Ssnot!

The fine tuning argument, on it's head.

2012-01-26T02:16:00.000-08:00

The fact the universe from its very inception require certain very specific characteristics in an incredibly narrow range for planets, stars, solar systems, galaxies and the chemicals and conditions for life to exist.

There's nothing to indicate they are variables at all and vary at all. In fact, we've never seen characteristic of anything that wasn't contingent on other physics.

And a God does not need these specific characteristics to allow for the natural creation of planets, stars, solar systems, and galaxies, chemicals, or the right conditions for life. A God could just make that happen directly. Some land, make it the right temperature, poof life alive, and you're done! These special conditions are those which we have that allow for natural forces to result in exactly the universe we have, without God. This universe looks exactly like a universe would need to look if there were no God, and this is exactly true on every level and on every point. It's massively good evidence for atheism because on atheism we would assume these things would need to be the case and lo and behold they are. The fine-tuning argument in this light is really just looking at the fact that the universe can exist without a God, that it looks exactly as if there is no God, and says, "Well isn't that an amazing coincidence? Isn't that too good to be true? Yes it is, God did it!" -- It's saying that it's amazing that there are no gaps to shove God into, and therefore God.

The fine-tuning argument here is wrong because, God doesn't need *ANY* special conditions or characteristics. Only atheism requires that those characteristics should be exactly like they are, because these are the kinds of characteristics that could allow a universe to exist, if God didn't exist. "Why if you jigger those characteristics a bit you might not get 70 sextillion stars and 13 billion years to allow random mindless forces to get have life kick up here and there purely by chance!" -- YOU DON'T NEED THAT! GOD CAN MAKE ONE PLANET AND PUT LIFE ON IT!

You don't need just the right stars to make higher elements in those stars and allow them to explode and make the debris for planets to coalesce. God could just make these higher elements, without the right levels to build them in stars. Only atheism needs it to happen by mindless natural forces. "Oh, it's so suspicious that the universe so perfectly fits what it would need for atheism to be true, therefore, clearly, God exists and did that. Here's some things somebody else pulled out of their ass to suggested if they were different the universe wouldn't exist!" -- If the universe were made out of butter rather than elements there'd be no life, therefore Elves made the universe exist out of atoms. If gravity pushed rather than pulled there'd be no life, praise be to the flying spaghetti monster!

If the universe cannot be explained perfectly by natural forces, then God. If the universe can be explained perfectly by natural forces, "Well isn't that remarkably perfect?" Therefore God! The fine tuning argument is basically saying that perfectly meeting the requirements implied by atheism, is too perfect and therefore is evidence of God. There's a very narrow window of universes that can create themselves without God, and we perfectly fall into that window! It's an amazing feat that only God could do.

The universe as evidence for God.

2012-01-22T20:06:00.000-08:00

There is evidence that elves exists.

Consider these facts:

1) There is a perfectly cubical grain of sand on the beach.
2) It rains.
3) Sand exists.

Therefore elves.

----

My analogy here is carefully chosen, it's not solely intended to poke fun at this argument but to show an analogy. While we might well just accept that life exists or that the universe exists because it demonstratively is true in that we exist to see such. We are then asked to weigh the need for a real explanation against Drew ad hoc supposing God exists, and that God should make the universe, as we have a universe it is therefore evidence of God. This is at the core what Drew is arguing.

Our existence is not contingent upon a perfectly cubical grain of sand on the beach. So we cannot say that because we exist, it necessarily must follow that there is a perfectly cubical grain of sand on the beach. But, this is true of life and the universe. We can only exist in universes which life can exist within, and we can only exist on planets which life can exists on, and given that a our parents met, their parents met, and they did exactly what they did. Any difference could well have resulted in different people rather than us. That we exist rather than one of any of those unborn ghosts, sisters and brothers, our half sisters and half brothers if our parents never met, or our cousins if our parents were never born. These odds against us are stupefying, if one pretends they are meaningful.

Why that exact series of events should occur rather than another, is not a question with an answer. It just did. It was hugely unlikely, as would be any specific set of events, but if it didn't something else would have, and it would be equally unlikely. This is the power of the anthropic principle, since we are contingent on everything that lead to us existing, the odds seem amazing, but since we are here they necessarily had to happen.

So claiming that elves made it so that I was born, rather than any of the other combinations of sperm and eggs of my parents, would seem dizzying. Because what are the odds? Well, really the odds are 100%. I can only exist as I do. If somebody else existed, they would only exist as they did. And any of the people who could be here (yet aren't) would be here, and be. They would exist as they did. So really, we need to get around this. It actually pointless to ask about any events that could only be what they are, because our asking is contingent upon them. Elves should want me to exist. If they existed they should make me exist. Since I exist, that is strong evidence for elves. This is actually meaningless. If somebody else existed they could ask the same thing. If Earth were a lifeless hunk of rock, aliens on another planet could well ask the same sorts of questions.

If you think that elves cause it to rain, every time it rains you'll see evidence of elves. We can only look backwards and ask ourselves, how we got here. Which theory is the best to explain the everything we have? We do not suppose that everything we have is evidence of elves, because you believe things about elves would give us everything we have.

We should not be blinded by the odds that life should exist elsewhere in the universe, nor should we be blinded by the odds that there exists a perfectly cubical grain of sand on the beach. Because we are not directly contingent on these existing. We can be objective about this idea, without supposing they are necessarily true. But, should we suppose that there is such a grain of sand?

We know that elves are expert craftsmen and want to make perfectly cubical things, and they made all the grains of sand, and a grain of sand would be so small as to be a marked feat of a great craftsman. Such a grain of sand would be strong evidence for elves, or some highly intelligent supernatural craftsmen with all the same properties as elves. Without elves, you would need to explain how such a grain of sand could exist. You would seemingly have nothing but natural forces to rely upon to make this case. Now, let us suppose I have located (regardless of the odds for it's existence) a perfectly cubical grain of sand on the beach. Is this evidence for elves? Should one accept it as evidence? -- Well, perhaps. But, it's still blindingly bad evidence.

What are the odds against elves? What are the odds that such a grain of sand could form by mindless natural forces? Much like abiogenesis there's a lot of good speculation here but not not a complete understanding of everything. We generally know how sand forms. We understand that it's silica crystals and crystals tend to have sharp edges due to the way crystals are. That we aren't dealing with randomly placing atoms but that the atoms by necessity are fairly uniform and the cleaving of these crystals will actually form sharp edges. In theory this reduces the odds from blindingly close to nothing to something somewhat reasonable. You need to run into parallel sides and right angles. And due to the way crystals form the parallel sides might well also be more likely than we should suppose by otherwise. Much as lipid formation into cell like structures or the the ease at which amino acids form, seems harder on first glance. One could argue that this grain of sand is more likely than it initially seemed, but it would still seem quite perfect. And still, one might assume, be good evidence for elves.

Well, the problem actually tends to go away when we consider how many grains of sand are on all the beaches of the planet. There are ~ 20 sextillion grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. If elves actually made all the sand and they love cubical things, why aren't they all cubical? Why didn't they just make one grain of sand? Why should there be ~20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand on the beaches of Earth if these elves just wanted to make one perfectly cubical grain of sand to show off their skill. But, if there were just one grain, then the odds would be staggeringly low that it could be formed by random mindless forces. The only way to get that mindless forces could be responsible is if there were so many grains of sand that one could just break just right to be. There would need to be forces such as crystallization which could allow for perfectly arrayed atoms in the sand, and some manner of sheering that allows for sharp corners. And amazingly all of these exist. Perhaps if elves wanted to carve a grain of sand to look like Mount Rushmore one could not have explained these things as easily. But, the overwhelming evidence is that it can just happened by chance. And there likely are a great many perfectly cubical grains of sand on the beach.

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour." - William Blake

And ultimately, this is the case with gods as well. As Carl Sagan noted, "The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth." (70 vs 20 sextillion) -- While the conditions needed for life, may be strange and they may be rare, to show how it could have happened I do only have a smattering of good scientific theories. But, to say that one is only taking facts and I am talking in theories is like saying that you need something to hammer in a nail, and when a hammer is offered, it is declined because one only wants to use atoms. Theories are made of facts. That's what decides the very quality of a theory. And whatever you end up using would equally just be a theory. The difference is that a theory that elves carve perfectly cubic grains of sand, seems so bad one typically wouldn't call it a theory. And supposing that it is the case and just using sand as evidence, because elves make sand. Is actually as firmly established as Drew's claim is.

Many of our theories for abiogenesis deal with healthy bit with stuff we're not sure about, but many things we are. We know there are basic ways to replicate and basic biochemistry that works, there are balls of lipids that could protect an early organism and there are many. We know all of the basic stuff we need to happen are entirely possible and we know a lot of facts like the property of crystals to form sharp edges which suggest that far from being an impossibility it's actually nudged significantly towards being likely. The universe is exactly as it should look if there were no God. That's a fact. It's built on other facts and other theories and even educated guesses and reasonable inferences. The universe is vast and old with time and chemicals aplenty to kick up life here and there, and maybe a perfect cube of sand or two. Whether it's in the waves of Hawaii, off up near some rocks in Indonesia, unnoticed in the waters of the Florida Keys, or on some atoll largely ignored. There is more sand on these beaches than there are stars in the sky, we don't know if it's only a one in a million chance or one in a billion. Or if it's one in a hundred sextillion and we should count our lucky stars that life exists at all (as there'd only be a 70% chance for 1 and we'd likely still then be that one and have gotten lucky). If there was an all powerful being who created us, why should there be an uncountably number of pointless planets revolving around pointless stars in pointless galaxies we can barely see with billion dollar telescopes. And galaxies we can't because they formed so far away that they don't yet exist to us yet. A god would only need to create one planet, wouldn't even need a star and certainly not one that only gives us 2 out of every billion photons. A God could create any manner of universe, so why create one that looks exactly like one that could happen by way of mindless natural forces? Why create a universe where solar genesis happens? Where nebula create stars? Where life evolves? Where life can evolve? Where only the tiniest fraction of a long 13.75 billion years where in 0.0001 billion is of any relevance to our species? Unless you talk about the 2 billion years it took for our species to evolve from tiny nothing of bacteria into highly impressive species with 7 billion people each made up of 50-75 trillion cells. Which is a lot of work for nothing. Though if there were no gods then this is the only way to be here. And since we can only look into the past and ask for the best explanation of it, it's actually remarkably damning for theism. Everything that needs to be true for atheism to be true, is true.

Why should every question we've ever really answered always come down to mindless natural forces? Why is it that when theists claimed that lightning was caused by the gods, that disease was caused by demons, that heredity was the domain of God, that the sun was a fiery chariot across the sky, why should they always be wrong? Well, they don't have to be. They just are. It turns out that that supernatural answers of gods and elves and spirits and ghosts turn out to be wrong. We understand this reality because we've looked a lot of claims made over the years, and we know what sorts of answers are likely correct. So if we care about our answers and we like to guess correctly when we only have guesses we can make, we should guess at unknown natural forces because after all those are the only answers that have ever been right. When somebody guesses at gods for the million-and-first time, we should be unsurprised when those claims turn out to be wrong and it turns out that again it was mindless natural forces. In fact, since that is always what has happened throughout all of history, we should expect it!

For atheism to be right, stars should form naturally. Planets should form naturally. Life should form naturally. Elements should form naturally. A process by which simple forms can become progressively more complex must exist. Everything should be made of pretty much the same stuff. You need to a lot of time to get anything as strange as life to kick up, by chance. There needs to be an enormous amount of universe to exist to allow life to kick up, because it like cuboid grains of sand should be rare. There needs to be an enormous amount of time for life to kick up in. It would take real work to go from a simple form to a complicated form, and it would take real time to do that work. And everything from Human parasites, to human food animals, to humans would have had to have come about by this process. Everything from the tides to the seasons need to be the result of mindless natural forces. And every time a theist says that we can't explain that, they need to be wrong. Wrong about the tides, wrong about the seasons, and wrong about every explanation that says a creative superbeing is making puppets of us. And all of this is true. Everything that needs to be the case, for the universe to exist as it does without a God, exists exactly in that way it needs to. Everything. And everything is a whole lot of facts. So many in fact, that you'd be hard pressed to keep any of them straight without modeling those facts and drawing conclusions. And hence the need for theories.

You wish to oppose all this evidence. Everything we know about the universe, such that it's exactly what it needs to be for there to be no God. And do so by assuming God in the first place, and using the existence of the universe as evidence. I am at a loss as to how you cannot see through this as obviously hollow. We can only exist in universes where we exist. Such is no more convincing that elves that arranged for our parents to meet, so that we could exist. Because it's seems such a rare set of events.

If elves would make grains of sand to be a perfect cube, that such sand is evidence for elves. If you believe that elves cause it to rain, then everytime it rains you'd see evidence of elves. This doesn't work. Because you never established the first bit, that there are elves, that this is their intent. And that there aren't better answers out there. You are trying to use, what must be the case, as evidence for something that people made up without any good reason to do so.

After all, if there are no gods, then we need to understand why people keep inventing them. And coincidentally they invent thousands of them, and none of them agree with each other, but all of them agree with the person making the god claims. We know a lot about the gods of men, and they don't reside on Olympus or Sinai, they are in the heads of men. Who look at the complicated world, the happenstance nature of reality, all those cogs and bits that gave rise to them and think that it could happen no other way that the universe intended it for you. That the elves arranged those cogs and bits so that you might be. But, really, if it wasn't you, it would be something else. And isn't it that much more odd that you're making a claim that most people are wrong about. Theists know that other theists are wrong, they can see all too clearly that what others propose is absurd, and should see that those propositions are believed just as clearly and just as strongly as their beliefs. You are supposing an answer that we know human beings make up out of the blue for no reason. From the cargo cults of the John From to the God who needs blood to fix the universe, these are beliefs that humans invent and there's no good reason to suppose that it's true, or to suppose that a perfect God should want for a universe, or that a universe is what an all powerful God should want.

The universe doesn't care about us. The solar system formation process bombarded Earth with massive impacts over and over again, and still can to this day, though there are far fewer rocks, they can wipe out the dinosaurs for no reason leaving the birds as their only survivors. Life has to evolve through a process that amounts to torture, that necessarily as a consequence of geometric population growth kept in check only by mindless natural forces causes most life forms to live terrible lives of pain, suffering, illness and death, and the best of them may breed more before succumbing. If there were a creative God, who made evolution, who guided evolution, we should spit in his face for being a sadistic bastard. But, if there are only mindless natural forces, evolution would be the only way to get at complicated organisms through the struggle for survival.

Surely, everybody should see that the entire universe being made exactly in such a way to happen by mindless natural forces, is strong evidence against a God. One could suppose there is a trickster God who wants to hide, but there no reason to suppose this either, and good reasons to suppose against it. And so few gods are trickster gods. Humans tend to only invent gods who love them and planned for them and made them happen. But, such a God could do far better than this universe. Mindless natural forces could only do this universe. But, looking at the universe that we have, we find a universe such that God is unnecessary. But, more than unnecessary such a God shouldn't create a universe like this at all. And this is very strong evidence indeed. Everything atheists need for the universe to exist without God existing does exist, and on the opposite claim, the God of theism is bending over backwards spitting out pointless planets for no reason at all, torturing animals needlessly, and giving us 13.74 billion years of pointless time.

Can a universe be evidence for God? Yes. Is this universe good evidence for God? No. This universe is good evidence for atheism.

Greta Christina, Why arguing against religion is not a waste of time.

2012-01-09T17:40:00.000-08:00

The Hidden Faith of the Founding Fathers, what an odd thing...

2012-01-09T16:34:00.000-08:00

It's literally a documentary from a Christian perspective on the founding fathers and the lie that they they were gungho for Christianity. It's very Christian perspectives with good facts behind it. I'm not even sure what to make out of it.

On the laws of thermodynamics and evolution and life.

2012-01-08T10:49:00.001-08:00

I have yet to meet the person who has ever put forth the argument you describe. My guess is that you haven't either. It's a strawman- an argument nobody is actually positing, stated merely so that the person stating it can claim superior knowledge.

Some people do make that fallacy. They say things like because everything has a cause the universe has a cause. That actually fails due to composition.

Thanks for stating the obvious. It doesn't change the fact that the entire rest of the known universe follows basic fundamental laws that render Life impossible.

That the vast majority of the universe is inhospitable to life and that there's 70 sextillion stars in trillions of galaxies, with even more planets and moons around that, most of which are undoubtedly dead and the whole thing some ~14 billion years old is exactly what we should expect if there is no God. Without a God the only way to make life is by getting really lucky, and you might well need 70 sextillion stars to get lucky enough to mix up the chemicals enough times in enough places and do so over and over and over again in a really old universe. If God existed, you'd need one star and one planet. And even that arrangement might well overly complex.

Actually, we can't. Not even close.

We can and do. In fact, that's pretty much just how climate science works. Heat in vs. heat out.

There's not even close to enough matter in the observable universe to explain the energy that it generates. That's why the aforementioned "Dark Matter" theory exists.

Gravity isn't energy it's a force. You can't take a magnet and make power out of it. You need magnetic flux. The change in gravity is energy. Gravity is just a force there making anything with mass stick together and tugging at spacetime to do it.

This isn't a topic that's open for debate. It's a settled scientific fact.

The fact that you're wrong is certainly worth addressing. Dark Matter is a theory because galaxies spin too fast without flinging apart. So the presumption is there's more gravity there than we suspect. That's not bonus energy, it's additional gravity. And it's concerning galaxies not Earth. And it doesn't have any known implications on "energy in, energy out" on Earth.

For the Universe to be expanding at the rate it's expanding, there simply isn't enough matter in existence.

That's dark energy. If there were only matter things would actually collapse as we originally suspected. The universe however is accelerating in it's expansion. But this is nothing to do with the matter but rather that spacetime is expanding.

But in terms of evolution, it means that natural systems never move from simple states to complex states. It's not how the universe works. Look at any other planet in the solar system. Are they "evolving"? No. They're cooling. They're moving from a state of high energy to a state of low energy.

That's why we have metabolism. It's basically the one of the defining bits of life. They salvage energy and store it. That's what plants do. It's not that they are basking in the sun but rather that they are banking some of the suns energy because that a massive ball of negative entropic energy we orbit around, is constantly bombarding us with it. The entire raison d' etra of life is that it captures energy originally from the sun and uses it to do better at getting more of it. And the better organisms are at this the more of them exist, because we also bank those tricks in hereditary molecules. We end up hitting an energy ceiling whereby most of the potential new critters can't exist. So it ends up, sorting out those banks of tricks, and if anybody happened to have accidentally copied it down wrong and tweaked it for the better, that critter will be more likely to do better, have more copies, and more copies of that helpful trick.

So just some duplicating gunk trying edging each other out for a fraction of that incoming energy to duplicate a but more is entirely possible within the confines of thermodynamics. And that's also basically the definition of life.

Your objection is basically that we don't know of anything else that has a metabolism that isn't alive. And we only know about life on this planet. And you're using this objection to attempt to say that life on this planet isn't possible.

He instead used the term "Natural Selection", which only means "If you kill all the redheads, only blondes and brunettes will be left to reproduce".

He wanted to try to stick to the science and arguments. People had knee jerk reactions to claims about transmutation at the time, as Darwin so acutely learned from Vestiges (book). Also, redheadedness is a recessive gene. You could certainly select against it with murder. But that's artificial selection, not natural selection. Natural selection is when you allow nature to do it because of the struggle for existence and rather than select for just something like non-redheadedness you select for *anything* that makes one do better and the difference has to be ever so slight and you get eons to do it in. Darwin's argument here was quite good. In a couple hundred years look what we did to pigeons and dogs, imagine what the selection of nature could do in eons!

It doesn't say, as so many Atheists seem to think, that the universe wakes up one morning and decides that people are a cooler idea than apes. That's a distinction that requires intelligence. Which the universe doesn't have.

That distinction requires people not intelligence. Humans are apes. Ape is a taxonomic group and humans are certainly a great ape. And evolution never made that decision. After all, there are still apes and there are still monkeys. It's not that one is cooler than the other but that each group has survived on it's own merits.

Me, I argue that evolution is inconsistent with the second law because the second law says that evolution can't happen.

It doesn't. It says things will tend to lose their energy and order. Your argument would suggest more directly that life itself cannot exist. That I cannot from eating sugars and breathing oxygen live from day to day without decaying in short order. And it's actually true if I were not alive. As soon as my metabolism shuts down and I'm not unbanking energy stored reserves of the negative entropy of the sun my body will break down. The problem here is that we're alive, and we store energy. We effectively have sugar-batteries. So even though we should stop working, we fight that breakdown and loss by adding even more energy into the system, constantly. We get that energy from the sun and banking it is called metabolism. And we tend to make copies of ourselves so if one copy stops working there are others, and if one copy happens to be an improvement then more copies of that copy are made and the future copies will be improved. And necessarily since worse copies won't copy they won't be around.

Far from thermodynamics making evolution impossible, thermodynamics are the reason why evolution works. You got to beat the decay and anything that doesn't is screwed. So the critters with the best methods of thriving giving such decay do the best, and thus there are more of them. Is it any wonder that some of the most successful organisms thrive on poop and death?

There's absolutely no way to explain why the universe, sans God, would suddenly decide that Elephants are "better" than snails.

People tend to decide such things like that. But, nature doesn't. You can tell by the existence of both elephants and snails. They both do a great job. Elephants exploit economy of size and run warm blooded, and snails conserve their energy and protect their bodies with a natural ceramic. Those are both really great strategies and they both do very well in their respective niches. And both of them beat out the decay.

But "better"? Nature doesn't really decide that. I suppose one could argue that lizards are better than trilobites because trilobites bit it, but that just surviving. Copies of lizards are still around, so by some measure they were better at avoiding the decay. But, that's a bit narrow of a definition.

So basically, if we just overlook that troublesome "How did Life come into being in the first place?" thing, then everything is hunky-dory. But we can't. That's the entire issue.

No it's not. All your objections were to how things cannot possibly beat out decay but metabolism and evolution certainly do solve that. You could build a little rover with a solar panel, battery and wheels, and that would suffice to solve those problems. Abiogenesis is actually a completely different issue. Where do these original copiers come from? And odds for that are pretty good that they just kicked up by chance.

Richard Carrier Interview. On Fine-Tuning and the Universe.

2012-01-03T17:54:00.000-08:00

http://www.thebestschools.org/blog/2011/12/31/richard-carrier-interview/

Similarly the “fine tuning” of the universe’s physical constants: that would be a great proof—if it wasn’t exactly the same thing we’d see if a god didn’t exist. If there is no god, we will only ever find ourselves in a universe finely tuned (in that case, by random chance), because without a god, there is no other kind of universe that can produce us. Likewise, a universe that produced us by chance would have to be enormously vast in size and enormously old, so as to have all the room to mix countless chemicals countless times in countless places so as to have any chance of accidentally kicking up something as complex as life. And that’s exactly the universe we see: one enormously vast in size and age. A godless universe would also only produce life rarely and sparingly, and that’s also what we see: by far most of the universe is lethal to life (being a deadly radiation filled vacuum) and by far most of the matter in the universe is lethal to life (constituting stars and black holes on which no life can ever live). Again, all exactly what we’d expect of a godless universe. Not what we’d expect of a god-made one.

So often I am kudized for being so intelligent. But, most of the time I'm just stealing from Richard Carrier. He's so often right about such things that I absolutely love it. He's right. If God wanted to make the universe he'd only need 1 star and 1 planet. Everything else is rather pointless. However, if random chance wanted to make a universe, it'd need to be hugely vast and insanely old to stand any chance at all of having us exist.

Rolling Dice. Probability and Evolution.

2012-01-03T16:20:00.001-08:00

Somebody posted this link to me on rolling dice by probability and doing so by evolution. I've made this point before, but it's written in Javascript. How cool is that?

Placebos and self-reported results.

2012-01-02T16:23:00.000-08:00

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/spin-city-placebos-and-asthma/

It turns out placebos aren't really that effective at all. They are only wrongly reported as effective. There is a growing idea that just because a lot of alternative medicine doesn't do much more than placebo but it turns out that placebo have a rather large effect that CAM/IM is a worthwhile investment. Well it turns out that the only thing much of the placebo reaction does is make people think they are wildly successful but as it turns out, people are horrible judges of such things. Objective measures find they don't do anything at all.

Cee Lo Green: Bowdlerized Imagine.

2012-01-02T08:36:00.000-08:00

"Nothing to kill or die for. And all religion is true." -- Well that's something to kill and die for.

Come on we don't have much in the way of popular works. Imagine is the only really popularly atheistic song. Just as Emperors new clothes is the only really popular skeptical story. It's just kind of a dick move to don a fur coat and expensive jewelry and make Imagine a pro-religion song. You might as well rewrite the Emperors New Clothes to be a story about the virtues of faith.

Also a great talk from "Skepticon, Heuristics and Biases, Skepticon 4 Eliezer Yudkowsky "

2011-12-25T21:24:00.000-08:00

Christianity Invented?

2011-12-19T22:32:00.000-08:00

So I ran across this article and basically it was horrible crap and I told em why. But, put a lot of work into it so I also posted it here.

Christianity existed prior to Constantine significantly so. It's the start of a terrible conspiracy theory to suggest otherwise. Much of the supposed external sources for a historical Jesus are from the second and third centuries and do no claim Jesus was real but expressly do establish that Christians actually existed. There was a push at the time to create one religion for one empire and Christianity did become the state religion afterwards. But there's every reason to suppose that any other religion could have done just as well and would likely have been more Roman than some middle-eastern blood cult.

You suggest that Christianity is a copycat religion, this is largely false and based on the work of Graves. Who was so sloppy as to be effectively worthless. Of the 16 mythical crucifixions most are outright fabrications or huge stretches to suppose that Osiris being cut into pieces is a "crufixition". Which isn't to say there weren't other blood magic crucified saviors, the Thracian God Zalmoxis is actually attested to in the BCE and was crucified and through his magical blood you can live forever in a spiritual realm. However, Graves never cited this. Rather he cited things like Chrishna who was not ever said to be crucified until there was a massive Christian influence in the region. And since these aren't properly attested and when, we have little to go on to suppose this. And saying that Mithra was crucified is downright absurd. Mithra's amazing feat was that he was born of a rock and slew a cosmic bull of some sort. There's little on their actual beliefs but what we know largely comes from a pictograph. In short, the only way anybody could say what you're saying is if they believed terrible scholarship and outright falsehoods. There's absolutely no historical records to indicate Mithra ever died much less died by crucifixion. With so many good arguments for the failures of Christianity or arguments you can draw out by pointing out the religion claims the universe is fundamentally hinged on the oxygen carrying cells of terrestrial animals as to propose that God needed blood to fix the universe, and only his own blood had enough magic to do it, so he gave himself a body and killed it. This is absurd as a genuine cosmology, but is exactly what superstitious people obsessed with blood magic would come up with if invented a religion, and lo and behold exactly such a people existed exactly where Christianity is first practiced.

Such arguments are terrible in a sea of great potential arguments to the point that it undercuts the entire case by even offering them (maybe somebody knows the most basic elements of the story of Horus or Mithra and can so easily scoff at them, that they will feel justified scoffing at all of them. If you give a bad argument along with good arguments, established cognitive biases are such that if they can see through the bad arguments they won't even address the good arguments.

The purpose of the Council of Nicaea was largely to establish the true Christian faith and condemn the heresies of Arianism. Deciding the true Christianity and outlawing all those others. It was the domination of Trinitarianism not the whole sale invention of Christianity.

While it is true that Eusebius argued for lying for Jesus and likely did. It is even the case that every copy of Josephus' work we have today that includes the Testimonium Flavium comes from a specific copy owned by Eusebius and that there's certainly a chance that he was the one who actually made that forgery. It is also the case that most all of the given external sources for a historical Jesus are significantly flawed. Most simply are late first and early second century documents which attest to the existence of Christians. And therein is a significant problem for your proposed thesis. Rather than evidence for it, you're saying that all of these documents can't even attest to the existence of Christians. Nor can there have been pretty much any of the early church fathers. Somehow all of the writings of Origen (AD 184/5–253/4), are actually fraudulent and don't really exist? Seriously? And that's just Origen, there's a dozen others Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Tertuillian, etc. Who defended the faith in the second and third centuries. They must all be fiction as well? Many of the Early church fathers argued for a Christianity much like the one that survived Nicaea.

Christianity existed long before Rome. The claims you are making is so absurd as to be downright shame worthy. With the bounties of proper claims why would anybody make the claims you're offering here? It's so bad and scattershot as to make the entire post worthless because you can't tell the mistakes from the points you got right, so much so that you'd be better off disregarding everything you said and doing all the research yourself. And that's not even considering the minor points like you suppose the library of Alexandria was burned to get rid of other gospels or evidence that Christianity didn't exist, or that the "The Serapeum housed the Great Library of Alexandria." Neither of which is true. They burnt the temple and the Serapeum burnt too. But, it wasn't the library of Alexandria, it was a separate annex across the town from the library that housed some of the books of the library. It was more to do with the civil unrest and general not caring about the books than it was an overt attempt at censorship. There were many other copies of the books the Library housed throughout Europe, they didn't get destroyed by fire or to suppress anything but rather they mostly rotted and nobody ever cared to rewrite them or save them during the dark ages.

Even the minor stuff you get horribly wrong. And you're using it to draw an absurd conclusion. It would be better to not read what you wrote, because it's filled with so many mistakes that it would likely make you wronger after you read the thing, than the small possibility that you rightfully correct somebody's mistaken impression.

Anasognosia and Cognition

2011-12-18T20:11:00.000-08:00

Intelligent Design Pre-Darwin, Naturalism, and Evidence.

2011-12-17T00:30:00.000-08:00

Prior to the theory of evolution by natural selection, Intelligent Design was the theory supported by all the evidence. Scientists from Galen, Newton, Jefferson, Galileo, even Darwin when he was younger accepted this as the best explanation for how such amazing functional complexity could exist in the human body. The only alternative at the time being chance, and chance was a clear loser.

There wasn't a lack of any evidence, but rather a huge amount of evidence for the propositions. Which weren't as much magical thinking as we would think today as they were simply unknown. They weren't wrong for thinking this way. They honestly were very rational and went where the evidence lead them, and it lead them towards something that had many of the attributes one would ascribe to a God.

It actually was good evidence for God. Which is why when evolution came around and kicked that ideas' teeth in, all the foremost scientists in the world went from largely being deists and theists to being atheists. For this diversity of life to exist without God requires that there be a process like evolution that could create the diversity out of only randomness and time, and lo and behold there is *EXACTLY* such a process.

It isn't proof or certainty, but the fact of the matter is that evolution is good evidence that there is no God. It would be remarkably strange for God to create a universe whereby God need not exist, considering with God every universe would be possible. However, if there were no God, we would have to have a universe like this universe.

The chances that we'd have this universe are much higher if there is no God. And such claims that the only alternative to our current science is nothing at all is absurd. From preformation to Phlogiston and miasma, we've been wrong before, but we were lead there because that's actually what reasonable logical inference and evidence led us to conclude.

Ignoring such things and thinking the other side is a blank slate is actually kissing away an easy win. If you assert nothing, and they only assert bad arguments, when you've torn through their bad arguments you've finally managed to tie, because you never pointed out that what you're saying has always been the case and that the universe actually is particularly good evidence that they're wrong. And that what you're saying isn't an implicit assumption of science but rather the conclusion of science. It isn't that science must assume that the supernatural doesn't exist but rather than science works so damned well without it that that is considerable evidence that it doesn't. Science builds on the shoulders of other science, and the if one treats naturalism as a theory, you will find it has considerable evidence to support it, no evidence that contradicts it, and that it works effectively as a base theory for the rest of science. You need not exclude the supernatural a priori, you can do so a posterori. The supernatural doesn't work, it never has, and has always been wrong. It's not some special bias against supernatural claims but rather the fact that it's always been wrong that rightfully leads one to assume it would be wrong this time as well.

Seeing what we hear. The McGurk Effect.

2011-12-16T03:20:00.001-08:00

Either it's true or it isn't, 50/50.

2011-12-06T20:32:00.001-08:00

I actually had somebody insist that their position was a coin flip because it was either true or not.

I am saying that the universe is natural phenomenon. That the only answer that has ever been right is generally the most likely answer for any new questions. You are saying that God needed blood to fix the universe and some bits of Semitic mythology are true even though they describe a radically alien universe. -- You don't get to slap a 50/50 on that bad boy. It's a horse race. My horse has never ever lost. Your horse has never ever won. My explanation has been the answer to everything we've ever figured out. Your answer has never been the answer to anything ever in the history of the universe!

Heh.

Christianity in a nutshell.

2011-12-02T19:18:00.001-08:00

Mormonism

2011-11-28T11:42:00.000-08:00

You'd always think that such things would be such a resounding slam dunk that nobody would believe it. You can make somebody watch this, have them fact check the data, and they'd still just ignore it.

Ask Tat: The Why of Gayness.

2011-11-28T06:43:00.000-08:00

"Is being gay a product of choice, preference, environment or is it caused by a mutated sex determining gene?"

None of the above. These are often given as the main guesses but they are notabily wrong and naive. A couple facts of gayness.

1) Twins share sexual preference to a greater degree than siblings share sexual preference.
2) Identical twins share sexual preference to a greater degree than fraternal twins.
3) Identical twins do not share 100% identical sexual preference.
4) The youngest son of a woman who has had several sons has a statistically significant increased chance of being homosexual.
5) This increased chance does not exist if the child is not biologically hers.

These aren't in dispute. And they tell us a lot of what the answer could be. In that it's not choice, and it's not strictly genetics. It is to some degree congenial (being established during gestation), and to some degree genetic. Because twins are more likely to share sexual orientation than siblings and they are genetically just siblings. But, identical twins don't absolutely share sexual identity, which would be a requirement if it were genetic because they would share all of their genes.

So we're likely talking about something that is genetically influenced, that happens during development in a rather complicated cascade of hormones that isn't absolute. The ability to turn off the attraction to one sex during development isn't absolute. In fact, in bonobos it's completely gone leaving the population to be completely bisexual. Attraction to generally one gender more than another isn't an exacting thing, it's actually somewhat vague and sometimes wrong. Just as gender identity is often wrong, and a large degree of inter-sexed people. The fact is, being attracted to men, is perfectly common and typical for women. So it's not as much some kind of freak mutation as a imperfect sexual dimorphism of a somewhat useful but generally unrequired non-attraction to one gender. Both non-attraction to men and non-attraction to women are common but they are generally closely tied with one's gender. Being closely rather than absolutely means that gayness exists.

Richard Carrier on Bayes.

2011-11-26T15:46:00.000-08:00

I preblogged this. I'm so sure it's awesome I'm already posting it and saying it's epic. Or at the least we can say that it's more epic than all the alternatives.

I am so smart! Minecraft triangulation.

2011-11-26T09:06:00.000-08:00

I'm posting this to be humble.

If I weren't humble, I would post this to Facebook or something where people could see it. So playing Minecraft, there's a newly added end game section to the game. Where you can actually beat the thing rather than an endless sandbox. Well, to get there you can track Eyes of Ender, which are silly things that you throw into the sky that fly up and land towards the Fortress, where you might be able to get to the end part. I realized that you can just triangulate the position. After two throws at P(-32,-198) which ended at P(-22,-198) and P(-250,-1556) which ended at P(-241, -1546) I calculated the position at P(972,-198). We went there, dug around, and found the sucker at P(1070,-101). The important bit being that we found the sucker. Seriously, there's so much space in the game and I found the sucker with math. When used right, Math is like a super-power.

Quotes: Richard Carrier.

2011-11-16T04:02:00.001-08:00

"God needs blood to fix the universe, but only his own blood had enough magical power to do it, so he gave himself a body and then killed it." - Richard Carrier.

Don't Talk to the Police

2011-11-06T10:41:00.001-08:00

It's seriously one of the best lectures you'll run into.

I often love to cite unicorns as mythological creatures in some rants...

2011-11-02T23:52:00.000-07:00

But, I actually pull my punches because years ago I ran into this stupid site:

http://www.lair2000.net/Unicorn_Dreams/Unicorns_Man_Made/unicorns_man_made.html

It's so stupid as to have a special bubbly mouse cursor and anything but it makes a pretty good case that unicorns under some definitions do exist.

Hm. You know, DarkMatter2525 might be on to something.

2011-11-02T14:46:00.000-07:00

I admit it's a bit speculative, but really does fit the observed phenomenon well. When a god believer tells you to believe in their God. It's a bit like they are offering this figure in their heads to you, that they have come to know and love. And telling them, no, that doesn't exist, and you're wrong. Really is a kind of rejection of God (of their God in their head) and of that person. Reacting emotionally is the obvious response, whereas I've analogized it to becoming upset because I don't believe in bigfoot, but theists don't have a person relationship with bigfoot.

"Hey, do you want to go steady with my God?" -- No. Your God is fake, stupid, doesn't make any sense. Nobody should go steady with that mythological hogwash.

So ofcourse there's definite rejection going on there.

"Hey, do you want to go steady with my God?" -- No. I'm already going steady with MY God.

Understandably, far less animosity there.

It puts things like Julia Sweeney's Letting God of God chapter where she "breaks up with God" in a new light.

The margin between science and faith.

2011-11-02T03:21:00.000-07:00

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

There's some margin between what we know and what is possible. For example if you want to think the universe is 13.6 billion years old, you're in luck that's within the margin of error for the last WMAP readings. If your religion says that the universe works by loop quantum gravity, you're in luck it very well might. If your religion says the universe is 6,000 years old, you're just wrong. That's well outside the margin of error.

Cutting glass is hard.

2011-10-27T20:07:00.000-07:00

Just saying, how pass fail is that. You either cut it correctly or you need another thing of glass. Long story short I changed a very broken window in my house for a slightly broken window, that I cut and kinda glued the bits back on. And only really had the one large enough piece of scrap glass. My mistake was using the glass cutter after I broke it. I fixed it with a pin, a nail, and a screwdriver, but it didn't cut the same (I cut a bunch of smaller bits of scrap glass to practice).

Harold Camping says the world ends today.

2011-10-21T06:08:00.000-07:00

Be ready, we may have to fight flying insects with goat heads or something. Yeah, sure he wasn't spot on come May, but he's certainly right this time. He's gotta be right.

An early review of Darwin. Exactly right.

2011-10-20T18:03:00.000-07:00

In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, IN ORDER TO MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill.

(from an anonymous review of a work on evolution, Atheneum, 2102, 8 February, 1867, p. 217.)

Red Line on Monitor, who's your friend?

2011-10-19T01:51:00.000-07:00

So if I tweak my monitor the red line going down it will sometimes go away. I did this a couple times with fantasies that if I keep it that way it would stay that way. Now, there's a red line and a green line!

DOG BISCUITS!

Memristors are coming. Yay.

2011-10-07T16:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/06/10/2011/51988/ief2011-hp-to-replace-flash-and-ssd-in-2013.htm

First properly developed a few years ago, Memristors have a really interesting property that as you send a current through them it changes the resistance as a lingering effect. And since it's pretty much just a special type of wire, and requires no transistors to work or capacitors like DRAM, it ends up being really really really tiny and taking very very little power. They are set now to replace SSD, and hopefully end up replacing a lot of computer memory including the memory on CPUs. With this technology it, you could significantly reduce the amount of electricity a computer needs. And, actually stop the computer without losing the computer's current state. You could turn it off, and all the data would stay where it currently is and turning it back on wouldn't change anything.

But, even without utilizing those properties yet, you still have faster and cheaper and better. Even if you don't yet need the non-volatile abilities for things which have traditionally been volatile. Also interesting technology in the pipeline (not at HP that I know of), non-volatile displays. It turns out there's more than a few ways to replace the current LCD displays which use refreshing liquid crystals with backlighting to technology that simply reflects different colors. Like a paper that changes what is printed on it. Then what is displayed on the screen stays on the screen, and if you take your device into the sunlight, it gets even more clear rather than bleaching out.

There's a lot of interesting technology out there, that's coming to fruition.

Skeuomorphs vestiges in human objects.

2011-10-07T00:51:00.000-07:00

A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original. Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar, such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and cancellation lines. An alternative definition is "an element of design or structure that serves little or no purpose in the artifact fashioned from the new material but was essential to the object made from the original material"

Quote: Ernestine Rose

2011-10-03T00:02:00.000-07:00

Do you tell me that the Bible is against our rights? Then I say that our claims do not rest upon a book written no one knows when, or by whom. Do you tell me what Paul or Peter says on the subject? Then again I reply that our claims do not rest on the opinions of any one, not even on those of Paul and Peter, . . . Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters. -- Ernestine Rose, Feminist, Suffragette, Atheist, Abolitionist

Marian Call's New Album.

2011-10-02T00:45:00.001-07:00

Less Geeky, still good.

http://mariancall.bandcamp.com/album/something-fierce

*shrug*

My take on faster than light neutrinos.

2011-09-25T13:32:00.000-07:00

Clearly what's happening is that EM travels through some medium we never accounted for even in a vacuum (what's a real vacuum in this universe anyway?). Neutrinos are so weakly interacting that they can completely ignore all everything and go at c. It's not that c is wrong but rather that we've been wrongly measuring it by measuring photons in a pseudo-vacuum. Whereas neutrinos are so largely unaffected by things that they come much closer to the actual value of c, because vacuum-spacuum you can send them through the Earth and they'd never hit a damned thing. My guess is that our typical measurements of the speed of light do not take into account the index of refraction of spacetime due to zero point energy. Which would be experienced by photons but not by neutrinos.

That or they're just wrong.

But, heck any medium does slow down light and less interacting bits of even the EM spectrum get slowed down at different rates. This is dispersion and it's the reason we get rainbows. Because different parts of white light are slowed down by different amounts. So in air you will find that radio waves can travel faster than the speed of light in air. Really a few scientists managed to stop light completely, and before that slow it down to a crawl. Heck, I can run faster than light in such cases. But, I certainly don't run at c.

Comments: Species Demarcation.

2011-09-22T05:47:00.000-07:00

Kay asks:
Explain this for me if you will. The other day I saw a post from a creationist stating that the Theory of Evolution has to have some fault in it because there is no interbreeding of species. How in layman's terms did the first humans evolve from apes and then proceed to separate themselves from the apes? At what point did breeding with apes stop by humans?

That's not the theory of evolution. That's a question of taxonomy and demarcation. It's a real problem, but mostly with the way we typically think about such things, as oppose to the reality of evolution. Evolution doesn't directly deal with speciation, or how far is far enough to say that one species stops and another species starts. That's like asking where childhood ends and adulthood begins. There's just not a clear point.

Evolution says that the struggle for existence and nature selecting such that the most advantaged individuals have the most children who are similarly advantaged. This insures that species tend to adapt better to whatever niche (way of living, food etc) they occupy. Evolution says that species adapt to changing conditions of life, and can result in amazing adaptations and solutions to environmental problems. This is all evolution says. Things go forward. But since they go forward in different ways, they also tend to drift apart.

Where the species fork, and part irrevocably is a matter of happenstance and saying how far is far enough, and what a species is, turns out to be a harder problem than one would suppose because gene pools in populations do not adhere to the sort of Platonic ideals. There is no perfect human. There's no absolute ape. There's no abstract rabbit to which all rabbitness is to be compared. That's just not the way it's works.

If you go child, to mother, to grandmother, to great grandmother, and so forth and go back 350,000 generations, you'll never hit a point where a child was a different species than it's mother. It just doesn't happen. However, if you do this, with me and you do this with Oliver the Chimpanzee you'll end up at the same critter. My 350,000th grandmother is likely the same as his 350,000th grandmother. And at no point were any of my ancestors a different species than their direct offspring. And at no point were any of his ancestors a different species than their direct offspring. But, at some point, at some time, you could draw a line and say that these distant cousins are now two different species. But, that line would always be arbitrary.

We think there's some absolute human, that somehow adheres to a Platonic ideal of humanness. But, really that's not how things work. I mean, would one consider Neandertals a different species than human beings? They broke off the main human lines some 600,000 years ago. But, it turns out that modern humans interbred with them, and anybody with European ancestry is like 3% Neandertal. So are they really human? Were they always human? The Denisova hominims broke off of the Neandertal stock, and share a common ancestry with homo sapiens some 600,000 years ago too. But, they too interbred with humans in modern Melanesians (people in Oceania, like Vanatu where you get black-skinned kids with blond hair likely due to such influence). And apparently Denisova also from time to time (if a newly found toe bone is to be believed) bred with their closer cousins the Neandertals. So were any of these really different species? Under different definitions there are different answers, because the term species is absolute and evolution is gradual and progressive.

Species in some sense are a sort of hind sight thing. It is certain that at one time all of the rodents and all of the lagomorphs (rabbits, hares, pikas) had a last common ancestor (which DNA analysis suggests lived ~90.1 million years ago). This last common ancestor had at least two offspring. One of which gave rise to all the mice, rats, capybara, beavers, squirrels, porcupines, etc, and the other which gave rise to every rabbit, hare, and pika. Somewhere along the line, you can draw a line, but it would an arbitrary line. And is somewhat irrelevant to the actual history that actually happened with regard to their populations. And more and more this is what we're finding. Taxonomy is largely what we tend to call things, we give populations names. But they aren't that exact thing, there is no exact thing. They gradually change all the time.

This is largely why more and more we're trying to move away from such things. Replacing the typical system of taxonomy with a nested hierarchy so we can say that this last common ancestor of rodents and lagomorphs was a glires and so are all of its offspring. But, this ancestor doesn't necessarily fit into any of the subgroups of it's progeny.

So if for example in the distant future, many animals have died off, and bats have diversified to take over their now open niches. Let's say there are bats that swarm during the day, bats that swim under the ocean, bats the size of mosquitoes that suck blood from bats that that graze in the fields. All of these bats would be different species, but they would never stop being bats. There would be more groups inside the old groups, but the old groups, which would be the species we currently know, wouldn't stop being real. Perhaps the bats under the ocean and the bats that graze in the fields, and the ones the burrow into trees to hunt for insects, would all be fruit bats. So fruit bats wouldn't be a species but rather a group of distinct species (to some extent they are as there's many species of fruit bats), just as the glires are a group that gave rise to every rabbit and rodent on the planet.

Which is a long way around to the question you initially asked. Largely this creationist is confused as to what evolution says and what problems are really problems for the theory. The problem here is with our old ideas of taxonomy and what species are. This isn't a problem for evolution. Reality is what reality is. Our taxonomy needs to fit with reality rather than our general beliefs about names and putting things in boxes (Platonic ideals). It's all gradual, and there are no absolute lines, and we know this because we know evolution. It isn't that there's flaws in evolution, it's that there are flaws in the way we think about biology and evolution lays these errors out for us.

How in layman's terms did the first humans evolve from apes and then proceed to separate themselves from the apes?

It doesn't work like that. We didn't separate ourselves from the apes. At some point some of our ancestors took different paths than their siblings. One brother went one way, and the other brother went the other way, and they never got back together. And these ancestors of ours were apes, so we are apes. We don't ever stop being apes. Populations split and divide. The group that gave rise to the orangutans went one way and the group that gave rise to the gorillas/humans/chimps/bonobos went another and didn't get back together. Then the group that gave rise to the mountain and lowland gorillas went one way and the group that gave rise to the humans/chimps/bonobos went the other, and didn't get back together. And the group that gave rise to humans went one way and chimps/bonobos went the other. And then the chimps went one way and the bonobos went the other. There isn't some set in stone principle that says this is X and it perfectly exemplifies Xness. There are populations and they divide. Sometimes they get back together and sometimes they don't. When things started, they were no different than one brother is from another brother, in fact, necessarily you could find a set of siblings that gave rise to every divided group. You could find a pair of siblings where one gave rise to all the reptiles, dinosaurs, and birds, and the other to all the mammals.

At what point did breeding with apes stop by humans?

There's no absolute lines there. Humans are apes. And humans breed with humans. So in a very real sense humans still breed with apes (namely humans). But, looking back to our last common ancestor with chimpanzees (our closest relatives), and it may well be that humans might still be able to breed with them! It's not impossible for lions and tigers to breed or horses and donkeys. They produce offspring, and it might well be possible to have human-chimp hybrids. We just don't try it. So at one point did the ancestors of all humans and the ancestors of all chimpanzees stop breeding? -- They stopped breeding when they stopped. Seemingly about 7.8 million years ago or so.

There are some humans in some distant parts of the rain forest who do not know civilization. The large interbreeding population of humans haven't bred with them since we stopped breeding with them. If for some reason we never started back up, eventually we couldn't and we may well end up with two species of humans, such as the Morlocks and the Eloy (from H.G. Well's the Time Machine). It all depends on when the populations stop and happen to stay stopped.

So how did we separate from the other groups of apes. We went one way, and the other group went another. At what point did we stop breeding with them? We didn't breed with them anymore, when we didn't breed with them anymore.

The actual answers seem sort of anticlimactic, and they are. But, mostly because the problems are with our understanding and not evolutionary theory. We tend to see species as these distinct things which fit into these specific boxes. But, that's not what they are. They are siblings and a few million years of isolation. If you want to draw a line, at some point and say your 30,000th cousin is no longer the same species, you can, but realize that it's an arbitrary line, and our 30,000ths cousins the Neandertals bred with us just fine.
You could go further back, but it's still all just where you draw the line and that has nothing to do with evolution, that has to do with you and your line.

" The other day I saw a post from a creationist stating that the Theory of Evolution has to have some fault in it because there is no interbreeding of species."

No. There's a problem there but it's our idea of species that has the fault, not the theory of evolution.

The invisible hand of the market and God.

2011-09-20T17:25:00.000-07:00

Apparently every third-order emergent property is God at work. There's apparently a belief gaining some steam that the invisible hand of the market is God at work.We see this same thing in various other places too, in Evolution by natural selection we see that it's God at work, and within the human brain we see that that too is mysteriously God.

a third-order emergent structure is a consequence of shape, time, and heritable instructions. For example, an organism's genetic code sets boundary conditions on the interaction of biological systems in space and time.

Well, sometimes things like markets, intelligence, science, and evolution which all rely on evolutionary algorithms are easy to confuse. Early on we develop a theory of minds, and are often keen to assign minds where they don't belong and end up painting with a broad brush to catch all human minds and any other third-order emergent structures, so we see the products of nature as the products of minds. And the invisible hand of the market as God's hand. And the amazingness of our own minds. We see minds in every third order emergent structure, because realizing something is/has too much design to be the result of first or second order emergent structures typically in our lives means it's the result of a mind. Though, it could similarly be the result of anything implementing the evolutionary algorithm, which basically is just the non-random selection of randomly occurring differences.

I don't know which is sadder.

2011-09-16T17:48:00.000-07:00

http://thisiscolossal.com/2011/07/world-record-connect-the-dots-mona-lisa-in-6239-dots/

I'm not sure which is sadder, the fact that in instantly recognized that collection of dots as the Mona Lisa or that I instantly knew what it was and that I could do significantly better.

The case against Corbett was finally thrown out.

2011-09-14T09:31:00.000-07:00

Apparently as a teacher, you can say creationism is superstitious nonsense, not because it's absolutely true but because teachers have qualified immunity and should get a bit of leeway rather than the hard boot.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2011/0819/US-judges-rule-for-teacher-who-called-creationism-superstitious-nonsense

Also the court finally reversed their decision on some math teacher who was hanging up religious posters. When the initially decision came down I thought it was amazingly stupid. It's not about the teacher's freedom of speech but rather about the teacher in his role as an agent of the government. He doesn't get first amendment protected because the first amendment is specific to restrict what he can do.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2011/0913/God-Bless-America-Not-in-high-school-math-class-US-judges-rule

How to MacGyver a knife sharpener.

2011-09-14T00:53:00.001-07:00

I tried it. It actually works.

The typical Weighted Euclidean color distance values are wrong.

2011-09-12T01:06:00.000-07:00

There's a rather common set of weights for Euclidean Color Distance, to better approximate the human eye.

(30*(r1-r2))**2 + (59*(g1-g2))**2 + (11*(b1-b2))**2

30, 59, and 11 for RGB weights.

Well, they seemed rather pulled out of one's ass. And I'm not the first to notice. But, I did bother to code up a routine to compare CIELab to color distance weights and find out, by brute forcing each and every color distance to find out where the weights there should be.

22.216091748149788, 42.88860259783791, 34.895305654012304

Or 22, 43, 35 since we're very likely going with integer math. This is just brute force average best approximation of weighted Euclidean to CIELab.

From the cited Color metric article:

Several individuals suggested a weighted Euclidean distance in R'G'B', according to the formula: $∥ Δ C ∥ = 3 \times Δ R' 2 + 4 \times Δ G' 2 + 2 \times Δ B' 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - \sqrt$ This function has practically the same result as YUV. Its simplicity and speed of calculation make it a better choice than YUV.
As explained in the section "gamma correction" below, the perception of brightness by the human eye is non-linear. From the experiments it appears that the curve for this non-linearity is not the same for each colour. The weighted Euclidean distance presented works quite well for the subset of colours where the "red" signal is 128 or more (on a scale of 0-255). For the other half of the full R'G'B' cube, this different weighting produced better results: $∥ Δ C ∥ = 2 \times Δ R' 2 + 4 \times Δ G' 2 + 3 \times Δ B' 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - \sqrt$

2, 4, 3, are pretty close to my values (they are weights and thus need to be proportional to each other not similar in absolute magnitude). 2/9, 4/9, 3/9 or 22.22, 44.44, 33.33 when you bring the weights up to how many parts I have. So 22.22 vs 22.21... 44.4 vs 42.8 ... 33.3 vs 34.9.

Update:
I also ran the colors for CIELuv.

R G B weights:
0.2753667361197665, 0.3846815980739518, 0.3399516658062818

28, 38, 34

Evangelist says things in response to atheist.

2011-09-10T01:01:00.000-07:00

So part of Google+'s features is something called sparks. It's actually pretty cool for finding relevant bits of fun things. Like this interesting article which vaguely consists of an Evangelist saying things in response to an unlinked Atheist in some state somewhere.

There is a lot of really pathethic bits, once again highlighting the difference between answering or countering something and simply responding.

“The greatest leap of faith is assuming that order evolves out of complete chaos,” -- This statement particularly stuck in my maw. That's not a leap of faith, that's actually demonstratively true. From Benard Cells, to hexagon's on Saturn, snowflakes, round planets, orderly solar systems. The fact is you can mix a crap ton of whatever in a blender, and leave it for a few days on a table and it will get very orderly. It turns out that chaos is actually rather unstable and things tend to get orderly. While it is true that the second law of thermodynamics insures that higher energy and greater entropic points will necessarily equalize out, that's actually making things more uniform over time. There was a lot of chaos in the early solar system with rocks and debris flying every which direction, but over time, order evolved and the Earth is the only big rock in this very close to perfect circle we orbit in. This is especially true for higher degree emergent phenomenon like evolution, which as a natural consequence of heredity and natural selection creates organisms which bias towards the preservation of better genes and better adapted bodies coded by those genes.

And as for the balanced ecosystems and perfect design of nature, he's just wrong. Everything in nature is poised on a knife's edge, being eaten by parasites and killed by predators, and often starving to death. Most animals suffer through most of their lives with the smallest amount of bad luck separating one from suffering through another week or dying what must be a very painful death. If a loving God designed such a system, that God's only love is for suffering and pain, because nature is red in tooth and claw. And the life of animals is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The only thing such a system manages is to make the smallest genetic advantage thrive within that population's gene pool and thereby selectively bias the future generations towards having rather than lacking that advantage.

And then there's his other really terrible bit of claiming:

“Nothing in life is free. The more valuable the object, the higher the price. Nothing is more valuable to God than the human race, which is why such a high price had to be paid, and in this case with a divine human life.” --- Paid to whom?

Really, to whom?

While it's certainly the case that propitiation by blood is a common theme throughout religion and religious views, it's not something that actually would be fundamentally important in our 13.75 billion year old universe. The idea that that the oxygen carry molecules of some species, on this tiny little planet, around this tiny star, in this large galaxy, which is simply one of billions, is obviously absurd to anybody who really questions the core bit of Christian dogma, that Blood Sacrifice of God to God makes any real sense.

And the thing is, it does make sense. This is exactly what we should expect to find if a culture obsessed with primitive blood magic were to make a religion. Because if we give blood for blood for criminal offenses, it's rather quick to give blood for sin in religious ones. And then the better the blood, the more it will atone for, so how great and powerful must be the blood of God? This argument is found wholecloth here by Jason Frenn as well as in Hebrews 9. Christianity is exactly what we should expect to find coming out of a culture rife in belief in blood magic, but not what we should expect to find being true. And lo and behold, we find Christianity first coming out of exactly a place and region and people obsessed with exactly that. So it really does make sense, as long as Christianity is false.

Flat adverbs always seem sketchy.

2011-09-09T00:30:00.000-07:00

The evolution of lines. That's clever.

2011-09-05T17:30:00.000-07:00

I'm a huge fan of evolutionary algorithms and some general crowd sourcing stuff.

There's stuff we haven't seen! Save the world.

2011-09-05T17:02:00.001-07:00

&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;gt;So &amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;

So if there's a bunch of critters that we know everything about is it okay to kill them all?

It likely is about time to explain basic climate science to people.

2011-08-31T16:00:00.000-07:00

Hopefully in the simplest terms possible.

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/08/if_you_believe_that_blankets_k.php

CO2 works like a blanket. It traps heat. We're making it thicker. That'll have consequences.

On design, of birds and beaches.

2011-08-26T20:38:00.000-07:00

My response to a person who acted hostile after I told him that there really is design in nature. I think denying such is bizarre and wrong, and really just a terrible line of argument. The truth is a far better argument for reality anyhow.

--

Let a beach exist for a billion years. It will stay a beach. It will change a bit and the shore will move. But, there's nothing really designing it. Let some reproducing creatures exist for a billion years and they will develop new designs and adaptations and forms that one could never imagine.

Evolution is a process of self-design, and beaches do not evolve in that sense. They are not designed. They are not improved.

There really is a difference which calls an explanation and evolution is that explanation. There is a very real difference between beaches and birds.

It's certainly true that evolution is the answer, but the question is why is there so much design in nature. Birds have insanely adapted well adapted form, hollow bones, light feathers, amazing lungs, huge pectoral muscles, and that can't have just happened or happened by chance. And it didn't they evolved. The design is the result of the system of reproduction and death.

Some of the oldest rocks in the world have some of the oldest signs of life.

2011-08-26T12:02:00.000-07:00

Oldest fossils of life going back 3.5 billion years ago. It's cool and all but I was thinking and went off on a tangent. I think it's really cool that we have 3.5 billion year old rocks. Australia is about the only place with them because it's been a pretty consistent land mass over the history of Earth. With the amount of shifting and moving and subduction zones, it seems like sitting there unchanged for 3.5 billion years ~ 3,500,000,000 years is quite a feat. If anybody could do it, rocks could do it. Go rocks! Way to exist.

While really old fossils are cool, my suddenly being impressed by the feats of rocks warranted a blog post.

Rape and Pillage

2011-08-22T00:53:00.000-07:00

I so love David Michell. He's always awesome.

A tale of two Michelles.

2011-08-18T11:42:00.000-07:00

I so totally wish that more things on television were this good.

The worst part of Kalam

2011-08-10T14:25:00.000-07:00

I think the worst part of the Kalam Cosmological Argument is the presumptive nature of the whole thing. While the Bible answers the question of cosmology with "God did it", the cosmology in the Bible that "God did" isn't starting the inflationary expansion of the universe or causing the big bang. But rather painstakingly and skillfully (Psalms 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.) created a large metal-like dome held up by strong pillars to keep the cosmic ocean divided and the waters above the heavens and below the Earth apart.

In the Bible, we live under a large metal like dome of heaven, with little twinkly lights stuck into it and above the heavens there's the waters and below the earth the other waters which God so helpfully divided up in Genesis. The Bible's answer to this is "God did it".

-- That's fine, but you don't get to copypasta that answer onto a modern cosmological framework and suppose that the authors of the Bible had any freaking clue what the universe was like. "God did it" is the answer the Bible gives to the metal-like dome protecting us from the cosmic ocean, you don't get just re-appropriate that answer to new cosmologies that are less horribly wrong. It's like saying Jesus cured diseases. No, he shooed out demons that caused diseases. You don't get to use the modern understanding and the answer "God did it", because the "God did it" was to answer in the context of the primitive understanding. The Bible says God is the reason the sun revolves around the Earth, sorry Bitches, no backsies!

The fluxuations of science.

2011-08-10T04:08:00.001-07:00

Science use to say the universe was infinitely old, then 2 billion years, 3 billion years, 10 billion years, 8 billion years, 9.5 billion years, 10 billion years, 8-12 billion years, 12 billion years, 13-14 billion years, 12.5 billion years, 14.8 billion years, 13 billion years, 13.7 billion years, 13.72 billion years, 13.73 billion years, 13.75 billion years.! Science can't make up it's mind. It could be anything tomorrow, and then something different the next day! -- Anybody who supposes things along this line of reasoning, really didn't pay enough attention to that sequence of numbers to notice the underlying pattern.

Genesis 1:2 and the Christian Delusion.

2011-08-10T02:23:00.000-07:00

I read the Christian Delusion a while back, having gotten a copy in Riverside signed by Richard Carrier. The chapters are all pretty fantastic and it's hugely informative, and I'm already rather encyclopedic so learning new things is rarer than it should be on such subjects. But, Babinski's chapter on Biblical Cosmology has been hugely influential on me. My views were pretty shattershot.

I understood that parts of the Bible talked about the vault of heaven and that the sky was a hardened dome. But, I never really understood the entire picture. I figured that people thought the sky was water because it was blue. It turns out that within Semitic cosmology that's just the color of the bottom of heaven of the firmament which is held up by the mountains. But, I never understood why the dome was spread-out like hard metal or resting on firm foundations, or the other bits that relate to cosmology. And it has a lot to do with how the world was created in the myth and what existed before and the picture people had of the universe.

Genesis starts out with basically a preamble, in the beginning, the gods created the heavens and the Earth. And then describes how they came to be. What's interesting is how the second line of the creation myth is just glossed over, and largely ignored. The first line we get, the third line is understandable, but what the hell is that second line saying?

1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Sure, formless earth, nothing there, darkness are all understandable. But, what is the "face of the deep"? And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters? What waters? When did waters get created? If you read through the genesis account, water is never created. There's a lot of sections about dividing the waters by making the firmament and keeping it apart from the waters of the Earth. And allowing land to be exist, and gathering waters into seas, but never actually making the water. The reason for this is that at the core of the cosmology it isn't a creation ex nilho.

The universe was created out of a cosmic ocean. The firmament and the Earth divide the waters because its all waters. And cosmic ocean underlay all the cosmologies of the Semitic regions. The universe according to the Bible wasn't made out of nothing, it was made out of a formless ocean that was divided up. The reason for professing repeatedly in the Bible as to how strong and secure the firmament, how it's made of strong metal, and upon solid foundations and expertly crafted, is because it was a very real fear that the ocean might crush you. That Noah's Flood might very well happen and the waters will flow out of the vault of heaven and out from under the Earth, and our precarious little bubble might not exist.

7:11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.

8:2 The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained;

And given the myth of the flood it was absolutely vital to assure people that such a thing would never ever happen again, with God's regrets, and pinky-promises and rainbows.

9:11 And I will establish my covenant with you, neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.
9:12 And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations:
9:13 I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.

It was a very real worry that the cosmic ocean would kill everybody., and much of the Bible goes to dissuade our fears of this. And in fact, because the sky is hard and metal and protects us, it's clear evidence for God.

Psalms 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

And really, understanding this is rather devastating to Biblical cosmology and a lot of apologetics. There's a lot of stuff with like the Kalam Cosmological Argument that largely says that the universe was created ex nilho and science can't explain this, but God fully explains how this happened. But, the Bible never actually said that, it starts out with a cosmic ocean and a sky made of hard material on solid foundations, which attest to the handiwork of God. Far be it for Christianity to explain the Big Bang with a divine fallacy, they need to explain rather where that original cosmic ocean came from. The gods created the heavens and the Earth to divide up the waters, but that's doesn't explain the origins of the cosmic ocean.

The Bible doesn't actually fit that paradigm at all, it not even trying to answer to the question of what caused the initial expansion/existence of spacetime. It's answering very specifically how did the strong firmament of heaven and dry land get formed out of a cosmic ocean. The answer is "God did it", in fact God spent a solid 1/6th of the time he spent making stuff to make that firmament, that majestic roof fretted with golden fire (as Shakespeare put it). Spending the entire second day on it. Dry land was part of the third day. Then in day four God spends a lot of time adding bling to the firmament. Putting stars in it, and really big balls of light to travel across the firmament. The little tiny spots of light (which according to Revelations will fall to the ground during the end times) and the giant greater and lesser lights of the sun and moon, just to deck it out and give us signs for seasons and such. A lot of the OT is depended on this view of the universe, and really by coming to understand that, you really see how hollow various claims about how God explains the universe actually are. If you read the Bible, the authors have no clue what the universe is really like and spend a considerable amount of time explaining how why the cosmic ocean doesn't kill us, how the sky is hard as metal, and how awesome God is for making said firmament.

So the general theist argument that atheists can't explain the origins of the universe but God does, is even hollower, not just because the answers we have are really good and anything is better than the always wrong answer theists try to shove into every gap, but because the Christian God explains the origins of the metal dome protecting us from the cosmic ocean..

Kalam and Cosmology

2011-08-06T17:52:00.000-07:00

There were some bits towards the beginning that irked me a bit, but after understanding there was no advocacy here but rather a presentation of the possible with the arguments of the apologists I got into the groove.

Sir Galahad, Josh Ritter

2011-08-04T09:06:00.000-07:00

Pretty awesome.

Evolution Is Intelligence: Paley, Design, Hume, Darwin and Conclusions

2011-07-27T02:46:00.000-07:00

I do accept that there is merit to the bits of Paley's argument that survive Darwin's explanation. Because the Argument from Design, if we remove the ad hoc conclusion that 'God did it', still says something. While Darwin explained how nature can design itself through a rather amazing emergent phenomenon, he didn't explain why these things look "intelligently" designed.

The conclusion Hume draws is still, I believe, acceptably true. "Since, therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man..." -- The equivalency fundamentally holds. Darwin simply showed us that the Author of Nature was a bottom up process of self-design by evolution. He in no way showed that therefore it's nothing like "the mind of man." This is generally and wrongly ignored, and often thought to be a complete rebuttal. That because we know how design occurs in nature, that it can't be intelligence. But, really we don't know how intelligence fundamentally works, so Darwin pinning down the "Author of Nature" side of the equation does nothing to negate the equivalency and we should, I believe rightly, conclude that the mind of man works very similarly to evolution by natural selection.

In fact, if one considered a robust evolutionary algorithm surviving on, accurate predictions about some external environment, rather than energy, one would find that such a system would account easily for the senses, how they work, how they adapt to shortfalls and gaps, how they cooperate, and a great deal of the robust bits of intelligence which current theories completely fail to explain, much less predict. As well as giving a rather interesting paradigm for how the brain would necessarily have to work. Namely as a virtual black box, which could be as isolated as DNA is from the ongoings of nature, but still able to contain a great deal of very important and accurate information about that environment. DNA, afterall, knows a lot about the world, and the only sense it possesses is death. Is it therefore much wonder that a skullful of neurons testing theory after theory against confirming or rejecting senses could create a remarkably accurate view of the world, without those senses in anyway necessarily causing that view or needing to be fundamentally accurate?

I think that Intelligent Design in Paley's time had merit, and was right about a lot of things. But, like Einstein expanding Newton. Darwin actually built on Paley and Intelligent Design, by finding the underlying process for bottom-up self-organizing design, and explaining not only the design but ultimately intelligence. The best metric for intelligence is the Turing Test which explains nothing but comes off as a version of Justice Potter's pornography test: "I don't know what intelligence is, but I know it when I see it." -- And yet, for thousands of years people have been looking at trees and saying: "That's so clearly made by intelligence!", and thus, in a very general sense, passing the Turing Test with evolution. And I think that with such an proper understanding creationism and intelligent design is hollower than anybody ever dreamed. When they offer that the intelligence behind nature is God, they are really deifying evolution, an apotheosis of a simple bottom up mechanism for producing additional order by ruling out what doesn't work, very much akin to the accusation of "worshiping evolution" that atheists are occasionally pilloried with; frankly I don't blame them.

What would prove to you that there is a God?

2011-07-24T14:15:00.001-07:00

>>I think the strength of evidence required to falsify a claim depends on the amount of evidence extant.

Actually and somewhat interestingly, I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. The old axiom that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is true but what is meant by "extraordinary" isn't simply "a lot" but a quality difference as well. There is some arcane debate out there as to what would convince an ardent atheist there is a God. And some folks claim "well if God came down and talked to me", but others have rightfully noted that somethings like left-temporal lobe epilepsy can cause that exact heterophenomenon and it might well be a better conclusion that you are simply having an exceptionally vivid hallucination (as many are), rather than God is really talking to you. So then where does that leave the proposition?

The problem here is that a lot of evidence is different than extraordinary. You really need an explanation that explains everything. And to the above question I think a satisfactory answer is that if I woke up from a matrix like game designed and executed by God, upon waking I quickly regain my real memories and understand the physics of the real universe are nothing like the massive multiplayer networked video game that is all of this universe and that real physics were completely different than the physics of Earth. Such evidence would be substantially more extraordinary than something claiming to be God coming around and showing off what could be super-advanced alien technology on Earth. Extraordinary doesn't mean a lot of additional evidence to the contrary but something that could actually overthrow everything we think we know about the universe.

On De-Evolution and the Fall of Man

2011-07-23T23:47:00.000-07:00

Though it is not very common, there is an argument that stupid design is explained by the fall of man in Genesis. I tend to go to the trouble of showing how silly such ideas are by refuting them. It seems like a lot of work to refute a rather laughable claim, but why not? It's just a few thousand words and maybe you'll free a mind. As I bothered to write up a pretty good explanation elsewhere I'll repost it here, because it's awesome and I tend to look back here to find awesome things. Even if nobody read this blog, except for you (warning nobody might read this, but if that's true then its a safe statement because nobody read it), it still works as a great resource to save things.

While one could attempt to make that argument. The problem is that Pareto efficiency of the designs observed combined with an understanding of the evolutionary ancestry requirements producing better and specific assumptions, don't fit at all.

Allow me an example. There is a nerve in humans and in all mammals called the recurrent laryngeal nerve which travels from the brain to the larynx, via the heart. It travels down from the head, loops around the aortal arch and back up to the larynx. In the giraffe this is like twenty feet of unneeded nerve to travel a few inches. This is a largely inefficient design, but under your theory it would have had to have developed since the Fall of Man. That somehow the deterioration of the perfect design made all the recurrent laryngeal nerves of all mammals and all the four legged land critters (and a good number of the ocean critters, just not arthropods) suddenly lengthened and looped around the heart.for no reason.

Moving from one design to another would likely cause the larynx to fail. Basically what we have is a Pareto efficiency, it's not the best design, but it is one that any alteration would cause serious errors and thus cannot be changed (save gradually), and no set of gradual changes could get you to the more efficient design. But, the reverse is also true. You can't go from the efficient design to the inefficient one without also likely breaking the system completely.

However the evolutionary explanation is really straight forward. We are rejiggered.fish. In fish the path the nerve takes is a straight line. It goes right through the heart there because that's the best and most efficient design. The problem is that through our evolution the heart has moved down in the torso the head has become more isolated and the larynx is not located much closer to the brain than to the heart. So once it developed in our evolutionary ancestor (and the ancestor of a all the rejiggered fish, read all four legged land animals and any of the water dwelling descendents thereof) it couldn't be changed. In fact, it can't be changed. You can't get from the efficient design to the inefficient one or the efficient design to the inefficient one. Evolutionary the design was quite efficient in our distant ancestors but doesn't work well for us, and as such, it is not only explained by evolutionary theory but such things are predicted by evolution and are only explained by evolution. You could say that that our eyes are so fantastic that they need an intelligence to explain how wonderful and intricate they are, however, you can't use that explanation to explain why all the blood vessels and nerves in the mammalian eyes (including ours) go forward towards light and not back towards the brain which is their final destination. Which requires that they be narrowed and made rather clear and that a large hole causing a blind spot exists in our vision.

You also cannot use some sort of de-evolution from the Genesis Fall of Man as an explanation. The designs are good, they are just wrong. They are well designed to cope with things like flawed design at the most basic level, but also it's impossible to go from the most basic design principles to the inferior ones without breaking the entire system. And even if you could, you'd need an explanation for how good the system is at coping with the most basic errors.

So,
The explanation you are offering fails to account for such designs.
The explanation you are offering could not allow a transition from a perfect design to the inferior but well coped designs.
The alternative explanation explains such specific mistakes.
The alternative explanation predicts these specific mistakes.
The alternative explanation gives the specific reasons why those mistakes should be very common.
The alternative explanation makes a wide swath of specific explanations which perfectly mesh with what we know. We know for example that evolutionarily fish are the first vertebrates and some of the systems would work fantastically for them.

So the explanation accepted by the science is one that explains all the data at hand, predicting a great deal of it, fits with known facts, and requires no unknown assumptions. Your explanation cannot account for the data at hand, does nothing to predict how things should turn out or if they are consistent with the assumptions, requires a great deal of unknown assumptions and is primarily based on iron age interpretation of Semitic mythology from late bronze age principly accepted by some of the nomadic goatherders of the time, and varied throughout the region.

I think when things are this clear you should seriously consider if you could be wrong. Taking into account things like the modern understanding that certainty is an emotion rather than reliable metric by which to judge the quality of the evidence, and that being wrong feels exactly like being right while it's happening.

Home again...

2011-07-22T21:26:00.001-07:00

Traveled up north. I have returned. Not that anybody could notice or care much.

*watches tumbleweed roll passed*.

On eternal rewards and punishment and meaning.

2011-07-15T01:20:00.000-07:00

The more you think about it, if there were an afterlife that is eternal there's no finite crime that could warrant any infinite punishment. Who cares if you get to have your finite life before your infinite life last 15 or 90 years, or how brutal and horrific the transition. Clubbing a person to death, no more or less warrants any party to any infinite reward or punishment, than any other action.

If you really weigh such things you realize that the very prospect offered means that this life is largely pointless and minutia compared to the infinite. Such claims are often is offered by the religious to say that it's super important what we do here because it governs our path in the next infinite life. But, really that makes no sense. It's dictating an illogical system which demands that this life is infinitely important while finitely experienced. There is no good reason to do this. The only reason to suggest a system like this is because the proposition that there is some infinite reward or punishment somewhere is false. If there actually were an infinite punishment or reward the impact of some brief 80-90 years would be 0. As such, any reasonable system would accept this and never dictate the infinite by way of the finite. Whereas if the proposition is false, and this is the only life. Then attempting to give it more value by giving it infinite weight would be a reasonable if poorly executed thing to attempt. Moreso if you tied the rewards and punishments to generally moral comeuppance within this life.

Upon the prospect of eternity, life would be meaningless and as such the sins committed within it would be equally meaningless. If we grant the prospect of heaven and/or hell we must conclude that all people go to the same place regardless of any petty finite crimes or sins. For if everybody went to heaven except for Adolph Hitler who burns in hell, then after a few thousand, million, or billion years all of those people who had a brief nothing of a pre-eternal-life shortened by his actions must agree of the unjust nature of an eternal punishment. Such a system, where Hitler was sentenced to hell, would be hugely unjust and would require the intervention of any slightly compassionate humans.

The only crime in such a universe, would be a crime that causes an infinite punishment. The failure to save a soul, the killing of an unsaved person who might have eventually be saved, or anything that would alter the fate of any soul to hell rather than heaven. But, then this too would collapse. Because this would never happen if this never happened. The Nash Equilibrium of such a system is that everybody should go to heaven, anyway. Because only such a crime as to damn a soul would perhaps warrant such a punishment, and the only way to do that is with an infinite chain of damnation that could never have begun. And in such a case, the only real criminal would be God. -- Where theologically one attempts to place an infinite finger on the scale of importance of life, they only succeed in making the entire system a farce. And the infinite the only thing worthy of measure. If there were such infinite rewards and punishments the only coherent system is a uniform system. But, if there were no such set of rewards and punishments, then making the claim that such a system exists would be logical, reasonable, and likely. For what better to attempt to keep people in line than a stick and carrot. And what better stick or carrot than an infinite stick and infinite carrot. But, if we have infinite carrots laying around, whatever we're trying to achieve is meaningless because some fraction of that infinite would outweigh any finite goals we might have. Heaven and hell make the most sense when they are false propositions. For as a real system, they render the earth largely a pointless pitstop that serves no function and engenders no rewards and punishments regardless of anybody's actions. As a fake system, they make sense to try to solidify religious power and bring people in line with whatever religious or moral behavior you want.

The problem here is that such a system is rife for abuse, it's rife for failure and for primitive notions of morality. Morality gets better all the time, secular ethics which focus on what the best way to live should be and how we can get the best results given an acceptable range of behavior has long outstripped the moral notions within various holy books. The Bible describes what kinds of slaves you should have and how they should be treated, how best to buy women from their fathers, how to sell your children, how to commit genocide, take sex slaves, and when it's acceptable to rape them. The Koran is a small nudge from justifying flying planes into buildings. The Bible easily justifies walking around with signs informing people of God's Hate for various things. The idea of heaven and hell doesn't work as truth, and as a lie to compel adherence it gives a loaded gun to pointless nonsense. While I admit that in a system where there is no form of government outside of the hollow threats of religious comeuppance, it might be preferable to a completely failed state. It's not however the best system or even a coherent system in the end. The likelihood that the system described by beliefs of heaven and hell actually exists, is low because the system places considerable emphasis on our Earthly life, while paradoxically rendering it meaningless. Whereas the likelihood that the system should be presented as true when it's really false, is exactly what we should expect from goat-herding nomads grasping at straws to try and macgyver a system that function as a government without any real government authority. When all you have is hollow threats, go big, or go home.

If heaven and hell are real, the universe is a bizarre paradoxical place that doesn't make sense and is perversely unfair.
If heaven and hell are fake, the universe is exactly what it appears to be. People try to control other people and use threats to do it. And when cooperation is generally useful, such threats can be used cohesively and effectively.

As is often the case, religion makes sense, but only if the things it says aren't true. Because generally there are not only answers to the questions posed, but there are good underlying reasons for the claims. And those claims ultimately make no sense unless those claims are also false.

What Being Wrong Feels Like?

2011-07-14T01:37:00.000-07:00

While we tend to think that being wrong feels embarrassing, shameful and dreadful, that's just what we associating learning that we're wrong feels like. Actually being wrong feels exactly like being right.Certainty is an emotion, not a degree of reliability we assign to our beliefs. It has nothing to do with the truth.

Just as, oddly enough, lying has nothing to do with the truth. When we lie, we give a false account of our heterophenomenological beliefs. We say what we believe to be true or we do not. The actual truth does not need to be accounted for. For if we say what we believe to be true is not true, we are lying. Whether or not by happenstance or dumb luck it turns out to actually be true. If we say something we believe to be false is true, it doesn't matter if technicalities or flukes or incorrectness renders our lies factually accurate or not, they are still lies. And if we say what we believe to be false is false and what we believe to be true is true, it doesn't matter if we happen to be mistaken, they are not lies. Lies are when we misrepresent our beliefs. And our beliefs do not need to align with the truth. -- Our beliefs have no solid ties to the truth, nor do they need them. Truths feel exactly the same as falsehoods when they are bouncing around our heads, namely they feel like beliefs; because they are.

Herein is the pride and fall of our minds. Because to avoid the shame of being wrong there are two courses we can take. We can either minimize the pain of wrongness by stubbornness and spite, because what is there that stubbornness and spite can't do even if we must sacrifice all of reality to maintain the illusion. Or we can accept that being wrong isn't shameful, that it's an opportunity for growth and a lesson for future humility. I tend to joke that my humility is part of my awesomeness, but the truth is that I believe it in all honesty. I think humility with which to temper pride is the highest of virtues. I don't mean the bland sort of failing to take credit for your awesome; that's stupid. Own your awesome. Know how badass you are, but do not extend that to your beliefs. You're beliefs are not you. The flip side of insulting a person's beliefs while respecting that person as a person, is a sort of humility where you understand and revel in your positive aspects but avoid believing in beliefs. The idea that because you rock, your beliefs are rock solid is simple folly. It seems rather zen, but understanding the fallibility of the human brain and the cognitive biases to which we are all prey, allows you to forgive yourself for being wrong. It's okay. It really is okay to be wrong. It's not even forgiveness, but understanding that there's nothing to forgive. Because being wrong is easy to do, and it is hard tell wrongness from rightness.

This, however, isn't to say that we should just call the whole thing off. No. All roads lead to epistemological foundations and this is a clarion call for the developing those skills. How do we know what we know, and should we care if our beliefs are true? Rather than pridefully denying our wrongness, we should accept that our wrongness is an absolutely reasonable option and often is the best option. We should be ready to test our beliefs, and determine whether or not they are true and accept that they are what they are, and not care, because to accept a belief nether more nor less than the degree required by a careful understanding of the evidence in favor of that proposition should be passionately wished for. It's more important than I-told-you-sos and regrets about recently abandoned false beliefs, to care enough about your beliefs to be ready to abandon them for the mere objection that they do not conform to reality. Thinking critically requires a deep desire to want to believe true things and not believe false things, to revel in those moments others find embarrassing, shameful, or dreadful, and understand them for what they really are: growing pains.

When coding bugs...

2011-07-04T23:30:00.000-07:00

When one codes bugs try to make sure they are either non-existent or catastrophic.

The sneaky ones are a pain in the ass.

Show Binge Withdrawls.

2011-07-02T02:18:00.000-07:00

It's an odd effect that will I first experienced watching a several seasons of Alias in short order, but the effect of having a show watching it up to date and suddenly having nothing is an odd sort of emotion. It's like the end of a show, a good finale that you can't really believe it's all over and want more but know that there's nothing else to do. I just finished watching the first and second seasons (up til now) of Treme, an HBO drama about post-Katrina NOLA. Fill up your free time with pure binge and now you'll get a weekly trickle. It's not even like it's over, or canceled it's just I can't mainline it with a needle straight into my eye.

It's like a dear friend to stop me from partying and getting doped up sent me into working on an oyster boat between occasional chauffeuring into town to play some music. I know it's coming. I've done such things before. But, it always ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

Saga of Bjorn, animated short

2011-07-01T02:19:00.001-07:00

Heh.

Should math be taught in schools?

2011-06-30T23:47:00.000-07:00

You've seen this already but in case you haven't.

California becomes even more backwoods as time goes by...

2011-06-24T20:03:00.000-07:00

New York just legalized gay marriage. California was a trailblazer for a little while there, now we're less social and advanced than Iowa. But, then it's really hard to be more progressive and equal than Iowa. We'd need to treat people as human.

Mark Shea and various drivel.

2011-06-20T01:35:00.000-07:00

So in some distant corner of the internet I am discussion religion with religious people and was offered in part an article by Mark Shea that was dreadful, I did my due dilligence and tore it up but I figured since it hit upon some of the very general important bits of Plantinga's argument against naturalism I should repost it here.

Mark Shea's article is rather terrible. It first parrots the claim that if God doesn't exist that atheists should care less. This is both dismissive and wrong. I care deeply when my fellow human beings fritter their lives away on harmful dangerous nonsense.

And then it notes Haldane's objection which is parroted by C.S. Lewis and rehashed more modernly by the likes of Plantinga with his argument against naturalism. Largely that if minds are naturally evolved that they cannot be dependable. Therefore that belief is (minds are naturally evolved) is undependable. The mistake here is more subtle because it is discounting all of epistemology and science. It's entirely true that our minds are made of atoms and that our minds are evolved and that our minds suffer from massive cognitive biases and mistakes, hallucinations, sensory errors, perception mistakes, etc. The question then becomes how do we get around these problems? How can we, considering the limited nature of our brains, manage to come about to find beliefs which are likely true. Not just give us a feeling of certainty but which are something we should really accept. And the answer is largely by delegating our beliefs the best we can to reality. Testing those beliefs and coming up with the best conclusion we can and be ready to abandon that conclusion the instant it stops being the best. Generally, we need to build a functional epistemology from the ground up.

The conclusion that others offer is that we should just dive into our biases assume that our minds are designed by God and can do no wrong. And that believing otherwise forces one to do the really hard job of living a examined rather than unexamined life. But, that our brains are evolved and cognitive biases exist are manifestly true. The conclusions of Lewis and Plantinga is basically to claim that "maybe your brain is faulty, but my brain is perfect" which is the clearest hobgoblin of a faulty mind one could make manifest.

Science and the application of Relgion.

2011-06-17T04:44:00.000-07:00

"Science works for everything else. The reluctance to use it for religion may have to do with the fact that science slices through the tissue paper nonsense of theology like a hot knife through non-existent butter."

Thanks to Regina for noting how awesome this turn of phrase is.

Biases and Epistemology.

2011-06-16T02:36:00.000-07:00

The NY Times has a pretty good article on the reason for reason. It's not entirely wrong as there's a lot of cognitive biases and people tend towards defending their own ideas and attacking other people's ideas than about testing their ideas and rejecting them when they are wrong. Reason, used in this sense, is a tool or rather a cudgel for beating people with who disagree with what you believe, rather than taking any time to stop and consider and try to suss out what the truth is, rather than make your Truth win out over others Truths.

The understandings here should convince one that there's a deep and serious need for epistemology. That understanding how we should properly determine what is true and what isn't true is singularly important if you care whether your beliefs are true. If you care only about winning, then your beliefs are irrelevant. You can preach the gospel or fear the coming rapture. You can call Obama a socialist or claim that we should be socialist. The arguments and beliefs are largely pointless and unneeded. What matters is the truth, and to know the truth we need to know how we know we know.

I think that science is the only usable metric in this regard. That without testing our ideas against nature, we can't know anything about nature. The empiricism is a virtue. That if you accept evidence over your own current beliefs. You must have a low evidential inertia. You must find the evidence to be the ultimate arbiter, and everything wrong to be cast out. When Einstein did the calculations on what his theory said about the perihelion of Mercury, he about fainted, because it was right. It was observational evidence. But, if he were wrong, he would have rightly chucked it out the window, just as Kepler had to do with his rather beautiful analogy of the rotation of the planets as being within the perfect geometric shapes. It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory, if it doesn't fit the evidence it's wrong.

Therein is the real difference. That's the core of the issue. Without confronting the idea of epistemology you just get talking heads yelling at each other and argument is going to be nothing more than an attempt to win, and have very little to do with producing the correct result.

Bayes Theorem and the Holy Ghost

2011-06-13T08:28:00.000-07:00

>>but I also have to come to grips with the reality of my religious experiences. Are they simply neurons or some psychological trick my brain is playing with me, or has a higher being worked within my life and the lives of multitudes?

This is where Bayes theorem would come in handy. Do we know of any psychological tricks that brains do? Well, for one there is the supposition that the brain is playing tricks with you, rather than the reality that the brain IS you, among a great number of other clear biases. And how many supernatural superbeings do we know of that alter mental states? Well, none. So we'll have to assume one ad hoc, without any motivation or plausible physics by which it could exist. So which theory is more likely? Something we know can and does exist, exists or that with no evidence in support of it, a being with superpowers in an invisible realm is fiddling with your brain to tell you to do things you want to do?

Keep in mind this superbeing is also telling other humans radically different and contradictory things also directly in line with their personal wants too.

The explanations that former religious people give that they realized that they were telling themselves these things the whole time explains everything. The explanation you are leaning towards supposes superbeings in invisible realms telepathically communicating with everybody and telling different people contradictory things, but perfectly in line with their wants.

The methodology of miracles, the failures of science.

2011-06-13T03:39:00.000-07:00

Miracles are often established by exclusion. For example Lourdes has an established protocol of miracles that it must be shown to have no proper medical explanation before being accepted as an official miracle. This is much like calling a light in the sky an alien spacecraft because you ruled out everything you could think of. It's absurd and contradictory. It's saying, quite blatantly, I have no explanation therefore I have an explanation. While this prologue is interesting in it's own right, I want to say something else.

I think science should take it as a huge complement, that such a flawed methodology is even supposed. It is saying quite literally: "Science couldn't explain it. It's a miracle!" How many volumes does that speak for the efficacy of science?

Bronies and the Patriarchy.

2011-06-12T20:46:00.000-07:00

So I went to Fark as I tend to do from time to time. I'm not an active person there, but I do check the place. Heck my Fark ID number is 4 digits, and very low four digits. And there was an article on Adult Men who Like My Little Pony. Expecting the worst I checked the comments, fully expecting to find manboobz (a blog that points out misogynist bigotry) level fail. I was amazed to not find that.

I came to the thread expected to find patriarchal hate for those deemed to not live up to the standards of manliness. I found a bunch of people who generally agree that the show is good and liking it, isn't that weird.

Apparently Bronies (Bro-Ponies) are neither weird nor uncommon, and apparently for all my pessimism the new My Little Pony show gets pretty rave reviews for being for preteen girls. And while there are a few people claiming that they would like to murder Bronies, they were astoundingly a small minority.

Odd.

Alexander Hamilton Hiphop.

2011-06-11T15:34:00.001-07:00

cool

<p>&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;A</p>

Christianity by prophetic evidence.

2011-06-09T00:08:00.000-07:00

>>I say Christianity is true, by the prophetic fulfillment (various empires arising, wars coming to pass, Messianic prophetic fulfillments, eschatological fulfillments like Israels' rebirth, etc.),

I don't think any of these count. Not just because I'm a doubter but because I think any of them could be considered prophetic in reality. And it ignores all the failed prophecies in the Bible. I mean the end of the world was going to be in Jesus' generation, over and over we hear this. It was downright soon, and yet nothing.

Compare some of these to the prophecies of Nostradamus. I'm not saying Nostradamus was magical, but he was fairly secular. And the comparisons are clear. You can get these prophecies from pretty much anywhere. Wars typically happen, especially in the first millennium. If somebody predicted there would be no more wars, that would be amazing. If true, that would be miraculous. That wars happen and countries arising, etc, are facts of life. Not magical predictions. Muhammad predicted Islam would splinter into many different factions. It has! OMG!

Next the Messianic prophecies, are written into the Bible. If you look at the scholarship and the proper understanding of the Bible, we can see that the major edits between Mark->Luke and Mark->Matthew are edits to establish prophecies as true. If this means adding in a hamfisted genealogy that contradicts the other hamfisted genealogy so be it. If it means writing a bizarre narrative where everybody has to go back to their father's birth-town when *NOBODY* would ever do that, so be it. And what's more you can see them making it fit prophecies that didn't even exist. Matthew 2:15 says it's a prophecy that "Out of Egypt, I have called my Son" but that's from Hosea 11:1 and says "11:1 When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt." -- It's talking about Exodus. The author of that part of Matthew made them go to Egypt just to get out of Egypt, in an origin story directly in conflict to the added stuff Luke adds. Or going to Bethlehem (Matthew 2:5) to fulfill Micah 5:2 that's about a military leader who according to Micah 5:6 will lay waste to Assyria by sword, and Bethlehem Ephratah is a clan. It's a group of people and says as much! How much credit should I give prophecies like this? What about demonstrations of power? Muhammad pointed at the moon and broke it into two pieces. Isn't that amazing? It says so in the Koran, which was magically dictated to to Muhammad (who couldn't even write). How are these that amazing.

Finally eschatological predictions are a fickle thing. Perhaps you should read the book "88 reasons why the world will end in 1988", which is filled with escatological predictions. Further, have you read the Israel prophecy? It doesn't say that. Further, the prophecy was purposely fulfilled. So the Bible doesn't really say that but part of the reasons Israel was brought about was because people said it was prophesied! It would be as amazing as saying that somebody will post to this thread the words "Rosebud, pickle, vicecounte." -- It's an amazing prophecy. I mean, those are randomish words, "vicecounte" is even misspelled! What are the odds? Well really they are quite good.

"I have my faith, and others have faith in only the certainty of death" - No. That's obvious and dishonest. They have faith in the same sorts of nonsense. The 2012 apocalypse with Nibiru, Camping's new end of the world is in October. There's people with faith in Nostradamus, and even a group that thinks that the song American Pie is a prophecy of a coming apocalypse. And they all have faith, and as good of evidence as you do. So really, what makes your religion special? Shouldn't they rightly have as much faith in the 12th Imam because of the known miracles of Muhammad and the holiest of Miracles of the Koran itself? They seem exactly as reliable and if your religion is the true religion, shouldn't it seem better than all those, as we agree, fake religions? Shouldn't God's real chosen religion, be awesome enough to overcome the general human biases that keeps them believing what they were taught as children?

I'm trying out OTF as an argument. That it doesn't matter because a religion should be better than others if it's true. That if God chose your religion or made your religion that it should be important, or right. It should be good enough to exceed the natural human cognitive biases that are all around us. It seems remarkably good, but generally most anti-theist arguments are pretty good.

The dangers of phantom Bible quotes?

2011-06-05T21:00:00.000-07:00

In the midst of a rather fru-fru article on not-really-in-the-Bible Bible Quotes it makes a rather odd claims that they are dangerous! *GASP*

Getting biblical scriptures and stories wrong may not seem significant, but it can become dangerous, one scholar says.

Most people have heard this one: “God helps those that help themselves.” It’s another phantom scripture that appears nowhere in the Bible, but many people think it does. It's actually attributed to Benjamin Franklin, one of the nation's founding fathers.

"Danger Will Robinson! Danger!" - 4 Corinthians 5:6

Where's the danger? Somebody might think American values are Biblical? That self reliance and personal individuality are Biblical notions? Well compared to slavery, genocide, and treating women like chattel which actually *ARE* Biblical notions, how dangerous does this read?

Some of the guilty parties are anonymous, lost to history. They are artists and storytellers who over the years embellished biblical stories and passages with their own twists.

Yeah, and prior to the 4th century they'd get added in here and there. So silly Journalist, let he who is without sin cast the first stone!

And if you’re a preacher telling a story about Jonah, doesn’t it just sound better to say that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, not a “great fish”?

For the life of me, I don't get it. You can't live inside either. It's not like whales have air in them, the oxygen is stored in their blood. You drown both ways. It's a stupid story either way, right up there with talking donkeys and talking snakes (oh! I mean serpent, goodness forbid we miss that distinction that makes no difference) because talking critters are totally real and not strongly indicative of fairy tales.

Still waiting for some dangers. Or are the dangers much more mild than reading what's actually in the Bible.

Objectivity to Christianity.

2011-06-03T16:29:00.000-07:00

Something I wrote elsewhere about using the Outsider Test of Faith:

Mostly I'm pointing it out because it of the Outsider Test of Faith. I'm currently reading the Christian Delusion which is everything critics claimed the God delusion should be. A scholarly work that deals with the nuances of Christian faith by experts in their fields. It's the best thing I've read. (yes the sentence ended there). -- But, it is a really good set of points that certainty is an emotion and that humans are well primed toward biases. We emotionally react to threatened beliefs, when we should let them rise or fall on their merits. And as children we believe whatever we're told. So simply telling children there is a God suffices to make them believers who defend the faith. But, it holds equally true for any faith. Especially in light of this we must, necessarily, strive to examine religion objectively. Because if you are a God who is intent on burning people forever in hell for failing to believe, you really should make your chosen religion able to be believed objectively. Such that you don't already have to be that religion, to believe that religion. That you could be compelled away from your current faith to the correct faith reliably by something. But, if we honestly look at the evidence and we can't find one religion that consistently wins (except perhaps Secular Humanism or Scientific/Naturalist Pantheism). If we try to use any metric objectively, we consistently find that every religion is true (which means the metric doesn't work) or we find that none of them are. This ultimately is a very serious problem for religion.

If what you use to believe your religion can be used to believe any religion, then you are necessarily treating your religion differently than you treat other people's religions, and since we can all agree other religions are false religions. Then what you are using to believe your religion can be used to believe false religions. -- It's a pretty critical problem for religion, but it's also a fairly new set of arguments so I might as well give them a whirl. After all, the logic is pretty inescapable, your religion should be different if it's right, so we should determine a way to figure this out. We have reliable methods for determining truth, and they determine your religion is false. We can use unreliable methods for determining truth, but they determine that all religions are true. -- And it's not really gotcha logic. Maybe there is a method of consistently determining truth, and only Christianity passes. As such, we would then be right to convert to Christianity. But, at a minimum we must look at religions the same way those not of that religion view them, and doing so reveals the same obvious flaws that are so apparent to everybody else. Asking one to accept talking reptiles, and talking donkeys, magical trees and worldwide floods is bad enough when you have your personal feelings of certainty to rely on, but when you need to do so objectively? It's laughable. If somebody-else's religion had those, Christians would point and laugh on a daily basis. -- So asking for objectivity, is actually rather damning to the faith.

So I'm doing research for a simple facebook post and...

2011-06-02T22:06:00.000-07:00

Having looked up zoonotic diseases of birds I'm subjected to the following topic point:

"MOST DISEASES STARTED WITH ANIMALS"

Um, wtf. Where else would they come from. You want human specialized diseases? Or do you count those against too. Is HIV started with animals because it jumped over from chimps in like 1900? And humans are animals. What the hell? Most diseases started with rocks? And what do you mean started? I mean a lot of them are bacteria and they started some couple billion years ago along with all the rest of the life around.

That's just stupid. I'll get better rage on other topics later.

Ego-Surfing, finds...

2011-06-01T18:33:00.000-07:00

So I went ego-surfing (basically google Tatarize) as it's only going to link to me and I found something cool I wrote back in 2006:

[A]m I rational in thinking that there is a desk before me when I seem to see it?
Yes. That is rational. Firstly, desks are known to exist. People have jobs making desks. People buy desks. People use desks. It is true that you could be completely insane and think there is a desk where there is not. However, then one needs to explain what keeps your stuff from falling and why everybody else similarly believes that such a desk exists. It becomes much less rational to disbelieve in the desk than to believe in the desk.

If so, what grounds are there to suppose that mystic experiences are not also legitimate ways of knowing?
The same grounds which existed for concluding that the desk existed. Do people have jobs making mystic experiences (outside of drug dealers)? Do people buy mystic experience? Do other people share an exact same mystic experience (do they also see the walls melting)? Can we test these things and find the results consistent with other things in existence? Does the absence of mystic experience leave a number of hard lingering questions? It does not become less rational to disbelieve. In such a situation, belief becomes clearly the irrational path.

Why assume that empirical investigation is the only way reality can be grasped?
Because 'empirical' deals with reality. Should we attempt to grasp reality by what exists in reality or things which do not exist in reality? Asking why we should use empirical investigation to discern reality is like asking why we should aim for the hoop when we want to make a basket.

Secondly, there are certain fruits of these labors. For example, the internet functions with the aid of a number physical properties and quantum phenomenon. We didn't learn about these by investigating how ghosts manage to push light through fine strands of glass? How long should we have spend testing for goblins within transistors?

Investigations into the supernatural, into gods and ghosts, horoscopes and rabbit feet have produced nothing. They have *never* given us a greater understanding of reality. We have never used ufology to make a better mousetrap or speed up a computer, only empirical investigations do that.

In short, we should look to reality when we intend to grasp reality. Because, it's the only thing that has ever worked and produced repeatable results; results which have given us all the technology we use everyday and all the understanding about the world we have today.

Damn I was good.

I previously failed to know how awesome Jonathan Coulton is...

2011-05-29T23:15:00.000-07:00

I even once posted a video for the deaf that covered one of his songs.

But, others like "Re: Your Brains" and "Code Monkey", "The Future Soon". Which are very awesome

0 to fanboi in 3 hours is rare.-- To be fair I've heard some of the song before but never put them together and realize that they came from the same nexus of awesome.

Yay. I can post again.

2011-05-29T23:07:00.000-07:00

Somehow blogger failed. I could log in with gmail and all, but not post. Very offputting. I really wanted to post this video about how much Jonathan Coulton rocked but I couldn't!

"Nobody knows the day or the hour..." - Matthew

2011-05-24T18:06:00.000-07:00

The fun bit with Matthew is that that passage is added *BECAUSE* they failed. Early Christian preaching was apocalyptic to some degree from the start. You can see early on the authors pushing the dates back further and further from this generation, to a day is like a thousand years, to you can't predict when it will come. You can pretty much date texts by looking at when they claim the Judgement day will be and subtracting like a decade. If they say it'll be before the Second Temple falls, then they may well be before the second temple fell. If they say that the temple doesn't matter, they are likely writing afterwards.

The line in Matthew is specifically because this sort of stuff was the origin of Christianity. Really, as far as failed apocalyptic preachers go Harold Camping is pretty much on par with Jesus. So all the little "thief in the night" and "nobody can really know" stuff got added after they failed their asses off from the first to third centuries missing every benchmark they set.

The end of the world, "soon", for the last two thousand years. Heck the Jewish doomsayers were wrong so often they gave rise to Christianity. The end of the world is the failiest prediction ever.

So yeah, there's apologetics for why all the doomsayers failed, because starting with Jesus they were always dead wrong. Unless you think that somebody from Jesus' time is still alive, and that generation hasn't known death. And apologetics for the failures got added the the Christian corpus, but Camping is only as wrong as Jesus, with regard to the end of the world. So that's not too bad.

I am the palendrome fear my power, power my fear, palendrome the am I!

2011-05-21T21:17:00.000-07:00

Awesome. Just awesome.

(The title is from an episode of The Middle Men).

I'm glad the rapture got press

2011-05-21T14:31:00.000-07:00

Usually these things live and die in obscurity. They are wrong but nobody can say out loud and publicly that they were wrong, because nearly nobody heard of them. We also have the 2012 apocalypse coming and I hope some others get a good amount of press. The 2012 is so soon after the elections that it might get sort of drowned out. But, a few more and maybe we can get some press for the fact that all of these preachers predict crap from crap that always turns out to be wrong. It's as if the Bible is a terrible place to get your assumptions and certainty is an emotional state and not a level of reliance we can have on some points.

Errata: Myths of Galileo and Aristotle.

2011-05-18T16:07:00.000-07:00

In an old set of posts I did about the BBC series "Did Darwin Kill God", I made a mistake by relaying a common misconception and set of myths about Galileo and Aristotle:

Aristotle was a proponent of science in one's own mind. The idea that one could rightly divine by thinking about an issue the correct answer. This idea may seem compelling, but it has always been wrong. It was wrong when Aristotle concluded that objects of different masses fall to Earth at different speeds, it was wrong when Galileo dropped different masses off the Tower of Pisa to see if they did, and it was wrong when the masses struck the ground at the same time.

Aristotle appears to have argued against that position. not in favor of it. Galileo appears to have actually just done that figuring in his mind and posing some thought experiments as to what happens when you tie a 1 pound weight to a 10 pound weight and likely didn't actually drop the weights from said tower and that story is likely apocryphal.

The Star Trek Rule and Argumentary Efficiency.

2011-05-12T01:12:00.000-07:00

The Star Trek rule is generally a rule described by Russell Glasser on the Atheist Experience™ blog:as asking theists to keep in mind:

Before quoting the Bible to atheists, always ask yourself whether the same statement would be just as effective in your mind if you were quoting Captain Kirk.

The problem I have with the rule is argumentative efficiency. Due to the sheer mistake per word ratio of creationists and theists and other general wrong people it become critically important to have efficient arguments. That ultimately if you take a minute to refute each wrong claim and they can make four wrong claims a minute, you are going to lose to the sheer divergence of wrongness and leave some claims unrefuted or require four times as much time as they took to make said claims. The problem with the Star Trek rule is that it violates the general brevity required for refutations.

I recall a fairly good video on youtube that took seven minutes to say what I know how to say in a fourteen words, which is largely a refutation to the argument that atheism says something about God and therefore is a faith position and therefore makes atheism a religion. "If I not buying, what you're selling, it doesn't mean I'm selling something else." I believe there was a caller on the atheist experience which called in just to give that great one line rebuttal. And it's the best rebuttal I've seen for that particular argument.

The issue with the Star Trek Rule is that you have to explain yourself and it's not worthwhile. The better answer is to appropriate something Robgene (About Atheist Forum, Twsh Quotes) said: "Trying to prove God with the Bible is like trying to prove Superman with a Comic Book." Which I turned into a demotivator and got some quasi fame. I think this is better than the Star Trek Rule.

I think you can forgo the long explanation and initially undercut the comment by saying:

If you want to relate a nugget of wisdom, ask if I'd be compelled with that same nugget of wisdom taken from a comic book. If you want to try to prove God exists by using the the Bible, please note that it will be about as effective as trying to prove Superman exists with a comic book.

Dennis McKinsey on Proselytizers.

2011-05-07T20:45:00.000-07:00

Dennis McKinsey said, that when evangelicals come to your door and when they leave and you're still an atheist, you shouldn't count that as a victory. You let two lost souls leave with their delusions intact. You were the one who lost.

That's some optimism. (This was from some webcasted radio program half a decade ago).

Somebody has an odd form of criticism. (of Carrier)

2011-05-05T15:25:00.000-07:00

Apparently we are to conclude that Richard Carrier is a pathological liar because he cited #11 when he should have used citation #12. In an essay, from a decade ago, that he's corrected elsewhere and says has some mistakes and is superseded.

http://religiousyetsane.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-are-atheist-scholars-so-dishonest.html

Because apparently 1 error = Pathological Liar = Other side wins = God.

Oh, also he removed a lot of crap that wasn't about Jewish burial practices, in his essay about Jewish burial practices, between two passages that were about Jewish burial practices. Clearly because the original intent of the passage is to be long and have a bunch of stuff about how children are stoned to death in boring detail, because that changes so heavily how you bury them?

It's sort of weird, because he's good enough to check the original sources, but terrible enough to be confused as to what is and isn't a valid criticism of somebody's work.

That's an odd thing to run into.

2011-05-02T02:30:00.000-07:00

So I was reading through the posts on Debunking Christianity, and came across this one that spoke to me.

It said, "Tatarize..."

Well it really did start off that way.

Tatarize: "I'm Only On the Fifth Chapter."

Which is a review of the book The Christian Delusion, that I posted on About's Atheism Forums.

**spooky**

On the testing of slippery supernatural suppositions.

2011-04-26T03:08:00.000-07:00

I ran into an atheist on Facebook and criticized him for supposing that supernatural claims are not testable because supernaturalists are apt to change them.

John
14:13 And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
14:14 If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.

You're telling me that there's no tests for this? That somehow it's utterly impossible to make a coherent way of determining whether all prayers, in Jesus' name, are answered in the affirmative?

According to some billboards, Judgment day is in May of this year. I think May 21st. This is the return of Jesus and the whole flying around thing. This is a supernatural claim. Am I really suppose to accept that there's no conceivable way to check that? Not even on the 22nd?

I freely admit that one could change their claims indefinitely and never stake their belief on the latest nonsense they've pulled out of their hat. I cannot truly establish that disease isn't caused, as the Bible says, by sin or demons. But, I can establish that whatever these demons could do it's a moot point compared to germs. Just as I can show that invisible chariots would need to do no work because I can explain the motion of the stars with gravity (and I confess due to the nature of the analogy requiring an assist by dark matter). One could forever change their explanations, but that's not a requirement of supernaturalism. One could argue thusly that the moon is made of bananas with equally slippery supposition and layers of conspiracy. And nobody grants that that claim is supernatural. The fault lies not with the ability to test supernatural claims (after all, most every natural phenomenon from tides, to seasons, to healing, to weather, was supposed supernatural at one point), but with the ability to change ones claims as easily as clothing. Science can test reality, and if supernatural effects are part of reality then they can be established scientifically. It isn't a shortfall of science or the slippery nature of supernatural claimants but rather that reality shows nothing demonstratively supernatural about it. If fairies at the bottom of my garden were pushing up the daisies, we could well find evidence. We could also suppose magical reasons why the evidence didn't exist ad infinitum, but it doesn't really negate the original claim. It still becomes less likely to be true and more precarious to establish. And since we're talking about evidence and not absolute proof, it a serious problem. Testing supernatural claims, makes them less likely, even if they make up something new (and the fact that the way the do this is ad hoc confabulation rather than any sort of observation or perception of reality).

I'm not yoking the supernatural with scientific reason, I'm pointing out that if it matters with regard to reality, then science is the best and only real way of deciding the question. The only way the supernatural escapes science is by not being part of reality, that may well be the case, but it doesn't preclude science testing whether it is the case. You can argue a claim into such vagueness that it no longer matters, but it can't both matter and be scientifically untestable and undetectable. It must either be irrelevant or false, and if it's false it would necessarily be irrelevant.

I think you're giving supernaturalism far more credit that it deserves. It isn't something that's untestable and unfalsifiable, but rather something that we end up testing time after time and find it to be false. They make up something new, but it doesn't mean they weren't checked and found wanting previously. Supernatural claims have been tested and checked and phenomenon theorized, hypothesized, and understood for thousands of years (with a thousand year gap in there) and though religionists are always quick to open with "God did it" they have never ever been right in the entire history of the world. They always claim, initially, that it could only be the result of the supernatural and science has, thus far, always made them eat those words. Just because they backpedal, try to save face, regroup, and offer another steaming pile of shit at a later date, doesn't imply they weren't wrong each and every time they jumped to that same wrong conclusion by ignorance and faith. Given any reasonable scientific phenomenon, somebody somewhere claimed it was caused by supernatural forces; they were wrong. They've always been wrong. And claiming that it was because they weren't tested and found to be wrong is the utmost stupidity. You sacrifice the truth of scientific progress, naturalism, and empiricism in order to argue that they've never played some game properly because they play over and over and over and lose every time.

Bones is stupid sometimes. Yeti = Heliocentrism.

2011-04-24T21:31:00.000-07:00

In Season 6 episode 18 of Bones, Bones and Booth have a discussion where Booth claims to have seen a Yeti and Bones scoffs at it. Then Booth says that she's just the same as those who were certain that the Sun revolved around the Earth.

Heliocenticity was never an entirely terrible claim. It was lost between Aristarchus and Copernicus but largely lost because, most science was lost and Ptolemy was a towering genius whose geocentric model was the go to method of calculation until after Newton. While theoretically simple, it wasn't an accurate way of predicting the future. And the Inquisition voted 11 to 0 to dogmatize geocentrism (because geocentrism was Biblical) during the time of Galileo. In a real sense, you really could see it either way and it just changes the math a lot. Generally due to universal gravitation it's clear that the Earth travels around the sun far more than the reverse is true, but from a standpoint of calculation it might be easier to go from the Earth because being on Earth this is where observations are made.

However the comparison between such "close-mindedness" and the failure to accept Cryptozoological crap by hearsay is rather unfair. The proper position is always to go where the evidence leads you, and really there was a lot of evidence on both sides of the solar system debate (it wasn't until after Newton that people dropped Ptolemy all together, even when he lost the theory debate he was still better at calculating the planets position.) Whereas there's no good evidence for bigfoot, chupacabra, or yetis.

Aw, another good example gone away.

2011-04-24T13:28:00.000-07:00

Sathya Sai Baba died. He was a great example of what trivia parlor tricks would end up looking like in somewhat backward cultures. Take that guy and move him to 1st century Judea, and you could well have a Jesus figure. Underwhelming magic tricks, and the guy got a million followers.

I should think more.

2011-04-19T15:21:00.000-07:00

There's an old moral question about two different situations. One you can pull a lever and change the tracks of the train and therefore redirect a train away from killing five children and into killing one hobo. And comparing this to a situation where you can push a button, which will abduct a hobo harvest his organs and use his death to save five children. And the question is why does the first one feel okay but the second one feel completely unacceptable, when they are really the same situation? You are exchanging one life for five lives.

I just thought this was rather interesting and didn't bother to think about it. But, in reality the two situations are completely different. I just hadn't posed the questions correctly enough to consciously understand what I so clearly unconsciously understood so well. The difference is the type of society you live in. We're fine living in a world where people are hit by trains. Trains are pretty cool and they move stuff from one place to another. We're not fine living in a world where somebody can be abducted off the street and murdered for the greater good. The situations really are different, so different answers are required.

Truth as a wedge issue.

2011-04-14T03:12:00.000-07:00

I was in Riverside earlier today listening to Richard Carrier speak, and one of the questions was concerning whether theists cared about the truth because some argued they did and others argued they don't really. And Dr. Carrier made the point that that is what makes it a fantastic wedge issue. It wasn't elaborated on, but certainly it's accurate, and has always been the rather core issue with religion.

If you care whether your beliefs are true, then there are a set set of things you should do. You should find a way to determine if something is true or false. You should find methods and a methodology by which you can determine what is true and what is false. And when you care about truth, your beliefs must always live and die by the evidence. Following closely from the desire to believe what is true is the requirement that we rely on evidence and reasonable argument. And that's a rather stunning trap. Because if one limits themselves to reasonable arguments and evidenced facts, you've cut off all paths that could get you to theism.

The want for truth isn't very hard to illicit from believers, so they really do care whether their beliefs are true or not. But, if you dig a bit with regard to their religious beliefs, this nice metric developed ad hoc suddenly becomes a heresy when you ask it to be applied to religion. On one hand theists want to accept what is true and not accept what is false, but on the other they don't care about the evidence at all or anything you say because they want to believe. And if they do that, they are accepting something less likely to be true over something more likely to be true, while they are allowed to do that, it's a rather serious problem. And if they are stuck there confronting their own cognitive dissonance it's not too much harder to ask them to admit that your position (not accepting any gods) is a perfectly valid one to hold because, after all it's more reasonable than theirs. They can try to weasel out at any point but they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they abandon the epistemological metric developed then they don't care whether what they beliefs are true or not. If they insist that there evidence matters, then the lack of evidence for theism in general or Christianity in particular is a serious problem, and the absence of evidence makes reasonable an absence of belief.

Treating "caring about truth" as a wedge issue forces theists to either abandon faith as an argument, or accepting that accepting faith as an argument means abandoning truth as a desire. They accept God as true on faith, and admit using faith as grounds means they don't care about believing true things. Or they can accept reasonable evidence alone which means they need should have a reason to believe resting on sound evidence and argument.

Finally, what does it say about the state of intellectual discourse in religion if "caring whether you believe true things" is a plausible wedge issue?

Music and chords... who needs something new?

2011-04-10T00:12:00.001-07:00

Tim Minchin animated Storm

2011-04-08T14:43:00.000-07:00

Give me awesome and I'll show it to dozens (who likely have already seen it).

Creationism is bad science AND bad theology...

2011-04-01T21:11:00.000-07:00

The problem with such statements is that there's such a thing as good science. While we can all agree that creationism/intelligent design etc. is bad theology, we have no examples of good theology. So somewhere near the core of the statement is a tacit lie that the emperor has clothing.

That's a lot of work for April Fools.

2011-04-01T20:01:00.000-07:00

http://xkcd.com/

XKCD is in 3d. It's weird and annoying and seems like it would take a lot of rather pointless effort.

I just watched Atheist Experience: Ray Comfort vs. Matt Dillihunty.

2011-03-27T15:43:00.000-07:00

It was basically like they (Matt and Russell) came in with baseball bats to beat a legless chipmunk to death.

You'll see it very soon. It's going to go viral.

Why yes, Ed, there was criticism of the Erie Canal.

2011-03-26T21:37:00.000-07:00

Just watching the Bill Maher from Friday. (I went to see the Thursday show (jokes, etc, without guests) live and really liked it.) And Ed Rendell says "We use to be a country that took challenges on! When we built the Erie Canal did anybody say 'It's too expensive' or 'it's too complex'". -- Yes. Those things were said of Clinton's Ditch. It got turned down by federal funds by Thomas Jefferson because he said the technology wasn't there and Gov. Clinton got voted out of office in part because of the idea.

Silly ass revisionist history. We don't pay attention to the criticism. I don't think criticism is worth it, when you call a moron a moron and they are a moron you get no credit. But if you call something stupid and it turns out to be a huge success and a vital economic boost for a rather large area, then you get scoffed at. Critics are only footnotes in the stories of successful people, because if the critics are right, they rightly get no mention.

The silliest lack of comeuppance.

2011-03-25T14:37:00.000-07:00

I always maintained that one of the suckiest things about atheism was the lack of comeuppance. While Christians can suppose I'm burning in hell when I die. I can't tell them that they'll know nothing after they die and the answers won't be provided for them because they will just die. While there does seem to be a somewhat contrary bit of comeuppance, in denying dooms days. For example a religious group has gotten enough money to advertise their judgment day as May 21st, 2011 and get some billboards up. At the very least in Hollywood where I was yesterday to see them. That's awesome.

Anybody who believes in the Judgment day is an idiot. They are stupid. Even if they believe in perfectly secular ends of the planet they are wrong. Super-volcanoes won't hurt us, large asteroids, and certainly not events from mythology like the Mayan Calendar or return of Jesus. -- Regardless if things like super-volcanoes are real and happen, the lack of comeuppance by snuffing out life before people can say "I told you so" makes things that much easier to say.

Young Earth Creationists and Hyperevolution.

2011-03-23T03:51:00.000-07:00

It seems rather odd but if you look for it, a number of YEC people believe in hyper-evolution. They believe that only the "kinds" of animals survived on the Ark and then diversified after being returned to the newly purged Earth. I've even heard some creationists go so far as to suggest that "birds" is a "kind". This means that over the last four thousand years or so that doves haven't just diversified in to the rock pigeon and all the fancy birds that fanciers fancy, but the hummingbird and the ostrich. It is one thing to suppose that a lone wolf became every variety of dog as well as all the varied wolf species, but if we are to believe that a mass extinction of so much biodiversity occurred four thousand years ago, there must also be hyper-diversification over the extraordinarily fast periods of time.