Bayesian thought, the End of Christainity

I'm currently reading The End of Christainity and was hoping Richard Carrier's chapter on Neither Life nor the Universe seem Intelligently Designed would be better, it's a great chapter mind you, and certainly worth it the price of the book in and of itself.

But, more and more I find myself thinking in a Bayesian sense. It's worthwhile to ask yourself whether you can go from hypothesis A to conclusion c cleanly. Does ~A get there cleanly? And what do we observe. Even for seemingly basic premises and thought that haven't so much as occurred to me ever such thoughts illuminate arguments I've never heard or thought about.

Why can't people in heaven or hell communicate with Earth? I mean you can't really get from the premise "there is an afterlife" to the conclusion therefore that afterlife will be completely barred from communicating with the living. But, necessarily that's a requirement if there is no afterlife. While one could conclude that there are a myriad of afterlives that could have that restriction, it's not what we should expect of Christianity. Why not allow the living to occasion to hear the screams of torment of the damned. Or of the blessings of heaven? Why allow a child to lose their faith when their mother dies and goes to heaven? Why not allow the mother a couple quick words to save their child's eternal soul? It seems as though this restriction would be both counter productive and arbitrary. But, if there were no afterlife, it simply would be the obvious result. There is no undiscovered country, there is only death.

Or how can you cleanly go from the premise, there was a historical Jesus to there will be no evidence for a historical Jesus. You can very cleanly go from "there was no historical Jesus" to there will be no evidence for a historical Jesus. It's not about proof but that, on balance, the premise "there was no historical Jesus" would be stronger. And while the question could be reversed rather suddenly by a well placed piece of paper, it can't be the case that the evidence for a historical Jesus outweighs the opposite claim if every prediction of the opposite claim that must be true actually seems to be true.

How does one get from God exists, to therefore God should become a demigod and sacrifice himself to himself to appease God's human-anger emotions towards innocent people for the crimes of their ancestors. Well, I don't see an easy way to get there. But, on the premise that there is no God, I should expect to find religions everywhere that are simply the product of the cultures they were invented in, and in a culture that is obsessed with primitive blood magic, atonement of sin, appeasement of gods, punishing innocence to allow the guilty to go free, god's emotions, etc. Such cultures we know actually existed, and which did have strong and rather new pagan influences from Rome, we should almost expect Christianity. In fact, if you mix Jewish thought of the Messiah with Pagan love of demigods and the wacky adventures thereof, we should almost perfectly predict Christianity to arise from that very culture. And we should see gods all over the world, the product of their own cultures. And this seems to be exactly what we do see. But to actually assemble a universe based on the oxygen carrying cells of some terrestrial animals on this tiny speck of dust in a universe of 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, seems a little freakish. The actual universe actually hinges on blood magic being true? That's not something I could really get from "God exists". However, I could conclude that from God doesn't exist. Because then if people are inclined to invent gods, and we generally should accept that they are, then they would invent gods that humans would invent. With human emotions and stray bits of human culture. Much like we see with Yahwah and Jesus. One could offer perhaps that that culture existing is unlikely. But, that's a sharpshooter fallacy. For if we have Viking culture, we end up with heaven being a pub in the sky where the best heaven is for those who died in valiant battle. Any culture that existed, could well have ended up with their own religion and we could just as easily be discussing that religion, rather than Christianity. The specific form of the culture doesn't matter, just that cultures should exist, and religions which reflect those cultures should arise within those cultures.

How do we get from God exists to God should punish people on the basis of belief. That there are two afterlives which are infinitely good and infinitely bad. How do we get from that premise to that conclusion? I don't rightly know. But, I know how we get there from no God existing. If God doesn't exist then these theological claims are made up by people, and people believe religions not based on truth (as they would all be false) but rather based on Public Relations (PR) and as such, infinite sticks and infinite carrots could do wonders towards propagating a religion, and the better it propagates the more it will propagate. So the religions would be optimized towards propagation and not towards dissemination of the truth. If you don't want infinite suffering believe this. If you want infinite bliss believe this. Teach it to your children, tell it to others, make them also believe. If God exists why doesn't he evangelize people himself? After all, shouldn't God be able to do a better job at it? Why depend on silly human agents? If there were no God, all there are are human agents. Each of these points actually provide rather strong evidence that religion is completely bogus. There a heck of a lot of assumptions we just take for granted that are actually hugely problematic if we think about them correctly. Why should Gandhi burn forever in hell for failing to believe the correct tenants of a religion largely believed in a region he was not from? Why should religions be hugely dependent on region? Why is the message delievered in book form, if books and languages change? How do we get from God exists to God will have human emotions? The list goes on and on. We accept a lot of things without question that we really should question profusely. Why are souls undetectable? If they don't exist, ofcourse they'd be undetectable. But, how do we go from "Souls exist" to "souls should be completely undetectable"? Wouldn't seeing souls leave the bodies of dying people, tell people that they have souls and perhaps they go somewhere and could be saved?  There's a lot of baggage concern religion, and why should the supernatural be undetectable? If I developed Jedi powers, anybody could tell I had them, and even if they didn't I could, with a wave of my hand, convince them that I did have those powers they were looking for. Such things would be supernatural and detectable so why are the only supposed supernatural things completely undetectable. How do we go from "The Supernatural Exists" to "The Supernatural is Undetectable". I do however see quite easily how we go from "The Supernatural Exists" to "The Supernatural is Undetectable". At best, the hypothesis "The supernatural exists" must by this argument be less likely than "The supernatural doesn't exist" because we don't detect it. That alone suffices to make it a better claim.

Upon being told I am blind to Jesus...

The problem is that looking objectively at all the evidence is the same as being blind to it all. There's no difference between the evidence for Christianity, and the evidence we'd expect to see if Christianity is false. After all, we can agree that other religions are false religions, and all of them have testimonials and first person experiences. So if Christianity were false, we'd expect it to have exactly what you claim it has. Being blind and being in a room with absolutely no light at all are very similar experiences.

There's no serious difference between Christianity and what we can agree are false other religions. Which is to say that Christianity has no evidence in its favor and considering things like blood sacrifice, and demigod adventures, the sins of ancestors, and fairy tales which are found in Christianity but should not be found in a true religion. Because they make no sense as a matter of reality, God no more needs a dying and rising savior son to be blood sacrificed to himself for propitiation for the sins of the ancestors than God needs a spaceship made of string cheese, but these are things we should expect of a religion that was invented in a mix of cultures obsessed with primitive blood sacrifice and that was hugely in love with the wacky adventures of the sons of gods.

We have no reason to suppose Christianity is any more true than any of the agreed upon false religions, and we have many reasons to suppose that it was simply invented by people between 1800-2000 years ago or so.

Quotes: Richard Carrier.

"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.

Truth as a wedge issue.

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?

My life changes through various media.

I have, for various reasons, a lot of free time. I spend a lot of time reflecting and watching various things. As such, I've had my perspective changed rather radically many times over the years. Some major changes were major, some profound, some subtle. I have a good memory and can usually recall what changed my thinking.






Asimov's "The Relativity of Wrong" essay about the nature of science.
http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

This essay really did change my perspective on science and allowed me to view science generally as an evolutionary algorithm gradually improving things over time. Not perfecting them, but making them better by increasing understanding. When the older theories are wrong it isn't that they overturned, but rather improved subtly.








Krauss' lecture on the Universe from Nothing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo

While, I've advocated zero-sum universe for a bit, mostly on philosophical grounds and lack of preclusion by science. Krauss makes a very compelling case that the science actually supports it. This is going to be the end of the first cause argument. QM says we don't need causes. And 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says we can't get something for nothing. So if we have something. It needs be net zero. So rather than 0=1, the universe is 0=1+(-1).


Aron-Ra's explanation of taxonomy, as well as his argument that humans are monkeys.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6TEDuDD3Zs

I swear I understood evolution prior to watching Aron-Ra's videos but it really doesn't feel like I did, how could I. I didn't properly understand cladistics. I can't even fathom how my brain worked without understanding basal relationships within monophyletic clades.



(Several More, Below the Fold)
(I just now figured out there's a button for the fold, not that I looked much).

Two Horses And Faith

Imagine two horses are due to run a race.

The first horse has won every race it has ever run. And it has run over a million of them. And each and every time it has won.

The second horse has never won. It has always raced against the first horse and every time it has failed to win, usually it has even failed to finish. It has done this over in the same million races.



Now, when you go to make your bet on the horses you notice that the odds are somehow even money. Now, is it really "faith" to bet on the first horse or the second horse? Is the "faith" to bet on the first horse actually equal to the "faith" it takes to bet on the second one?

Did Darwin Kill God, Part 3: Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda.

Despite the poor handling by Cunningham, the question of whether or not atheism and evolution have any direct or indirect ties is actually a fairly interesting one. On one hand, atheism is simply the non-belief in any gods or gods and the only reason one truly accepts atheism is because theism is not embraced. In this sense atheism certainly doesn't rely on anything other than the failure of theism. Whereas evolution is an astounding and impressive explanation as elegant as it is simple, and as powerful as time allows. It fully explains the location, design, complexity, elegance and beauty of life. It's a complete explanation for one of our greatest questions, but it says nothing about God. -- And in that, it is somewhat atheistic. In the solution to one of the most important questions ever there's no role for gods to play. If we contrast this with Paley's argument which would have been the foremost accepted explanation prior to Darwin we can see a stark contrast between the two. Paley's theory could very well have made deists out of pure rationalists simply by being the most convincing explanation. When we see the amazing designs of nature, Paley was just scratching the surface, and though his claim was, admittedly, an argument from ignorance, what an argument it was. It would seem unfathomable to anybody that you could explain all of life with simple secular terms. That any force, other than an intelligent fathomer, could come up with such amazing and seemingly purposeful designs.

As Richard Dawkins noted in The Blind Watchmaker,

An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: "I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one." I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

In this same vein, it is my opinion that the way in which it could be said that Darwin Killed God is that he moved the end point of a functional epistemology. If one lived their life based on the evidence and the best reasons they had at hand, prior to Darwin one would have been a rational deist and after Darwin, outright atheism became the natural endpoint to living an evidence driven life.

It has always been the case that there have been scientific ethics and scientific endeavors, since the first of the ancient Greeks questioned the notion of whether or not progress was possible. Whether or not people could understand more of the world than they currently understood. If there exists some way of investigating reality. This is the first scientific conflict with religion.

There has always existed specific scientific virtues of curiosity, empiricism, and progress throughout history. Wherever they are suppressed, science is suppressed. Wherever embraced, science is embraced. When Galen challenged early evolutionists whose theory of transmutation was weak, powerless and wrong, he attacked the ideas with empirical evidence, pushed our understanding of the human body, and yet still concluded that the divine was the most logical conclusions. However, he didn't go beyond his evidence. He didn't propose an infinite God because there were noted limitations within men. He went were the evidence lead him, and the evidence lead him to God.

When ever these virtues are challenged, even by great minds, they end scientific inquiry. Wherever they flourish, science flourishes. 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. Asking whether or not our beliefs are true, and how we can go about seeing if they are, has always been the scientific way of looking at the world. Wanting the most true beliefs and the fewest false beliefs has always been the core of science and the results of scientific virtues.

Isaac Newton was the greatest scientist to ever live (if this is hyperbole, you'll have to drop a few names). But, he was also a Christian. He wasn't Christian because he was blinded by his faith and wrong about what to believe, he was Christian largely because that is what a rational view of the world would lead on to believe in the 1600s. With no explanation of how life or any part of the universe arises by chance or by simple laws, it would have been absurd for Newton to not conclude theism. That is not to say he wasn't a freethinker. He refused to be ordained as was required by a man of his position because he felt that Trinitarianism was idolatry because the first commandment said that "I am the Lord your God, who delivered you out of Egypt, you shall have no other gods before me" and frankly Jesus didn't deliver the Jewish people out of Egypt so worshiping Jesus is worshiping an idol. And in those places where the scientific ethics failed and religious ethics succeeded they rendered Newton sadly moot. In the end of Principia, Newton concluded that the order of the planets and their interactions between each other must be the result of the hand of God keeping them working. It was another hundred years before Laplace properly explained perturbation theory and did the calculation properly without God ('I have no need for that hypothesis' or so he was rumored to have told Napoleon).

Cunningham cited St. Augustine to make the claim that Christians never really took Genesis as literal. However, what Augustine was really angling at is that they never really took science literally and they shouldn't embarrass themselves in the company of those who do. Augustine wasn't saying that it should be taken as figurative, but that rather it didn't need to reveal scientific facts about the world (which Augustine noted God clearly knew) but that we didn't need to know them. We have no need to be curious about the world because all we need is to be saved and all we need to be saved is the Bible. We don't need to test the world or test God, because we just need to be saved. And even if we could progress in our understanding of the world, it simply isn't necessary to be saved. Augustine wasn't saying that we should throw Genesis out the window and ignore it, he was saying that science is stupid and you don't need it to be saved, so God didn't include it in the Bible. This isn't a hard conclusion to reach, Augustine spelled it out:

In short, it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, to teach men anything that would not be of use to them for their salvation.

This is the division that has always existed between science and religion. Why when we look back through the ages we find many rational and scientifically minded people believing in God in times prior to Darwin and after Darwin we find that these examples cease with a surprising abruptness. Why should Thomas Jefferson, who was perhaps our only scientifically literate president, have said, "He (Calvin) was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be". He derided the newer supernaturalist brands of theology as talks of nothing and to be equivalent to saying that there is no God. Why should Jefferson be a theist when any contemporary individual of such a caliber embrace atheism? I contend that the answer is Darwin.

Cunningham is not only wrong on the obvious points, that Genesis was intended to describe the start of the universe within Christian theology and was clearly believed as mostly literal by a vast majority of Christians throughout the ages. Or that ultradarwinists extremists are trying to use Darwin to argue against God by embracing the Selfish Gene and Memes. Cunningham is also wrong on the core points, there is some respect that we could say that Darwin killed God. We can't accept that literally, as there never was a God to be killed. But, it is safe to say that Darwin made not believing in God the reasonable position to embrace, given a careful and full examination of the evidence. It wasn't until after Darwin and largely because of Darwin that a full embrace of scientific ethics lead to atheism. Darwin moved the endpoint of a functional epistemology from theistic conclusions like those (somewhat non-sequitury) drawn by Paley and others to having no need for God. Darwin made God superfluous. And for a God that does nothing, this is worse than a bullet. A difference, that makes no difference, is no difference. A dead God, or living God, or non-existent God doesn't change a jot or tittle of our existence, and Darwin made all three functionally identical when he explained life itself.

Hambone Talks: Richard Carrier & PZ Myers

* This is part 1, there's like 14 of them.

Carrier makes a number of great points. Science is a moral good. If we want to be healthy, then the Bible is really bad. Jesus goes around shooing demons but in Mark 7 says it's fine to scoff at unwashed hands and dishes are fine to eat from.

7:2 And when they saw some of his disciples eat bread with defiled, that is to say, with unwashen, hands, they found fault.
7:3 For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they wash their hands oft, eat not, holding the tradition of the elders.
7:4 And when they come from the market, except they wash, they eat not. And many other things there be, which they have received to hold, as the washing of cups, and pots, brasen vessels, and of tables.
7:5 Then the Pharisees and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashen hands?
7:6 He answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

However, we have strong scientific evidence that washing your hands is leaps and bounds more effective than shooing demons.

Hitler Table Talks, real but mostly a hoax.

If you've been kicking around a while on a number of different fronts you'll run into quotes contending to show that Hitler was an atheist and hated Christianity and therefore the Holocaust not the fault of Christians who pretty well established the wellspring of antisemitic hate floating around since the middle ages.

Well, the most commonly referenced work (by commonly referenced I'm talking ad nauseum) is Hitler Table Talks. Which include such bombshells as:

* "The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death.... When understanding of the universe has become widespread... Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.... Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity.... And that's why someday its structure will collapse.... ...the only way to get rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little.... Christianity the liar.... We'll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State."
* "The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity."
* "Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery.... .... When all is said, we have no reason to wish that the Italians and Spaniards should free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let's be the only people who are immunised against the disease."

Clearly, one should have little doubt of Hitler's atheism and hatred for Christianity! And the only issue that I can raise is that it's pretty much all lies and a hoax.

I strongly recommend Richard Carriers work on the subject from the 2002 November issue of Freethought Today: On the Trail of Bogus Quotes.

Sadly, due to the brilliance of Carrier I'm hardpressed to summarize his statements better than he, so here's a few choice quotes. Though I recommend reading the original article and, if so, inclined his piece in German History Studies.

"For example, one oft-repeated quote comes from 13 December 1941: "But Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery" (Stevens and Cameron's English, again matching Genoud's French verbatim). But the original German says, "Christianity teaches 'transubstantiation,' which is the maddest thing ever concocted by a human mind in its delusions, a mockery of all that is godly." The difference in meaning here is radical, and again shows how Genoud (hence the Trevor-Roper translation) has distorted Hitler's criticism of one form of Christianity (which implies he believed there was a true Christianity) into a thoroughly anti-Christian sentiment."

The reason why the quotes appear to be a caricature of what right wing Christians might *want* Hitler to say... because that's pretty much what they are!

Stevens and Cameron are certainly guilty of some shameful incompetence, if not outright dishonesty. Nor does Trevor-Roper have much of an excuse. But the real culprit is François Genoud. David Irving tells how Genoud attempted to hoax him in the 1970s with a forgery of "Hitler's Last Testament."7 Genoud even confessed the forgery to Irving, declaring in his defense, "But it's just what Hitler would have said, isn't it?" He was evidently willing to perpetrate a hoax, thinking it permissible to fabricate the words of Hitler if it was what he believed Hitler "would have said." His motives for doctoring the Table Talk may be unfathomable. Genoud was a very strange man with a colorful history: a Swiss banker and Nazi spy who laundered money for the Third Reich, a self-professed neo-Nazi even up to his suicide in 1996 (though, stranger still, he never supported the holocaust), a voracious purchaser and profiteer of Nazi archives, and an admitted financer of terrorists

Sure, Hitler may have not been anti-Christian (although he did disagree with some dogmas and some church practices / who doesn't?) but 'it's just what Hitler would have said, isn't it?'

I am often astounding what a small amount of scratching can do to key pieces of evidence for commonly repeated Christian claims. This is probably more due to the fact that they become "key" when there aren't other sources saying the same thing and with general or common claims there should be many independent sources for the information at hand. However, it's odd to see how aptly lies are bought hook line and sinker. I suppose it's hard to avoid believing false things ever. Still, some people don't even try.

Core Problem: Religious Epistemology

In the July/August issue of Skeptical Inquirer, Richard Carrier makes the point that the core issue concerning religion and atheism is that of religious epistemology.

The problem is religious epistemology. As long as we have that we will always have fallacious and ridiculous beliefs like creationism, biblical literalism, false beliefs about atheism, and so on. - Richard Carrier, Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 31, Issue 4, Page 66, July/August 2007

I must agree in the strongest terms. We tend to notice religion only when it does something stupid like oppose stem-cell research or evolution. We notice it when it gains political clout or when it uses said political clout to impede on our rights or to line their pockets with our tax dollars. However, these are all simply outgrowths of dogma and the reason why the religious believe dogma to be valid: faith.

If not for the belief that reality doesn't reflect what is real and actual, or that evidence is unneeded or that propositions are actually stronger without evidence, it would be impossible to prop up such endeavors. One cannot believe the universe is 6000 years old without faith, nor can one believe in 72 virgins in paradise after crashing a plane.

The problem with religions is they want different rules. They want to declare rather than determine. They want to announce rather than analyze. They want to believe rather than justify. Faith allows people to believe things which may be comforting. This isn't an argument for faith, simply a statement of its purpose. Faith has nothing to do with truth, because truth has nothing to do with comfort.

Preferring the lie, to an unwelcome truth, is the mark of a coward.

Welcome every truth.

Richard Carrier on Anthony Flew

Richard Carrier is one of the smartest people you'll ever hear about, though that has little to do with his blog post on Anthony Flew which is simply amazing. It makes you angry, saddened and amused at Flew and the vultures feeding from his corpse.

Richard Carrier: Brains as evidence for Athiesm

Actually a fantastic argument. Though I wouldn't expect any less. I'm fairly sure this is from the extra interviews on The God Who Wasn't There. Such an odd trend, but the added interviews are much more interesting than the work they are a part of... The Atheism Tapes were better than A Rough History of Disbelief and I daresay the Uncut Interviews of The Root of All Evil? is probably more interesting than The Root of All Evil? was itself.