tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74856649809691519342023-11-15T05:26:37.524-08:00Quine's QueueThoughts and Ideas in Philosophy and ScienceQuinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.comBlogger76125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-35051350474455186762013-12-23T16:01:00.002-08:002013-12-25T22:18:21.011-08:00Merry Solstice<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/BLKiMbC6s2k" width="420"></iframe>
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The winter solstice was on Saturday at 9:11 am, here in California. I feel a physical link to my ancestors going back into deep time as Spaceship Earth circles around to more sunshine for the northern parts. In modern times we can know, to the fraction of a second, exactly <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_solstice" target="_blank">when the crossover happens</a>, but before the time of calenders ancient people going into winter did not know when, or even if, the sunshine was coming back at all. <a href="http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/december-solstice-customs.html" target="_blank">All around the world there have been celebrations</a> associated with the "Return of the Sun" sometime in the first few days of winter, when people noticed that the length of daylight had stopped getting shorter.<br />
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As time went on, religious rituals took over the ancient festivals of the returning Sun, and in the case of Christianity, the "death and resurrection after three days" may have been slid along the calendar to Easter in the next season. However, winter solstice as a time to gather friends and family to exchange gifts and good will, is now more associated with the sales and entertainment industry supporting commercialization, than with the <a href="http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/Christmas_TheRealStory.htm" target="_blank">fictitious story of baby Jesus</a>. But, that is not what we hear about the "War on Christmas," which tries to induce fear of the secular as the big threat to tradition and moral purity.<br />
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Dave Niose wrote a nice piece titled "<a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201312/merry-times-atheism" target="_blank">Merry Times for Atheism</a>" at the Psychology Today blog, this morning. In it he addresses the increasing secularization of Christmas as the polls show a falling belief in religion in general. If you watch the political media, here in the U.S., you would get the impression that the Christian Right is locked in a life and death struggle about who says "Merry Christmas" v. those heathens with their "Happy Holidays" straight from Hell. Actually, I and many of my atheist friends are quite fine with wishing others a "Merry Christmas" because we are talking about the gathering and celebrating, which has nothing going on about a baby Jesus myth, let alone a <i>post-mortem</i> deification to make any kind of "Christ." Niose closes with the observation that, "...<i> </i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"><i>dismissing the existence of God was really no big deal, but rejecting Santa Claus would be another matter entirely</i>."</span><br />
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Dan Dennett has often told us that he even likes the church part of Christmas. He likes the singing of the Christmas songs and all that goes along with it. I am sure this would also be true of Harry Potter fans or Doctor Who fans, if they had their own winter solstice tradition. You don't need to believe fictional characters are real to enjoy the rituals and traditions built around them. At the same time, if my Christian friends and family catch me wishing a "Merry Christmas" it is not going to give them any ground to think that I am slipping from my holding December 25, as special, because it is the anniversary of the birth of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton" target="_blank">Isaac Newton</a>.<br />
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Bertrand Russell wrote this Christmas Message, and I think it serves us well, even in modern times:<br />
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A CHRISTMAS MESSAGE</div>
<i>The spirit of brotherhood embodies not only the highest morality but also the truest wisdom, and the only road by which the nations, torn and bleeding with the wounds which scientific madness has inflicted, can emerge into a life where growth is possible and joy is not banished at the frenzied call of unreal and fictitious duties. Deeds inspired by hate are not duties, whatever pain and self-sacrifice they may involve. Life and hope for the world are to be found only in the deeds of love.</i></blockquote>
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So, Merry Christmas to all post solstice, remember Newton, and rest assured that celestial mechanics (not divine intervention) will bring the Sun back again to shine like a crazy diamond.<br />
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<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-38555062035259678152013-11-29T15:16:00.000-08:002013-11-29T15:19:09.904-08:00Review: Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief BehindI read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Caught-The-Pulpit-Leaving-Belief-ebook/dp/B00GYGF5B8" target="_blank">a new book</a> that just came out this week by Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola about The Clergy Project that has been running for a couple of years now, to help those in the profession of religion transition to secular life after losing faith. There are about 500 members of that confidential community at this point, and the book tells the story of its origin and the personal stories of about a dozen members. Those stories are different based on the different personalities and denominations involved, however many of the stories also have the common ground about being stuck in a profession that has no approved exit to any other. Changes to other denominations are common, and even changes to completely different religions are well known, but once in the religion business, your resume will generally not be very attractive in the secular business world.<br />
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Jerry DeWitt was one of the first members of the Clergy Project, and one of the first to "go public" with that membership. You can hear him tell his views of what being a preacher was all about for him, here:<br />
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In this book Daniel and Linda say a few things, themselves, but for the most part they let the words of the clergy they have studied do the talking. One of the things that comes through in the study is not only that a significant percentage of the priests and ministers and rabbis and imams no longer hold the beliefs that they had at the start of their careers, but that there exists an unwritten rule that no one asks the question about personal faith of their clergy, and that many hold that if not asked, they are not being dishonest by leading services for those who do believe. It is the ecclesiastical form of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."<br />
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The book is a quick read, and has extensive references and pointers to getting more information. The Clergy Project is focused on serving its members and does no outreach to find new members and little advertising other that a <a href="http://www.clergyproject.org/" target="_blank">web site</a>. What the book lacks is objective sampling data about the extent of this condition among clergy. How to do that is not currently known because of the sampling problems in the face of the secrecy issues. But, the first step is to get the word out that some clergy are up there doing a job they do not believe, and that the only way to find out is to break the tradition, and ask.<br />
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<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-23059086450596730442013-11-04T17:51:00.000-08:002013-11-04T17:51:21.287-08:00Please Reclaim "Creature"We use words to express our thoughts, but at the same time words exert some selection pressure on our thoughts both consciously and unconsciously. Sometimes that spills out into the political world as fights over owning particular words or labels. Such a fight to claim or reclaim a word and change its definition and usage can take generations or centuries, especially if that word has a very common usage in agreement with <a href="http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/creature" target="_blank">its dictionary definition</a>. Consciously starting such a campaign is often viewed as quixotic given the difficulty and low chance that the people who do so, will even be around long enough to see success if it even happens. However I have been arguing for just such a campaign to reclaim the word "creature." I am asking people to voluntarily restrict the use of that word to things or characters or organisms that actually have a creator.<br />
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Here is an example of a living organism that is a genuine "creature" with a real creator, Craig Venter:<br />
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Other examples would include the monster in the story <a href="http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Something_other_than_Frankenstein.jpg" target="_blank">Frankenstein</a> or any other character in fiction, as well as simulated life as in the creatures in the computer game <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatures_(artificial_life_series)" target="_blank">Creatures</a>.<br />
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My problem with this word is its origin in a time when all living things were assumed to be a part of Divine Creation, whereas today we know that the living things around us (not including Venter's creatures) evolved, and were not created by anyone or anything. To me, railing against the erroneous pronouncements of Creationists while going around calling living things, "creatures" is self contradictory. Yes, I know this is convention; I know biologists who fight hard for Evolution, but do this themselves. I am politely asking for people to put aside their past usage, refrain and reclaim the word for use referring to actual created things, while not putting blame on anyone who sticks with the convention left over from a time when religion controlled science.<br />
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Choice of words matters in any movement. I am asking for your help to spread this meme, or more specifically, to put the old Creatures of Heaven meme to bed. There will be more and more of our creatures to talk about as time goes on, and letting all know that we know that the living things around us evolved here (and were not plopped down by any sky daddy), is helped along by our choice of words.<br />
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Thanks<br />
<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-50368976413289862972013-11-02T15:19:00.000-07:002013-11-02T20:32:59.745-07:00Review: A Manual for Creating AtheistsDr. Peter Boghossian has just released a new book titled: "A Manual for Creating Atheists." He speaks a bit about his thinking in this video:<br />
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I bought his book and started reading it. A discussion started over at the Richard Dawkins site, <a href="http://www.richarddawkins.net/news_articles/2013/10/29/-learn-to-de-convert-the-faithful-with-practical-new-book" target="_blank">here</a>, so I put in this comment after reading a bit of the book:<br />
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I am four chapters into this book today, I can definitely recommend it to all here. The characterization of "deconverting" is not quite right for what Dr. Boghossian is describing. He specifically writes that one should not attack someone's religion or even someone's beliefs, but rather, go after the way someone concludes that beliefs themselves are valid. He calls this, "street epistemology." He has modeled it on the Socratic method as applied in areas such as deprogramming cult members or addiction recovery programs. His goal is to equip non-believers with tools to use to talk to our religious friends and neighbors in such a way as to cause them to think more deeply about why they hold the beliefs that they hold.</blockquote>
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This approach is very interesting to me because I have been trying out approaches close to the same path with friends and neighbors in person (most specifically with my missionary neighbor) and on-line for several years now. Our techniques overlap to a great extent in that I agree that you have to spend your time asking questions with an open mind that really does want to lean about why your religious interlocutor thinks things are true that you do not. I agree that it takes time and quite a bit of patience.</blockquote>
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Where Dr. Boghossian takes a different tack is that he is going on a pure epistemological path on which he renounces the use of facts. I do agree that dumping a pile of facts on someone who is holding bogus beliefs does not usually work if that person is holding on to the beliefs for emotional reasons, and does not want to examine them. However, those of us who come from a science and engineering background are hard pressed to let go and become as detached from grounded fact as we so often see among the theologians.</blockquote>
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The message I am getting is that Dr. Boghossian would like us to ask the believers the questions that they are avoiding asking themselves, and to do so in such a way that instead of withdrawing in defensiveness, our friends and neighbors will go off and ponder those questions. He characterizes "faith" as "pretending to know what you don't know" and wants each person to internally ask him or her self what is really known, and how.</blockquote>
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I suspect I will want to write a full review of this book at some point, but I have seen enough of it to make the recommendation.</blockquote>
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After finishing the book I wrote a second comment to close it out:<br />
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Now that I have finished reading the book, I can give some more detail. I see the book as built in three parts; the first is presentation and discussion about his method as I reported in my comment above. The second part he calls "Anti-Apologetics" in which he goes through the list of typical religious justifications for faith (with which most of us are only too familiar), and his ideas on effective replies (yes, the "evidence of things unseen" canard is in the list). The third part is unusual for these kinds of books in that he writes down his objections to the postmodern and cultural relativist movements in the academic world, which is where he puts the blame for lack of critical thinking among the students he teaches. After you read the third part, you get a much better understanding of why he developed the method he presents in the first part.</blockquote>
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Having had a chance to think about this, I do see a difference in approach re the books we have seen in the past few years. We have had books from former religious clergy, such as Dan Barker et al., that tell how they got away from religion, and we have Dawkins and Harris and Dennett explaining why religion makes no sense, and Hitchens stating that religion is beneath human dignity, in any case. So, those tend to be very useful when you are explaining to a believer why you don't believe (or directly converting a believer who happens also to be open to logical thought). However, Boghossian is not looking to help you explain why your lack of faith is justified, he is providing a method whereby you can shift the burden to the believer to justify having faith.</blockquote>
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It has been my personal experience that how I approach someone on the issue of faith really does depend on the style of thinking I am encountering. People I meet in the technical business world tend to pay attention to facts and logic, and a book like TGD from Richard is going to do the job because those people have a world view in which propositions tend to be true or false as tied to facts. However, there is a larger population who think more in terms of opinions than facts, and that someone from one culture is not morally justified in criticizing how people in other cultures think about what constitutes truth. Some of those people consider the whole science and technology establishment to be one such 'culture' who's 'facts' are not so solid as advertised (science keeps changing its mind), and has no right telling other people how to think.</blockquote>
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Yes, I know that when most of us run into someone who starts giving out the pomo "nothing is really true for all cultures" crap, the urge is just to turn and walk. However, if you are willing to hang in and take the time that some Socratic method is going to take (and it will as I can tell you from years with my missionary neighbor) I think the steps in this book will be helpful to the process of putting questions forth that stick the in believer's mind. That is all you can really count as a win for these kinds of cases, but questions about why a person believes what that person believes are more likely to bring on self examination (for some) than presentations showing why that person's beliefs are stupid (it really is better if they figure the latter part out, on their own).</blockquote>
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I continue to recommend the book to all here.</blockquote>
P.S. Here is a nice animated review that just came out:<br />
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Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-62079748791128533572013-10-13T20:13:00.000-07:002013-10-13T20:13:17.434-07:00Who Was Your First Ancestor Who Was NOT a pZombie?I am sure many of my readers knew this post was coming. Yes, it is the other shoe (or, at least another shoe) falling after the question of <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2013/10/who-was-your-first-ancestor-to.html" target="_blank">first to have qualia</a>. In the field of Philosophy, the <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/" target="_blank">pZombie</a> is a thought experiment in the <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum" target="_blank">reductio ad absurdum</a></i> form, going to the heart of the consciousness question, that was intended to show that some form of <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/" target="_blank">dualism</a> must be true because beings that acted in an identical manner to humans, but who had no "inner life" or subjective experience, were logically impossible. However, after many years of debates and hundreds of papers in the literature, a forcing contradiction has not been found. Most people respond to the question by stating that they just know that they are not pZombies because they directly experience their "inner life," even if they can't prove that to anyone else. If you take that position, it does not help, because everyone around you could still be pZombies who are all also claiming to have subjectivity, but really don't. Worse, the subjectivity pZombies are defined not to have, has to be a "true" subjectivity that is not any form of illusion or dream world.<br />
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So, let us say that you do have the "true" subjective inner life that cannot be the product of electro-chemical processes in your nervous system, thus you are not a pZombie. You might also insist that neither of your parents were, either. If we go back ten thousand generations, you might still argue the point, but when we go back to our common ancestor with the other great apes, it gets much harder. No language means less modes of expression of subjectivity. If you keep going back through ancestors of simpler and simpler neural control systems you eventually get to organisms that even <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers" target="_blank">David Chalmers</a> is going to recognize as transparent to the pZombie question. That is, there is nothing "it is like to be" them.<br />
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If we start running the evolutionary clock forward, we are eventually going to get to some ancestral organism that we think might have experienced subjectivity. But that had to come to be slowly over the generations. Whatever causes subjectivity, it has to be able to be built up, bit by bit, as genetic mutations resulted in more and more complex neural connectivity. Thus we can see that subjectivity is not an all or nothing thing, which is exactly what we also see in the development of any individual human from a clump of cells to an organism with a complete nervous system responding to the external world. If you ask the pZombie thought experiment question re humans whose cells have not yet differentiated into neurons, you get an easy answer. Where, exactly, in development does that clear answer go away?<br />
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We were all pZombies early enough in our lives, and going back far enough, all our ancestors were for all of their lives. By definition, there is no test you can preform on anyone else, to show that she or he is not a pZombie. How do you really know that you aren't, still, one too?<br />
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<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-88903387259397262112013-10-12T16:26:00.000-07:002013-10-12T16:26:57.932-07:00Who Was Your First Ancestor to Experience the Qualia of Color Vision?Another direct application of the argument of continuity of physicalism comes with the questions of qualia. Specifically, I would like to consider it in the context of the famous thought experiment of Mary, the color researcher. I will let John Searle present the Mary argument:<br />
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There are other presentations, and many papers written on this thought experiment. Ultimately I think the story is flawed, because if Mary really did grow up her entire life without color exposure, it would have impacted how her visual system got wired during early development, which would then impact the experience she later has when color is introduced. I am more influenced by Dan Dennett on this subject than any other, but want to put all the usual discussion aside and look at the problem from the continuity standpoint. In the typical presentation, Mary is said to know all there is to know about the neurophysiology of color vision. I am going to add that Mary also knows all of that for every one of our ancestors going back to before our ancestors had eyes, at all. If there is something that Mary does not "get" about the current visual system, when did she first lose it along the phylogenetic line?<br />
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Of course, I am going to ask the corresponding ontogenetic question: if Mary knows all there is to know about vision as humans build themselves from a single cell to an adult, at what cell division point, or neural wiring event does she lose out? When you developed, if you are a person who can experience color, when did you first have that experience? You may have an earliest memory of seeing something that made you particularly notice color, but when did you first be able to have the experience? We can be sure that as a clump of cells a couple of weeks on from singularity, you did not have have that.<br />
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My point is to use these questions as intuition pumps to show some of the problems with the Mary argument. When you assume that Mary knows "everything" about the subject, you allow that she knows things that we don't or perhaps even can't. That is neither uniquely specified nor subject to falsification. The presentation is obscured in its setting, but really boils down to not being able to experience someone else's experiences directly. It is the same point that <a href="http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/nagel_nice.html" target="_blank">Nagel makes about his bats</a>. However, granting that knowing what something is "like" is not necessarily the same as experiencing what something "is," does not, in itself, establish a non-physical attribute to qualia.<br />
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<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-33776487127284023052013-10-12T15:06:00.003-07:002013-10-12T15:06:51.829-07:00Who Was Your First Ancestor to Have an "Afterlife"?<div class="tr_bq">
In my previous post about physicalism, I noted that the continuity argument could be used to question the idea of supernatural afterlife. I put that to a specific question and sent it to the Richard Dawkins site to be posted as a discussion topic. They published my question <a href="http://www.richarddawkins.net/discussions/2013/10/1/who-was-your-first-ancestor-to-have-an-afterlife" target="_blank">at this link</a>, and I received many interesting comments. Here is a copy of the posting:</div>
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<i>Lately, I have taken to asking my religious friends and family this question: "Who was your first ancestor to have some kind of supernatural life after death (often received as asking about Heaven and Hell)?" I typically get some answers about expectations of seeing long lost relatives in a happy forever spiritual world, but then I clarify the question as not being about the ancestors you remember, or even just know about, but rather going back as far as anyone has had ancestors. Blank looks tend to indicate (of those I talk to, anyway) that this question is not the usual mental rumination. Many break out of that by falling (so to speak) back to Adam and Eve, which then opens the can of misunderstanding of Evolution that stops so many religious people from looking deeply at their own biological history. </i></blockquote>
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<i>Having opened that can, the first thing I usually have to get through is explaining the difference between the fact of common descent and the theory of how mutation and selection generates new species. We have facts from geology and the fossils and the DNA of all living things that allows us to make a direct factual inference building the Tree of Life. We know about our biological ancestors; that part is not theoretical in the common sense as differentiated from fact. Even if someone rejects the Darwinian mechanism of Natural Selection, and insists on faith that a divine hand makes the selections, we still have common descent, and can trace our ancestors back along the branches of the Tree of Life to simple cells a billion years ago. </i></blockquote>
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<i>Sometimes the discussion stops right there. No mater how factual common descent may be, it is not going to be accepted by people who want the story of Adam and Eve to be literally true. A 'just' metaphorical A&E story is a problem because lacking that discontinuity in the chain of ancestors, even if the chain is divinely directed, one runs up against the question of when in our common ancestors did a person first have an immortal soul, who has ever since been enjoying or suffering an "afterlife," that was not the case for his or her parents? It really is a difficult question because each of our ancestors going all the way back to the start of life, itself, was almost identical to its (yes, going back to before there was even gender) parent or parents. Yet if someone believes that he or she possesses a "soul" that is going to live on and meet up with long dead friends and family, that had to start sometime, but no such start can be found.<br /><br />This explicit necessity of discontinuity in a chain that demonstrably has none, is an application of a way of thinking that I began considering while posting here on the old consciousness thread. Consciousness, is not an all or nothing thing so it can develop to some level gradually over time (as in the Sorties Paradox) with no supernatural discontinuity needed. However, not so for an "immortal soul"; you cannot "evolve" a supernatural afterlife. The question of when it came to be answers itself: it didn't.</i></blockquote>
In the comments, I clarified with:<br />
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<i>I wrote this piece from a phylogenetic standpoint, but there is always the associated ontogenetic question: when you started dividing from a single cell, how many cells did you have to get to so as to have an "afterlife"? Of course the religious tend to be annoyed when you start asking about the nature of the afterlife one expects to attain having died as a clump of four or eight cells. Millions of such deaths happen each month in the world because of natural development, or uterine attachment and carry, problems. If those "go to Heaven" we would expect Heaven to be populated more numerously with souls who had never been born, than those who had seen the outside world (and even that group would be heavily represented by deaths in the first six years). Seems an odd way to spend all eternity, to me.</i></blockquote>
Furthermore:<br />
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<i>Today, Hermant Mehta put up <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/10/04/maybe-its-a-good-thing-so-many-christians-preach-creationism/" target="_blank">a piece on his blog</a> about Richard Dawkins and comments that tie into expectations of an afterlife, and especially about keeping people in line by fear of Hell. We have discussed this before in terms of the so called "Pascal's Wager" in that to compete with other theological systems one needs the most terrible Hell, and that horror needs to go up to balance out the low probability that it exists, at all. This also applies to the question I have asked, because one would have to wonder who was the first of our ancestors to go to Hell? If that possibility came into existence at some point in Evolution, how would we expect the brain development (genetics) and cultural development (memetics) to be advanced enough so as to not come as a very big surprise to wake-up-dead-in-Hell? </i></blockquote>
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I was asked, "Quine, what sort of answers were you expecting from your friends and relatives?"<br />
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<i>I had no expectations and was (still am) interested in anything that would logically justify the insertion of a discontinuity (sudden existence of 'afterlife') in an otherwise continuous parent to offspring chain, with no unique physical transformation at any specific link. The Catholics have been trying to gloss over this so that they don't have to go up against the facts of Evolution, but I am using the question as what Dan Dennett calls an "intuition pump" to get them to see more of the serious logical problems with the dogma of "souls" and "life after death." </i></blockquote>
As a further explanation:<br />
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<i>I wrote this piece from a phylogenetic standpoint, but there is always the associated ontogenetic question: when you started dividing from a single cell, how many cells did you have to get to so as to have an "afterlife"?</i></blockquote>
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<i>One of the reasons I put that sub-question is because the idea of ensoulment changes based on the theological standpoint. It has been argued over the ages in various flavors of Christianity, and in Judaism it is simply left open (some think it is at the first breath after birth). On one hand, it is easiest to peg it at conception because that event is truly unique, but it is also the point when we are most clearly modeled as biochemical machines, essentially no different from all other animals starting from a single cell, with the exception of a small percentage of unique DNA sequence. When you are only a singe cell, having an immortal soul doesn't show, and may be as useful as a bicycle is to a fish. </i></blockquote>
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The commenter, PG, wrote, "Quine whenever I've put this question to various normal science accepting (ie not creationist or extremists) they've all come up with the notion of a soul and the notion that at some point in our evolution, unknowable, we became intelligent enough are were given a soul."<br />
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<i>Thanks for your comment, PG. Just yesterday I got into a discussion over at the NCSE blog where a religious person <a href="http://ncse.com/blog/2013/09/what-s-wrong-with-belief-evolution-part-1-0015055#comment-1072339376" target="_blank">wrote me just such a justification</a> for belief that what we know from facts about Evolution does not rule out 'his' doctrine of "The Fall." I am just now gathering my thoughts to write back to him about that, but in doing so I will be using the intuition pump of the conflict of a discontinuous event (getting a 'soul' or having 'The Fall') in an otherwise near continuous process of either phylogenetic or ontogenetic development. Our ancestors did not suddenly (in a single generation) realize the complete moral responsibilities of their actions, any more than you did one fine day when you were 6 or 7 (or maybe 23) years old. It simply does not fit together that humans began being born with 'immortal souls' that their parents didn't have, but somehow that their children will have. </i></blockquote>
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I was then asked about the discussion over at NCSE, and replied:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Good to hear from you, too. I am thinking over how I am going to reply at NCSE because that commenter did the kind of side-step we see so often. It reminds me of the line in Life of Brian: "Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturer of dairy products." They know the A&E story cannot be actually true, but they still need to hang on to some metaphorical "Fall" so as to justify redemption (they want it to be just as good as if The Fall really did happen, but not be pestered by the conflicting evidence). But, the point I am making on this thread re an "afterlife" also applies to the mythical Fall, as in, when was your first ancestor needing redemption? I doubt the small mammals trying not to be eaten by dinosaurs were in such need, so when did that discontinuity happen in what was an otherwise continuous descent line? Punting to metaphor does not help, because that still has to apply to some first ancestor, and trying to tie to some unspecified moral sense also does not work because that can come on gradually, through the generations, with no first person responsible. (The analogous argument is a defeater for a special significance to qualia in the consciousness discussion. No first ancestor had qualia that was not available to her or his parents. Same for 'Quantum Consciousness.') </i></blockquote>
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PG wrote, "If its any help I've checked with religious friends and with our head of RE, and the literal fall is not considered necessary for any of them." I replied:<br />
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<blockquote>
<i>Hi PG. I got the same reply over on the thread I mentioned. Here is what I wrote back:<br /><br />I must say that your position is common to the religious people I have met who reject literal scripture, but want to keep their "metaphorical" interpretation, none the less. However, that interpretation is in the eye of the beholder, and usually a post facto justification for what one wants to be true.<br /><br />It is true that people (and other species) do harmful things as well as helpful or neutral things. The fact that these harmful actions are done is not evidence for the objective existence of "evil" as a thing in itself, and thus no justification for believing in "The Fall."<br /><br />The evidence for evolution indicates that there never was one of our ancestors who was significantly different form her or his direct parents. We come from a continuum of tiny genetic changes spreading in a breeding population that was never fewer than a couple of thousand individuals. Our feelings for what we should or should not do (so called "moral sense") are extensions from the basic drives to care for offspring that are common with our early mammalian ancestors who were hiding in the rocks trying not to be eaten by dinosaurs.<br /><br />As language became more complex, our ancestors began to pass ideas and culture along together with their genes. Early humans could think about what we should and should not do from progressively more abstract positions, and as you note, attribute justification to imagined intentional magic beings, as they did for so many of the aspects of the natural world around them. Later, as our ancestors began to carefully examine the natural world, they slowly lost supernatural justifications for rain and wind and lightning and earthquakes and disease, etc. Now, we are just getting to dropping the supernatural justifications for our culturally extended moral sense, as well.<br /><br />It still boils down to the same reasoning. The continuous way we evolved does not comport with a discontinuous event such as a "Fall." Without such, the natural development has no foundation for the idea that we are lost and have to be "saved," or that somehow have an "afterlife" coming. ... Do you really believe that, at a point, a specific ancestor was born who is now enjoying or suffering an eternal afterlife, while his or her parents simply "went into the ground" with all their ancestors? You can get a moral sense, a little bit at a time, but not an eternal afterlife. </i></blockquote>
---------------Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-62839772737118089012013-09-25T23:57:00.000-07:002013-10-12T14:22:46.922-07:00The Continuity of Physicalism<a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/" target="_blank">Physicalism</a> is the philosophical position that the physical interactions of forces and particles (what we see in study of the physical world) account for all real phenomena. It is not possible to prove this position true because doing so would require taking inventory of every event in the Universe, over all time, and showing that each is accountable by known physical mechanisms (which in itself presumes even knowing all physical mechanisms). Nonetheless, a pattern has been developing with the advancing of science that physical explanations have been found for most of the things that were formerly considered supernatural (such as the lightning bolts of Zeus, or the need for <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lan_vital" target="_blank">Élan vital</a></i>).<br />
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While science simply proceeds by methodological naturalism to look for the physical explanations, more philosophic effort goes into finding defeaters for physicalism than for proofs of it. The first person subjectivity of human consciousness is held out as just such a defeater. Another is the origin of the Universe, itself, at Extrapolated Time Zero (ETZ). However, these two examples have a distinct difference, in that, whereas we can never go back and watch the start of the Universe to verify the physical processes involved, we can see humans develop from single cells into conscious beings. More than that, we can see evidence of a continuity of reproducing beings over Evolutionary time frames.<br />
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Putting the origin of the Universe aside, we can reasonably argue that there was a time when the Universe was very hot and all ordinary matter was either hydrogen or helium, with no conscious beings of any kind. At that point in time we can conclude that physicalism was almost certainly true. So, when do the defeaters come along? We cannot know what happened everywhere, but here on Earth we have good evidence that conscious beings had to wait for Evolution to build the brains that can support first person subjectivity, even if we don't yet know how that subjectivity works.<br />
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This is where the argument for continuity comes in, and is connected with an application of the <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/" target="_blank">Sorites Paradox</a> to the problem of consciousness. If you are a conscious being, and so were your parents, and so were their parents, at what point in your line of ancestors was there a conscious being that did not have conscious beings for parents? Of course, there never was such. Every generation had a form of consciousness that was for all practical purposes identical to that of their parents. However, the first person experience of the world was different if you compare those of sufficient distance in generations. Thus, there is no point where we have any evidence that something non-physical entered into the known physical process of Evolution, a process that makes tiny changes from generation to generation. This calls into question consciousness as a defeater for physicalism.<br />
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I like to tie this example of continuity from generation to generation with the continuity of the development we each experienced when we built ourselves from a single cell (devoid of consciousness) up to the point where we as multicelled organisms could experience a first person subjectivity. That subjectivity did not come to be in an instant (although a new concept of yourself may have) but changed slowly, hour by hour, day by day. When we were each single cells, all our processes were physical effects of the actions of chemistry. As our cells divided and differentiated into specific tissues and organs, no new physics emerged, although information processing capabilities did. Again, the defeater for physicalism does not have a place to emerge from the continuous process of development.<br />
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The continuity argument can also be applied to the question we hear from the religious about, "where do we go when we die?" I ask those people if they think their great-great-great-great-grandfather "went somewhere?" They usually answer "yes" and then I ask about their ancestors going back 100 generations, then 100,000 generations and a million generations. At some point the idea of "going somewhere" has to break down unless you believe there is a supernatural afterlife for our ancestors who roamed the Earth as small mammals trying to avoid being eaten by the dinosaurs. As there cannot reasonably be a generation that had an afterlife that their parents did not, I find this to be one of the best defeaters for every known organized religion, all of which teach that you have a supernatural afterlife coming that your pets and pests do not.<br />
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<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-65782628315737504372013-09-21T23:07:00.000-07:002013-09-22T11:23:29.741-07:00Sean Carroll Almost Sees Through "Fine-Tuning"As I have indicated in earlier posts, I am an admirer of Sean Carroll, who is one of the best presenters of our current knowledge of cosmology. Also, Sean has studied the history of Philosophy and knows the terminology used by philosophers and the historical arguments they reference. This knowledge allows him to answer in the language understood by philosophers, while working in knowledge from observation of the physical world around us. He uses both of those (<i>a priori</i> or "armchair" knowledge from philosophy and empirical or observational knowledge from physics) in this excellent video presentation from January 2013 examining the foundations of theology:<br />
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There are many great points made in this presentation that I would like to showcase, while at the same time there are a couple of areas, in which I take a different position from Sean, that I would like to explain more carefully. The first area is about misconceptions that arise from slippery terminology and the second is the map v. territory error at the heart of so call "fine-tuning."<br />
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The Good:<br />
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Sean launched into an excellent presentation of the limitations of arguing from what you can't envision, as done by theologians who argue that there must exist their idea of a deity or deities because they can't see how the Universe could exist otherwise. I am sure 17th century thinkers also could not see how big cities could exist without horses.<br />
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At (7:56) Sean says, "Mathematics reveals the consequences of axioms." This is extremely important to the theological argument that claims that the usefulness of mathematics reveals a divine hand. That is not necessarily so because we pick the axioms such that the consequences are useful. When it is not useful enough, we extend (or delete in the case of going beyond Euclidean geometry) the axioms until it is. This flies in the face of the metaphysical assumption of existence of Platonic "Ideals," and is essential to cutting through unsubstantiated conclusions left over from the time of Aristotle.<br />
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Around (15:00) Sean does a very good job of attacking the idea of necessity of reasons. He correctly points out that what constitutes a "reason" depends on what level of context you are examining. I like to remind people that for billions of years life developed on this planet without "reasons" because there were no brains evolved to have symbolic mapping of external reality that could support the concept of "reasons." It is almost a sure thing that other "reasons" exist that are yet beyond our current level of brain capabilities. Thus, the lack of "reasons" does not tell us anything about anything.<br />
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At (17:59) he makes a critical point by explaining the importance of the word "may" as it applies to the Cosmological Argument. I covered this exact point in my article about <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2013/08/understanding-forcing-arguments.html" target="_blank">forcing arguments</a>. I would love to watch Sean explain this to William Lane Craig, as it calls down a mistake that WLC makes in almost every debate. However, I am also sure that WLC would ignore such information, as he typically does, whenever his logic errors are exposed (going on as if not debunked is another rhetorical trick).<br />
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I quite enjoyed Sean saying that the problem with the metaphysics of Aristotle is that it is based on the physics of Aristotle, which is full of errors. Every time I manage to lock up a Catholic theologian in a logical corner, he or she pulls out metaphysics from Aquinas as a "get out of jail free" card, and I have to explain that said metaphysics is built on the same from Aristotle, which is in turn built on a whole lot of wrong (which does not do much good because, if you are a Catholic theologian, Aquinas cannot be wrong).<br />
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At about 43 minutes in, Sean gets to some good stuff about what we would expect the Universe to look like given various divine attributes. There is not so much physics, here, other than what we see about the tremendous scope of our Universe. No fancy probability math is necessary to see that we are so tiny and insignificance and improbable. This argument has been made for centuries. A divine creator was easy to envision when the world was flat and not much bigger than your tribal lands. As the known world got bigger, the question of why the extra space became more bothersome. When Galileo showed there were other worlds moving through the heavens, it became outright disturbing. Then, our little solar system was shown to be a speck in a vast galaxy, and by the time we found out that there were more galaxies out there than there are stars in our own, the "waste of space" argument against the traditional idea of deities became overwhelming. Sean does not add much that was not already in this argument, but he does state it rather well in terms of early entropy.<br />
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The Bad:<br />
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Right at the beginning, Sean falls into the language trap of using the big "G" deity label without definition or establishment of attributes. I suspect the Catholic teachers Sean had all those years, drummed into him the baseline assumption that either their deity (or deities, if you consider Catholics to be polytheists) exists or none at all (classic false dichotomy). By falling into this Sean drags in all kinds of unstated baggage and assumptions (he acknowledges this problem around (3:00), but goes on with it, anyway). Yes, I know that it is easier for him to simply speak in terms of the big "G" but I ask you to listen to his comments again and imagine what it would have sounded like had he used generic deity language, instead. For example, if you say "creator being" instead, you have not dragged in any assumptions from anyone's religious scriptures or pronouncements. Everything Sean wanted to say could have been phrased in deistic language until the very end where he zeros in specifically on the Christian deities with the Problem of Evil, etc. In both English and Arabic the generic "god" was taken over to implicitly establish a position of assumed exclusivity that slants every argument that uses the terms. There is no need to cede that advantage at the start.<br />
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At (2:09) Sean tells us that he is going to use "theory" to mean an idea about the Universe that may be true or false. This is not such a big problem, and I could just let it slide, but those of us who have spent years trying to get Creationists to understand that the word "theory" as used in "The Theory of Evolution" means an explanation that is supported by extensive tested evidence, and is not just an hypothesis or "idea that may be true or false." In the profession of Physics, theory and hypothesis are often used interchangeably. Those in that field understand that perfectly well, and it presents no problem there. The problem comes when presenting to the public, where hypothesis is interchangeable with "guess." We really need "theory" to mean more than "guess" when we present these things, and it would be nice if the physicists would help out with that (not holding my breath).<br />
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I am sad to see Sean pull out Bayes' theorem circa (31:50) and try to feed it probabilities re an undefined and specified deity and unknown to even exist alternate Universes. It is another case of garbage in and garbage out. How would the choice of Krishna or Baal or Zeus or deified Jesus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster change the resultant probability? What if the possible alternate Universes are quantized with big jumps in between, what result would that give? The point is that bringing in an algorithm, even if it is known to work in general, cannot help you if what you have to work with is based on what you don't know, and especially if that is also what you can't test.<br />
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The Erroneous:<br />
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My biggest problem with Sean comes in the segment starting circa (27:00) when he presents so called "fine-tuning" as something like evidence for the theistic hypothesis. Sean almost sees through this, but not quite. I have <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2008/06/anthropomorphizing-fine-tuning.html" target="_blank">written about this before</a> (more <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2008/07/cosmic-fine-tuning.html" target="_blank">here</a>), and it is sad to see someone who has studied epistemology make the kind of map versus territory errors that Sean makes. There is a general confusion between using the phrase "laws of physics" when describing the regularities we observe in Nature, versus using the same phrase to describe our mathematical models of Nature. This map/territory error leads to speaking about the "laws of Nature" as if they are objective "things" instead of our inductive inferences. If Hume were around he would tell you that we cannot show that our "laws" are fundamentally correct, or that they "run the Universe" only that, so far, they work as models (maps) to let us make predictions about what Nature will do in a given situation.<br />
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We write parameters into our models and then do experiments to make measurements of Nature so as to set values in those models that will give the best predictions. That we choose something to be a parameter does not necessarily mean that there really exists any such thing in Nature. Nature may have an entirely different fundamental structure that sets things to be the way they are, but it happens that all the conditions that we can test allow that to be modeled by the mathematical operators and parameters we now use. So it was with Newton, until special conditions of high velocity and gravity did not match observation, requiring Einstein. We can never know if our equations actually drive reality, we can only refine them, just as a better map maker draws finer and finer lines.<br />
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Our models are judged by how well they predict what happens in our Universe. This is a one-way relationship. Nothing validates our models outside our Universe, just as Newton was not valid for high velocities. The "constants" in our models are there to make the models give proper results; they are not parameters that have any validity on their own. We are used to playing "what if" games with simulations in engineering and business, but those testings of parameters are always within our knowable of reality; we can go test if these alternates are meaningful. A model of our Universe is not like that. Changing the value of a constant so that something other than our observed physics comes out, is a case of garbage in, garbage out. We do not know if what we picked as constants could, in any way, be different than what we measure. We don't know if any can be changed independently of any other. They are not the reality, they are the map to the reality, and the very idea of expecting to make a different reality by changing a value is like expecting someone to get hurt by sticking a needle in a voodoo doll made in the image of said person.<br />
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So called "fine-tuning" loses the force of necessity because it uses the modeling process backwards. What the argument really boils down to is, "if the Universe were different, it would not be the same." Physicists will continue to ask why the models we have are so brittle such that the constants have to be so carefully set to get proper results, but that is a proper question about how we model Nature, not one about Nature itself. Perhaps one day we will find some deeper driving structure that underlies the brittleness, but we may never. The proper answer is that we don't know, and one cannot properly draw conclusions from what we don't know. The bottom line is that the brittleness of our models does not necessarily imply that our Universe is "fine-tuned."<br />
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In Conclusion:<br />
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I like Sean very much and really enjoy listening to him explain what we know about cosmology. He can easily rip through the common arguments used by WLC ("fine-tuning" notwithstanding), and I am looking forward to seeing him do so.<br />
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<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-56422551673772312402013-09-14T17:20:00.001-07:002013-10-14T09:16:15.981-07:00Krauss v. Craig: Why is there something?This is the second "discussion" between Lawrence Krauss and William Lane Craig in Australia during August 2013. I have written about part 1 <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2013/09/has-science-buried-god.html" target="_blank">here</a> and part 3 <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2013/09/is-it-reasonable-to-believe-there-is-god.html" target="_blank">here</a>. It is somewhat unfortunate that part 2 was delayed because it would have given me a better context for writing about part 3, had I seen these in the order they happened. I will try not to repeat too much of what I have already written.<br />
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Lawrence started this round and decided to say what he wanted about Physics, leaving the evening's stated topic to be opened by Dr. Craig. Dr. Krauss seemed to want to make the case that the principles of science make the world a better place, and that we should look at the Universe for its explanation, like it or not.<br />
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Then came Dr. Craig. WLC wants to restrict the definition of "nothing" to be the <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2012/02/physical-nothing-v-metaphysical-nothing.html" target="_blank">metaphysical nothing</a> as used by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz" target="_blank">Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz</a>. Leibniz had a tremendous mental capability of a bent that one, today, would associate with the fields of computer science and/or analytic philosophy and/or mathematics. As with other great thinkers of the past, I would very much like to know how Leibniz would alter his philosophical writings if he could come back and read (in his case) Darwin, Einstein and Turing. He guessed the foundations for so much that would be developed after his time, but was stuck with the clockwork model of classical physics and the theological objections to naturalism arising from the big "gap" of human origin that would not be plugged until Darwin. There is no doubt that quantum mechanics would have completely fascinated Leibniz, as it dashes the "clockwork" to tiny pieces that appear and disappear and knock together to make anything possible for short enough times and at small enough scales.<br />
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But all of this is of no concern to WLC because the subject of the evening has been stated in terms of the question asked by Leibniz of the metaphysical nothing that was understood in the 17th century. WLC defends this by stating that such a "nothing" is not in itself a "thing," but rather, the universal negation of all things. This is one of those tricky assumptions that has to be used carefully in logical arguments. If I have a set of things, I can take the complement of the set an talk about the things that are not in the set. This is metaphysical when applied to reality, because we do not know all the properties of the set of all things and need some justification to take the complement of that set (universal negation) and thus tie physical nothing to the notion of a null set of "things." What has been demonstrated in the laboratory is that no amount of taking things away gets to a "nothing from which nothing comes." Thus, the very existence of the metaphysical nothing of Leibniz (outside of just an abstract concept) has not been shown as possible, in itself.<br />
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WLC goes on to put up his bullet points for the argument from contingency attributed to Leibniz:<br />
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<i>1) Every existing thing has an explanation of its existence (either in the necessity of its own existence or in an external cause).</i><br />
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<i>2) If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.</i><br />
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<i>3) The universe exists.</i><br />
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<i>4) Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1 and 3).</i><br />
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<i>5) Therefore, the explanation of the universe's existence is God (from 2 and 4).</i><br />
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WLC then asserts that to escape the "air tight" logic of the argument, the "atheist" must show that one of the premises is false. Here comes WLC's most common rhetorical trick, burden shifting. No, the atheist does not have to show any of the premises to be false, WLC has the burden to show that they are each necessarily true. Not just maybe true, but demonstrably true in order to use them in a <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2013/08/understanding-forcing-arguments.html" target="_blank">forcing argument</a>. WLC can't show that (1) and (2) are true, so he resorts to "more plausibly true." However, that is exactly the trick of using something you have not show to be true to force the acceptance of a proposition as true that you can't directly show to be true.<br />
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The justifications for (1) presented by WLC are full of the usual holes. We don't know of any actual thing with "necessary" existence. Abstract concepts are not "things" with the kind of existence we notice in the rock that has just caused us to stub our toe. Mathematical objects are tautological consequences of chosen axioms, and did not exist even as ideas before there where human minds to explore those consequences. We also have quantum events that are neither necessary nor contingent. WLC then proceeds to the fallacy of composition by asserting that a property that we hold independent of size would necessarily apply to the Universe itself (the biggest thing). However, we judge a property to be independent of size by comparing things of different size to see if it still holds, but you can't get outside the Universe and compare it to anything else, so that test no longer makes the property necessarily true. (It is amusing to hear WLC try to make a joke about someone stating existence of a ball as a brute fact without explanation, all the while that is exactly what he is asserting about his deity.)<br />
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Premise (2) is even more flim flam. There may be any number of explanations for the existence of our Universe. Nothing says we have evolved enough brains to understand those explanations, or have ways to put them to the test. There may be an explanation, there may be multiple explanations, but untestable, or their may be no explanation. Pulling out a deity for the job is the ultimate God-of-the-Gaps that WLC keeps (falsely) claiming that he does not do. His claim that atheists generally agree with (2) is completely bogus, and the next few minutes are devoted to a straw man completely made of his imagination. (Note: "atheism" is not a proposition that can be true or false, it is a position of lack of faith.)<br />
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The moderator asked Lawrence to explain abiogenesis (without using that term) and Lawrence expanded that to the origin of everything, and took it very well into talking about the illusion of design. The moderator then asked WLC about the testability of his deity by science, and he sidestepped the issue by stating that because science studies the natural world, it lacks the conceptual tools to do theology. Of course, he neglects that every religion makes claims of supernatural actions in the world that we can look at, and that the long history is that when we do, we find natural causes and religion has to retrench back to where science has yet to make the needed tools.<br />
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In the back an forth, I was glad that Lawrence called WLC down for using the phrase, "... that I can possibly think of ..." which is exactly arguing from ignorance. WLC depends on the audience not being able (or willing) to think past the option he offers, and so doing abuses the forcing nature of the argument. I have wanted to yell at him for this in every debate I have watched him give over the years, and was glad to have Lawrence do so, at least this one time.<br />
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The moderator threw in an off-topic question about why SETI has not found anything, and Lawrence did his best to work around it anyway. That was followed by another off-topic question of infinity that did not make any progress in any particular direction. Even the moderator recognized that her next question was a distraction; Lawrence used it to go off on the value of uncertainty. Next Lawrence asked WLC for something from theology that has added to our knowledge. WLC waffled on that by playing with the definition of "knowledge" while Lawrence challenged him as to why different theologies in different religions come up with different knowledge, whereas, science from all around the world comes to the same conclusions. After some back and forth the moderator realized she was not making progress with her questions, and moved on to those submitted by the audience.<br />
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The questions from the audience were not much better. At a point Lawrence pushes the discussion into "consciousness" by asking for evidence for a "soul." WLC tries to dodge this by shifting to a discussion of "intentionality" which he leaves undefined, but depends upon to make a "gap" argument. Lawrence then uses a question from the audience to go into why we can't resolve these origin issues without a quantum theory of gravity (i.e. quantum general relativity). The moderator then objects that given the lack of scientific training of the general public, isn't Lawrence asking them to take his book on faith just as religions do? I was surprised that Lawrence was able to keep his cool and not blow up after that one, but he did remain cool and did a fair job of keeping science from devolving into faith.<br />
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Dr. Craig gets asked the question of how a timeless deity gets to the point of making the decision to create our world. It is pretty much the same question so many children come up with about what said deity was doing for an eternity before getting around to the "Let there be light." WLC waffles around but basically answers that a timeless, omnipotent and omniscient deity can just do that.<br />
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It irritates me, and I think many others, when WLC pulls things from our arguments into his own as if those work the same both ways. At this point in the discussion he says that faith is believing what you have good reasons to think is true. The writer of the question was calling Dr. Craig out on this very point because if you do have good reasons, then you are using reason and not faith. I often say that in place of faith I have reasonable expectations based on prior evidence. WLC has a website called "Reasonable Faith" where he promotes the idea that he can use reason to overcome objections to the truth of his faith. The "reasonable" part for WLC seems to be achieved if he can argue his way around the objections, not that he necessarily has a positive path of reason, which still leaves room for "faith." He wants to have faith, and not need it at the same time. (P.S. The girl in his high school German class was just too hot to ignore.)<br />
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The moderator read a question to Lawrence that boiled down to accusing him of wasting his time trying to find out how the Universe will end. Dr. Krauss came back with an excellent reply about how being audacious and asking such questions is what makes life worth living.<br />
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Dr. Craig was asked about making a connection between the immaterial deity in Leibniz and the Christian deity. WLC stated that there was nothing making that connection, as that was not the subject at hand, but that any of the monotheistic deities would fill the bill. The question then proceeded to why just one and not polytheism? WLC replied that one was, by Occam, simpler, and Lawrence managed to sneak in an aside that zero would be better. I would have tried to jump in at that point and argue that the immaterial cause from Leibniz need not be any "being" at all, nor need to have of the attributes commonly associated with deities. For example an eternal quantum network of immaterial fields that randomly pop out universes also fits the requirements.<br />
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Unfortunately, the moderator then lets WLC digress into why he thinks his deity is necessary for objective morality and Lawrence complains that they went through all that in part one, the night before. At least they were able to agree to keep it to a minimum until part three.<br />
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The subject of lack of evidence for the existence of any given deity was handled well by Lawrence when it looked like the moderator had hit him with a trap question. It would have been nice to start out the evening with a clear statement that, just like Russell's Teapot, Lawrence was not taking the position that science could disprove that which has no effect on the world. However, WLC tried to use comments from Steven Hawking to indicate that theology did enter into scientific discussions, but that was easily put to the side.<br />
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Next the moderator took a veiled shot at scientism by asking Lawrence if science was all that was needed to address the question of why there was something. Lawrence did not step into that trap, either, but quite handily stated that if you want to understand the origin of everything, you should look to the physics we find out by empirical observation. A second attempt asked about "sources of knowledge" and Lawrence asked what that means only to be gleefully jumped by WLC with reference to the earlier rejection by Lawrence of requests for clarification of "knowledge" by theologians. There was back and forth on that, that the moderator called "a tussle."<br />
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IN CONCLUSION (I'll bet you were wishing for those words long ago ...)<br />
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Both Dr. Krauss and Dr. Craig showed a degree of getting used to each other that was not evident in part one. Lawrence dropped much of the personal animus that had been shown the prior night, and took much better care that he keept to logically defensible positions. Dr. Craig may be seriously deluded, but he is not stupid and he is very skilled in the rhetorical tricks that make him sound as if he as proven a point, even when he has not. Trying to answer the basic question from Leibniz in this forum is very difficult if not impossible because it requires a first unpacking of the definitions and assumptions in the question itself, not the least of which is the starting point of the teleological "why" instead of the factual "how did it come to be." Leibniz poses what sounds like a simple question, but it needs at least a book length answer, which will still boil down to the tautology that if there were nothing, we wouldn't notice.<br />
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[<a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2013/09/is-it-reasonable-to-believe-there-is-god.html" target="_blank">Part 3 here</a>]<br />
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<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-22877534209213108442013-09-06T16:05:00.000-07:002013-09-09T12:15:22.107-07:00Is It Reasonable to Believe There Is a God?"Is It Reasonable to Believe There Is a God?" is the title of the third 2013 debate in Australia between Lawrence Krauss and William Lane Craig. (I reviewed <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2013/09/has-science-buried-god.html" target="_blank">part one, here</a>.)<br />
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1) "<i>God is the best explanation</i>."<br />
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William Lane Craig comes right out of the starting gate with the "fallacy of equal burden." He wants the question of reasonableness of belief to be judged by weighing the 'for' and 'against' arguments to see which side has the edge. This is a rhetorical trick to get a leg up in the contest where, in fact, all the burden of proof is on the side making the assertion: "There is a God." One needs no reason to reject belief in the existence of entities for which there is no evidence. It is not just a matter of seeing which side can tip the scales, if it were, we could weigh YHWH against Zeus and see which myth seems better, all the while ignoring the basic burden for showing that they exist, at all.<br />
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1.1) "<i>The Universe began to exist</i>."<br />
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Once again, WLC invokes the "God-of-the-gaps" by asserting that his deity is the best explanation for the origin of the Universe, without giving any explanation, at all. He attempts to force his audience (see <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2013/08/understanding-forcing-arguments.html" target="_blank">Understanding "Forcing" Arguments</a>) to accept the "Big Bang" as a "beginning" or moment of Creation by misrepresenting physics, as if a necessary connection to his deity arises simply from a point start of time itself. Misrepresenting physics to do so has worked well for WLC in the past, but in this case doing so in the presence of a world class cosmologist is <i>not</i> going to work out so well.<br />
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1.2) "<i>If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a transcendent cause</i>."<br />
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This implication is not justified as physical nothing may well be eternal (or even timeless) in past, and the Universe may be able to spring without cause from quantum fluctuations of that physical nothing. This is the current work area examined by Lawrence Krauss and written about in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Universe_from_Nothing" target="_blank">his latest book</a>.<br />
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1.3) "<i>Therefore, the universe has a transcendent cause</i>."<br />
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It would be one thing if WLC honestly postulated a "transcendent cause" but instead, he goes straight to the unjustified inference that there MUST be such a cause, and that it MUST be his deity (I have written <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-bogus-cosmology-of-william-lane.html" target="_blank">more about that here</a>). WLC moves on to try to force the audience to accept, by elimination (always watch out when he says "... there can only be two things ..."), his proposed "unembodied consciousness," given as if such <b>can</b> exist. However, everything we know about any conscious mind comes from the operation of a living body, specifically a living brain. What he is doing might as well be presenting "unembodied swimming" as if swimming can be going along without a physical body actually in the water. If WLC tried to invoke a "square circle" as a 'cause' we would stop him right there because the statement is logically self-inconsistent; with "unembodied consciousness" he is fooling his audience into going along with something they are just not quite able to see as such.<br />
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2) "<i>The Applicability of Mathematics to the Physical World</i>."<br />
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This is one of those backwards arguments, as in having the cart before the horse; the Universe is not shown to be necessarily based on mathematics just because we use mathematics to make a map of it. Mathematics works because we construct it so that it works. What does not work, we leave on the shelf waiting for some application to pop up where it might work. Mathematics is tautological based on chosen axioms that are without proof. Out of the unbounded number of different systems of mathematics that can arise from different axioms, there is no way to "prove" that one is better or more "correct" than another, until, it comes to use in modeling what we see in the world around us.<br />
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2.1) "<i>If God did not exist, the applicability of mathematics would be just a happy coincidence</i>."<br />
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Showing amazement that such models work is like showing amazement that the tools in the mechanic shop can be used so well to work on your car. When the math of the time of Newton was not sufficient to do the physics he needed, he defined new mathematical tools (The Calculus), which had they not worked, we would not be hearing of, today.<br />
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2.2) "<i>The applicability of mathematics is not just a happy coincidence</i>."<br />
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Mathematics is applicable to the physical world because we make it so, extending it from time to time as needed. A great achievement of human kind, no doubt, but neither coincidence nor theological justification, what so ever.<br />
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2.3) "<i>Therefore, God exists</i>."<br />
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A false premise implies any conclusion. As explained above, this is trickery in the form of a logical argument.<br />
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3) "<i>The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life</i>."<br />
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I went into this canard in my <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2013/09/has-science-buried-god.html" target="_blank">blog post about the first of these</a> three Australian "discussions." Physics only tells us about the Universe we have, and can make no reliable statement about a different Universe that we don't have, because the models cannot be tested against observed data in a Universe that we don't have. Extrapolating models derived to match the observations in our Universe to outside that bound of verification, is not science, but provides WLC with a means to peddle his flimflam.<br />
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4) "<i>Objective Moral Values and Duties in the World</i>."<br />
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Yes, there are no "objective" morals. However, there is still no proof of objective morals, even if there do exist deities (as per Euthyphro). This is another cart before the horse situation. First, deities would have to be justified, and then some proof would have to be constructed to objective morality from there. The "wanting" of such objective morals does not justify the postulation of the object of desire. We are here on this world, together, and if we want to have mutually beneficial lives, we have to use our own brains to work out systems of right and wrong to make that happen. If you are the elder of a tribe, and the people will believe that you can speak the moral law from a worshiped deity of absolute right, then that job is much easier for you.<br />
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5) "<i>The Historical Facts concerning the Resurrection of Jesus</i>."<br />
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Yes, people take this on faith because it is absurd, and there really is no other way. The so called "historical facts" are all about what people in the first and second centuries did or wrote as indications of their beliefs, but not historical facts about what actually happened.<br />
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5.1) "<i>There are three established facts concerning Jesus' fate: his empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances, and the disciples' belief in his resurrection</i>."<br />
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These are not established facts. People in the Hellenic community wrote, decades later, about stories about events after the death of Jesus. A non-empty tomb would be real evidence that Jesus did not rise from the dead, but that does not mean that an empty bomb is. If Jesus was really interested in having future generations believe, he could have had them gather around to watch him get up and walk out of the tomb, and continue to walk (or float) down the street to start preaching in the Temple. An empty tomb is necessary, but not sufficient, to meet the standard of extraordinary evidence needed for the extraordinary event of coming back from the dead.<br />
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5.2) "<i>The hypothesis "God raised Jesus from the dead" is the best explanation of these facts</i>."<br />
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The best explanation is that later people, who were not there, came to believe unsubstantiated stories about what was believed by earlier people. This has happened in the development of epic tales and religions throughout the history of humanity.<br />
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5.3) "<i>Therefore, the God who raised Jesus exists</i>."<br />
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This gets very confusing when the theology of the Trinity is dragged in to show that the deity that raised Jesus, was Jesus, so what does being "dead" in that context really mean? The whole argument falls because the premises are not substantiated.<br />
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6) "<i>God can be personally known and experienced</i>."<br />
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This is a bogus invocation of "Personal Evidence," which I have <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2012/09/personal-evidence.html" target="_blank">written about in the past</a>. If we have learned anything from using the Scientific Method, it is that what we can become personally convinced of, need not be true at all. Feynman advised us to keep in mind that we, ourselves, are the easiest to be fooled by our own desires for something to be true.<br />
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In summary, WLC has no extraordinary evidence for his extraordinary claims.<br />
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Lawrence comes out and lets the audience know that humans have dumped the thousands of deities that were worshiped in past times, but WLC is holding out for his "just one." He presents the case that belief in deities is no longer needed to explain our world, and thus these deities are of no importance, and he comes very close to making the argument that I have, noting that <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2012/10/most-people-are-wrong-about-religion.html" target="_blank">most people are necessarily wrong about religion</a>.<br />
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In Brief: Our ideas have changed. Resurrection, old idea with no evidence. The alien abduction reference shows us how wrong we can be about hallucinations, miracles etc. Personal evidence. Answers in advance. Reasonable people have unreasonable beliefs. Not to believe is different from believing the negative. Nonsense of Original Sin. Dependence on Geography. Canaanite children. "then a miracle ..."<br />
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I would have liked Lawrence to have asked WLC when, in the chain of our ancestors that goes back to simple organisms, the suffering of pain did begin?<br />
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At the start of the 'discussion' part, WLC once again unjustly claims entitlement to an even burden for his extraordinary claims.<br />
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Yes, there are examples cosmic models without bounded past time. See: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3MWRvLndzs" target="_blank">Contracting Space-Time</a>.<br />
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In the discussion of so called "Fine-Tuning" Lawrence almost gets out of the logical trap, but not quite. A statement such as "certain aspects of life would be impossible if the constants were different" falls into the trap, and should have been, "in a universe with different physics, the scientists would come up with different models." He tries to tell WLC that the 'constants' are part of what determines the 'laws' such that there is no way to know what would happen if the constants were different, and that there might be different matter and chemistry and life. Unfortunately, Lawrence is still talking about models of physics and not the physics itself. It continues to be a win for WLC as long as WLC can point to work by physicists who plug in different 'constants' (a contradiction in terms) and show chaos. But this is not because our models are "fine-tuned" it is because they are very brittle, and a small change in a critical place will throw them off such that they no longer predict what we observe. Lawrence should have pointed out that our models come from observations in our own physics, and do not extend beyond it. The models developed in physics are not designed or tested to give accurate predictions in universes other than our own, full stop.<br />
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WLC likes to claim reliability the oral stories that existed before the writing of the Gospels based on the presumption of characteristics attributed to the "oral tradition" at the time. However, Jewish oral traditions were learned and practiced by the educated scribes and temple workers, not the common people. Further, a religious story had to be canonized, or reach some level of acceptance, before it would be considered important enough to be memorized for recitation to future generations. In the first half of the first century there seems to be an expectation among the followers of Jesus that his return to establish a new kingdom was imminent, and thus no need for making long lasting records.<br />
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Explainability is another red herring that WLC calls upon as if it were some objective fact. However, it is a function of by whom and to whom. Once upon a time, the Universe was not explainable, at all, because there had not evolved, yet, anyone to form an explanation, nor anyone to consider such an explanation. As time and Evolution has gone on, such have come to be, but how would we justify that we are now the brains advanced enough to judge the 'explainability'?<br />
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I was glad to hear Lawrence say that no mathematical model exactly reproduces Nature. If he had gone just a bit farther, he would have been able to use that to undercut the 'fine-tuning' argument. He needed to tell WLC that the Universe is not "written in the language of mathematics" but rather that we write mathematics to help us understand a Universe that we observe doing what it does.<br />
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Lawrence got a good point in about the lack of any special value of the Genesis myth v. all the rest.<br />
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Finally, Lawrence did very well to observe that philosophy advances when science gives it more facts about the world to use as the basis of further thinking. So often philosophy is discounted because there is a public assumption that it stopped at the time of the metaphysics of Aristotle. I suspect that Lawrence has been favorably influenced by Dan Dennett and others who are right on top of modern neuroscience and cosmology, and use that increasing knowledge to cut through the fuzzy thinking of the past. All and all, the last few minutes of the 'discussion' part was much more interesting than so many of the dry debates we have seen from WLC over the years.<br />
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<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-62940602579456938812013-09-01T00:18:00.001-07:002013-09-24T14:39:37.157-07:00Has Science Buried God?"Has Science Buried God?" is the title chosen for the first meeting between William Lane Craig and Lawrence Krauss in Australia.<br />
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[Update 9/6/13: Embedding of the video has been disallowed. You can <a href="https://vimeo.com/73280102#at=0" target="_blank">see it at this link</a>.]<br />
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I have watched this a couple of times, now, and want to write about a few points it brings to the forefront (I am going to ignore the speechifying by the 'moderator'). It was good that Dr. Krauss brought up the multiple deities issues at the beginning, as this <strike>debate</strike> 'discussion' was organized by a Christian fellowship that presupposes their own deity to the exclusion of all others, and thus leaves all of those thousands of others out of the discussion. That comes in again, later, when the argument over 'objective' morals gets going.<br />
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I don't think it was a good idea for Lawrence to go into matching up Christian stories with earlier myths without clearly sourced references. Doing so played into the area where WLC could dismiss those based on his own credentials. WLC did so by insinuating that myths from the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans were not something that a group of Jews were going to take up. He got away with that because the historical Jesus is connected with reforming the Jewish tradition, whereas, the deified Jesus that came along well after his death, (in the churches set up by the Hellenic peoples) were two different things. The early Jewish followers of Jesus did not dream up the Trinity, or expect to wipe away the Jewish tradition, and that group did not last. The founding of a new religion based on the deification (a common idea in the non-Jewish community) of the risen from the dead Jesus, was done by people who never knew Jesus when he was a street preacher.<br />
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Lawrence does a good job in the summary of his points. Attacks on the honesty of WLC should have been handled better (i.e. show that WLC is wrong without the implication of mendacity). However, Lawrence got a chance to make use of it in the third meeting where he was able to attribute the misstatements of WLC to religious enthusiasm not restrained by facts.<br />
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Then WLC got up. He immediately throws in a red herring by presenting a TIME magazine reference to "theologians" and the "death of God." The topic at hand is not theology, but science, and talking about mistaken ideas by theologians was rhetorical misdirection, pure and simple. WLC then transitions to folks at science conferences talking about religious subjects. Notice he does not state that such discussions were favorable to religion, or that any new supporting evidence for religion was introduced. Yes, you are going to find individual workers in science who have individual religious faith positions, however, none presenting objective evidence to support the truth of those positions. Just because organizations like sayTempleton, are putting money behind dialog with religion, does not mean there is any there, there.<br />
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WLC wants to dismiss all the objections by the "New Atheists" on the basis that the simpleton deities trashed by the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens are not anything like what is studied by "sophisticated" theologians. Yet, we can bring up video after video on the Internet of street preachers such as Ray Comfort professing exactly the "God-of-the-Gaps." WLC decries such simplicity, and yet, throughout the rest of the presentation he, again and again, appeals to his deity as an explanation for what is not yet known. Watch him profess that the cause of the Universe is not explained, therefore it must be exactly the deity, to which, he arbitrarily attaches the three "omni" attributes, all the while ignoring both the lack of supporting evidence and the inherent conflicting implications.<br />
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Let's move on to three of his 'six' ways: (he says the last three were really killer, but there just wasn't time ...)<br />
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1) "Theology furnishes the conceptual frame work in which science can flourish."<br />
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No. The philosophy (epistemology) of critical thinking does that. It has nothing to do with any kind of theology. As Lawrence pointed out, it depends on being truthful even when that truth rips down your most dear belief. You simply cannot do that in theology. Christianity did not promote that critical thinking. If, however, it had, it would not mean that Christianity is necessarily correct. Most of the thinking that was found to be of use in Christian theology came from Aristotle, who was a pagan. The source does not set the validity.<br />
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I can't see how WLC can keep a straight face when he denies that Christianity sees the world as inhibited by 'spirits' (in contrast to Asian theology) when exorcism and casting out of demons is common place.<br />
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* The 'laws of logic' don't come from Christianity, they are axiomatic like the rules of the game Monopoly.<br />
* The orderly structure of the physical world emerges stocastically from the randomness of the quantum world.<br />
* Our cognitive faculties are very un-reliable and that is why we need the Scientific Method and our peers to help us not fool ourselves.<br />
* We do not know if inductive reasoning is valid, it is simply the best we can do.<br />
* The moral values we use in Science are not objective, they are what we have found to work best (so far).<br />
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The scientific world view is the same as the Christian world view until it is not. Much the same as most persons who are scientists and most persons who are Christian, wear shoes.<br />
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2) "Science can verify, as well as falsify, theological claims."<br />
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* The Scientific Method can show that given claims are consistent with observed data. This is usually not very interesting. The interesting part is when the Method shows that what you want to be true is just not true. The cutting away of the non-truth is how scientific knowledge advances. I am glad to hear that WLC believes that science can falsify religious beliefs (if only ...).<br />
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* We do not know if the Universe we observe, was the result of something that came before, or simply originated from physical nothing. WLC is keen to force us to believe in a created beginning and will use whatever rhetorical tricks needed to push this. He has been called down many times for misstating the knowledge we have about the subject from physics, and continues to do so, here.<br />
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* The 'fine-tuning' canard. See <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2008/06/anthropomorphizing-fine-tuning.html" target="_blank">my refutation</a>.<br />
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3) "Science encounters metaphysical problems which theology can help to solve."<br />
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* Teleology. A psychological need based on our nature from evolution. See <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab1TaROJ5bo" target="_blank">this video by Dan Dennett</a>.<br />
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* Explanation is about the marks on the maps we make and use to help us deal with reality. It is not about the reality itself. Confusing the two is another rhetorical trick.<br />
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* Theology postulates, but does not explain.<br />
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* WLC could prove all this, but alas, "time does not allow."<br />
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End of WLC standard spiel.<br />
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The moderator comes in at this point and tries to put science and religion on some kind of equal footing in terms of motivating people to tackle the problems of the world. He fails at that, and Lawrence lets him know that "Science is not a 'thing,'" which is one of the best things Lawrence says all night. Science does not do things in the world, it is there to tell us things about the world, upon which, we can rely.<br />
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WLC completely blows it on the religious take on environmentalism. It depends on what your religious beliefs are. If you believe that your deity has given you dominion over the Earth to do with as you will, that is not going to get you to sacrifice exploiting some resource. If you think (like some American congressmen) that your deity protects the world from global warming, you are going to make catastrophically disastrous decisions about public policy. Worse, if you believe using up the resources of the world will hasten the "second coming" then we are all screwed.<br />
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Moderator declares a "cheap shot." Both WLC and the moderator invoke the is/ought. Unfortunately, they are correct and Lawrence does not know how to show that the concept of "objective" morality is bogus, and so it matters not that the unattainable does not come from science. I truly wish that Lawrence did know the answers to these things, such that it would not look like WLC is winning the day with unsubstantiated assertions. Rational morals do depend on initial assumptions just as does the geometry of Euclid. As a society we can sign up to a moral standard, even if it can't be proven to be "objective." That is how we make a <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2012/09/betterism.html" target="_blank">better world</a>. WLC then tries to reject Euthyphro without explanation or justification, and Lawrence does not have the ready answer. His attempt to justification by "brains" does sound good to the audience, but is not going to stop WLC, although when Lawrence points out that "objective" depends on your choice of deity, the moderator has to jump in and save WLC.<br />
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I resent the gratuitous defamation of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philistines" target="_blank">the inhabitants of Philistine</a> by the moderator. Got evidence?<br />
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Yes, moral improvement happens in spite of the claim to "objective" morality by religion. People are sometimes ends in themselves, except when they are collateral damage. You are not going to get any morality about the Crusades, Inquisition etc. WLC proclaims the right of his deity to take lives, with no presentation of evidence. I am sure you understand why I would have liked Lawrence to ask WLC for evidence, and keep asking even though he was not going to get any.<br />
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Next we have to confront the bullshit from the moderator about the moral principle of not stepping on the most needy. The moderator is implying that without the divine we would throw them in the furnace. Note, that does not happen in Sweden. Religion does not help here, but Lawrence needed a more comprehensive reply. As it was, it simply provided WLC an opening for platitudes.<br />
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Good statement by Lawrence about the greatness of knowing about how a rainbow works, as well as how beautiful it is.<br />
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WLC is still a loser on the Canaanite issue, but he is like Wylie Coyote running in mid air not realizing that he has no support, at all. Lawrence makes a very good point about Science trying to prove itself wrong, which religion never does (good reference to the Tooth Fairy). Yes, theologians would very well redefine "up" if that is what it takes.<br />
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On the question of what Christians have done to advance civilization in the past, this has nothing to do with the truth of Christianity or any religion. The Aztecs made a great civilization as well, but that does not mean that human sacrifice was necessary. Historically, the powerful supported the academics so that they did not conspire to overthrow the political order. When that order was the RCC, the RCC did the supporting.<br />
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"When I was a child, I thought as a child ..." Lawrence makes a very good finishing point.<br />
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Lawrence needed to explain "belief" as "reasonable expectation based on prior evidence." WLC needs to understand the difference between physical nothing and the <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2012/02/physical-nothing-v-metaphysical-nothing.html" target="_blank">unevidenced metaphysical nothing</a>. I wish Lawrence could have called WLC down on his <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2013/08/understanding-forcing-arguments.html" target="_blank">misuse of forcing arguments</a>.<br />
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General consensus: the moderator was a jerk.<br />
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My view of this 'discussion' is that WLC did his usual conceptual contortions in support of his religious beliefs. Had WLC been born in a Muslim country, I suspect he would be making the same arguments, but for a different deity. Lawrence said some good things, from time to time, but with just a small amount of training in the philosophy of religion, and the history of Christianity, he could have ripped WLC to bits.<br />
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[<a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2013/09/krauss-v-craig-why-is-there-something.html" target="_blank">Part 2 here</a>]<br />
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<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-52113366608847095062013-08-13T10:22:00.000-07:002013-08-30T00:19:09.079-07:00Lawrence Krauss calls out WLCLawrence Krauss debated William Lane Craig in Austrailia a couple of weeks ago, and I am looking forward to the video. In the mean time, Lawrence has called WLC down for remarks made against Richard Dawkins:<br />
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[Update 8/30/13] The 'debate' is up on the web at:<a href="http://vimeo.com/73280102" target="_blank"> http://vimeo.com/73280102</a><br />
Comments to follow in a subsequent post.Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-39778780747920411992013-08-07T13:12:00.002-07:002013-08-07T13:25:19.125-07:00Lying for JesusEarlier this year, the video blogger, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/potholer54">Potholer54</a>, put up this video dedicated to one of the 'tubes biggest pushers of lies for Jesus, the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-OLG0KyR4" target="_blank">Banana Man</a>, Ray Comfort:<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/GW05npbQHVs" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
Ray has practiced and practiced his "street ambush" rumble of risible rhetoric, and edited such into a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0u3-2CGOMQ">new campaign video</a> that he wants to distribute, much as he did <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13M_GEGN3TY" target="_blank">his "new intro" to Darwin's master work</a>. Ray's new video shows the same kind of lying for Jesus that Potholer exposed above, and that we discussed in great length re the movie "Expelled" on the venerable "<a href="http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/2394-lying-for-jesus" target="_blank">Lying for Jesus</a>" thread five years ago.<br />
<br />
I am not going to go through the new video and point out all the tricks and fallacies, but just want to relate some of my own experiences with missionaries who have tried some of them on me.<br />
<br />
1) "Do you believe in Evolution?"<br />
<br />
I answer this one. "I don't have to believe in it, I can check it." Usual reaction: deer caught in headlights. It leads to a discussion of what is meant by "believe," which is a little piece of epistemology (quite a lot, actually) that is swept under the rug in religion, because you are supposed to already know what it means.<br />
<br />
2) "But you have faith in science!"<br />
<br />
My reply is, "I have reasonable expectations based on prior evidence." That is not as stupefying as the above, but I can't help counting the seconds it takes to sink in as a quick measure of my interlocutor. Once again, it can lead to a broad discussion of what is and is not "faith."<br />
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3) "But you have not seen Evolution happen!"<br />
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"And you have neither seen Jesus die on a cross, nor rise from the dead." As you can guess, this leads to talking over the reliability of Bible passages v. looking at fossils in rocks and DNA in cells. Objective observation of factual evidence wins over legends in mythology (the theology of the past) every time.<br />
<br />
4) "But there are no transitional fossils!"<br />
<br />
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik" target="_blank">Tiktaalik</a>, so STFU.<br />
<br />
And last, but oh so sweet:<br />
<br />
5) "Do you think you are a good person?"<br />
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My answer: "No." After the typical looks of confusion, begins the discussion of why knowing that one is "good" would assume an objective measure of goodness, that has not been established.<br />
<br />
The Banana Man will keep doing his tricks, but we can each be ready to avoid being used by him to push his dishonesty.<br />
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<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-85563469936402243302013-08-06T15:06:00.000-07:002013-08-07T14:01:09.617-07:00Sean Carroll at 3amSean Carroll gave <a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-philosopher-physicist/" target="_blank">an interesting interview to the 3am mag</a>.<br />
<br />
I particularly liked his summation of our state of knowledge:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 19.21875px;"><i>But reality is much larger than the realm of our everyday experience, and we’re very far from having the whole world figured out. Obviously we don’t understand dark matter, dark energy, the Big Bang, quantum gravity, etc. We don’t even have a consensus on what really happens during the process of a quantum measurement. My own guess is that the most dramatic potential for new ideas lies at the intersection of quantum theory and cosmology. I previously confessed to having fondness for the multiverse, but we honestly don’t have a compelling model of it as yet. It’s absolutely conceivable that the whole multiverse idea is dramatically on the wrong track, and the truth is going to look completely different once we understand how space and time emerge from quantum mechanics. Even better and more exciting would be if we find that our current view of quantum mechanics is completely wrong and has to be replaced by something deeply different – I should only be so lucky.</i></span></blockquote>
<br />
To get a feel for how far we are from such fundamental knowledge, watch this video that looks at the question of "Before the Big Bang":<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/IFcQuEw0oY8" width="560"></iframe>Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-61938800083163567142013-08-06T11:06:00.000-07:002013-08-12T04:58:00.187-07:00Why Am I An AtheistToday, Hermant Mehta put up a short <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/08/04/why-am-i-an-atheist/" target="_blank">video on his blog about why he is an atheist</a>.<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/i9FuZv02TgQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <br />I wrote him that I thought it was excellent, succinct and honest. I would have said almost the same things, and recommend it to all, and recommend you keep a link to it handy as an example of clarity to send to your theist friends and family.<br />
<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-86808566676546747142013-08-05T15:46:00.001-07:002014-01-24T02:32:03.289-08:00Center of Your Own UniverseOne of the most odd parts of my experience posting over at Strange Notions, was the introduction to some commenters who were part of the <a href="http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/9/12/18017/5649" target="_blank">Geocentrist Movement</a>. This came out of the blue, to me, but the astronomer, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Plait" target="_blank">Phil Plait</a>, had an <a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/14/geocentrism-seriously/#.UgAekpI0iSo" target="_blank">article debunking it back in 2010</a>. Now, it is a fact that you can pick any point in the Universe and assume that point is absolutely stationary for the purposes of a coordinate system, and then calculate the motions of all other points in terms of that system. But if you can do that for any point, then no point is preferred, and you have not found a difference that makes any difference.<br />
<br />
Looking around for information about this, I found a YouTube channel where the producer has a series dedicated to debunking this nonsense; here are the links to the parts of this very educational series available at this time: <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/wyRJZbNmC7U" width="560"></iframe> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Wu7LqF8fzk" target="_blank">part2</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4bfFrPg21g" target="_blank">part3</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XvOq20N9Xc" target="_blank">part4</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlJHHRyzUPM" target="_blank">part5</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3RXa0GLeHI" target="_blank">part6</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFFL9RciJOU" target="_blank">part7</a> & <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88Os16IUGbo" target="_blank">part8</a>.<br />
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I mostly ignored the geocentrists as SN, but at a point I did decide to explain the idea of picking a coordinate system to a commenter named, "Bob," by describing "<a href="http://www.strangenotions.com/straw-man-scientism/#comment-954566141" target="_blank">Bobcentrism</a>":<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Suppose you picked a point on or in yourself as the physical absolute stationary center of the Universe, lets call this the "CoB" (Center of Bob). As you have pointed out, there is nothing mathematically from preventing the adoption of this reference frame. Now suppose that you are going to run an Olympic race in a stadium. You know that when you run you are not actually moving, but rather, you are stationary at the CoB and your legs are pushing the entire Universe behind you, and then by pushing a bit harder with one leg, you rotate the stadium (the Universe, and all the people watching) around you until you position the finish line under your feet.<br />Now suppose a flea jumped on you just as the race started. Of course, that flea is not going anywhere (much) because it is mostly stationary to the CoB. It sees the stadium and all the people go around, and from its flea brain the idea of Bobcentrism works perfectly fine. However, the people in the stadium all have the view and agreement that you ran around the track.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Always remember that heliocentrism is not about any absolute frame, it simply holds that the planets rotate around the Sun in our solar system (even as the Sun is moving around the galaxy). If any point in the Universe may be chosen to locate a reference frame, then no point has any special standing, and the concept of absolute motion is without evidence.</i></blockquote>
Bob seemed to come to some understanding, but it really did amaze me that some other commenters, there, who had enough science background to know better (one with a PhD in chemistry, even) were giving Geocentrism as much as an even shot at truth. Oh well, ...<br />
<br />
P.S. Some links:<br />
<a href="http://www.geocentrismdebunked.org/">http://www.geocentrismdebunked.org/</a><br />
<a href="http://geocentrismdebunked.blogspot.com/">http://geocentrismdebunked.blogspot.com/</a><br />
<a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2013/12/david-palm-takes-on-the-thankless-task-of-debunking-geocentrism.html">http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2013/12/david-palm-takes-on-the-thankless-task-of-debunking-geocentrism.html</a><br />
<a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2007/02/15/why-biblical-geocentrism-is-wrong">http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2007/02/15/why-biblical-geocentrism-is-wrong</a><br />
<a href="http://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2010/09/geocentrism-galileo-was-wrong.html">http://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2010/09/geocentrism-galileo-was-wrong.html</a><br />
<a href="http://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2011/04/geocentrism-does-nasa-use-geocentrism.html">http://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2011/04/geocentrism-does-nasa-use-geocentrism.html</a><br />
<a href="http://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2011/06/geocentrism-ubiquitous-aberrations.html">http://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2011/06/geocentrism-ubiquitous-aberrations.html</a><br />
<a href="http://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2013/12/more-geocentrism-and-conspiracy-theories.html">http://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2013/12/more-geocentrism-and-conspiracy-theories.html</a>Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-64519576863180932682013-08-04T15:34:00.000-07:002013-09-26T12:21:59.257-07:00The Bogus Cosmology of William Lane CraigNo amount of public debunking seems to get past the cognitive dissonance shielding <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lane_Craig" target="_blank">William Lane Craig</a>. I read his recent book "Reasonable Faith" and <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2012/03/untrue-reason.html#c3" target="_blank">reviewed parts of that</a> used in a compilation issued last year before the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason_Rally" target="_blank">Reason Rally</a>. Chris Hallquist takes a major shot at WLC on <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/hallq/2013/05/an-index-of-why-william-lane-craig-is-a-dishonest-genocide-defending-creepy-homophobe/" target="_blank">his blog</a>, and I don't feel the need to rehash all the reasons why WLC <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76nvMikFdkY" target="_blank">takes unfair advantage of the debate format</a>, but WLC is continuing to push nonsense out through his web site, and I thought I would take a minute to review a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COJ0ED1mV7s" target="_blank">CA video</a> he has there.<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/COJ0ED1mV7s" width="560"></iframe>
In the style of a one-trick pony, WLC started writing about the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kal%C4%81m_Cosmological_Argument" target="_blank">Kalām Cosmological Argument</a> back in the late 1970's and has simply kept doing so while ignoring <a href="http://debunkingwlc.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">all the refutations</a> that have been presented to him. He has changed the language in his presentation to be harder to pin down, and added some purported scientific support, to come up with something that sounds better, and is simply called the "CA" for short. We argued this out, extensively, over at the Strange Notions threads <a href="http://www.strangenotions.com/god-exists/" target="_blank">here</a>, <a href="http://www.strangenotions.com/new-cosmological/" target="_blank">here</a>, <a href="http://www.strangenotions.com/cosmological-argument/" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://www.strangenotions.com/fallacy-of-composition/" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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Starting off, the video defends "Whatever begins to exist has a cause" (P1) by saying that things cannot just pop into existence as if by magic. Yesterday, I explained <a href="http://quinesqueue.blogspot.com/2013/08/understanding-forcing-arguments.html" target="_blank">why P1 is not necessarily so</a>, and thus, cannot be used as a premise in a formal logical argument. WLC does not really care about that, because he is making a video where ordinary people are not going to look too closely, and so he just has to make something sound good on a common sense level. The video asks, "If something can come into existence out of nothing, why don't we see that all the time?" From the physics standpoint, the answer is that we do see that all the time, but the probability of it happening as a function of size drops off so fast that you would have to wait trillions of years to see something pop in that is big enough to see at all.<br />
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Evolution gave us our common sense to deal with common situations on our common size scale. Common sense prepares us not one whit for what is going on at the very small scales of the quantum world. The video uses the word "cause" but uses none of its time to explain what that would mean in a context outside our common sense. But causation itself turns out to be an emergent property that arises from the statistical sum of everything that could be going on, with associated probability distributions, at the quantum scale. We only see the residue from that sum that has enough pattern integrity to hang around long enough to have an effect on our scale, where we call it a "cause." Running the clock backwards approaching Extrapolated Time Zero, corresponds to a size scale below our common sense, and at which what we could ever find as a "cause" becomes unrecognizable.<br />
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Next, the video moves on to "Did the Universe begin to exist?" (asserting so as P2) without the benefit of defining what exactly "the Universe" means. If you think that means the collection of all stars and planets, then we can be reasonably sure there was a time when conditions were too hot for those to exist, so at some point when things cooled for enough of those to exist (bit of a <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/" target="_blank">Sorites Paradox</a> there) you could put down a mark and declare universal existence. However, if the Universe is made of "stuff" that arises from something we don't understand, then is the starting point of the Universe pushed back to the starting point (if there is one) of that unknown "stuff"? If you can't define what it is, you can't prove it began.<br />
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The video then (1:28) tries to make an argument from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics" target="_blank">Second Law of Thermodynamics</a>. This is another common sense shot that ignores the simple fact that, just like causation, the laws of thermodynamics emerge from the statistical action of quantum events that don't, themselves, need to be bound by them on small enough scales of duration and distance. The argument is that the running down of usable energy means that running down could not have been going on for an infinite past. This is true, if past is envisioned as happening just like the present, but we don't know if a quantum sized event can arise or tunnel in from the collapse of something that "ran out of usable energy" or if there has been an eternal expansion and collapse. The video goes on to profess a "singularity boundary" which is a speculation without confirming evidence. Ultimately the poorly defined, P2, is indeterminable.<br />
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Thus, it cannot be shown that what we commonly call a "cause" necessarily applies to the Universe as a collection. But what if it were? Once WLC thinks he has justification for a "cause" he then takes hold of the word as if it were the kind of cause for a simple action in our day to day world, and asserts that the properties of such causes, automatically hold for a "Universal cause." It is through those asserted, but not justified, properties that he works his way to a fiat deity. As with all of the above, he is unjustified, and relies on the unnecessary. Unfortunately, being unjustified is no deterrence to the evangelist, William Lane Craig.<br />
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<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-42364513766022578112013-08-03T14:45:00.001-07:002013-08-12T05:11:49.149-07:00Understanding "Forcing" ArgumentsAlmost all of us are familiar with the old "Sherlock Holmes" style of forcing argument. It is often summed up in the saying, "<i>When you have eliminated all other possibilities, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth</i>." This form of argument can be used to "force" a conclusion that has no evidence of truth in its own support, but is merely what is left to believe when all else is stricken down. It works so well in the stories written by<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle" target="_blank"> Arthur Conan Doyle</a>, but then, he knew "who done it" before putting pen to paper, and was in control of all the "possibilities."<br />
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In real life we rarely know all the possibilities. The phrase "however improbable" cannot stand without limitation. As probability approaches zero, the alternate cases that seemed impossible, start looking better. This, and our limited ability to know what is really possible leads to the <a href="http://evolutionwiki.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes_Fallacy" target="_blank">Sherlock Holmes Fallacy</a> of applying a forcing argument to cases where all the alternatives cannot be completely known or properly evaluated.<br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/UT4uy9DFljo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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This misuse of argument came up several times in the discussions of such topics as the <a href="http://www.strangenotions.com/cosmological-argument/" target="_blank">Cosmological Argument over at Strange Notions</a>. I spent<a href="http://www.strangenotions.com/cosmological-argument/#comment-928145290" target="_blank"> quite a bit of time explaining</a> why forcing failed for the premise "All things that begin to exist, have a cause" (let's call this P1). The point is a bit subtle, but important; the most important word in P1 is "all.". If someone asserts P1 you should ask, "Have you checked ALL things?" Of course, no one has, and Hume would drop P1 like a hot potato right then and there. However, what usually happens is that the side making the assertion comes back with, "Well, show me something that doesn't."<br />
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Making the listener feel at a loss for a counter example is a rhetorical trick. The flipping of the burden off the side making the assertion is unjustified, and should be called out then and there. However the trick usually works in this case because we don't usually see things begin to exist in our normal lives, without cause. So, because we don't see something, the side doing the asserting is going to get away with using P1 to force us to accept the existence (without direct supporting evidence) of something which we also don't see (either a Universal unnamed 'cause' or all the way to some deity or deities).<br />
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The thing to do is to step in and stop that logically unjustified rhetorical trick, but that is not always effective with those who can't see the inner workings, or who won't look there. Short of that, we can do what we should not be required to do, and present a counter example that falsifies P1, or at least pulls the generality away. To do this we go from the events in our usual lives, to the events of the very small quantum world. As we look into the physics of the smaller and smaller, the very principles of causality on our scale, become unrecognizable the way faces in pictures become unrecognizable when magnified so much as to become a collection of colored dots. On the quantum level, we find events that <i>may</i> have no cause.<br />
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Those who want to hold on to P1 will, at this point, jump up and object that physics can't prove that those events have no cause, just that they have not found the cause. This is where we need the word, "<i>may,</i>" that I highlighted above. Because P1 is used in a forcing argument, we need only show that there are events that may be uncaused to break the forcing. Note, that does not prove that P1 is false, it just means that P1 is not necessarily true, and that is enough to free us from being forced to believe something that ain't necessarily so.<br />
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<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-40300843267913283512013-08-02T11:35:00.000-07:002013-08-12T05:30:14.083-07:00An Experiment in Strange Notions<img src="http://www.strangenotions.com/wp-content/uploads/Areopagus-600x266.jpg"><br />
Three months ago, <a href="http://brandonvogt.com/" target="_blank">Brandon Vogt</a> launched a web site (<a href="http://strangenotions.com/" target="_blank">Strange Notions</a>) as an outreach project, from a Catholic point of view, directed at the on-line atheist community. This was quite interesting to me because it falls in the area of trying to understand what is possible and, perhaps, even productive in dialog between those "of faith" and those of us who lack religious faith. I have been active in on-line discussions going back to the old bulletin board days of the 1980's, and got much more so when atheist sites went up a few years after the turn of the century. What we are used to is religious sites such as First Things that push religious articles and allow restricted commenting, and then atheist sites where science or anti-religion articles are presented and religious comments are derided.<br />
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The idea at Strange Notions was that articles from both points of view would be posted as starters for discussions that would ensue by comments from the community of users. For this to happen, some rules of the road would have to be followed, and a fair amount of tolerance practiced by both sides. From the start, I suspected the moderation task at the site to be analogous to Sisyphus rolling that big stone up hill. Those on the religious side would have to put up with atheists committing blasphemy in every comment, and atheists would have to put up with nonsense like Galileo being wrong, and the RCC having been right all along. It was quite a bit to ask for, on each side.<br />
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The surprise, to me, was how much of it actually worked. Strange Notions collected a community of commenters with substantial backgrounds and knowledge. Many of the atheists I had met in years past at different places in the atheist blogosphere, reunited there. The articles presented were heavily on the Catholic side, although, a couple of atheists were interviewed, and <a href="http://www.strangenotions.com/straw-man-scientism/" target="_blank">an article I submitted from this blog</a> was published. Few of the articles had any new subjects re the debates that have been hashed out on-line in recent years, but as starting points for discussion, that was not as important as how the people in the community hit the ball back and forth among themselves. I thought it went rather well, but that is subject to conformation bias, as I myself put in over 1,100 comments.<br />
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However, there had been clouds on the horizon for some time. There are a limited number of points that Catholics can bring to the table, and once they run out, you can expect to be referred back to Aquinas as the unexplained answer for each further question. The purported "proofs" for divine existence were shot full of holes in the first couple of weeks of the site's going on-line. As time went on, the lack of substance in the articles left more room for pushing the line re personal squabbles or rivalry among the community. Ultimately, there always was going to be a point where, what there was to say, had been said, and the clash of world views was going to become the strain that could not be maintained.<br />
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That happened yesterday when a valued commenter and distinguished member of the community, Epeeist, was banned. The reaction was shock and disbelief, which seemed to catalyze an implosion. The bulk of the non-religious commenters have left the community (<a href="http://www.strangenotions.com/cosmic-census/#comment-984848802" target="_blank">including myself</a>) and the experiment seems to have concluded. I have quite a bit of material to use in my study of the faith to non-faith discussion subject, and hope to be putting those things up at this blog as time allows. Was fun while it lasted.<br />
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<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-63783216808407419022013-02-04T18:41:00.000-08:002013-08-12T05:38:03.773-07:00Watching Naturalism Move Forward<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Ju4C_ITlBsU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
I am watching a set of videos of a terrific group discussion of my favorite issues when Science hits Philosophy. The summery of these videos by Sean Carroll is at:<br />
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<a href="http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2012/12/11/moving-naturalism-forward-videos-and-recap/">http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2012/12/11/moving-naturalism-forward-videos-and-recap/</a><br />
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The group comprises: <a href="http://preposterousuniverse.com/naturalism2012/participants.html">http://preposterousuniverse.com/naturalism2012/participants.html</a><br />
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Here are the videos:<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju4C_ITlBsU">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju4C_ITlBsU</a> Day 1, Morning Session 1: Introductions<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeyBqxY3MsQ">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeyBqxY3MsQ</a> Day 1, Morning Session 2: Introductions, What is Real?<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j7wn4WmYtE">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j7wn4WmYtE</a> Day 1, Afternoon Session 1: Emergence and Reduction<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZYLb7D2bQw">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZYLb7D2bQw</a> Day 1, Afternoon Session 2: Emergence and Reduction (cont.)<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebuve4INdAU">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebuve4INdAU</a> Day 2, Morning Session 1: Morality<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVb2zSMRRUU">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVb2zSMRRUU</a> Day 2, Morning Session 2: Meaning<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ob4c_iLuTw">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ob4c_iLuTw</a> Day 2, Afternoon Session 1: Free Will/Consciousness<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WloXdTi8Ymg">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WloXdTi8Ymg</a> Day 2, Afternoon Session 2: Free Will/Consciousness (cont.)<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3_yJTF5FM4">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3_yJTF5FM4</a> Day 3, Morning Session 1: Philosophy and Science<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhZPlD448SA">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhZPlD448SA</a> Day 3, Morning Session 2: Final Thoughts<br />
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I am going be writing blog posts of my thoughts of these sessions (I will edit the links in, below, as I do).<br />
<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-61062197464658394582013-01-31T11:21:00.000-08:002013-08-13T00:33:26.363-07:00The Solution of No DesignSupporters of the teaching of the Theory of Evolution (ToE) will sometimes get into discussions (sometimes arguments) over the use of the word "design" when referring to the anatomical or other structures that have evolved in the biological world we see. The problem is that we commonly use that word to refer to the work of a willful "designer" who is implementing some mental forethought to achieve a goal or purpose. The problem with using that in the evolved world is that it implicitly drags in questions of an "intelligent designer" and teleology. It would be nice to not have to remind readers that every time you write "design" in this context you are referring to something that evolved and was not "designed."
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I propose that we start using the word "solution" as short for "evolved solution" instead of "design" in this context. Evolution is a process that is constantly (but mindlessly) searching for solutions to the problem of getting genes (and co-evolving memes) into the next generation. That is always the ultimate answer to the question "what is it for?" when looking at the lens of an eye or the shell of an egg, etc., but there can be any number of problems for which a particular adaptation is a "solution" on the way to that ultimate answer.
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So, would you call the crazy path of the <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2010/06/22/the-laryngeal-nerve-of-the-gir/">Giraffe laryngeal nerve</a> a "solution"? Yes, it is the solution to the problem of making the neck longer without going back to embryonic development steps, long fixed and not changeable without modifications to a host of genes. Everywhere in the biological world we see temporary solutions to the problem of gene and meme propagation. Why does the problem (gene propagation) exist? Because it can; so it will exist, somewhere sooner or later.
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Try it out. Next time you see a structure that has evolved to be what it is, call it a "solution" instead of a "design" and see how that fits, and see if it puts a better slant on both your own thinking, and how that thinking is received by your audience.Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-21729445714912972602012-10-11T15:29:00.000-07:002012-10-11T15:29:32.136-07:00Pledge of No Pledge<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There is an <a href="http://richarddawkins.net/news_articles/2012/10/11/pa-lawmaker-refuses-to-say-pledge-of-allegiance-at-house-meeting" target="_blank">interesting article</a> up at the Richard Dawkins site about:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0f0f0f; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 25px;"><i>Democratic Rep. Babette Josephs said the words "under God" in the Pledge make it a prayer, and she refused to say it.</i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When I read this I thought about what would happen if we started a movement to get all non-believes in the country to agree to stop saying the Pledge until the original pre 1950s wording without "under God" is restored so it is no longer a public religious prayer. I put this comment in at that site:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #0f0f0f; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 24px;"><i>I like it. Perhaps instead of trying to get it fixed at the Supreme Court, we should just start a social media effort asking people to refuse to say the Pledge until it is fixed. As the portion of the public who are non-believers increases, and the believers who want to keep the government out of their religion join in, it could be a way so show our political presence.</i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I got some encouragement so I am going to follow up. If you know U.S. people who are able to move traffic with YouTube videos or have Twitter campaign pull, please contact them and ask them to support the "Pledge of No Pledge" to restore our Pledge back to our secular nation, and stop the use of our patriotic symbol by religion. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>"<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishment_Clause" target="_blank">Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion ...</a>"</i></span></blockquote>
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<br />Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-78912225221627777682012-10-10T09:40:00.000-07:002012-10-10T09:40:58.531-07:00Humphrys' Doubt<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Humphrys" target="_blank">John Humphrys</a>, a long time BBC commentator, wrote a 2007 book about doubt, and an article about the book went up the Richard Dawkins site <a href="http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/1593-in-god-we-doubt" target="_blank">here</a>. I rather like his style in stating the quandaries involved, but think he did not look deep enough into the philosophical problems he discussed. More of it was about our emotions and how we "need" answers to emotional longings even if those answers are like a small fragment of a child's favorite blanket, clutched in the hand or stroked across the cheek. I was drawn to a small quote from Pascal that he used:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'Liberation Sans', FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;"><i>The 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal described the predicament of those who do not know ". . . why I am set down here rather than elsewhere, nor why the brief period appointed for my life is assigned to me at this moment rather than another in all the eternity that has gone before and will come after me. On all sides I behold nothing but infinity, in which I am a mere atom, a mere passing shadow that returns no more. All I know is that I must die soon, but what I understand least of all is this very death which I cannot escape".</i></span></blockquote>
After reading that, I posted <a href="http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/1593-in-god-we-doubt/comments?page=2#comment_64016" target="_blank">this comment</a>:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'Liberation Sans', FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">I enjoyed several things from this piece by John Humphrys. First, the big question from Pascal is one of the great stoppers from all of philosophy. You cannot find a answer to why you are here in this place, at this now, from your view looking out. You can, however, notice that from the view of the unfolding universe, someone has to be at each place (where someone is), at each then, to have that view looking out.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'Liberation Sans', FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">I liked the "comfort blanket" idea. There must be some brain chemical and/or neural pathway for this. The need for this "little bit of satin at the edge" can cause panic attacks in many children. We generally grow out of this (new paths in the brain override it), but it surely brings up the image of Frances Collins looking at his frozen waterfall.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'Liberation Sans', FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">Everyone knows it is folly to try to tell Mike why he should not be in love with Mary. If I do tell him what is wrong with Mary, I will not be shocked that he thinks I am arrogant and offensive. However, the bad result (to me) of their love will not (usually) be much worse than loosing Mike to Mary's social group that does not like me. But if Mike converts to a religion that makes him think it is noble to kill people like me, that is a problem.</span>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'Liberation Sans', FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">The unique potential of humans is to use our minds to transcend our genes. That is not going to happen if we cannot use our minds to transcend religion first.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'Liberation Sans', FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><br /></span>Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7485664980969151934.post-38934827951479302612012-10-09T22:48:00.000-07:002012-10-09T22:48:44.383-07:00Warren Meets the Reason Driven LifeAlso back in 2007, Rick Warren and Sam Harris sat down for a little discussion about faith. <a href="http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/825-the-god-debate" target="_blank">An edited transcript</a> was posted on the old Richard Dawkins site. It is a bit amusing to read at this point, because it is clear that Rick was just not used to talking to someone who was not taken in by his preacher ways, and who knew so much more about both religion and science that Rick did. The best he could do was dance around the subjects so it would not look like he lost. After reading it, I put <a href="http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/825-the-god-debate/comments?page=1#comment_26757" target="_blank">this comment</a> in:<br />
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I believe the value of these debates should not be judged on some kind of win/lose basis. The value is that the arguments against religion are being made in a forum that is accessible to the population in general. When possible, the religions use their substantial political power to keep people from hearing any dissent. Part of the reason so few people admit to pollsters that they do not believe is that they do not know where the line is. People often say they do not believe in the conventional personal deity, but do not consider themselves to be atheists.<br />
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As time goes on, and Sam does more of these, I am looking forward to more and more sticky questions. I would have liked to ask Warren, "when Jesus was preaching, why didn't he say 'Blessed are those who absent themselves from rats, for the fleas of rats may carry plague.'" Just think of how much death and suffering of the innocent would have been avoided in future generations by these simple words. Or how about, "Energy is mass times the speed of light, times again, the speed of light, but thee shall make no weapon of this." Were these words written in scripture, although it may have taken a while, there would be no religious doubt today.<br />
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Warren talks about the arrogance of Sam's position on evolution. I would like him to put himself in the position of someone who goes before a great religious council stating that he has found that the sun does not go around the earth, as described in their scripture, but rather the earth both spins and goes around the sun. In this situation, Warren would be told he is arrogant. How could he deny what is written, and anyone can see happen every morning? Had he gone up into the heavens and seen it himself? What about all the art and poetry about the sunrise and sunset? Isn't it worth believing so we can have such creativity? Does he really want to live in a world where the living god Amun-Ra does not exist? I suspect Warren would consider himself just the way Sam considers himself, not arrogant, just wondering if it really is worth his time to talk to these closed minds (i.e. idiots).</blockquote>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: inherit; line-height: normal;">I also continued with <a href="http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/825-the-god-debate/comments?page=2#comment_26794" target="_blank">this comment</a>:</span><br />
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There is a nice coverage of Pascal's Wager at: <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/p/pasc-wag.htm" target="_blank">http://www.iep.utm.edu/p/pasc-wag.htm</a><br />
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I like to point out to folks who use this argument that it leads to a religious arms race. The winner is the religion that can dream up the very best heaven, and the very worst hell. I choose to measure my truth by the veracity of evidence, and not by the scope of fiction.</blockquote>
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Quinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11849577057413011746noreply@blogger.com0