On the testing of slippery supernatural suppositions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Tim Minchin animated Storm

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

Creationism is bad science AND bad theology...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On the calculation of the odds of life.

The idea that there's some way of calculating the odds is wrong. There isn't. Really we don't know what the simplest thing needed is, so calculating the odds of randomly assembling amino acids or to randomly put together the atoms of a DNA molecule. Or to manage to assemble the human genome out of randomly assembled nucleotides is both insufficient and compelling.

We don't presently know what step zero is, so we cannot calculate how likely or unlike it may be. But, even if it were extraordinarily unlikely, it would still necessarily be a better answer than miracles or the supernatural. After all, we have found answers to things and some of those answers have been unlikely occurrences, but none of them have ever been supernatural. The answers to any thing we've ever found answers to have been simple naturalistic forces of things we didn't know. So because the right answer has always been naturalism and never supernaturalism, that is certainly going to be the better answer even if it were far fetched.

If you hear a gallop, you should think horse. Because that's what it commonly turns out to be. But, I freely admit that it might be a zebra. But, the only reason you're asking that I concede the long shot possibility of a zebra is because deep down you believe it to be a unicorn, and think that maybe if the typically right answer isn't certainly the right answer then the never right answer might stand a chance; it doesn't.

I want this. Earthquake warning.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/35090/?p1=A1

Residents of Tokyo likely had about 80 seconds of warning before a devastating quake rumbled through the city after striking 373 kilometers away, off Japan's northeast coast, thanks to a new early warning system.

I live in a town that is going to be flattened by the San Andres quake. And it'll take like a minute to get here. I should be able to be told about this and run off to some place that won't get hit by anything. Also somebody was interviewed and mentioned that her computer screen popped up and said an earthquake was hitting in 60 seconds.

I hate trailers. Especially for awesomeness.

Suddenly I go from not caring to wanting to see such a thing. And seriously, I can't have it for a good long while so that's just dreadfully annoying. April 1st, is a delightfully untrustworthy release date and like half a month away or some such thing.

Freaky Math: HHH vs HHT in a thousand random flips.

Oddly enough if you flip a coin a thousand times, you'll encounter the string HHT more often than HHH.Don't believe me? Oh well. Doesn't change the correct answer.

Tat's Trivia Bot, 3.61

Tat's Trivia Bot 3.7

Update: Latest Tat's Trivia Bot 3.69

Download: Tat's Trivia Bot, 3.61

See Tat's Trivia Bot, 3.65

This is a feature update. It adds team assignment permanence..

In what is likely the second weirdest thing in the history of Tat's Trivia Bot, I actually added a feature after like half a decade. It seems that the trivia team mode was unduly hampered by not maintaining team assignments in the player files. It would just leave them in the hash table during run time and lose them when the bot stopped. So every team game, everybody would need to do !join or they couldn't play. It also had no power to force assign people to a specific team or to limit their ability to join teams. Combined these would make having the bot run only in team mode, rather effortless. It is the first feature-addition-request/inquiry-if-it-had-such-ability I couldn't just give a bit of award code, point out a secret hidden feature, or justify as too far off the beaten path to ever bother with in half a decade.

!op team (Player) (Team Number)
!op team Tat 2

And a few relevant disables.

I also added !help to the disabled section. So it can be modified in commands tab.

In case anybody cares the weirdest thing was this one time somebody sent me a bug fix with usable code. Usually if somebody finds a bug and fixed it, they added it somewhere odd and it was an eye-sore of a kludge and completely useless. One time though, somebody sent me code that actually worked the way the bot worked and was placed in the correct routine and everything. I actually just pasted it in. It was truly bizarre.


--------------------

There is a bug which causes the ping to not work.

alias -l check.respond {
unset %respond
var %respondlevel = $getset(disable,$1 $+ .respondlevel)
if (%respondlevel == 2) set -u2 %respond .notice $nick
else if (%respondlevel == 3) set -u2 %respond msg $chan
else if (%respondlevel == 4) set -u2 %respond .msg $nick
else if (%respondlevel == 5) set -u2 %respond describe $chan
}

This routine should not actually use $chan by $iden

alias -l check.respond {
unset %respond
var %respondlevel = $getset(disable,$1 $+ .respondlevel)
if (%respondlevel == 2) set -u2 %respond .notice $nick
else if (%respondlevel == 3) set -u2 %respond msg $iden
else if (%respondlevel == 4) set -u2 %respond .msg $nick
else if (%respondlevel == 5) set -u2 %respond describe $iden
}

It'll be fixed next version. Thank you KindOne for the note.

Charlie Sheen, I hated him before it was cool.

"They represent the real gifts and treasures of this life," says Charlie, who also has an older daughter, CASSANDRA. "Anybody that doesn't believe in God hasn't looked into the eyes of their child."

Yeah, that was way back in April 2006. American Atheists had a blurb and it went around the atheist blogosphere. And I figured that that amount of tool-being was generally not easy to recover from. 

"Anybody that doesn't believe in God hasn't looked into the eyes of their child." - Charlie Sheen, tool.

Dinosaur Scifi... Ah. The wonders of TV.

(Via Paleo Errata)

Dinosaur scifi is such a limited field down to just about Jurassic Park and a couple episodes of Sliders. But, time traveling to the past seems like such an awesome idea if you have a lot of nice technology. Though, I wonder how hard it would be to get the science right. Somehow it should undoubtedly be a bunch of dinosaurs in a modern looking place, and older-style dinosaurs. So pretty much not difference in the age of the critters or when they actually properly existed and there will doubtfully be any of them with feathers. That's my standard issue complaint about anything with dinosaurs now... not enough feathers.