2012-10-04
Arguments with Shallow Atheists
This web log seems to be where I publish my thoughts about metaphysics. I suppose that's OK as long as nobody reads it.
I got in an interesting argument with a self-described atheist last night after the POTUS debate. I overheard this guy say that no rational person could possibly believe in God. Well, I agree to some extent, at least that metaphysical things like gods are not subject to ration. But I instinctively seized the opportunity to make a case for theism. Full disclosure: I'm not a theist. I'm not even an theistic agnostic. And, I admitted to the guy up front that I was playing Devil's Advocate.
I started things off by asking what problems he saw with believing in the existence of a personal God who interferes in human affairs. He began by saying that there exists cause and effect. I immediately challenged a looming assumption, in order to prevent him from assuming it. I responded that we do not have any evidence that there are single causes for single effects, i.e. pure causal chains. Each effect is a complex or a network of effects and each cause is a network of causes. So, what we really have is a cause-effect mesh. He denied that by pushing his wife slightly and asserting that his push was the cause of her slight forward motion effect. I replied that an additional cause is her flexibility. Were she a rigid object, weighing in at 120 lbs or so, she would not have moved. So, his simplified identification of the cause was too simple.
Now, it was a pretty long conversation with lots of tangents. But I'm only going to write enough of the story here to document my thinking. Were he to ever read this, I'm sure he would have different thoughts he could document here or elsewhere.
Anyhoo, at this point, he asserted that the world was a continuum and cause-effect had to be understood in that continuum. Again, I immediately stopped him and explained that this makes my rhetoric even easier. If we live in a continuum, then it's very clear that there are no unit/atomic causes, only smears of causal distributions.
This is where he went fundamentalist on me. He claimed that we have to agree on something in order to make any progress. For example, if we can't agree that 1+1=2, then we have no basis for rational discussion. Of course, since he wanted to assume that the world was a continuum, I denied there was such a thing as "1". There is only 1.0. Hence, 1+1=2 is a delusion but 1.0+1.0=2.0 is real (no pun intended). He then picked up his beer glass and asserted that, surely, I had to agree that this is 1 glass and adding it to another glass produces 2 glasses. Of course, I did not agree. If he insists that the world is a continuum and he also insists on setting up a language wherein we can discuss things rationally, then we have to define our terms. What does "1 glass" ... or for that matter "glass" mean?
Here he kinda flipped out. He began asserting that I am irrational and nobody could possibly have a rational discussion with me. So, I let it drop and went for another pint of beer. We all wandered around the party for awhile. But a third party rebroached the subject. He offered that "1 glass" is a label for "a receptacle made from glass". Even though I could have argued with that, I didn't because I wanted to accept the compromise he introduced. My acceptance seemed to astound them and there was an awkward pause.
Then our protagonist asserts again that I had to admit that 1 receptacle + 1 receptacle = 2 receptacles. Of course, I disagreed because it depends on how we define the binary function "+". Even if we simply place each glass on a table, since we live in a continuum (remember I'm playing along with that assumption because he wants me to), we can still find a point half way between them so that if we only look at that region of the table, we only see 1 glass. The unit is an attribute ascribed by an observer, not a fundamental property of the receptacle.
Well, he flipped out again and reiterated that I was irrational. But he also began calling me all sorts of other names. I began to get the feeling that he might be insulting me. So, I asked him if he were insulting me. I had to ask several times. "Are those insults?" He responded with something like "Maybe. It depends on you. If you take them as insults, then they're insults!" To which I asked, "So, I can say anything I like to you, call you any name I want, and it's only an insult if you decide it's an insult? My intent doesn't matter?" To which he answered, "Yes." He also offered that I was free to insult him. I turned him down.
Remember, I admitted up front that I was playing Devil's Advocate. I even repeated a few times during the course of the rhetoric that I don't necessarily believe any of the assumptions we're making as we go. I'm doing it to follow through with his assertion that only irrational people could believe in God.
And the conversation ends with him insulting me.
Later, I wished I'd asked him why he was insulting me. I suspect it was because my refusal to implicitly adopt the mountain of assumptions he wanted me to adopt so we could jump to the end and talk about vague, undefined things like "God". That refusal frustrated him and, rather than just stop trying to talk to me, the irrational Devil, something inside him made him want to do something ... continue somehow ... get through to me somehow. And in the end, the only thing he could do was insult me.
A friend of mine recently said he thought "faith" was a kind of short-cut in one's justification of some action or behavior. Each person has a kind of limit to the "drill down" they're willing to do into rationalizing or explaining their plans or past actions. And at bottom, everyone must resort to faith or else they'd seize up and never do anything ... they'd be stuck in an infinite recursion, diving ever deeper into the well of justifying every little thing.
I suspect my protagonist in this story has a very shallow receptacle for his justification, a low tolerance for nuanced, holistic, or integrated rhetoric. He has faith that anyone who defends a belief in God is irrational. And he's quick to arrive at the bottom, shunt the justification, and act in blind faith.
I got in an interesting argument with a self-described atheist last night after the POTUS debate. I overheard this guy say that no rational person could possibly believe in God. Well, I agree to some extent, at least that metaphysical things like gods are not subject to ration. But I instinctively seized the opportunity to make a case for theism. Full disclosure: I'm not a theist. I'm not even an theistic agnostic. And, I admitted to the guy up front that I was playing Devil's Advocate.
I started things off by asking what problems he saw with believing in the existence of a personal God who interferes in human affairs. He began by saying that there exists cause and effect. I immediately challenged a looming assumption, in order to prevent him from assuming it. I responded that we do not have any evidence that there are single causes for single effects, i.e. pure causal chains. Each effect is a complex or a network of effects and each cause is a network of causes. So, what we really have is a cause-effect mesh. He denied that by pushing his wife slightly and asserting that his push was the cause of her slight forward motion effect. I replied that an additional cause is her flexibility. Were she a rigid object, weighing in at 120 lbs or so, she would not have moved. So, his simplified identification of the cause was too simple.
Now, it was a pretty long conversation with lots of tangents. But I'm only going to write enough of the story here to document my thinking. Were he to ever read this, I'm sure he would have different thoughts he could document here or elsewhere.
Anyhoo, at this point, he asserted that the world was a continuum and cause-effect had to be understood in that continuum. Again, I immediately stopped him and explained that this makes my rhetoric even easier. If we live in a continuum, then it's very clear that there are no unit/atomic causes, only smears of causal distributions.
This is where he went fundamentalist on me. He claimed that we have to agree on something in order to make any progress. For example, if we can't agree that 1+1=2, then we have no basis for rational discussion. Of course, since he wanted to assume that the world was a continuum, I denied there was such a thing as "1". There is only 1.0. Hence, 1+1=2 is a delusion but 1.0+1.0=2.0 is real (no pun intended). He then picked up his beer glass and asserted that, surely, I had to agree that this is 1 glass and adding it to another glass produces 2 glasses. Of course, I did not agree. If he insists that the world is a continuum and he also insists on setting up a language wherein we can discuss things rationally, then we have to define our terms. What does "1 glass" ... or for that matter "glass" mean?
Here he kinda flipped out. He began asserting that I am irrational and nobody could possibly have a rational discussion with me. So, I let it drop and went for another pint of beer. We all wandered around the party for awhile. But a third party rebroached the subject. He offered that "1 glass" is a label for "a receptacle made from glass". Even though I could have argued with that, I didn't because I wanted to accept the compromise he introduced. My acceptance seemed to astound them and there was an awkward pause.
Then our protagonist asserts again that I had to admit that 1 receptacle + 1 receptacle = 2 receptacles. Of course, I disagreed because it depends on how we define the binary function "+". Even if we simply place each glass on a table, since we live in a continuum (remember I'm playing along with that assumption because he wants me to), we can still find a point half way between them so that if we only look at that region of the table, we only see 1 glass. The unit is an attribute ascribed by an observer, not a fundamental property of the receptacle.
Well, he flipped out again and reiterated that I was irrational. But he also began calling me all sorts of other names. I began to get the feeling that he might be insulting me. So, I asked him if he were insulting me. I had to ask several times. "Are those insults?" He responded with something like "Maybe. It depends on you. If you take them as insults, then they're insults!" To which I asked, "So, I can say anything I like to you, call you any name I want, and it's only an insult if you decide it's an insult? My intent doesn't matter?" To which he answered, "Yes." He also offered that I was free to insult him. I turned him down.
Remember, I admitted up front that I was playing Devil's Advocate. I even repeated a few times during the course of the rhetoric that I don't necessarily believe any of the assumptions we're making as we go. I'm doing it to follow through with his assertion that only irrational people could believe in God.
And the conversation ends with him insulting me.
Later, I wished I'd asked him why he was insulting me. I suspect it was because my refusal to implicitly adopt the mountain of assumptions he wanted me to adopt so we could jump to the end and talk about vague, undefined things like "God". That refusal frustrated him and, rather than just stop trying to talk to me, the irrational Devil, something inside him made him want to do something ... continue somehow ... get through to me somehow. And in the end, the only thing he could do was insult me.
A friend of mine recently said he thought "faith" was a kind of short-cut in one's justification of some action or behavior. Each person has a kind of limit to the "drill down" they're willing to do into rationalizing or explaining their plans or past actions. And at bottom, everyone must resort to faith or else they'd seize up and never do anything ... they'd be stuck in an infinite recursion, diving ever deeper into the well of justifying every little thing.
I suspect my protagonist in this story has a very shallow receptacle for his justification, a low tolerance for nuanced, holistic, or integrated rhetoric. He has faith that anyone who defends a belief in God is irrational. And he's quick to arrive at the bottom, shunt the justification, and act in blind faith.
2011-04-20
The (lack of) Ubiquity of Science
Here's an interesting article:
The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science
I don't really believe the implicit claims of the author, namely that science denial is more prominent on the political right. While it certainly seems true that many population issues seem to baffle the right more than the left, I think I can claim that the left misunderstands much of the scientific evidence they claim to believe.
So, it does not seem like the lefties I meet understand science any better than the righties, even admitting that my anecdotal evidence is not scientific. If we take it to be true, though, perhaps it reflects an overwhelming role of "denialism" independent of whatever subject. In other words, it's not science that's at issue; it's the willingness of lefties to take another person at their word, regardless of whether that person is a scientist or not. I think it would be easy to build an argument that righties just don't trust other people as much as lefties do. I forget where I heard it; but I remember someone claiming that the biggest difference between conservatives and liberals was that conservatives believe people are basically bad or selfish and liberals believe that people are basically good and altruistic.
Another issue I can't help but conflate with this article is the alleged rise in narcissism (or at least entitlement) amongst college students, which I attribute to a rise in network/influence connectivity, which I think naturally leads to what the author calls "motivated reasoning" (selecting influences that fit your own biases).
But my question for y'all is more personal. I've always enjoyed arguing and the dialectic as an efficient tool for arriving at "truth". I've always found that if someone adopts a position, the most efficient thing for me to do is adopt it's opposite and refine the differences as much as possible. This usually leads to very specific questions that can be asked of, say, JStore or Science Direct ... or even ChemSpider.
A problem I find, though, is that almost nobody I have these discussions with cares enough to follow up. Never mind admitting when you're wrong or avoiding "I told you so." People, in general, won't even respond! I can't even count the number of times I've come home from the pub, spent a little time finding scientific evidence for or against my position in some silly argument and e-mailing it to the other participants only to have them completely ignore it all.
To me, this is way more relevant to why "we don't believe science" than self-selecting sources for our biases. I don't find that people engage in motivated reasoning so much. It's more like they just flat don't care enough to read through scientific literature, much less think about how/whether they could reproduce the results. These people will invest days in a video game or futzing with a router in order to get just the right decoration on some piece of trim ... but they won't take a few hours to dig deeply into any science. They'll invest immense effort into, say, optimizing their bicycle or assembling their next desktop; but they won't spend any time studying the journals of materials science.
Why is that?
You can't just say "they're lazy". There's something deeper. It's almost as if the byzantine morass of qualifiers and gray areas of science are somehow unsatisfying. It's like they have an urge to be right; but they only want to be right NOW. Perhaps it's unsatisfying to reserve judgment for later, after they've put in the time and effort it takes to discover whether or not they really are right. It's easier and more efficient to gloss over all the things you don't know and jump to some conclusion that allows you to act immediately, without any deep thought, reading, or understanding.
The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science
It all raises the question: Do left and right differ in any meaningful way when it comes to biases in processing information, or are we all equally susceptible?
There are some clear differences. Science denial today is considerably more prominent on the political right—once you survey climate and related environmental issues, anti-evolutionism, attacks on reproductive health science by the Christian right, and stem-cell and biomedical matters.
I don't really believe the implicit claims of the author, namely that science denial is more prominent on the political right. While it certainly seems true that many population issues seem to baffle the right more than the left, I think I can claim that the left misunderstands much of the scientific evidence they claim to believe.
So, it does not seem like the lefties I meet understand science any better than the righties, even admitting that my anecdotal evidence is not scientific. If we take it to be true, though, perhaps it reflects an overwhelming role of "denialism" independent of whatever subject. In other words, it's not science that's at issue; it's the willingness of lefties to take another person at their word, regardless of whether that person is a scientist or not. I think it would be easy to build an argument that righties just don't trust other people as much as lefties do. I forget where I heard it; but I remember someone claiming that the biggest difference between conservatives and liberals was that conservatives believe people are basically bad or selfish and liberals believe that people are basically good and altruistic.
Another issue I can't help but conflate with this article is the alleged rise in narcissism (or at least entitlement) amongst college students, which I attribute to a rise in network/influence connectivity, which I think naturally leads to what the author calls "motivated reasoning" (selecting influences that fit your own biases).
But my question for y'all is more personal. I've always enjoyed arguing and the dialectic as an efficient tool for arriving at "truth". I've always found that if someone adopts a position, the most efficient thing for me to do is adopt it's opposite and refine the differences as much as possible. This usually leads to very specific questions that can be asked of, say, JStore or Science Direct ... or even ChemSpider.
A problem I find, though, is that almost nobody I have these discussions with cares enough to follow up. Never mind admitting when you're wrong or avoiding "I told you so." People, in general, won't even respond! I can't even count the number of times I've come home from the pub, spent a little time finding scientific evidence for or against my position in some silly argument and e-mailing it to the other participants only to have them completely ignore it all.
To me, this is way more relevant to why "we don't believe science" than self-selecting sources for our biases. I don't find that people engage in motivated reasoning so much. It's more like they just flat don't care enough to read through scientific literature, much less think about how/whether they could reproduce the results. These people will invest days in a video game or futzing with a router in order to get just the right decoration on some piece of trim ... but they won't take a few hours to dig deeply into any science. They'll invest immense effort into, say, optimizing their bicycle or assembling their next desktop; but they won't spend any time studying the journals of materials science.
Why is that?
You can't just say "they're lazy". There's something deeper. It's almost as if the byzantine morass of qualifiers and gray areas of science are somehow unsatisfying. It's like they have an urge to be right; but they only want to be right NOW. Perhaps it's unsatisfying to reserve judgment for later, after they've put in the time and effort it takes to discover whether or not they really are right. It's easier and more efficient to gloss over all the things you don't know and jump to some conclusion that allows you to act immediately, without any deep thought, reading, or understanding.
2010-12-23
Initializing this web log with religion
I came across this today:
A Holiday Message From Ricky Gervais: Why I’m an Atheist
And since I had a few entries about religion on my previous log, I figured this would be a good topic with which to initialize this one. So, here are the interesting excerpts:
Now, before I go on, let me say that I like and agree with Mr. Gervais' points... all but this one I'm about to pick at. And I have to pick at it... it's like a scab.... itching and itching... and even when I do scratch and pick at it, it never stops itching.
Mr. Gervais pulls "science" out of thin air without even seeming to know what the word means. Let me state it as plainly as possible. Science doesn't prove things to be true. It proves things to be false. Science does NOT know what it knows. It cannot know anything. It only knows what it does NOT know. (Let's allow all that anthropomorphizing of science as if it's a purposeful entity for awhile. Science doesn't do or know anything... people do and know things.)
Science has nothing to say about the existence of God or the gods because there is no testable, falsifiable hypothesis for the existence of God or gods. There are falsifiable and falsified hypotheses for the properties of particular gods. And the more specific hypotheses we falsify about particular gods, the more abstract, remote, and metaphysical the definitions of the gods become. True believers can always run, from science, to their permanently safe metaphysics.
Now, there is a practical line between mere belief and the ability to persuade. And science can be invoked in this context. Science, being a behavior, a process, can be transmitted from one person to another. Beliefs (or indeed any thought) cannot. In order to persuade someone, you have to act, move, do something. Here's where science is helpful. Science, as a behavior, is all about persuasion. It's a form of rhetoric. If I do something in front of you, like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, you tend to believe it. If I stop there, you kinda believe it; but it leaves you open to the persuasion of another. If I do it enough times and in enough specific detail so that you can also do it, and then you go and do it over and over again so that you remember the behavior, then I've completely persuaded you.
That's science. And it cannot cause a person to believe "there is no God" because science is all about doing specific, particular, behaviors in front of other people and teaching them to also do those behaviors.
Everyone who says they are an atheist because of science or a (lack of) scientific evidence is not simply wrong, they are the worst kind of ignorant... the ignorant know-it-all. A sanctimonious, arrogant twit who thinks they know more than they actually know.
Now, had Mr. Gervais simply gone with the "I'm an atheist because my brother asked me an important question at an important time in my life", I'd be totally down with that. But invoking science, here, is just plain stupid.
Having been called an atheist for most of my life by other people, I tend to regard atheists as "us". But when some of us say stupid and indefensible things like claiming they're an atheist because there's no scientific evidence for God, we have to show them the error of their ways. We have to police ourselves. God knows the theists are not going to police us effectively. ;-)
Oh, and there's a follow-up piece where Mr. Gervais answers questions:
Does God Exist? Ricky Gervais Takes Your Questions
He makes the same error as above in many of his answers. But, having dealt with that error, I'd like to pick at 2 more nits regarding "logical impossibility" and his inference of agnosticism. Let's handle the simpler one first.
Agnostics do not necessarily think "just because you haven’t found something yet doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist." It may be true that many agnostics think this way. But there is an alternative that Gervais leaves out because he doesn't understand science. That is that many agnostics (particularly many scientists) believe that evidence for God is unknowable. I.e. it's not that we just haven't YET found evidence for God; it's that there is no (never will be) evidence for God. There can never be certainty about God's existence because such certainty is metaphysical. This is the sense of "I don't know". And many agnostics could easily be as arrogant as the atheists and say that not only do I not know, but neither do you. You don't know there is a God. You don't know there is no God. You don't know it and you will never know it because it is unknowable.
Now the more difficult one. Just because something (e.g. a square circle) is logically contradictory does not mean it doesn't exist. That belief system can be called "logicism", the elevation of logic to some ontological reality. But we know from the logical results of Tarski and the mathematical results of Goedel that logic fails in a rather fundamental way in representing reality. Tarski showed that any sufficiently complex language (e.g. logical system) has to reference concepts outside itself. Goedel showed that any formal system will be either incomplete (some statements cannot be shown true or false) or inconsistent (some statements are both true and false).
More practically, contradictions are often only apparent and are really paradoxes that can be resolved by widening the discussion. To see this clearly, examine this picture:
Wife and Mother in law
You cannot see both the wife and the mother-in-law at the same time, yet both are there. While it's true that this may not be a logical ambiguity, it is certainly a perceptual one. The two ways of looking at the picture can be said to be contradictory, but they're not. They're the result of an ambiguity. Many apparent logical and mathematical contradictions are similar. They're an artifact of how we choose to talk about, view, describe the subject.
Hence, claiming that something is logically impossible is also a nonsense argument for being an atheist. Again, that doesn't mean one can't be an atheist. Believe whatever metaphysical stuff you want to believe! Just don't trot out silly arguments trying to justify your beliefs.
A Holiday Message From Ricky Gervais: Why I’m an Atheist
And since I had a few entries about religion on my previous log, I figured this would be a good topic with which to initialize this one. So, here are the interesting excerpts:
I don't believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his existence ...
[Science] knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence ...
Now, before I go on, let me say that I like and agree with Mr. Gervais' points... all but this one I'm about to pick at. And I have to pick at it... it's like a scab.... itching and itching... and even when I do scratch and pick at it, it never stops itching.
Mr. Gervais pulls "science" out of thin air without even seeming to know what the word means. Let me state it as plainly as possible. Science doesn't prove things to be true. It proves things to be false. Science does NOT know what it knows. It cannot know anything. It only knows what it does NOT know. (Let's allow all that anthropomorphizing of science as if it's a purposeful entity for awhile. Science doesn't do or know anything... people do and know things.)
Science has nothing to say about the existence of God or the gods because there is no testable, falsifiable hypothesis for the existence of God or gods. There are falsifiable and falsified hypotheses for the properties of particular gods. And the more specific hypotheses we falsify about particular gods, the more abstract, remote, and metaphysical the definitions of the gods become. True believers can always run, from science, to their permanently safe metaphysics.
Now, there is a practical line between mere belief and the ability to persuade. And science can be invoked in this context. Science, being a behavior, a process, can be transmitted from one person to another. Beliefs (or indeed any thought) cannot. In order to persuade someone, you have to act, move, do something. Here's where science is helpful. Science, as a behavior, is all about persuasion. It's a form of rhetoric. If I do something in front of you, like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, you tend to believe it. If I stop there, you kinda believe it; but it leaves you open to the persuasion of another. If I do it enough times and in enough specific detail so that you can also do it, and then you go and do it over and over again so that you remember the behavior, then I've completely persuaded you.
That's science. And it cannot cause a person to believe "there is no God" because science is all about doing specific, particular, behaviors in front of other people and teaching them to also do those behaviors.
Everyone who says they are an atheist because of science or a (lack of) scientific evidence is not simply wrong, they are the worst kind of ignorant... the ignorant know-it-all. A sanctimonious, arrogant twit who thinks they know more than they actually know.
Now, had Mr. Gervais simply gone with the "I'm an atheist because my brother asked me an important question at an important time in my life", I'd be totally down with that. But invoking science, here, is just plain stupid.
Having been called an atheist for most of my life by other people, I tend to regard atheists as "us". But when some of us say stupid and indefensible things like claiming they're an atheist because there's no scientific evidence for God, we have to show them the error of their ways. We have to police ourselves. God knows the theists are not going to police us effectively. ;-)
Update
Oh, and there's a follow-up piece where Mr. Gervais answers questions:
Does God Exist? Ricky Gervais Takes Your Questions
He makes the same error as above in many of his answers. But, having dealt with that error, I'd like to pick at 2 more nits regarding "logical impossibility" and his inference of agnosticism. Let's handle the simpler one first.
Agnostics do not necessarily think "just because you haven’t found something yet doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist." It may be true that many agnostics think this way. But there is an alternative that Gervais leaves out because he doesn't understand science. That is that many agnostics (particularly many scientists) believe that evidence for God is unknowable. I.e. it's not that we just haven't YET found evidence for God; it's that there is no (never will be) evidence for God. There can never be certainty about God's existence because such certainty is metaphysical. This is the sense of "I don't know". And many agnostics could easily be as arrogant as the atheists and say that not only do I not know, but neither do you. You don't know there is a God. You don't know there is no God. You don't know it and you will never know it because it is unknowable.
Now the more difficult one. Just because something (e.g. a square circle) is logically contradictory does not mean it doesn't exist. That belief system can be called "logicism", the elevation of logic to some ontological reality. But we know from the logical results of Tarski and the mathematical results of Goedel that logic fails in a rather fundamental way in representing reality. Tarski showed that any sufficiently complex language (e.g. logical system) has to reference concepts outside itself. Goedel showed that any formal system will be either incomplete (some statements cannot be shown true or false) or inconsistent (some statements are both true and false).
More practically, contradictions are often only apparent and are really paradoxes that can be resolved by widening the discussion. To see this clearly, examine this picture:
Wife and Mother in law
You cannot see both the wife and the mother-in-law at the same time, yet both are there. While it's true that this may not be a logical ambiguity, it is certainly a perceptual one. The two ways of looking at the picture can be said to be contradictory, but they're not. They're the result of an ambiguity. Many apparent logical and mathematical contradictions are similar. They're an artifact of how we choose to talk about, view, describe the subject.
Hence, claiming that something is logically impossible is also a nonsense argument for being an atheist. Again, that doesn't mean one can't be an atheist. Believe whatever metaphysical stuff you want to believe! Just don't trot out silly arguments trying to justify your beliefs.
2010-11-29
2008-06-27
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