Archive for October, 2009
Nerd cookies!
This is probably my first completely off topic post, but I couldn’t resist. Everyone check out my nerd cookies! They took a long time to piece together, and I doubt I’ll do this again anytime soon. Still, it’s fun once in a while…
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In God We Rust
How poetic! I couldn’t have said it better. The “In — We Trust” campaign was one-upped by the US mint. Check out a description here. The Kansas quarter was minted with an imperfection, reading “In God We rust”.
Obviously, it’s a mistake, but of all the imperfections that we might see, I happen to like this one the best. It’s an apt analogy to consider closed-minded religious beliefs as the vehicle of our “rust”, our mental and social stagnation. The linked site says that these imperfections usually only fetch a few dollars at most. But I’m predicting that there are plenty of atheists out there who have had their qualms with the motto on our money that we’ll see these actually become somewhat of a hot commodity. I’m actually wondering how I might get my hands on one…
Sneaky Scientologists!
You may think that nobody around you could possibly be taken in by the cult of Scientology, but let me tell you – they sneak into your life one way or another. Someone I know, who will remain anonymous for the sake of not embarrassing them, has recently surprised me by having posters and books on Dianetics and other Scientology goofiness. He claims that he has no interest in the ‘religion’ side of it, but that he likes the way that they teach you to understand and interact with people. I don’t claim to know much about that, other than to know that the whole thing is a ridiculous farce that only is taken seriously because it’s so harmful to people that get sucked in too deep. But now I see how they claw their way into your brain.
In the last couple of days, this person has begun talking about a new weight-loss regimen he’s beginning, with inspiration from… wait for it… Scientology! Let me describe this simple procedure for you: you take a couple of pills (no, I have no idea what’s in them, could be dangerous, could be a placebo, who knows), you go jog for 30 minutes, then you go sit in a sauna. Sounds fine right? Millions of people take diet pills, jog and enjoy a sauna. Oh, wait, I forgot to mention how long you’re in the sauna: 4 hours. What?! When asked if any medical professional was overseeing this or had signed off on it, we find out that it’s just someone at the “church” watching over his well-being. This goes well beyond a simple appreciation of their social interaction teachings, and frankly it’s already dangerous. Just because he hasn’t signed his life over to them legally, he’s on the path. It starts small, and grows little by little. Pretty sneaky, guys! Remember kids: Friends don’t let friends be Scientologists!
Soul Ponderings
So I took a little time off of writing, and it was nice. I actually expected to come back with lots of things to talk about, but it was less crazy than I expected. I had a little vacation to visit some family, and between the very liberal and very conservative members present, I expected more of a clash. Way to go everyone for keeping it friendly.
Still, there were a couple of interesting topics brought up that got me thinking. They have to do with the idea of a soul, and how to reconcile that with various situations. Personally, I have trouble with the word “soul” because it’s so inimately tied to religious connotations. On top of that, people generally describe a soul as “non-physical”, which leads me to ask what that actually means, usually to unsatisfying answers. Anyway, the topics that really made this conversation interesting to me were these: What would be the implications of being able to transfer consciousness between people/bodies? What are the implications of a soul in evolutionary terms?
First scenario – If you believe in a soul, do you think that it might be possible (in theory) to move consciousness from one body to another. To put it another way, if we had the ability to exactly reproduce the electrical workings of your brain in another body (or even some mechanical replica), would that still be you? Is there something beyond this that makes you, you? It’s an interesting possibility. For people who think that there is a non-physical soul that is really “you”, how would this get transferred, or would it? If it did not, what happened to it? If it did, are there some rules involved in how much of your brain activity needs to be transferred before the soul makes the jump too? What about if we just copied your consciousness over, and now there are two places your soul needs to be associated with? For those that think that you couldn’t transfer a soul this way, I want to know why. What is it about this body that ties it to my soul? If I lose some part of my physical body, I assume that I retain my soul. Then what’s the tie to my physical body? And if we can reproduce my consciousness, did we implicitly reproduce my soul somehow? If we copy my consciousness into a mechanical replica, do you have the same moral obligations to it that you do to me? What a metaphysical can of worms this is.
Second scenario – Does evolution lead to rejecting the idea of a soul? Most soul-advocates would agree that animals do not have one (except sometimes the family dog, which we’d like to see again in the afterlife). Many of them also want to be science-savvy and open-minded about evolution, but I have to ask, are the two compatible? To accept evolution is to accept that we share a common ancestor with creatures that have no soul. So then, somewhere along the way some creature must have had no soul, but given birth to one that did have a soul. Is this what we’re really saying? Where did that soul come from? At which point in the evolutionary line did we become just-human-enough to deserve a soul? Did that child have the same moral responsibility to its mother that we grant to fully human parents and children, or was its mother just an animal?
I don’t have good answers for most of this stuff, but it sure is mind-bending to think about and discuss. If you have good answers for what I see as logical problems with a soul here, let me know. I’m very interested.
Hijacking Science – Everybody does it
Today I’d like to try to instill a sense of skepticism about lay-people’s interpretation of scientific or mathematical results. I don’t think it’s any big secret that the popular media outlets tend to fail miserably at accurately reporting on the meaning of scientific discoveries, and instead focus on the hype factor. And it’s also not a big secret that the opinions that float around the internet (including mine) are just that: opinions. I think researching and interpreting things for yourself is a wonderful thing – but it’s important to remember to take everything with a certain degree of skepticism.
I’m reminded of a recent exchange I had regarding the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin result in cosmological physics. In short, it states that inflationary physics models do not mathematically permit infinite-past universes. Now, this is a great example of a result that is very easily adapted to whatever conclusion you’ve got in mind. There are a couple of ways to interpret this result, like this one: “That’s EXACTLY what we’ve been saying! There had to be a definite beginning, so therefore God is real!” And then there’s another interpretation that would go something like this: “This poses a problem for inflationary physics. If it’s true that there was a definite beginning to time, what does that mean? We can’t very well ask what happened before it to cause that, because there was no ‘before’ to talk about…”. And then on the complete other side of the gamut we have this: “Inflationary physics must be wrong. All scientific theories need to be improved as we gain more information. Thus, we just don’t know enough yet, but I KNOW that the universe did not have a beginning.”
Personally, I’m somewhere between the second two. Frankly, I find both the idea of the infinite and the finite to be perplexing when we talk on a universal scale. It’s hard to imagine a universe that has absolutely no end… you can go farther and farther and never reach any boundary. But then, it’s just as hard to think of a boundary. What’s on the other side? No, wait, that doesn’t mean anything. What if I push through it? I can’t? What if I push reeeeeally hard?
But this kind of result is always going to be twisted. William Lane Craig, whose website name has some unintentional resemblance to mine, is happy to discuss his feelings on the matter. I don’t think that he does a terrible job of researching and thinking about his answer to this question, which is a compliment to him. I don’t necessarily agree with him, but that’s another matter entirely. But what we need to be careful about is people finding this answer and calling it scientifically proven that God created the universe. (In his defense, his final point is that you are not outside of mainstream science to believe in a definite beginning to the universe.) Treat it with the same skepticism as anything else. If only my audience had more overlap with his, I would be reaching the people most likely to make this mistake.
Who has the time?
Recently I’ve been mulling over a small disappointment that’s been growing for me. In one sense, I’ve very happy to have this site up. It’s great for me to write my thoughts down, and I like the feedback. Whether I deserve encouragement, criticism or to be kept in line, I can always count on the internet to sniff it out. I’m confident in what I believe, and part of that is to be open to new ideas and criticism. Getting myself out there has been a great experience so far, and I don’t intend to stop.
But, wow, there’s a bunch of garbage out here too, isn’t there? Sometimes I start to feel like the internet is such a double edged sword for what I want. It’s a huge forum for debate and the sharing of ideas, but it also is rife with fakes. By ‘fakes’ I mean people who pretend to want to discuss things, but have no intention of thinking about anything. Yes, my experience is biased, and this tends to manifest itself with creationists and fundamentalists for me. My guess is that in any subject this would be the case. What prompted this was a brief exchange I had with a blogger that goes by the moniker Makarios. I came across the site and found a post I wanted to comment on. We had a brief exchange, neither one really feeling like the issue was resolved (that’s ok, I didn’t expect us to), and I decided to try to keep going with this guy. Maybe, I thought, I could get to know him a little better by discussing stuff on his blog. And then I started noticing all the crap. It turns out that I came to the blog on a good day, but in general it’s full of atheist hate garbage. Several posts a day with titles like “Atheists can’t or won’t understand”, “Is talking to atheists hopeless?”, “Atheist stereotypes”, and so on. This guy had no real intention of debating anything. I happened on a post that wasn’t full of “every single atheist is an idiot” garbage… but it was by far the exception. And I realized that it just wasn’t worth my time to try to keep up with all the hate-spam.
Blogs tend to be themed, and mine is no exception. I understand that in such a context, it may look like someone has a single-track mind, but that’s not what is going on here. It kind of turned me off to the idea of looking for meaningful discussion on the internet (yeah, yeah, big surprise, I know). It’s disheartening to actually spend some time, think about things, research things, and prepare a meaningful discussion only to see the other side regurgitate canned arguments.
The most popular (by activity level, anyway) sites are the ones that are the most controversial. People love to scream at each other from anonymity. So how do you weed out the ones who have no intention of listening in the first place? Any suggestions for finding some real conversations with people who don’t agree with you?
Oh No! Fake Shroud of Turin?!
The skeptic’s world is all a-buzz about this latest “finding” about how the Shroud of Turin may not be such a divine miracle after all. Seriously, just about everyone is reporting on this story. So, I just have to ask, who cares?
There are 2 reasons for making such a big deal out of this. Either they’re trying to “prove” that Christianity is a false religion, or they’re trying to kick up controversy. It’s fairly obvious that whatever the goal was, the second one is really all that’s going to happen. Let’s look at this from a Christian point of view. What does the research say? Mostly it says that he came up with a way to put a similar image on a similar type of cloth with means that they might have had some time in the past. So what! You’ve got to be kidding me. We have (according to statistics that Richard Dawkins quoted, and I haven’t researched) just under 50% of the people in this country blatantly admitting to the belief that all the scientific evidence for evolution is crap! In the face of such an enormous amount of evidence for our planet being billions of years old, they believe that it’s more like 10,000! Now, let me ask again, what were you thinking you would do with science to show these people that the shroud is a fake? It’s already been dated to the 13th or 14th century, and that didn’t mean a thing to the ‘true believers’.
Don’t get the wrong idea – I understand completely that it might be nice for you to just systematically disprove every last little piece of divinity that these people cling to. But it just isn’t going to happen this way. Seriously, it’s more like a neat thing to wonder about for most Christians, rather than a place to base your beliefs. People like to claim to have a piece of the ‘true cross’, or put a bone from a saint in their church. How many people in the country have a baseball that was signed by their favorite player. Yeah, it would suck to find out that the ball was a fake, but does that make you think any less of the player? I really don’t think it’s any different for Christians, even in the event that you could definitively prove that it wasn’t divine (which I doubt you could, for them).
I wouldn’t really have a problem with someone sitting in their basement and tinkering with this idea in their free time, but what we actually have is funded research in the quest to disprove the shroud. From one report:
Garlaschelli received funding for his work by an Italian association of atheists and agnostics but said it had no effect on his results.
Well, good that it didn’t affect him, but that’s not the point. This is what this Italian association of atheists and agnostics chooses to spend money on? I don’t know the situation in Italy nearly as well as I do here, though I’d like to (actually, I feel the same way about their wine…). But I really must protest to any significant use of funds for such a purpose. It doesn’t get us anywhere, but it makes the A&A community look like we’re actively working against religion. A campaign of hate is pointless. Let’s see that funding going to getting better science and reasoning courses in schools, or exposing domestic abuse condoned by certain religions. The Shroud of Turin? Come on, it’s a trinket. There are much more pressing issues facing our world today.
The Problem with Science
No, I don’t hate science. It’s wonderful. Sorry if the title was misleading. I guess the problem isn’t with science, exactly. It’s with people’s application of science. Maybe it’s shortsighted of me to say this, but it seems like human knowledge is getting to be so vast in this “information age” that no one person can possibly hope to have a deep understanding in all the important subjects. I know that as our culture develops, our children are learning more and more, earlier and earlier, but this can’t go on forever. Sure, we can picture 1000 years from now having (relative to us) super-intelligent children who have an intuition for calculus at age 3. But I think that it’s obvious to most that our knowledge is growing faster than any evolutionary mechanism is keeping up with. At some point (which may already be here), there is a very real limit to how much one person can master. Will you be a Jack of all Trades, but a Master of None? Will you pick a path, stick with it, and have some authority on the subject?
Map of science
This is incredibly important to our society in the here and now, however. The latest buzz in the United States seems to be about the rise of the “nones”, those suave, smart (and might I say, good-looking?) people who claim no religion. The conflict between theists and anti-theists and/or atheists is growing extremely rapidly, probably because of the incredible communication power of the internet. Here’s how these two things are so intimately linked: the conflict of religion and science (Yes, there is one. Maybe not on every issue or with every person, but there is. Deal with it.) is being brought on just about every front. We have the creation debate which touches biology, evolutionary biology, geology, paleontology, cosmology, physics, particle physics, astronomy and dozens of sub-topics of those. We have debates about scriptural accuracy touching history, archaeology, anthropology, literature and dozens of foreign languages. We have moral debates and afterlife debates, proofs and disproofs of supernatural beings, and arguments about the meaning of life which touch all the spread out fingers of philosophy.
So are we to understand that this debate that is so easily characterized is so easily soluble? No, what it tends to come down to in individual debate is you and your opponent searching for the particular subject in which you each have an advantage of knowledge or experience. Then, you can rest in that comfortable space saying “They may have answers for somethings, but not this one, which proves my point.” If this scenario doesn’t play out, the usual alternative is an appeal to authority (yes it’s a fallacy, yes everyone does it once in a while). It seems reasonable to say that we can’t possibly know everything, so building on someone else’s conclusions makes sense. But it doesn’t play out this way. Theists get slammed for “not thinking for themselves,” and atheists get it back even worse since that’s supposed to be a tenet of the “atheist philosophy”.
What’s the solution? I don’t know. The sum of human knowledge is too vast and is growing all the time. An individual simply can’t keep up. That doesn’t mean that I plan on never drawing another conclusion again. It’s better to be as informed as possible and decide what that means than to be in a state of perpetual inaction and un-decidedness. But I do it knowing full well that the debate will almost certainly never be closed. Blogs full of ranting and railing against the other side for “ignoring the facts” and being ignorant (or stupid, as the blogger decides) are pointless and add to the noise that detracts from real discussion. It’s almost a certainty: the debate will go on. Fight for what’s right, but do it for yourself first. That’s the only person you’ve got a shot at convincing.
