Category: Atheism

Measuring Belief and Quackery

Mark Davis1 Comment

While reviewing reporting on the RNC this afternoon, I found myself curious about the protocols at news organizations with respect to their editorial boards. For instance, does the Washington Post editorial board require that claimed facts within all opinion pieces are not clearly disputed? Does the New York Times? I suspect yes, which is what we see in the lawsuit filed by Sarah Palin against the New York Times concerning the suggestion that Palin’s campaign was relevant to the shooting of Gabby Giffords. There was at least a debate that rose to the level of the Opinion Editor, if not the board.

I was investigating this because I am curious how WaPo handles Trumpy columnists like Mark Thiessen and Hugh Hewitt, who are mostly cheerleaders without baggage for the current president, with only occasional whataboutisms and other distracting suggestions about Biden’s candidacy. They don’t defend lies and cons. They just cheer. Meanwhile, the board itself came down hard on the repeated falsehoods of Pamela Bondi and the ongoing slaughter of truth in the service of the Trump 2020 campaign.

The mainstream press represents Trump and cronies as conmen and women, manipulative, self-serving, corrupt, cruel, ignorant, ineffectual, morally questionable, and out-and-out liars. And the press uses facts to do so. Yet Trump maintains a remarkable following despite this evidence, with many quizzical onlookers at a loss as to the psychology of Trump’s followers.

In this modern example, there are many, many resources that can be used to fact check and form opinions. Yet people choose to rely on only a few and discount others as being biased.

I was recently reading some fairly detailed Bayesian analysis by philosophers concerning Hume’s argument against miracles.… Read the rest

Post Pale and Nerdy

Mark Davis1 Comment

White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert Jones is making the interview and excerpt cycle, here and here. I’m on the fence whether to read it since I think I get the gist from the excerpts and interviews, though I do often read controversial social criticism, social science, and religious thinking (Charles Murray, Coming Apart; Ehrman, Heaven and Hell; etc.). I inevitably learn something new. Here, though, the meta question is how a major religion that makes truth and moral claims to its adherents can harbor and tolerate something as repugnant as slavery and racism. Now, it might be argued that slavery and racism were simply part of our shared human past where tribes and nations vied for resources and land, but this of course argues against the possibility that religious traditions reflect some kind of special truth insofar as we are wedded to the idea that slavery and racism are bad, always and everywhere. Yet, from the “curse of Ham” to the endless support for slavery in the Old and New Testaments, and even the skin color tribal curses in Book of Mormon, there was plenty of ammunition for recent religious communities in America to be supportive of white supremacy, much less slavery.

And this is where the pale and nerdy comes in. In his review of Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing (which I also own) in the New York Times, physicist and philosopher David Albert took Krauss to task for bothering with the whole effort of trying to seriously engage with religious arguments concerning the origins of the universe at all:

When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for every­thing essentially human.

… Read the rest

Ethical Grounding and Numeracy

Mark Davis1 Comment

I recently discovered the YouTube videos of Paulogia. He’s a former Christian who likes to take on young Earth creationists, apologists, and some historical issues related to the faith. I’m generally drawn to the latter since the other two categories seem a bit silly to me, but I liked his recent rebuttal of some apologist/philosopher arguments concerning the idea that ethics must be ontologically grounded in something. The argument is of the sort stoned high schoolers engage in—but certainly more carefully attended to—as I commented on the video.

So rather than pick on definitional minutiae, let’s take an expansive view of ethical reasoning and try to apply it to contemporary problems in society. For instance, while all societies have generally condemned murder in one way or another, how do we approach something like whether governmental control or regulation of environmental pollution and interaction is necessary or obligatory?

For the apologist/philosophers in the video, they seem to argue that scriptural claims places a grounding of ethics in a person’s “heart,” but then leave open how that gets translated into some kind of decision-making. At one point, one of the guys says he tends towards virtue ethics, while the other notes that some might see deontological ethics as the proper extension of that ontologically- and theistically-grounded impetus.

Let’s take a minimalist and observational approach to ethical behavior. We can perhaps tease out a few observations and then try to fit an explanatory theory onto that.

  1. Moral and ethical perspectives are and have been varied across people and time.
  2. There seems to be some central commonalities about interpersonal and group ideas about what is ethical and moral.
  3. Those commonalities have reflections in the natural world and among non-human species.
… Read the rest

Overcoming Projection and Fear in the 2020s

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The end of 2019 has come with a soul-searching of sorts. While the politics of America is in an unexpected tribal divergence given the recent good economic performance combined with a world not in major conflicts, there are also undercurrents of religious change that many see as threatening to the established order. Religion in America is on the decline for the last decade, with young people, especially, indicating that they have no particular affiliation, and with the rise of atheism and related thinking in print and online.

Let’s take a look at some of the most recent journalism on the topic. We will start with an example of how, I believe, it contributes to this decline, then segue to some sage survey work and science concerning how people regard these ideas.

The Washington Times is almost always filled with sloppy journalism, editorials, scholarship, and thinking, but here we have quotes suggesting that lack of religious affiliation is “pagan.” (Wrong: paganism was and remains highly religious). Or editorialization that overthrowing “blue laws” is linked to the decline of religious adherence (or, perhaps, a better separation of church and state). Shakespeare’s jokes require biblical understanding? Perhaps some, but many others required (pagan) mythological and historical understanding. The hit list goes on and on: evangelization like in the Age of Exploration? Swords out, anyone?

But this kind of sloppiness reflects mostly a desire to denigrate religious skepticism and project onto it the fears of the religious themselves, at least according to this survey from the Public Religion Reseach Institute, as reported in the Washington Post, which is the anti-Times for some. The Christian religious right sustains a fear of losing their religious freedoms that is not actually desired by atheists or the non-affiliated.… Read the rest

Doubt at the Limit

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I seem to have a central theme to many of the last posts that is related to the demarcation between science and non-science, and also to the limits of what rationality allows where we care about such limits. This is not purely abstract, though, as we can see in today’s anti-science movements, whether anti-vaccination, flat Earthers, climate change deniers, or intelligent design proponents. Just today, Ars Technica reports on the first of these. The speakers at the event, held in close proximity to a massive measles outbreak, ranged from a “disgraced former gastroenterologist” to an angry rabbi. Efforts to counter them, in the form of a letter from a county supervisor and another rabbi, may have had an impact on the broader community, but probably not the die-hards of the movement.

Meanwhile, Lee Mcyntire at Boston University suggests what we are missing in these engagements in a great piece in Newsweek. Mcyntire applies the same argument to flat Earthers that I have applied to climate change deniers: what we need to reinforce is the value and, importantly, the limits inherent in scientific reasoning. Insisting, for example, that climate change science is 100% squared away just fuels the micro-circuits in the so-called meta-cognitive strategies regions of the brains of climate change deniers. Instead, Mcyntire recommends science engages the public in thinking about the limits of science, showing how doubt and process lead us to useable conclusions about topics that are suddenly fashionably in dispute.

No one knows if this approach is superior to the alternatives like the letter-writing method by authorities in the vaccination seminar approach, and it certainly seems longer term in that it needs to build against entrenched ideas and opinions, but it at least argues for a new methodology.… Read the rest

Causing Incoherence to Exist

Mark Davis1 Comment

I was continuing discussion on Richard Carrier vs. the Apologists but the format of the blog posting system made a detailed conversation difficult, so I decided to continue here. My core argument is that the premises of Kalam are incoherent. I also think some of the responses are as well.

But what do we mean by incoherent?

Richard interpreted that to mean logically impossible, but my intent was that incoherence is a property of the semantics of the words. Statements are incoherent when they don’t make sense or only make sense with a very narrow and unwarranted reading of the statement. The following argument follows a fairly standard analytic tradition analysis of examining the meaning of statements. I am currently fond of David Lewis’s school of thought on semantics, where the meaning of words exist as a combination of mild referential attachment, coherence within a network of other words, and, importantly, some words within that network achieve what is called “reference magnetism” in that they are tied to reality in significant ways and pull at the meaning of other words.

For instance, consider Premise 1 of a modern take on Kalam:

All things that begin to exist have a cause.

OK, so what does begin to exist mean? And how about cause? Let’s unpack “begin to exist,” first. We might say in our everyday world of people that, say, cars begin to exist at some point. But when is that point? For instance, is it latent in the design for the car? Is it when the body panels are attached on the assembly line? Is it when the final system is capable of car behavior? That is, when all the parts that were in fact designed are fully operational?… Read the rest

Two Points on Penrose, and One On Motivated Reasoning

Mark Davis1 Comment

Sir Roger Penrose is, without doubt, one of the most interesting polymaths of recent history. Even where I find his ideas fantastical, they are most definitely worth reading and understanding. Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast interview with Penrose from early January of this year is a treat.

I’ve previously discussed the Penrose-Hameroff conjectures concerning wave function collapse and their implication of quantum operations in the micro-tubule structure of the brain. I also used the conjecture in a short story. But the core driver for Penrose’s original conjecture, namely that algorithmic processes can’t explain human consciousness, has always been a claim in search of support. Equally difficult is pushing consciousness into the sphere of quantum phenomena that tend to show random, rather than directed, behavior. Randomness doesn’t clearly relate to the “hard problem” of consciousness that is about the experience of being conscious.

But take the idea that since mathematicians can prove things that are blocked by Gödel incompleteness, our brains must be different from Turing machines or collections of them. Our brains are likely messy and not theorem proving machines per se, despite operating according to logico-causal processes. Indeed, throw in an active analog to biological evolution based on variation-and-retention of ideas and insights that might actually have a bit of pseudo-randomness associated with it, and there is no reason to doubt that we are capable of the kind of system transcendence that Penrose is looking for.

Note that this doesn’t in any way impact the other horn of Penrose-Hameroff concerning the measurement problem in quantum theory, but there is no reason to suspect that quantum collapse is necessary for consciousness. It might flow the other way, though, and Penrose has created the Penrose Institute to look experimentally for evidence about these effects.… Read the rest

Poetics and Humanism for the Solstice

Mark Davis4 Comments

There is, necessarily, an empty center to secular existence. Empty in the sense that there is no absolute answer to the complexities of human life, alone or as part of the great societies that we have created. This opens us to wild, adventurous circuits through pain, meaning, suffering, growth, and love. Religious writers in recent years have had a tendentious tendency to denigrate this fantastic adventure, as Andrew Sullivan does in New York magazine. The worst possible argument is that everything is religion insofar as we believe passionately about its value. It’s wrong if for no other reason than the position of John Gray that Sullivan quotes:

Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.

Many religious people absolutely disagree with that characterization and demand an entire metaphysical cosmos of spiritual entities and corresponding goals. Abstracting religion to a symbolic labeling system for prediction and explanation robs religion, as well as reason, art, emotion, conversation, and logic, of any independent meaning at all. So Sullivan and Gray are so catholic in their semantics that the words can be replanted to justify almost anything. Moreover, the subsequent claim about religion existing because of our awareness of our own mortality is not borne out by the range of concepts that are properly considered religious.

In social change Sullivan sees a grasping towards redemption, whether in the Marxist-idolatrous left or the covertly idolatrous right, but a more careful reading of history proves Sullivan wrong on the surface, at least, if not in the deeper prescription. For instance, it is not faith in progress that has been part of the liberal social experiment since the Enlightenment, but a grasping towards actual reasons and justifications for what is desired and how to achieve it.… Read the rest

Indifference and the Cosmos

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I am a political independent, though that does not mean that I vote willy-nilly. I have, in fact, been reliably center left for most of my adult life, save one youthfully rebellious moment when I voted Libertarian, more as a statement than a commitment to the principles of libertarianism per se. I regret that vote now, given additional exposure to the party and the kinds of people it attracts. To me, the extremes of the American political system build around radical positions, and the increasingly noxious conspiracy theories and unhinged rhetoric is nothing like the cautious, problem-solving utopia that might make me politically happy, or at least wince less.

Some might claim I am indifferent. I would not argue with that. In the face of revolution, I would require a likely impossible proof of a better outcome before committing. How can we possibly see into such a permeable and contingent future, or weigh the goods and harms in the face of the unknown? This idea of indifference, as a tempering of our epistemic insights, serves as a basis for an essential idea in probabilistic reasoning where it even has the name, the principle of indifference, or, variously, and in contradistinction with Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, the principle of insufficient reason.

So how does indifference work in probabilistic reasoning? Consider a Bayesian formulation: we inductively guess based on a combination of a priori probabilities combined with a posteriori evidences. What is the likelihood of the next word in an English sentence being “is”? Indifference suggests that we treat each word as likely as any other, but we know straight away that “is” occurs much more often than “Manichaeistic” in English texts because we can count words.… Read the rest

The Universal Roots of Fantasyland

Mark Davis1 Comment

Intellectual history and cultural criticism always teeters on the brink of totalism. So it was when Christopher Hitchens was forced to defend the hyperbolic subtitle of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. The complaint was always the same: everything, really? Or when Neil Postman downplayed the early tremors of the internet in his 1985 Amusing Ourselves to Death. Email couldn’t be anything more than another movement towards entertainment and celebrity. So it is no surprise that Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland: How America Went Wrong: A 500-Year History is open to similar charges.

Andersen’s thesis is easily digestible: we built a country on fantasies. From the earliest charismatic stirrings of the Puritans to the patent medicines of the 19th century, through to the counterculture of the 1960s, and now with an incoherent insult comedian and showman as president, America has thrived on inventing wild, fantastical narratives that coalesce into movements. Andersen’s detailed analysis is breathtaking as he pulls together everything from linguistic drift to the psychology of magical thinking to justify his thesis.

Yet his thesis might be too narrow. It is not a uniquely American phenomenon. When Andersen mentions cosplay, he fails to identify its Japanese contributions, including the word itself. In the California Gold Rush, he sees economic fantasies driving a generation to unmoor themselves from their merely average lives. Yet the conquistadores had sought to enrich themselves, God, and country while Americans were forming their shining cities on hills. And in mid-19th-century Europe, while the Americans panned in the Sierra, romanticism was throwing off the oppressive yoke of Enlightenment rationality as the West became increasingly exposed to enigmatic Asian cultures. By the 20th century, Weimar Berlin was a hotbed of cultural fantasies that dovetailed with the rise of Nazism and a fantastical theory of race, German volk culture, and Indo-European mysticism.… Read the rest