An argument in reduced form

I have seen a number of arguments for the existence of God that boil down to the following:

1) Fact X doesn't rule out a weak form of Deism.
2) Therefore God exists.

Now there are many circumstances in which (1) is true - indeed there are few facts that will rule out a weak form of Deism.

My observations are not inconsistent with Russell's teapot and the invisible pink unicorn in my garage either; that doesn't make them reasonable positions. And not impossible is a very, very long way from true... or even "seems likely".

But in any case, if someone wants to take a Deist position, we will probably have little to argue about. Or if they want to believe in orbiting spouted ceramic containers of steaming Orange Pekoe, that's no terribly great loss either.

However, the conclusion simply doesn't follow, even if the God of (1) and the God of (2) were the same God. In practice, they never are. Indeed, the argument is more like:

1') Fact X doesn't rule out an invisible pink unicorn in my garage.
2') Therefore JFK was a reptoid.

Not only is it not a valid syllogism, it's a total non-sequitur. Sentences (1) and (2) are completely unrelated, because they contain no common elements.


This argument is well disguised by using the term "God" twice. It's a very neat bait-and-switch con - just like a used car dealer, the car that got you in and the car you were actually sold can both be described as cars... but they're NOT the same object.

And so with this argument - it's just as much of a con.

The God of (1) is far from the God of (2).

Indeed, often on closer examination, the God actually being introduced in (2) turns out to be inconsistent with the fact in (1), but that's of no concern to the person making the argument - once you've accepted proposition (2), standard apologetics take care of that little problem in (1)!

Sentence (2)'s God has been snuck in through the back door, and you're supposed to uncritically accept all the attributes of God (2) - based on an argument that God (1) isn't completely impossible.

Watch out for it. It's interesting how often some form of it crops up.

Belief and skepticism at the dinner table

My son has announced at the dinner table that he believes in God, twice this week.
(He's being indoctrinated by his school friends again.)

His little sister gave him a withering look each time and said "I don't."

This is no big deal. He's only eight and in a sea of godbottery, so it's not a big surprise that he picks up some of it. With Christmas coming, of course, they're practicing carols for the school christmas concert and stuff, so the exposure to that has had him thinking about it even more than usual.

Personally, I'm not even going to try to disabuse him of it. Not yet anyway, he's still a kid. Unless he tries to engage me in a conversation dealing with the merits of the position, in which case I may try a little gentle exposure to the bible and the actual beliefs of a few other religions. Curing only his ignorance of what belief in deities carries with it will probably be all he'll need, though it may take him a while to sort it all out once he knows a bit more.

He has a decent grounding in looking for evidence. He knows that not everything someone tells him is going to be true. He loves science. He adores the Mythbusters. It all has an impact.

He has expressed open skepticism in a number of beliefs that come with Christianity. Angels make no sense to him - none whatever - and he rejects them as made up. He doesn't believe that a star appeared over the inn where Jesus was born (he already knows that the stars are really far away, so whatever happened, it cannot have been a star dangling over Jesus' birthplace that they saw.)

So he's not particularly gullible - in fact, I have to say he may well be less gullible than I was. I am proud that he's applying logic to what he's hearing - that will stand him in good stead. He's a great kid.

I've told both my kids "Good on your for saying what you think".

I think that I will be helping my kids more by encouraging them to seek their own answers and ask their own questions (even when they come to conclusions I disagree with) than by trying to get them to believe what I do. I want to give them tools that help them figure out the world, not my answers. If I give them tools, they can go where I have not. If I give them answers, they may never realize that there may be better questions and better answers than mine.

And I think the world needs better questions and better answers.

Persecution and discrimination: a challenge

I often read about Christians who complain that they are discriminated against.

Many (possibly even the majority of) atheists in English speaking countries are ex-Christians and so have experienced things from both sides. If you think Christians are hard done by when you haven't experienced things from both sides, you have no basis for comparison and should shut up until you have the faintest clue what you're talking about.

Try this little experiment, oh poor persecuted Christian. For one week, see a little of what it's like to be an atheist:

- Pray to God and explain (though God already knows, right, so you can actually skip this part) that in order to try to understand your neighbors who don't have the benefit of belief in God (remember "love thy neighbor"? Where does that phrase come from again?), you won't be praying for a week, but after the week is up you'll pray extra to make up for it. Then stop for a week.

- Tell your boss you're an atheist.
(it's okay, after a week, you can correct the impression -- but nothing bad will happen in the meantime, since it's Christians that are the ones that are discriminated against, right?)

- Go to your kids' school(s) and tell their teachers you're an atheist
(you don't even have to tell them your kids are atheists - it's your experiment, not theirs). Mention your newly godless status to any parents you talk to while you're in or near the school.

- Tell the people at your local church you're an atheist. Remember, it's only Christians that face discrimination, so nothing bad will happen. Next week you can let them know it was just an experiment; Christians are known for their tolerance and cheek turning, so they will calmly wait for you to come to your senses.

- For one full day wear a shirt carrying an obvious atheist message, and drive a car with an atheist bumper sticker on it.

- Try to notice every time something you read or someone you speak to mentions atheism or God. Notice what is said, and try to imagine briefly what it would sound like if you actually didn't believe. (God, obviously, will still know you do.)

These are only a few things. You won't experience what it actually is like to live every day in the hostile environment many atheists experience, but it might give you the beginning of some insight. It's not like God won't know you're still a faithful Christian.

My prediction: not one Christian not already in a strongly secular/liberal environment will be able to do even these few things.

I'll be pleasantly surprised if even one bible-belter is brave enough to try. If you do it in Texas county, Oklahoma, you get double points!

New PM signs up

Kevin Rudd was sworn in as Prime Minister of Australia today.

He wasted no time, signing the instrument of ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on his first day.

A Righteous Wrath

The phrase "per se" is a Latin phrase meaning "of, in, or by itself". The "se" part is what contributes the "itself" to that.

Atheist writers note well: It is not "per say".

If you're going to use it like that, you'll sound like a moron, or even worse, a fundie.

per se

per se

per freaking se

Don't even get me started on "voilà". Voila is okay, since English doesn't do graves and accents and cedillas and umlauts and such but so often incorrectly written viola, or walla or wallah. If I get going on that one, I am liable to insert a "viola" in someone's nose.
(slightly edited...)

A gift for description

Martin Wagner at The Atheist Experience said in a post
calling ID a "theory," ... is like some no-hoper pointing to a Playboy centerfold taped to his wall and calling it his "girlfriend,"

The argument from extra belief

I find this particular argument amusing, even astonishing, but it's the way some believers (not just religious ones, but woos of many stripes) think. I have encountered it numerous times in different contexts.

"I believe X"
"Well, okay, but believing something doesn't make it true. We can be fooled. What evidence is there to believe it?"
"But I really, really believe it!"

For some reason, really, really belief is supposed to be more convincing.

I used to be completely unable to understand how this kind of reasoning came about. Lately I suspect it has something to do with the privileged position faith is supposed to be accorded, because faith is supposed to be admirable. More faith is supposedly more admirable, and hence, more privileged. We actually are expected to find that really, really more convincing in some way, or at least to stop thinking about it!.

[Edit]
I originally posted thinking there was no need to refute this, but I guess the fact that I see this argument sometimes indicates that some people at least can't see just how pathetic it is. So for posterity, here's one such argument. Believing something doesn't make it true - you can be wrong, you can be deceived. Believing it more doesn't remove that.

A blog I read

SkepStat.

To quote the first post:
My plan for this blog is to critique (and perhaps occasionally praise) the statistical methods used in current research articles. Sort of a post-publication statistical peer-review. Unfortunately, too few journals engage in quality pre-publication statistical review, so there should be no shortage of material. I'm going to be focusing on debunking research that seems implausible, poorly conducted, or just silly, especially research into so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). But anything is fair game!

My hope is that this format will provide some really good case studies for introducing or clarifying statistical concepts and methods. So, we'll have some fun, and maybe we'll learn a lesson or two along the way.

An admirable aim. The standard of the discussion seems to be of a level that will keep me reading.

The problem with debunking bad science...

... is you need to not fuck it up.

If you're going to flame science papers for bad mathematics, you better not do it yourself!

Junkfood Science quotes Dr John Ioannidis as follows:
"the probability that the research finding is true is only 1.5".

Sandy seems unimpressed by this figure she quotes.

[No, I didn't quote-mine there and leave off an important word like "percent"... the quote continues " — hardly any higher...".]

I don't know about you, but I'm very impressed by a probability larger than 1.

Having something occur more than 100% of the time seems quite dramatic enough to me.

Exactly how much more often than "occurs 150% of the time" would it take to make you guys think the effect was strong?

Maybe Junk Food Science should check the quote, because statisticians tend to get a bit skeptical when probabilities don't come between 0 and 1.

In normal circumstances, I wouldn't post something like that here, I'd put it in comments on the original blog, but junkfoodscience doesn't seem to allow comments. Doesn't even give an email address. Since I can't say it to them quietly, I will say it to everyone loudly.

More evidence of dumb design?

If cdesign proponentsists had an intelligent designer
    they'd be smart enough to understand evolution.

The amazing power of faith

A rant. You have been warned. (Edited to be less of a rant. Still pretty strong.)

Faith can have the power to change lives. This is often held to be a good thing. I think that in fact, it is a very, very dangerous thing. And, quite often, a terrible thing.

My reasons range from the mundane to le monde. These are merely examples; there are many more.

The mundane: I know a boy. A very nice, intelligent boy. A likeable lad. His brain is, unfortunately, completely infected with the faith meme. He takes ridiculous risks with his life. If you warn him of danger, his reply is that he believes in God and God will protect him from harm (and he will yell this over his shoulder as he plummets full-tilt down concrete stairs or heads toward traffic, in spite of the added danger not looking poses). The faith that his parents have inflicted him with, or have allowed others to inflict on him, places him directly in harms way.

If a parent deliberately and with forethought chose to deny their child some essential nutrient that substantially increased the risk of the child dying, the media would trumpet it to the world as evil child abuse. But instill blind faith in God’s providence, and the faithful treat it as admirable. This child is being denied an essential nutrient. The lack of it affects brain development and as a result, this child’s risk of death has gone up dramatically. One can cross one's fingers and hope he will come out of the worst of it before he is too badly harmed, but it’s rather like seeing a teenager taking up petrol sniffing – they might stop before the permanent harm becomes tragically too great, but you don’t necessarily believe they will.

The larger problem is, this increased risk in not limited to this boy. His faith rubs off on those around him (and, worse, he’s far from the most faith-meme-infected child I know). The fuckers that are playing with that child’s life are also playing with the lives of many children. Including my children. And, if experience is any guide, pleased with themselves. Like it's a good thing.

Perhaps slightly less mundane: Teenagers have sex. Many of them get pregnant. They always have. They always will. Getting pregnant when you’re not ready for it can be a bad thing. Further, having sex before you're mature enough to deal with it and everything that goes with it can be a bad thing. Some people of faith feel that the appropriate way to deal with it is to tell kids simply not to have sex. This is known as abstinence-only sex education.

The problem is, it does not work. Study after study show that it doesn't. Kids whose sex education consists of abstinence-only programs have sex younger and more often than kids who get full on sex-education, including explanations of how contraception works. Millions of dollars are being spent, especially in the US, on programs that, in effect, lead to more teenage sex and pregnancy. Older kids who take a pledge not to have sex until they are married have sex almost as often as kids who don't, but they're much more likely to engage in unsafe sex, and less likely to seek treatment for sexually transmitted disease. (And they feel guilty about it, for all the good that does them.)

The solution of the faithful is to spend more money on abstinence-only programs. You see, the problem is, faith cannot be in error, because it is faith - you have to believe it works, no matter what the evidence. To even examine if the results of a faith based program works is to doubt your faith, and that, apparently, is a bad thing. If, somehow, they cannot avoid noticing that it doesn't work, we must have done it wrong, so we all have to pray harder and do it more, and no matter how much harm it does, we have to force people to go along with it.

Le monde: Faith is, to a great extent, what got Bush elected. Faith is what convinces him that reason and evidence are trumped by the voice in his head. Faith (well, that and money, I guess) is what has convinced Bush and his cronies that trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of human lives must not only be spent, but must continue to be spent in a war that has made the world a far more dangerous place - and they were plainly told this in all manner of ways before it was too late. Faith trumps reason. Faith trumps evidence. Faith trumps truth.

Faith tells priests in Africa to tell people not to use condoms, that they're an evil Western plot. I see people say "that's no longer church policy". Well, they don't seem to have gotten the message in a lot of places. Go tell them, or stop whining that it's not fair to bring it up. If you're not doing anything about it, stop trying to interfere with those of us who want to give it some attention.

Faith is, to a large extent, why the world cannot currently deal with the greatest threat to my great-great-grandchildren, and my neighbors great-great-grandchildren, and dammit, all great-great-grandchildren everywhere – runaway global warming. Faith blinds people to truth, and makes them condemn the people who tell it.

Faith makes for very bad decisions, both large and small.

As a result, faith, in short, because it encourages bad decisions, harms, even kills children. It ruins lives, brings death, poverty, waste, ruin, tragedy. Don’t expect me to sugar coat this, because it's not a matter about which decent people should be polite.

Many theists, individually, might not agree with the bad decisions I’m talking about, but faith, and the belief that faith is somehow inherently good, is at the root of the problem of many bad decisions. Every major problem that keeps me awake at night, I see people of faith using that faith as a reason to stand in the way of solutions. Standing beside them I see people of less strident faith, people who hold “liberal” “sophisticated” beliefs, good decent people, not condemning them and everything they stand for, not fighting them. Instead, they praise their faith. They treat the misguided faith as admirable.

Pardon me if I don't join you in admiring it.

Greta Christina on truth vs helpfulness and how they are related

Greta Christina writes about the tendency to conflate arguments about the truth of religious claims with arguments about the possible benefits of religious belief - a mistake that is often made. However, she then goes on to discuss why false beliefs are inherently harmful. The two arguments can never be entirely separate.

She makes some excellent points. Go take a look.

Human makes Influence roll; God saves vs existence

A lot of people pray to ask for something they want to happen.

Sometimes they get what they want and sometimes they don’t.

People who pray a lot get what they want at about the same rate as those that pray hardly at all

People who don’t pray get what they want just about as often.

People who pray earnestly get what they want at about the same rate as those that pray half-heartedly.

People who behave well get what they want at about the same rate as people who don’t.

People who badly need help get what they need at, if anything, a slower rate than people who don't need anything at all get more of what they don't need (the rich get richer while thousands starve and die of preventable disease).

God not only answers prayers quite at random, he answers the complete absence of prayers just as much.

He’s a crafty old fellow, that God.

Apparently, God does play dice

Adding information about adding information

A number of posts back I was trying to make a point about the fact that even with a straw-man version of biology (and, incidentally, a very narrow definition of information), evolution could add information to the genome, most obviously by duplication followed by mutation. I figured that out for myself (it took me all of about 30 seconds of rumination), but it turns out that cdk007 was there before me - he gives exactly the same example (in a much funnier way) in his video "How Evolution Causes an Increase in Information".

I can only assume many other people have thought of the same thing (if someone as ignorant as me can come up with the example, obviously it's not that hard, unless you're a biochemist or something).

Anyway, I don't think I'll polish the argument I was trying to work on in that earlier post, since cdk makes the point much more succinctly, in the middle of a much more educational work.

Featured at Austin Cline's blog

Austin Cline at atheism.about.com featured a comment of mine.

Sweet.

His Noodly Appendage

... is such a wonderful, delightful phrase.

I cannot say it - I cannot even read it - without a smile growing into a barely held in snort of laughter. I'm grinning like an idiot right now as I type, trying like hell not to just burst out in joyous laughter.

It's not like I've just heard it for the first time - I've been aware of the FSM for ages, but it still amuses me no end.

What made me blog

(This comes from a comment I made to Greta Christina on her blog)

I have a confession to make.

You are the reason I have an atheist blog.
(I do have another, older blog elsewhere that's just sort of a "chatting with friends" thing, about my hobbies and interests and family. It's not really an attempt to communicate with the wider world, but with some people that share some of my interests and in many cases, some common experiences.)

My atheism blog has many parents, but you're both parent and midwife.

Because of Wil Wheaton I found that a blog could be personal and the same time real, inspiring and fun. Because of Wil Wheaton, I started using a blog aggregator (Bloglines). Because of Wil Wheaton, I started to read more than a couple of blogs. I have been reading Wil's blog for years now. Wil also directed me to the Bad Astronomy blog.

Without Richard Dawkins, I'd never have thought to look for other atheists on the web, nor gotten "fired up" enough about it to try to read what other atheists had to say. I started to think about my own experiences in the broader context of what's going on in society. I've been reading his books at least since I read The Selfish Gene around 1985, but The God Delusion got me to really think hard about my atheism. Because of Richard Dawkins, I realized I had to find a way do more. The first thing I had to do was read more. And because of his website, I read Bad Astronomy some more, and I found Pharyngula. That would have been just after mid-year I guess.

Because of Pharyngula, I realized a good blog could be snarky, and entertaining and right, all at the same time. And because of Pharyngula, I found your blog. (It may have been the link back in August, unless there was one a little earlier.)

And I kept coming back. Soon, I put you in my feeds, then moved you up into my couple of "special blogs".

Because of you, I realized I had things to say, and I had to start saying them, not one day, not soon, but right away. I don't think it was any single post, but the cumulative effect over several weeks. However, I think your two posts on September 30 were the final straw, and a few days later, I had a blog ready to go. Because of you, I actually began to write.

I don't know if my writing will ever be inspiring and moving and funny the way yours is. I certainly don't have enough time to really polish my posts, and what I write often comes out pretty raw and unfocused. But there are things in me that I am finally saying, and that means a lot to me.

You gave me a voice. Thank you.

Joining the Atheist Blogroll

Been meaning to do this for weeks. I asked to join mojoeys atheist blogroll. (won't be up yet) I'm up now!

http://mojoey.blogspot.com/2006/09/join-mojoeys-atheist-blogroll.html

The Atheist Blogroll is a service provide to the Atheist and Agnostic blogging community. The blogroll currently maintains over 350 blogs. Membership is limited to Atheist and Agnostic bloggers. To join, follow the instructions there.

Added the A

Finally got around to adding the Scarlet A. Yay. Take a look at their campaign.

[Edit 21 Nov]
Well it's been a long while, and they still don't seem to have added me to their list. I wonder if I should poke them again.
[Edit 24 Nov]
On the Out Campaign blogroll now!

Seen at Pharyngula

In the comment thread on P-Zed's liveblog of the NOVA Judgement Day program:


Posted by: Ex-drone | November 13, 2007 9:33 PM

cdesign proponentist n. a transitional evolutionary form between creationist and IDist


[By way of explanation - it comes out of a stuffed-up global edit of the creationist book Of Pandas and People, when they converted it to an ID textbook by attempting to replace "creationists" with "design proponents" and a variety of similar label substitutions, without changing the actual content, and cdesign proponentsists remained in the text as evidence of the mangled substitution.]