. Even the experiments at the LHC are accessible if you know where to look. That is by design.

Pseudo-sciences, in contrast, tend to only raise objections to established scientific theories, and do not provide the means to verify their claims. Although they are usually easy to refute, objections to those refutations often do exist. That doesn't give all those objections the same value, nor does it make their truth a matter of opinion. Those things are verifiable and verified. The very fact that you too could (not have but could) verify the validity of knowledge and evidence is what makes it more trustworthy than any argument from authority.

For example, flat-earthers do exist, their objections to a round-Earth are well known, and are easily refuted, but those guys do have refutations for those refutations that could look convincing in a vacuum.

I can show you how to set-up simple experiments to show that the Earth is round, and it should convince anyone in their right minds, but it won't convince flat-earthers, who are not in their right minds, and who will have objections for each of those experiments and objections. Or they will ignore the arguments and keep repeating the same BS. Creationists are doing the exact same thing.

There is an easy way to recognize pseudo-science for what it is though: so-called creation science has not resulted in a single real world application. You don't have to and shouldn't consider creationism or flat-earthism in a vacuum to judge whether they are likely or not to be true. All you have to do is see whether it *works*. Creationism and flat-earthism have produced nothing and just don't work. On the other hand, you need General Relativity for GPS to work, you need Quantum Mechanics for computers to work, and you need Evolution for biology, medicine and genetic engineering to work.

The things believers love to believe about unbelievers

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 05:10:39 GMT

You see, if we don’t believe, it must be because we’re angry at God (we’re not: it doesn’t exist; we’re only angry at the people who are trying to impose arbitrary rules on us, on behalf of that imaginary entity). And the thing is, we’re not allowed to be angry. Because, of course, God is infinitely infinite, and we are worthless finite beings. So who are we to doubt His infallible plan that we cannot know?

So let’s summarize. An infinite magic man in the sky that only manifests itself in the heads of people who want you to take their word for it has a perfect plan that we cannot know but that is so perfect that its imperfections can only really be us being too dumb to understand how glorious it all is. And you are not allowed to doubt that. Just doubting this argument is proof that it’s true somehow. And that you’re arrogant. How convenient. How could this possibly go wrong?

Well, that’s not how this works. Here’s how it works in reality: believers make crazy claims about God, and we point and laugh. We don’t laugh at God, note, but at the claims and at those who hold them. That we’re allowed to do, right? No infinite, unknowable and untouchable being in the equation this time.

Contraception and Religious Liberty

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 06:08:42 GMT

Yet another response to Ambrose, whose blog doesn’t like that my comments tend to have more than 4,000 characters... He says:

"the underlying argument is that religious freedom is not absolute in the US. There have been Supreme Court cases, such as not allowing polygamy, where it has been limited."

Yes, all freedoms have limitations, which is not a big deal. In the case of religious freedom though, religious people in my experience tend to believe that it means that if their holy book mandates something, it should trump the laws of the state, or that no new law can go against what they believe. This would of course be impossible except in a single-religion theocracy (which eliminates entirely everyone's religious freedom of course). I've written extensively on the subject already so I won't add too much on this here.

"any limitation on our First Amendment right to free exercise of religion should ideally find its justification in the Constitution itself (such as the right to life) or clearly in natural law."

The Supreme Court disagrees with this, as in the specific case of polygamy that Ambrose mentions, it said:

"laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious beliefs and opinions, they may with practices."

In other words, religious freedom is not a license to act as your book tells you. We should all be glad about that, otherwise people would get punished for apostasy or other imaginary crimes (let's not forget that religions themselves impose the strictest limitations on religious freedom, ironically).

But there are a lot more assertions in Ambrose’s post that I find objectionable. For instance:

"nobody is making me work for [Mormon employers]"

Well, Ambrose has a great privilege, which is to choose where he works. Unfortunately the majority of people in this country have no such choice and accept the jobs they can get. Does he really think that the 16% of Americans who have no health insurance deliberately chose to work a job with no coverage? That they could just have chosen to work where they would get great dental as part of the deal? Come on.

It should be mentioned that it’s not the employer that would have to pay for contraception (which I personally regret), so its religious freedom is hardly touched, even with Ambrose’s liberal definition of it:

"if a woman works for a religious employer with objections to providing contraceptive services as part of its health plan, the religious employer will not be required to provide, pay for or refer for contraception coverage, but her insurance company will be required to directly offer her contraceptive care free of charge."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/02/10/fact-sheet-women-s-preventive-services-and-religious-institutions)

Ambrose also makes a reference to Planned Parenthood that I find interesting, knowing the campaign of hate that has been unleashed against this institution by the religious right:

Even if we were to agree that contraception should be considered "health care," it is widely freely available through other means via organizations like Planned Parenthood.

Beyond the scare quotes, is he saying that he would advocate for better Planned Parenthood funding?

"All you have to do to avoid it is, duh, not have sex. So if someone is in a position where they it (sic) would negatively impact her health to become pregnant, she doesn't need expensive drugs or procedures to help her with that. Just don't have sex while you're fertile."

Now when comparing the efficacy of contraception methods, one must take into account user failures. Condoms for example (that Ambrose seems to be advocating for, which comes as a surprise to me) are fairly efficient if used properly, but the problem is that they often aren't. The method that he advocate for (sympto-thermal) is way worse. When properly applied, it is efficient (so is complete abstinence), but it still has a catastrophic overall failure rate, comparable to coitus interruptus. Recommending this when we have much better options is just irresponsible. Also, what can Ambrose possibly imply by:

"It's homeopathic! It's organic! It's all natural! It's great!"

Homeopathy is a demonstrated scam, and arsenic is natural too, so I don't see a good argument there.

"let's not forget that STDs are a serious problem, right?"

Yes, they are, but there doesn't seem to be a link between contraception and risk-taking (I'm not a MD but the research that I did in the literature indicates the contrary is true).

If Ambrose is sincere about limiting the spread of STDs, it seems his best weapon would be comprehensive sex education. Would that go against religious freedom?

"Preventing pregnancy is not analogous to preventing disease."

No it’s not, but pregnancy does have a huge impact on women's health. Limiting unintended pregnancy was in fact one of the major factors of progress during the 20th century. It reduced infant and maternal mortality rates, limited the spread of STDs and gave many women better opportunities to contribute to society. In turn, we know that empowering women is the single most efficient factor of human progress. Oh, and also, contraception is a great way to limit the number of abortion, whether those are legal or not.

Of course all that is not even touching on the right of women to enjoy sex without becoming pregnant (a right that men have been enjoying since... forever).

"If people feel strongly that all women should have access to contraception, I suggest that they coordinate and fund clinics and the like who can provide it. Or heck, they can just create a fund to cover it for the women who work for Catholic agencies. We don't need the government to mandate violation of the First Amendment to achieve their ends."

So now we have to pay for the shortcomings of Catholics? It so happens that the 99% of Americans who use or have used contraception do feel that women should have access to contraception (and they are right), and they did coordinate and fund organizations that can provide it. They did it by electing governments that advanced our society and provided Planned Parenthood, among other things.

We all pay for things we disagree with, through taxes and other means. Well, tough. For what it's worth, I'd like to get my Iraq war money back, but that's not going to happen, is it?

Don’t mind us, just continuing our vendetta

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 11:38:21 GMT

This is an answer to Ambrose’s answer to my answer to his post on atheists. Comment fields are just too small, so we exchange blog posts. Feel free to ignore me as I talk to Ambrose…

Hi, "poor Bertrand" here. First, don't worry too much about me, I'll do just fine. Second, no, I am not trying to prove myself smarter, or anything silly like that. Having always been surrounded by people who were clearly smarter than me, I maintain no illusions of the sort. The truth of it is that I actually have (as I've said before) a lot of respect for you, and I think you can do much better than that. I maintain that your post was in a way lazy, relying as it was on one single example, one where the author could quite easily be suspected of not talking seriously, being a writer of mostly comedic books. I do apologize for the general tone of the post though, as it could have been much more centered on ideas rather than personal trolling. I guess your post had the misfortune of being the proverbial straw on the camel's back that day.

So what more could you have done? Well, maybe quote from more than one book (oh the temptation to troll on that one, but I'll be strong, I'll resist), more than one atheist or ask atheists that you know what they thought? I would have no problem with your explaining your readership what atheists think if you were exposing the actual spectrum of opinions or narrowing your target to something more precise than that very wide term.

Unfortunately this new post piles new misrepresentations on top of the previous ones. Involuntary ones I'm assuming: there is a clear call to honest discussion, so again I'll bite.

At no point did I claim to say what all atheists believe, except for the absence of god, which is the definition of the word. What I exposed was my own position, as I thought was made clear by my usage of the words "I", or "me".

The claim that you and the book I linked to make is not just that monism requires faith, but that it requires *more* faith than... faith religion (you said: "it takes a tremendous amount of faith"). I pointed out in my post that the assumptions behind science (not atheism) are quite benign and cannot be meaningfully compared with those of any religion. I have not given up hope on convincing you one day that the flying spaghetti monster comparisons are more relevant than you think. The idea is not (just) to ridicule organized religion, but to explain what most religious claims look like *when seen from the outside*. My talking directly about your beliefs is unlikely to convince you because you have trained yourself to rationalize them. The FSM comparison is intended to shift your viewpoint and show you how your beliefs can look like. The hope is that it may encourage you to take a true outsider's test for faith, of challenging your own assumptions.

I recuse the accusation of scientism. I don't consider science to be a universal and exclusive answer (nor do I "worship" it, that is preposterous). I do not claim to "have a direct line to truth based solely on science". What I do maintain is that science has enabled us to attain some truths with an unparallelled level of reliability. That when a claim is contradicted by science but affirmed by religion, science wins every time. I also maintain that as science progressed, the gaps where the supernatural can hide has been shrinking considerably, and one is warranted to ask whether it exists at all. It certainly warrants one to ask for a precise definition of the supernatural. What does it *do*? If it doesn't do anything, it might as well not exist. If it does something, we can observe that something and put it to the test. Note that I'm not saying it doesn't exist, just that I find it extremely improbable. Is that materialism? Maybe it is. What it is not is a reduction to only admitting the existence of things that have "atoms".

You claim that "in school we are indoctrinated to treat [science][...] as an authority". Well, I don't know what kind of school you attended, but the ones I went to, and the ones where my kids go, have always made it very clear that science was verifiable, not a matter of authority at all but one of experiment. I cannot think of a single example of something being presented in the science classes that I attended without a direct experiment supporting it. The word "indoctrination" is particularly inappropriate as science teachers tend to do a good job at asking their pupils to think by themselves and formulate their own hypotheses, and then confront them to the results of an experiment. And before you ask, yes, even quantum mechanics I've been led to experiment directly, and so can you. I even went into the tunnels of the CERN and visited the colossal machines that observe and measure particle collisions.

Is there "an ability of science to account for reality"? Yes, there is, and we know that because it works, because we have countless verifications that it does, not because we have faith in it. No reification to see here. You say that "unless you personally participate in scientific experiments of EVERYTHING that you want to form an opinion about, then you are de facto forced to take things on authority, including those things purportedly discovered through scientific methods". I have heard that a lot, and it is true to an extent, but that extent is very small, which makes the argument a little dishonest. The *principle* of reproducibility is sufficient to reduce the importance of authority. If someone tells you that there is a teapot in orbit around the sun, he's asking you to believe him on authority, and that is just silly. If the same person tells you there is a teapot in the kitchen, and if there are people in the kitchen who are attesting there is a teapot, and who are reporting how they came to that conclusion (by seeing it, by touching it), if all those people give a consistent description of the teapot and if those persons are inviting you to verify yourself that the teapot is there, you don't need to actually go there to have a much higher degree of certainty that there is a teapot in the kitchen than that there is one in orbit around the sun. So is this still accepting the teapot on authority? Essentially yes, but to such an extent that it becomes irrelevant. That's what I meant when I said that not all authorities are equivalent.

When you say "you can't subject justice and love to scientific experimentation", I would disagree: why not? Both those concepts obviously exist and have an effect on the world. Why couldn't we study that effect? I'm not saying that it would necessarily give us a complete understanding, note. But some understanding, certainly. For example, if those sentiments can be induced realiably, isn't that an interesting insight?

Let me try to explain again now that thing about justice and love as emerging concepts. What I'm recusing is the idea that either requires a source. The idea of a source implies that there is something like a fluid, that is conserved and needs to be injected from somewhere else in order to exist. But when I fall in love, do we really need to believe that Cupid or some other entity had to transperce me with an arrow that had been plunged in the mysterious fluid? It's a poetic image, but not much more than that. There is no need for a reservoir of love, and giving love somewhere does not deplete it from somewhere else. That it's not conserved does not imply either that there is an infinite reserve of it somewhere. It only means that it is not conserved, like many other things, such as entropy or temperature. This leads to an important point: thermodynamics give one of the simplest examples of emerging phenomena. Thermodynamics have been developed without an understanding of the underlying microscopic phenomena. Later, we discovered that it could be *reduced* to the microscopic motion of molecules, but the concepts of temperature, exchange of heat or entropy form a perfectly fine model at the scale where they are valid. One cannot find an atom of heat, but one can understand how heat emerges as a concept from the collective movement of atoms. More than that, the concept of heat has no meaning at microscopic scales, but only makes sense at macroscopic ones, where statistics can be computed. The feeling of love can appear in a sufficiently complex animal's brain, and without resorting to evolutionary psychology, it is pretty obvious to see how it can be beneficial to the species (see Price's equation -and yes I'm aware of Price's religious ideas-). The same goes for justice, which is largely a corollary of the ideas of fairness and reciprocity. All those concepts require no source, only a substrate. This substrate is the brain. There is no need to invent a mysterious external source.

On dualism, not to appear arrogant, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind). Please note, Ambrose, that I did not categorically reject the possibility of a soul (it may surprise you, but neither do I categorically deny the possibility of a creator god), I just said that it was increasingly improbable as neuroscience progresses. Again, what does it do that a brain can't? I think that at best the answer is that we don't know. Otherwise, the next question has got to be: how do you know?
Finally, I'm all for the benefit of the doubt. Doubt is all I ask in fact.

Learning from a Catholic what Atheists think

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 09:03:41 GMT

If you’re out of the closet as an atheist, there is a number of canards that you will hear a lot. One of them is that Atheism requires more faith than religion. Whole (bad) books have been written on that “idea”. Ambrose has a new post on this entirely unoriginal topic, and he gets everything predictably wrong.

The problem with making blanket statements about atheists is that we are negatively defined. It’s a little like trying to understand how non-philatelists think. With a religion, it’s easy: there are holy books and dogmas. No such thing with atheism or aphilately, as the only common point between us is an absence. However, that doesn’t prevent our theist friends from telling us how we all think.

[Terry Pratchett] says something like "take apart the universe to its smallest particles and show me one grain of Justice" or something like that (sic). It's actually fairly poetic in its own way (I'm not doing the passage justice, no pun intended).
Sadly, I think it does accurately portray what an atheistic, materialistic worldview honestly is left with at the end of the day. No indeed, there is no atomic element of Ju (Justice), nor of Lv (Love), nor any other virtue. In a materialistic philosophy, these things really are lies, and an adherent is forced to have faith in those lies in order to create a reality that is bearable as a human.

No, that does accurately portray no such thing. Ambrose is conflating atheism with materialism, materialism with reductionism, and reductionism with determinism. He also betrays a very common quality of religious thought: a form of materialism that goes much farther than that of most people with any scientific literacy. Why do people think that in order to exist, something has to be reducible to some sort of conserved substance? What a lack of imagination that is. To take a random example, entropy is a very well-defined and real quantity, but there isn’t such a thing as an atom of entropy. A thought is a real thing as well, although there is no such thing as an atom of thought. Even if the substrate of all reality is space and elementary particles, there are innumerable emergent phenomena that are just as real. There is no problem or contradiction here.

It’s theists that make the false assumption here that love, morality or justice are substances that need to be breathed into the world by some magical entity, instead of just emerging from the brains of social animals. One thing that I can tell you is that you will never hear me say that morality or justice are illusions. I do think they are very real, even if they are only meaningful within human or human-like experience. This makes the following assertion fall flat on its metaphorical face:

one difference is that some atheists may try to deny that they have such faith, if put to the test, saying rather that, for example, Justice is only a handy term to represent a reasoned view of moral behavior in society based on mutual self-interest. But then ask them what they think about having prayer in schools or not redefining marriage to include homosexual unions, and just listen to them go off on how "unjust" those things are.

Oh, but what’s wrong with a “reasoned view of moral behavior in society based on mutual self-interest”? And how do issues of separation of Church and State, or civil rights contradict such a view of justice?

if I'm going to believe in things like Justice, Love, Freedom, Happiness, and other ideals and virtues, I prefer to have a rational basis for believing in them

Fine, and what would that be?

I think it takes a tremendous amount of faith to believe that my human experience is only the result of material interactions in my body. On the contrary, every fiber of my being tells me that there is more to my existence than the material--my own,observed and reasoned experience (I tend to be fairly self-reflective). So why would I take it on faith from scientists (an Authority) or atheistic philosophers (another Authority) that this is so, contrary to my own observations of life?
For me, that would take a lot more faith than to believe in what seems obvious to me based on my own experience and reason, namely that there is a Prime Mover

What Ambrose is basically saying here is that he trusts his personal experience, common sense and gut feelings more than science, ergo Jesus.

He makes a considerable number of mistakes here.

First, personal experience, common sense and gut feeling are extremely poor indicators of truth. Anyone who has studied quantum mechanics, or who has even seen an optical illusion should know how easy it is to fool the human brain, and how reality doesn’t give a damn about your common sense. You need tools such as science to mitigate your own biases.

Second, even if there is a leap of faith at the basis of all human thought, that does not make the tiny assumption that there is an objective reality equivalent to the huge assumption that there is an invisible flying spaghetti monster whose noodly appendages move all things. It’s a common claim of theists to assert that because nothing is ever absolutely certain (an assumption that is necessary to scientific thought), then all beliefs, no matter how outlandish, are equally legitimate to hold. It’s ironic that they hold their dogmas to be absolutely certain.

Third, the claim that scientific knowledge is a form of argument from authority is infuriatingly ignorant. Scientific knowledge is based on reproducible experiments. No claim is ever accepted before it has been replicated by independent teams. Who makes the claim is almost entirely irrelevant (although not all authorities are equivalent). Another very important difference between religious thought and scientific thought is that science works.

Finally, dualism is getting increasingly indefensible in the light of the progress of neuroscience. Once you know how changes in the brain mechanically cause changes in behavior, sometimes to the point where the identity of the person is radically altered or replaced, it becomes extremely difficult to believe that there is a soul in addition to the brain.

Atheism is a faith? What a joke.

What religious freedom is not

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 07:16:13 GMT

There is a growing culture of entitlement among religious people nowadays that we should not confuse with righteousness. More and more, we see politicians or bishops claiming that secular values are antagonistic to religious freedom. But what is religious freedom and why is it important?

In order to find out, I think it’s important to look at what it can’t be. What it can’t be, unless you have a taste for the perverse twisting of words, is religious tyranny.

Religious freedom is not a license to kill apostates (Qur`an 4:88-91). It is the freedom to become an apostate, convert or adopt any religion or lack thereof.

Religious freedom is not the freedom to discriminate. Even if your sacred texts tell you that white people are better than black people (2 Nephi 5:21), or that homosexuality is an abomination (Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10), you do not get to discriminate on sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation.

Religious freedom does not mean you get to use public spaces and positions to promote your religion. Public spaces are for everyone and cannot be hijacked for the use of one creed at the exclusion of others. They must be inclusive, and for that they need to be neutral. Elected officials do not represent their church, they represent their constituents, all of them, including those who did not vote for them. Public office is not a tribune, it is a position of responsibility.

Religious freedom does not allow you to avoid your professional and legal responsibilities, even if your moral convictions tell you otherwise. If you are a healthcare professional, you are required to provide the treatments and procedures necessary to improve your patient’s health. In particular you cannot refuse to perform a life-saving procedure. If you feel your religious convictions are more important, maybe you should choose a different line of work, because you are a danger to your patients.

Religious freedom does not mean your ideas are free from criticism. Nobody would dream to penalize political criticism in our secular democracies. We are free to criticize conservatives and liberals freely. Why is it then that religious ideas get a free pass and those who criticize them are accused of intolerance? No, it is healthy that all ideas are open for debate, and criticism is not the same thing as intolerance.

Religious freedom, to generalize, is not the license to apply what’s dictated by sacred texts, over the secular rules of the state (Deuteronomy 4:2). If we are going to live together, there must be one law for all. Anything else creates categories of people, with different rights. It’s also untenable, as many religions exist, with as many contradictory demands. As they can’t be reconciled (they each claim to be absolute and unchangeable), you would need to choose one over the others, which is nothing short of theocracy. Our laws can only reach universality by relying on deeper principles than religious texts. Those principles come from reason, not arbitrary revelation (even if they occasionally align).

Religious freedom is a secular value. It means that you are free to believe as you like, with no intrusion from the state. Nothing more, nothing less.

The Brick Bible is "vulgar and violent"

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 22:57:30 GMT

That’s not me saying it, but “Sam’s Club customers”. This is a really interesting story. Brendan Powell Smith has been publishing funny little books containing “straightforward illustrations of Bible stories using direct quotes from scripture”. They are really entertaining books, of which you can get a sample on Brendan’s web site: http://www.bricktestament.com/index.html. There really couldn’t be any outrage about the contents, right? It is, after all, quotes from the “Good Book”. Well, apparently there can.

Some people astoundingly had enough clueless stupidity to attack the book on its contents and call it “vulgar and violent”. That means, quite directly, that the Bible itself would have to be “vulgar and violent”. Cause the photos, you know, really are literal illustrations of the text, and the text is, well, the Text.

They didn’t stop there. They also resented “that the author is an atheist”. So what exactly is the problem with an atheist writing a book? Does the first amendment somehow not apply to people who don’t believe in God? Are we not allowed to quote Scripture?

Of course we are. In fact, critics of the book, having no rational grounds for their attempts at censorship, went for hypocrisy, as usual. They counted on corporate cowardice, which always works. They pretexted that the book was not appropriate for children. I would agree, the Bible is not for children. I would only really recommend it to Christians, who would do good actually reading the whole damn thing.

OK, it’s not child appropriate, so just move the book out of the children book section, into humor or religion. Problem solved. Those guys probably also think that South Park, Beavis and Butthead and Family Guy are child programs because they are animated.

Well, no. Sam’s Club actually caved in to the pressure and censored the book.

So what can we do? Well, let’s give them the Streisand Effect. Let’s use the idiots as amplifiers of their own stupidity. Let’s publicize this outrage of theirs, and ours. They have nothing.

And let’s buy The Brick Bible, because it’s hilarious. But not from Sam’s Club.

Blaming the victim

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 07:57:19 GMT

A few days ago, French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo was fire-bombed. The decent part of French society condemned the terrorist attack and offered its help. Even Prime Minister François Fillon, who is politically diametrically opposed to the journal, had some nice words of support.

The picture should be very clear: we have on the one side a legitimate press organization doing its job, freely expressing opinions and thoughts. On the other hand, we have despicable terrorists who are trying to silence people through violence and fear. I for one stand with the press, against the terrorists. Sounds easy, right?

Well, apparently not. Some people got confused as to who the bad guys were. In an astounding move, a blogger at Time Magazine had these words for the journal:

do you stillthink the price you paid for printing an offensive, shameful, and singularly humor-deficient parody on the logic of “because we can” was so worthwhile? If so, good luck with those charcoal drawings your pages will now be featuring […]

not only are such Islamophobic antics futile and childish, but they also openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy.

How can someone who poses as a journalist even say that? What's this guy's problem? What are we supposed to do? Let the terrorists tell us how we should live and what we're allowed to say or not say? I usually avoid swearing on these pages, but the only thing I feel like saying is: "fuck you, Bruce Crumley, you are a disgrace to your profession."

I really can't stand this revolting habit of blaming the victim. In the same way that a woman has a right to dress any way she wants without legitimizing one bit a rapist's horrendous crime, a journalist has a right to publish any opinion he holds without legitimizing any form of violence against him.

Let's also not lose sight of what Charlie Hebdo was making fun of. The "attack" (graphic and verbal, which is different from physical violence by the way) was blasphemy, which is a victimless crime. It is a foundation of our societies that we respect people more than ideas. The ideas that people should submit to a tyrant in the sky, that you can never get out of his grip under penalty of death, that little girls should be mutilated lest they later enjoy sex, or that women are worth less than men, those ideas are revolting and deserve no respect. What they deserve is precisely what Charlie Hebdo delivered: ridicule and spite.

Speaking of which: http://www.jesusandmo.net/2011/11/09/law/

Collaboration vs. Competition: why our Future is Open Source

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 22:35:39 GMT

Two Neanderthals need a bow and some arrows. Grrmt can build a bow in 5 hours and arrows in 4 hours. Aaaargl can build a bow in 2 hours and arrows in 3 hours. Thus, in order to build what they need, Grrmt will take 5+ 4 = 9 hours, and Aaaargl will take 2 + 3 = 5 hours. 14 hours total will be spent by the both of them.

Now what happens if our primitive friends talk to each other, specialize in what they do best, and trade? Something extraordinary. Aaaargl should have no interest doing that, as he's faster than Grrmt in everything, right? Right?

Wrong. If they each specialize on what they do best, Grrmt will have to build two sets of arrows in 8 hours, and Aaaargl will have to build two bows in 4 hours. Grrmt and Aaaargl both saved one hour. Both of them, even "faster at everything" Grrmt, because he was allowed to focus on what he's fastest at being faster.

If they compete, Grrmt and Aaaargl both lose. If they collaborate with each other, they both win. Competition can be detrimental to everyone? Who would have known? And this is without even taking into account that by specializing, one naturally gets better, and one can industrialize processes.

Of course, competition comes with its own dynamics of supply and demand that we've all been taught. But is competition really beneficial and stable? The supplier's interest is in the prices being as high as possible. He can achieve that by organizing scarcity. But how does he organize scarcity if he's competing in a free market? Why, by eliminating competition and becoming a monopoly of course... In other words, we have one agent in each transaction whose best interest is to eliminate competition, and the other whose interest is to maximize competition but that has practically no means of doing that, except for the collective control of governmental anti-trust laws. If left to evolve on its own, a competitive system spontaneously decays into the elimination of competition.

Every single year that I've attended the Microsoft company meeting, I've seen Ballmer jumping around the stage and getting borderline hysterical about being number one of this, becoming number one of that, and generally poo-poo-ing the competition. It's only natural: suppliers want to become monopolies, they want to control the market so that they can impose their prices.

Now look at a farmer's market. Do the cheese sellers there want to crush each other and dominate the world market of Gouda? Most of them don't, but they still do fine because they act locally, without excessive greed and in a collaborative environment. In this sense, it's not between the cathedral and the bazaar that there is a contention, it's between the bazaar and Wal-Mart.

One often talks about "competitive advantage". But there is also a collaborative advantage! Competition makes losers, that's inevitable, but collaboration makes it possible for everybody to win.

Open Source, by its very nature, is the ultimate collaborative mechanism. It eliminates competition, not by crushing it, but by replacing it with sharing and emulation. It makes sure that there is always a way out of monopolistic situations. It replaces the advantage of exclusive assets with the advantage of know-how.

Above all, it replaces top-down innovation with network innovation. What we are finding out is that many connected small structures are often better at innovating than a few big ones.

If Apple comes up with something brilliantly designed (as it often does), Microsoft's first reaction is fear, and then it is to move a few hundred engineers to the project of reproducing and improving on the idea, which usually takes at least two years, and gives mixed results. This is a reactive, sluggish and inefficient approach to innovation.

In Open Source, when a new innovation appears, it's never met with fear but rather with enthusiasm. Reactions vary from "wow, that's neat, and it solves my problem exactly, I'll just use it" to "wait a minute, that gives me a great idea". When an improvement is made, it's contributed back, and everybody wins. It's a much saner, productive and efficient way to innovate.

Of course, Open Source has its lot of problems, but it's nothing that good engineers can't work with.

It started with software, but it's spreading fast. The Maker and Open Source Hardware movement are another step, but we also see forms of crowd sourcing appearing everywhere in society: health, news, literature, encyclopedias, science have already jumped on that train. but I think there is another domain where this wind of freedom and collaboration must spread, and that is democracy. I don't expect that to appear first in the old Western democracies, but rather in all those countries that are awakening from the deep nightmare of dictatorship, and where everything remains to be invented.

That thing about contingency

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 08:39:55 GMT

One version of the cosmological argument relies, among other assumptions, on the following:

Every contingent being has a cause.

Leaving aside the necessity of defining what we mean by "cause", and of explaining how such an inductive statement could reasonably apply to a unique object such as the universe, I want to focus in this post on the concept of contingency.

How do we know that anything is contingent? How do we know that anything could have turned out to be different?

Like free will, contingency is useful, and even essential to our human experience. The idea that we can make choices, and that these choices may result in different outcomes is how we survived and evolved. Without it, the notion of probability seems to become absurd, and human experience seems to lose its meaning. This is in itself an interesting discussion, but what we would like or perceive reality to be is not what determines it.

As far as we know, and given the laws of physics as we know them, if we know the state of a system at a given time, we can in principle derive its state at all times. There is no room for contingency, except for those so-called initial conditions. I'm saying "so-called" because those are only initial if one extrapolates to the future: if one extrapolates to the past, those conditions are final rather than initial. Even in quantum mechanics, the wave function is deterministic, and the wave function might be all there is.

In light of this, we are left to wonder how contingent those initial conditions and the laws of physics can be. Many scientists, until the end of the 20^th century, thought we would eventually be able to understand why the physical constants have the values they have. Today, more and more are agreeing with Leonard Susskind that we might never know because there is nothing to know.

Does this mean that science now points to a contingent universe after all? Not at all. In fact, it's quite the reverse: the idea of a multiverse, which comes out quite naturally of string theory and inflation, indicates that the physical constants are only locally constant, and that there is a landscape of universes where all the possible values can be taken. Locally, within a universe, all that can be seen looks contingent or arbitrary, but the whole landscape possibly contains all that is possible. This is similar to the idea that the solutions to a symmetrical problem may not be symmetrical, but the set of solutions always is.

And here is the interesting idea: if all that is possible by virtue of being consistent exists, contingency disappears. This constitutes a unification between the sort of necessary existence that mathematical entities enjoy (the only kind of necessary existence that we know for sure is valid, by the way), and empirical, "contingent" existence.

Of course, this all doesn't seem falsifiable, and it probably isn't. But here is my point: the mere possibility that contingency might not actually exist is enough to kill the premise of a cosmological argument for god that "every contingent being has a cause". In order to use that premise, you first have to prove that there are contingent beings, and that may end up being a lot more difficult than one may have thought at first. And that is the problem with most of metaphysics: it holds as self-evident what in subtle ways isn't.

Metaphorical? But why?

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 06:45:00 GMT

Most modern believers interpret their sacred texts as mostly metaphorical. Only the most hard-core fundamentalists maintain that Genesis for example is an accurate historical account of the origin of Humanity.

In order to maintain such a hard stance, they must reject most of what the modern world has to offer, in particular empirical science and its discoveries.

The myth of Adam and Eve as the two ultimate ancestors for the whole of humanity for instance has been destroyed by genetic evidence and by population genetics in general.

It is unfortunately an extremely important myth as without it there is no original sin, and without original sin there is no need for a universal redeemer.

Faced with the evidence, believers resort to a number of techniques to salvage their faith. Some reject empirical science as a whole, some misrepresent the evidence and twist it to fit their pre-established conclusions, and some revise their interpretation of the text by declaring it "metaphorical".

I'm not too interested about the first two, which have willingly moved beyond reason. The third is more intriguing, but I think not much more consistent.

If the god of the Bible exists, he had the power of making the world exactly as it is described in the books he supposedly inspired. Why didn't he then?

Can God appear in a puff of logic?

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 06:30:00 GMT

Logic is a tricky thing. Any sound argument must rely on it, but it is easy to build seemingly sound and logical arguments that are still wrong or fail to apply to the real world. Fuzzy or wrong premises, shortcuts in reasoning, as well as plain fallacies such as circular reasoning, are easy to obfuscate, and apologists are kings at this game. It's what they do: take the conclusion they want to reach, and then build the rationalization for it. A prime example of this is the age-old ontological argument for the existence of God, that I will be looking at in details in this post.

The argument is that because we can conceive of a perfect being (defined by the impossibility to improve it), then it must exist for surely existing is better than not existing. Really? We'll see.

But first, let me quote Douglas Adams...

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

What Douglas Adams articulates so brilliantly here is that with badly defined premises and "pure logic", you can prove anything and its opposite, and that therefore you can prove nothing. There is no such thing as a puff of logic of course, as puffs are physical, and logic is mathematical, independent of the physical world, and therefore utterly unable to puff. Of course, I could have quoted Hume and Kant to pretty much the same effect, but this is a lot more fun, isn't it?

To drive the point home, let me paraphrase a reverse formulation of the argument I found in the comments of Ambrose's recent post on the subject:

We can conceive of maximal evil, for which one cannot possibly imagine anything more evil. Surely, it must exist, as something maximally evil would be quite benign if it didn't exist, and would assuredly be more evil if it existed. Therefore, it exists.

Oops. Putting empirical credibility aside, it doesn't look any more or less logically sound than the original argument. So where's the flaw?

What most people call "pure logic" is actually much trickier to define than they may think. I learned that in France a little more than 20 years ago when I was preparing the entry contest for college. One of the students in my class was an orthodox Jew, convinced that the world was 6000 years old, but also a genius, who had already explored Mathematics way farther than any of us. What he taught me was that words are not appropriate to do mathematics. One must be absolutely formal in order to avoid talking nonsense. Here is the example he used, also known as Russel's paradox:

A mathematical set is a pretty simple entity, right? It is defined by its elements. OK, so now consider the set of non-auto-inclusive sets, defined as the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. Well, that set cannot include itself, by definition, because all its elements are non-auto-inclusive. Therefore, it must include itself since it doesn't.

Uh? Yeah, exactly. Mathematics don't have paradoxes, they only have reductio ad absurdum. This so-called paradox only proves that the naïve concept of set we used here is inconsistent. In particular, the notion of a set of all sets can't be rigorously defined, although an English formulation of it seems to present no challenge. This is known as the naïve set theory, and it had to be replaced by something much more rigorous, which eventually led to a re-foundation of all of Mathematics by the Bourbaki group. This is an eminently modern idea that Anselm of Canterbury, Kant, Leibniz, Descartes or Plantinga could not possibly have known. We need to apply formal logic in order to determine what in the ontological argument is valid formal logic and what constitutes its premises and hidden assumptions.

Several people have done exactly that with varying success, but the attempt that I find the most interesting consisted in feeding the argument into a computer algorithm that automatically proves mathematical theorems. If that wasn't awesome enough, the good news is that the algorithm not only showed the logical soundness of the argument, it was actually able to simplify it and reduce the assumptions to a single one. The bad news is that this remaining assumption is not trivial. Here it is:

If the conceivable thing than which nothing greater
is conceivable fails to exist, then something greater than it is conceivable.

Makes sense? Suffice it to say that this still needs independent justification that cannot be reduced to formal logic. Back to square one are we? You can still argue one way or the other, but you are outside of the realm of logic doing so, which pretty much means that the argument, while quite subtle and logically sound, is not a complete proof of the existence of God.

Before I conclude this post, I'd like to point out that such attempts to make God appear in a puff of logic are not only doomed logically, they also constitute poor theology (assuming for a second there is such a thing as good theology). For really, doesn't it degrade the idea of God to reduce it to something that can be described and constrained by mathematical expressions? Doesn't that bring him down to the realm of the natural?

I care that everyone can get married

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 02:14:19 GMT

This post started as a comment on my friend Ambrose's blog but it was getting long enough to justify a post. Check it out for context.

Let's start with this: marriage cannot be defined by the biological prospect of having children, because that would rule out sterile couples and menopausal women. As simple as that.

On adoption, Ambrose said:

"it seems likely that the child raised by a homosexual couple will have at least some issues similar to other children who are raised without a mother or without a father"

What are those issues? Is there evidence of that? Rigorous studies on those problems exist, we don't have to guess.

I'm glad that Ambrose does mention that:

"It is [commitment] not infatuation, not sex, not even children--that is essential to marriage and is also its primary joy."

That I can agree with if we are speaking of marriage in our time and regions, but we should also not forget that in the past, and in many regions of the world, marriage has been and still is mostly arranged and more a matter of business than consensual commitment. But let's pass on that.

Then Ambrose says:

"it must be understood that this is an unbreakable, unquestionable lifetime commitment that no one, not even those who enter into it, can break".

That, I must say, sounds to me like an archaic and patriarchal vision of things. Surely Ambrose would agree that if a woman is routinely beaten by her husband, that marriage should be broken? I agree on the commitment, but I also think that a commitment can only be meaningful if it is consensual and if there is a way out. Otherwise, you have built a prison, not a marriage. At least not a modern one (oh, yes, I do think these concepts must evolve as our understanding of ethics does (and it does)). That does not mean it's subject to the "whims of passion" as Ambrose says. Actually, I find this slightly insulting: I do not remain my wife's partner because we're married. That's backwards. I am married to my wife because we have had and continue to have an adult relationship based on love, trust and shared values. That marriage will last because we don't see an end to these things, not because marriage is sacred. That commitment that Ambrose speaks of is not coming out of nowhere. It's not marriage that is creating it, marriage is only the representation and consequence of it, it existed before.

I would go so far as attributing the higher rate of divorces in the most religious parts of the US to sexual repression (if you can't experiment freely with sex, you are more likely to confuse lust with love), silly notions about contraception and an archaic notion of ownership of women by men that still permeates religious thought (but that I'm not accusing Ambrose of personally, of course).

Back on topic: even if Ambrose was right that marriage is fundamentally a granting of privilege and not a right (and I don't think he is), there exists a right to this privilege, and I don't think any privileges should be granted on anything that does not boil down to merit. He did not show why these privileges should be granted only to some. Gay people can commit to each other and adopt children just as well as, say, a sterile couple.

I also do not share his view that marriage should be translated into quasi-economic terms of cost and benefit to society. The state does guarantee all kind of rights on their own merits (plus it's quite tricky to define the "common good"). Reading the Declaration of Human Rights or the Bill of Rights should convince anyone of that.

Finally, if those civil unions that religious people so generously grant gay people (after having fought them), if those civil unions were enough, why does the gay community still insist that they aren't? Simply because the recognition they provide is not enough, yes.

Looping back to Ambrose's original point, yes, it's about recognition, the recognition that gay people are just as capable of commitment and love as anybody. Anything less is insulting and discriminatory.

Let's not forget that it's also about the happy couple being able to show their commitment to friends and family. We haven't talked about the ceremony and the celebration, but they are essential. You *can* do them with a civil union contract, of course, but it's clearly not the same thing to celebrate the "civil union" of Pierre and Paul or of Susan and Amy as it is to celebrate their marriage. There is a symbol here for which no substitute will do.

There are privileges associated with marriage for sure, but that's only one more reason why it should be a universal right.