Wishful Thinking vs What We Know About How the World Works

Posted on Friday 21 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Physicist Sean Carroll’s site is always interesting to dip into – he has a long list of posts from the past decade under his ‘Greatest Hits’ tab – and here is one from 2011 about Physics and the Immortality of the Soul.

This is an iconic example of the difference between what most people believe, or feel, and what the evidence of the world tells us if we bother to think about it.

Given what we do understand about rocks and planets and dairy products and the Solar System, it’s absurd to imagine that the Moon is made of green cheese. We know better.

We also know better for life after death, although people are much more reluctant to admit it. Admittedly, “direct” evidence one way or the other is hard to come by — all we have are a few legends and sketchy claims from unreliable witnesses with near-death experiences, plus a bucketload of wishful thinking. But surely it’s okay to take account of indirect evidence — namely, compatibility of the idea that some form of our individual soul survives death with other things we know about how the world works.

Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

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The Passing of Blind Obedience to Decaying Creeds

Posted on Monday 17 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Traditional religionists are in panic, it seems, from advances in social policy concerning same-sex marriage (which we proponents call “marriage equality”) and other things like legal euthanasia (is your right to die your decision – or the government’s?). Here is Adam Lee summarizing this issue, and by the way challenging a rival blogger who had mentioned his earlier post (without linking it) and then deleted comments concerning it, rather than posting a public response.

Clearly, religious apologists feel the world, which they once thought they owned, is slipping away from them; that they’re losing their privileged status as the sole arbiters of morality. You can understand their anger and desperation in this light.

Naturally, the apologists are eager to cast this as a rebellion against goodness itself. The truth is that their view, which is based on blind obedience to decaying creeds, is being replaced with something better: a morality that’s based on reasoned debate and human well-being. The churches and their advocates still command significant power, but they can no longer just assert that something is God’s will and expect to receive deference. If that prospect frightens and upsets them, perhaps it’s because they don’t have any backup arguments to offer.

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Prothero and Vick on that debate

Posted on Thursday 13 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Donald Prothero summarizes the Nye-Ham debate.

http://www.skepticblog.org/2014/02/12/hearts-and-minds/

Tristan Vick explains why he didn’t watch the debate, but sides with those who think it was a good idea.

http://www.advocatusatheist.blogspot.jp/2014/02/why-i-didnt-watch-bill-nye-vs-ken-ham.html

We have to debate Creationists, if anything, to share the accumulated information, the bulwark of human knowledge, and give them something tangible to think about. Otherwise, how will they ever learn anything? They are all trapped inside massive echo chambers of faith.

He also notes that the questions the Creationists asked weren’t serious inquiries.

These Creationists weren’t curious to know how or why things work in the world. They merely wanted to know how their religious beliefs could be considered wrong by those who thought and felt differently. Every single one of the 22 questions posted reflect back on how they perceive their cherished beliefs, beliefs they cling to, it had nothing to do with them wanting to learn about this or that thing or some such as it relates to the real world.

That’s the big reason their version of the way they see the world simply will not last. Because their version doesn’t wish to concern itself with the way the world really is. There is a detachment here, and this lack of curiosity, this lack of desire to understand, will cause them to fall behind the curve of progress and eventually they will have no choice but to leave their failed beliefs behind or adapt them into something new, something most likely bizarre, in order to stand the test of time.

Posted in Evolution, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Prothero and Vick on that debate

How God Works

Posted on Thursday 13 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

No One Cares About Your Damn Religion

Have you ever noticed how God always agrees with you? Not as often with your neighbor, your congressman, your family or even the pope. But he (or she, or it,) definitely agrees with you. Other people just aren’t enlightened enough to realize that. Yet.

Funny how that works.

Was the Christian God cool with slavery? Slave owners sure thought so — and had plenty of Biblical canon to support it. Abolitionists disagreed. Did God want women to vote? Not according to anti-suffragists. Suffragists were convinced otherwise. If society continues this descent into level-headed compassion, fifty years from now people will be claiming that God is pro-fur and factory farming. When one cannot defend a belief in the current context, moving the framework back a few thousand years and putting the blame on God is a pretty good fallback strategy.

Long examination of how the faithful cherry-pick their holy book to justify their prejudices. Obvious, but needs to be said, and said again.

Posted in Atheism, Religion | Comments Off on How God Works

Sam Family Values

Posted on Thursday 13 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

The father of Michael Sam, the potential NFL player who came out as gay this week, is apparently more upset by his son’s coming out as gay than by his earlier sons having died or ending up in jail.

William Saletan: Michael Sam’s Family Values

But here’s one prediction you can bet on: The family he builds as a gay man will be better than the “old school” family he grew up in. It won’t just be more tolerant. It will be more principled, better organized, and more useful to society. The next time you hear somebody talk about “family values,” remember that.

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Conservative values

Posted on Thursday 13 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

It’s long been my impression that conservatives, especially of the extreme Tea Party variety, are motivated largely by fear – of the unknown, of the ‘other’ (people unlike themselves), of the implications of rational engagement with the real world. And so they retreat to the supposed wisdom of the ancients, holy books and Founding Fathers. Us vs them. Conspiracy theories.

Tea Party’s fringe isolation: How a conspiracist mind-set poses long-term electoral danger

In all these areas, a conspiracist mind-set can be observed: The problem is a morally suspect out-group, being coddled and encouraged by big bad government, which is trying to destroy America, because of Evil. … the more vehemently they reject contrary evidence and arguments, the less open to honest discussion and dialogue they appear, the more powerful the evidence is that a close-minded conspiracist outlook is at work, with a chillingly narrow predetermined cast of heroes and villains.

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Natural Selection; Family Values

Posted on Wednesday 12 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

The trouble with ‘Darwin Day’ is that, it’s not about one guy, as evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks explains.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-brooks/darwin-day_b_4770363.html

It irks me the way Nye, and others who engage with creationists, allow the likes of Ham to call evolution “Darwinism”, and those who can comprehend natural selection and the overwhelming evidence for it “Darwinists”. An over-reliance on Darwin as our standard-bearer diminishes a broad and vibrant science, giving the impression it begins and ends with a guy who was born over 200 years ago. I believe the creationists and their dullard adherents go further, implying that one white-bearded gentleman is somehow being slyly substituted for another; Darwin supplanting God.

The beauty of an idea like natural selection is that it is true, whether or not you choose to believe it. It is true, even if nobody has yet had the idea or written it down. If Darwin hadn’t done so, Alfred Russell Wallace’s version might have swayed the Victorians. Or perhaps a version discovered some 50 years later.

Humanity owes a great debt to Darwin, and the history of science followed the course that it did because of him. But he isn’t the reason for the season; science does not need deities and messiahs. Darwin was merely the guy who figured it all out first…

Also today, an interesting essay by Will Saletan on Michael Sam and “family values”.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/saletan/2014/02/12/michael_sam_s_father_shows_gay_men_can_have_better_family_values_than_straight.html.

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Science and Fundamentalism

Posted on Tuesday 11 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Nice essay by Connor Wood at Science on Religion, about the Nye-Ham debate. Though he’s a PhD candidate in religion and science, he’d been putting off paying much attention to this debate.

The reason I didn’t get too excited about this religion-science hubbub in Kentucky was because I knew it would be, er, incredibly frustrating. Ken Ham is wrong. Pathetically so. I do not respect his beliefs (although if I met him personally I would try to respect the man). I don’t respect his beliefs because they are false beliefs, and demonstrably so. The people who think the world was created in six days six thousand years ago are Just. Plain. Wrong. That is not what happened. By hinging their beliefs in Jesus, their sense of meaning in life, and their connections with the past on this ludicrous cosmogonical error, creationists are doing more and deeper damage to the life of the spirit in this age than any Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett could ever do for them.

Wood goes on to explain “why fundamentalism exits” — fundamentalism, in the sense of today’s meaning of literal interpretation of the Bible, didn’t exist before the 19th century’s ascendance of science into the realm of meaning; it was a reaction to the raw reading of science as noticing that there is no “meaning” to the universe. And people cannot stomach that.

His conclusion is that both sides need to adjust their stances.

So are you one of those who thinks religion is stupid, and science is great? Wonderful. Keep it to yourself. Every single time you post a comment anywhere that perpetuates this war, any time you snark to a religious person about how science makes his or her worldview obsolete, you are bringing our culture one step closer to epistemological shutdown. And that means we all lose.

Or are you a religious person who believes evolution is wrong, and that the world is 6,000 years old? Stop. Seriously, stop. You’re making a fool of yourself, and you are making a fool of your God. So stop giving the T.H. Huxleys and Richard Dawkinses fodder for their ugly rhetorical cannons. I’m sorry, dinosaurs did not live at the same time as humans. The mountain of evidence against this claim is greater than Everest. Stop believing false things. And who wants such an insecure and brittle faith that the knowledge of mankind’s peripheral position in the great vastness of the cosmos shudders you? If your faith is strong, you can look down the barrel of 14 billion years and not blink. Be strong. Accept that the universe is more complex and strange and unexpected than can be written in a few verses of Genesis or Daniel.

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For Creationists, Intellectual Inquiry is a Sin

Posted on Monday 10 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern comments about a new HBO documentary, Questioning Darwin:

The Cruelty of Creationism.

Intellectual freedom is one of humanity’s greatest gifts—and biggest burdens. Our ability to ask questions, to test ideas, to doubt is what separates us from our fellow animals. But doubt can be as terrifying as it is liberating. And it’s the terror of doubt that fosters the toxic, life-negating cult of creationism.

That fear is on full display throughout HBO’s new documentary Questioning Darwin, which features a series of intimate interviews with biblical fundamentalists. Creationism, the documentary reveals, isn’t a harmless, compartmentalized fantasy. It’s a suffocating, oppressive worldview through which believers must interpret reality — and its primary target is children. For creationists, intellectual inquiry is a sin, and anyone who dares to doubt the wisdom of their doctrine invites eternal damnation. That’s the perverse brilliance of creationism, the key to its self-perpetuation: First it locks kids in the dungeon of ignorance and dogmatic fundamentalism. Then it throws away the key.

It’s not about the evidence of course; it’s about the fear that, unless one is living in a magical world dreamed into existence and ruled by a god, there are no rules.

Humans must have been designed by God; if we weren’t, then we’re mere animals, lacking in morality and dignity, consigned to a pitiful and pointless life of struggle and dolor. Evolution, one true believer informs us, is “incompatible with biblical Christianity” because it recognizes the permanence of death and leaves no room for a second coming. Creationists are consumed by repressing the existential panic that often attends acceptance of reality. Instead of confronting that terror, they’ve retreated into an elaborate fantasy.

A world view that abnegates our [presumably God-given] ability to think and reason.

This view isn’t benign or wacky: It’s poisonous and medieval. Creationists reject not just evolution but most of the Enlightenment and pretty much all intellectual development since. Rather than celebrate the brilliance of the human mind, they disparage free thought as dangerous and sinful. Instead of extolling the virtues of creativity and imagination, they malign all unorthodox ideas as immoral and wicked. For all creationists’ insistence that evolution denigrates humanity, creationism is fundamentally anti-human, commanding us to spurn our own logic and cognition in favor of absurd sophism derived from a 3,000-year-old text. It turns our greatest ability—to reason—into our greatest enemy. Using our brains, according to creationism, will lead us to sin; only mindless piety can keep us on the track to salvation.

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Creationists and Curiosity

Posted on Monday 10 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Terry Firma doesn’t think the creationists who held up questions about evolution (in that Buzzfeed set of photos last week) were really interested in the answers.

Just (Not) Curious: When Creationists Ask Questions, Are They Interested In the Answers?

It finally occurred to me that asking questions is not at all the same as displaying curiosity. Curiosity implies wanting to know. Some questions, however, are posed to achieve almost the opposite. They are ideological stands, markers of obstinacy presented under the guise of open inquiry.

They’re not about wanting to know; they’re about wanting to stubbornly assert doctrine.

Look at those photos and at the questions the Creationists scrawled on that sketchpad. I don’t want to be harsh, but I’m not sure that what I’m seeing is curiosity.

“How do you explain a sunset if [there] is no God?”

“If we come from monkeys then why are there still monkeys?”

Because if they really wanted to know they could spend 5 minutes of Googling, or an hour reading a book, and find the answers to their questions.

My bleak suspicion is that many of the people in the photos have not actually attempted in earnest to get past a sixth-grader’s understanding of the issues. If they’d read just the first few chapters of Evolution For Dummies even once, rather than the first chapter of the Bible over and over, their questions would already have been answered.

Firma quotes a recent book by science journalist Philip Ball that the underlying issue is that, to some faithful, curiosity is not a virtue, but a weakness.

The central problem with curiosity was that it was thought to be motivated by excessive pride. The accumulation of pointless learning ran the risk not that one would become another Lucifer, but that one would primp and preen rather than bow one’s head before the Lord. … Curiosity, like scepticism, was a sign that you lacked devotion and faith.

Thus does religion perpetuate itself by shielding adherents from interest (and sometimes complete awareness) in the outside world.

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