Short-form Thoughts

SFT #1: On Mental Illness & Climate Change.

I find a less recognized way in which religion harms society is in how it encourages many theists to deny the negative effects of mental illness and climate change. Because the existence of these things imply that, if there is an agency behind everything, that agency doesn't have our best interests in mind, they refuse to consider that they are real. This denial delays or thwarts the prospect of working on and potentially fixing issues that inhibit individuals' well-being and threaten our lives.

SFT #2: Disbelief in Magic

Theists often misunderstand why I disbelieve the bible. Let me be clear--it's because of the talking animals, duplicating seafood, parting seas, magic plagues, transforming matter, and resurrections. There are other valid reasons to be skeptical, but reasons 1 thru 100 are all the violations of common experience and observation that are not naturally possible. The same reasons that theists, hopefully, would doubt a tagline like "based on a true story" for Lord of the Rings.

SFT #3: Seeing Through Most Any Apologetic Argument

How I see religious apologetic arguments:

Formation 1.
Make an assumption that can only be true if God is real.
Use that assumption to say God is real.

Formation 2.
Find something with an incomplete explanation.
Substitute with a complete explanation based on the assumption that only God can be responsible.
Use that assumption to say God is real.

(In both cases, it would burn less calories to just assume God is real.)

Gods that Thwart Traditional Arguments for God

It's possible that religious apologists could be wrong about their arguments even if a handful of supernatural beings exist. Here are a few examples (that are obviously just me having a bit of fun, I'm not actually arguing any are real.)

Lacsap is a hipster God who ironically only grants those who don’t believe eternal life. Inversely, Lacsapians and all other religious types are met with an afterlife of everlasting The Nanny reruns, thus reversing Pascal’s Wager. Why would you risk believing if there was any chance an eternal Fran Dreser could be your fate?

The Great Nothing gives new meaning to the theist straw man that atheists must accept that everything came from Nothing. Indeed, Nothing created the heavens and the earth in not six, but three days...and he was drunk on the third...which explains a lot.

Bob the programmer coded our universe to test different structures of space/time. Bob’s universe is likewise coded by a programmer named Ted, who was programmed by Kim. This seeming infinite regress is made possible by a universe in which time has no beginning in which some hypothetical programmer resides.

Loki, if that is his name, is a trickster god who planted various memories, miracles and holy books into our past to mess with humanity. How can anyone be sure of their revelations if everything could be based on lies from a being who can manipulate reality?

Atheist Q & A

Do-It-Yourself Philosophy

Comedian Adam Carolla once said “I know everything because I know nothing.” By this he meant that his lack of parental involvement and disinterest in school led to a kind of philosophical blank slate which allows him to assess reality on reality’s terms. He claims the opposite of indoctrination in which every opinion is fully his own, made from scratch. I’m sure this is hyperbole, but I believe that he is more like he describes than the average Joe. In the same way, I came into blogging about atheism with little to no knowledge about theology, philosophy or, well, atheism.

I didn’t think this lack of knowledge was a good thing, mind you. Once I realized secular thought was a real option, my first instinct was to quickly build a knowledge base. I listened to the audio version of God Is Not Great and The God Delusion. Here’s an atheist confession for you: I didn’t like either. I’m probably not supposed to say this, but I’m not a Hitchens fan in general. I’ve since given Dawkins a second and third shot and enjoy his books on biology and evolution immensely. The Selfish Gene may be my favorite science book, but I’m still not interested in his editorializing. I generally desired the data and the consensus interpretation--the science, not opinion. For this reason, I discounted philosophy for a long while, which I saw as a field of speculation.

When I started debating religious apologists I really didn’t know what apologetics meant. I've since found this to be a cliched joke, but I actually thought they were going to tell me how sorry they were about their church’s policies. When they presented  their arguments for God, I never needed to look up how to refute them. The flaws were usually glaring when looking outside of their indoctrinated box. When in doubt, I only needed to turn their own reasoning back on itself which made any defense of my retorts a delegitimization of their original premise. Many of these theists go through “apologetics training” because almost every argument for God is the establishment of a carefully worded and memorized rule, for which their deity is the sole exception. To back up the argument they have what feels like a series of call-tree-like responses to common atheist rebuttals. The responses are seen as valid not because they came to them via their own reasoning, but because the training says they are valid. Understandably, years of Sunday School trumps any one conversation, no matter how clear the points made.

I’ve written about counter-apologetics before, but not because I want to train my readers to debunk arguments for God in a certain way. Most of my posts are the process of me working out my own thoughts. By committing them to the blog, I am forced to analyze my growing philosophy which sometimes results in editing or reinforcing my beliefs. And since apologetics is, for the most part, the aforementioned call-tree of responses, I feel like I can only cover it for so long. I don’t want to repeat myself and I don’t want to preach. If you are new to atheism, to some degree I don’t even want you to read--at least until you hash out all this for yourself.

Any single-topic world-view with as much on-line coverage as atheism is bound to create an echo chamber. It is important to not get lost in it as a consumer of words. My advice is to think for yourself. Decide on your own if the God hypothesis is consistent with your philosophy, morality, and the consensus reality of our world. Then, if you’re so inclined, blog your journey and supplement your knowledge with the material available from everyone point of view. It has helped me immensely and I’m thankful for all the fellow bloggers and commenters I’ve met along the way.

Immaterial Concepts Do Not A God Make

Not quite up for regular posting yet, but here is my take on why apologists using the "existence" immaterial concepts as rationalization for why an immaterial God is possible fails.

A popular thought in religious apologetics lately is that there are examples of things that are immaterial in which atheists can't deny and that these things make an immaterial deity possible.

Here's the problem:

The examples of these immaterial things aren't things, they are concepts. Yes, thoughts are immaterial--they are also fundamentally different from an active agent like God. Thoughts are completely dependent on a thinker, but to call the thinker an immaterial consciousness analogous to God is just as fallacious. The prerequisite for consciousness is a brain. To say that God requires no material prerequisite is special pleading and contrary to all evidence.

I floated this take on Google+ and it spawned 100+ comments. Here's the link.

Merry (Early) Christmas

I may or may not post again over the holidays, so I thought I'd go ahead and share my favorite Christmas song with you guys. I think you'll find it atheist friendly.



Have a happy holiday if that's your thing. If not, have a good week.

God Argument Power Rankings

The following is my personal assessment of the validity of popular apologetic arguments. The list goes from most valid to least valid.

The Fine Tuning of the Universe: Could be valid, currently based on assumptions.

1. There are a vast number of physically possible universes.
2. A universe that would be hospitable to the appearance of life must conform to some very strict conditions. Everything from the mass ratios of atomic particles and the number of dimensions of space to the cosmological parameters that rule the expansion of the universe must be just right for stable galaxies, solar systems, planets, and complex life to evolve.
3. The percentage of possible universes that would support life is infinitesimally small (from 2).
4. Our universe is one of those infinitesimally improbable universes.
5. Our universe has been fine-tuned to support life (from 3 and 4).
6. There is a Fine-Tuner (from 5).
7. Only God could have the power and the purpose to be the Fine- Tuner.
8. God exists.

This argument, had we just a little more supporting knowledge, could make me deist. It says that the physical laws and constants that allow for a life-sustaining universe lie in a very small fraction of the possible spectrum of values and the fact that our universe is within that unlikely range is evidence that it was designed with us in mind. Many atheists argue the anthropic principle here, which says that we can only come to this conclusion because we are, in fact, here. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t. Obvious, I know. The anthropic principle is worthwhile when arguing against the fine tuning of earth specifically, but we don't have enough information for it to be meaningful in terms of the fine tuning of the universe.

The difference is that the variables that can vary widely and affect the possibility of life on a planet (such as distance from a star, having a moon/asteroid belt to deflect impacts with space objects, the presence of water, etc.) are most likely all fulfilled throughout the universe. There are enough planets that one can say, “sure, we are alive on this planet because we couldn’t be alive elsewhere.” However, we can only account for one universe. If this universe is all there has ever been, and if the aforementioned laws and constants can vary to the degree apologists claim, then I agree that we are such a coincidence that a designer is a better explanation than chance. I’m just not convinced because those "if"s are not answered. I tend to think that the laws and constants can vary, but that enough other universes either have, will or currently exist to make the anthropic principle meaningful--but that’s just personal speculation.

The Kalam Cosmological Argument: Invalid, only replaces one mystery with another.

1. Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence;
2. The universe has a beginning of its existence;
3. Therefore: The universe has a cause of its existence.
4. (Implied) God is that cause.

This argument is at least based on something that is most likely true--the Big Bang Theory. So, I won't argue premise 2. As much as they like the Big Bang, apologists stop paying attention to the science after it can be used to support their beliefs. Traditional causation could very well not apply in general at the quantum level in which we find the singularity, and especially in the case of the universe with no prior time or space for a cause to occur or God to exist. The Big Bang, after all, isn't just the beginning of our universe, but also space and time as we understand it. To posit otherwise is merely an "of the gaps" argument. The implication of 4 is hasty now that there are more hypotheses than ever for possible causes of the universe and likely others that haven't occurred to us. In the end, the biggest weakness is that the argument establishes a rule because a lack of counter examples and then arbitrarily makes what they want to believe an exception. If we say that everything that begins to exist has a cause because we have no examples of things that exist without a cause, then we can also say everything that exists is within time and space because we have no examples of things that exist outside time and space. Since apologists require their God to be outside time and space for this argument to work, they would have to explain why the first statement is legitimate while the second it not.

The Ontological Argument: Invalid, basically it's just wordplay.

1. Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of “God”).
2. It is greater to exist than not to exist.
3. If we conceive of God as not existing, then we can conceive of some-thing greater than God (from 2).
4. To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God (from 1 and 3).
5. It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4).
6. God exists.

"Greater" is a value judgement that can vary from person to person, which is problematic to this argument. However, the real problem is that the argument works for any concept that includes the linguistic trick of including "must exist" in it's definition. For example, if one said the Fly Spaghetti Monster exists, by definition, then it exists. Somehow I doubt many Christian apologists would accept that definition. Nor should they, because existence isn't a property one can prescribe conceptually. Neither is "greatness" for that matter.

The Argument from Moral Truth. Invalid for a variety of reasons.

1. There exist objective moral truths. (Slavery and torture and genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong.)
2. These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world is but, rather, in the way the world ought to be.
3. The world itself—the way it is, the laws of science that explain why it is that way—cannot account for the way the world ought to be.
4. The only way to account for morality is that God established morality (from 2 and 3).
5. God exists.

I don’t know if this is the worst argument for God in my book, but it is certainly the worst of those still popular in the apologetic community. Why? Because it has so many points of failure. There is Euthyphro’ Dilemma that shows that God is a redundant factor if objective morality is valid. There is the impossibility of ascertaining exactly what the objective morals are if they exist, unless. of course, they are defined by humans in relation to social interactions which would discount a need of a supernatural law giver. There is the question if morality is objective at all (I see morality as a broad concept including the possibility for a variety of moral codes--which may be applied objectively but are hardly transcendent.) There is evolutionary biology that suggests moral instincts are selected traits which are passed down genetically. I feel apologists over estimate the argument’s power because the opposition can seem scatter brained when refuting it because the number of ways to refute it makes one’s mind spin out. That, and it’s the one argument that allows them to both claim there is a god and take the moral high ground in one fallacious move.

Alts, Poes, and Internet Anonymity

A catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they’re not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances. ~Urban Dictionary

The popular MTV show and film of the same name, Catfish, has popularized the reality that people use the anonymity of the Internet to pose as someone they aren’t in order to become more appealing. A high school drop out poses to a potential mate as a Harvard grad. A homosexual boy poses to a heterosexual crush as a cute girl. An atheist poses to a Christian apologist as a curious theist.

...wait, what?

Hear me out. The second I engage a believer I’m immediately (and correctly) seen as an atheist by my publicly recorded post history. The problem with this is that their preconceptions of an atheist color everything I say. To them I’m just mad at God, close-minded, hindered by secular culture, parroting the words of the “horsemen,” or even influenced by demons. Although some of their preconceptions are clearly unfounded, it’s natural to apply a stereotype and I’ve seen the same crime committed by atheists. Allowing the message to be heard independent of the messenger’s perceived stigma I see as the central benefit of theological catfishing.

This is my confession. I have been impersonating a theist in a variety of Google+ communities. I’ve already told you why I do it. Now I throw myself at the mercy of my readers with the question: is what I’m doing ethical?

I feel it is or I wouldn’t be doing it. The ends justify the means in my mind and I feel no need to defend my actions further. However, I have thought about how I might take it too far. The following are ways in which I choose not to abuse the trust of my “fellow” theists.

1. I will not become a parody of fundamentalism in order to drive moderate theists away. Talking to coworkers I’ve concluded that the single biggest reason folks are less religious these days is the Westboro Baptist Church. No one wants to be associated with the likes of them. If the more interactions people have with WBC-like fundamentalism, the more they distance themselves from analogs in their life, it stands to reason that becoming a poe would encourage secularism. I think this logic is sound, but I still won’t do it on the off chance it encourages a single nut-case in any way.
2. I will not dishonestly convert to atheism. An eventual reveal of my atheism is likely, but to do it as if I was persuaded out of the white lie of theism makes the lie darker. I won’t muddy the power of authentic conversion stories.
3. I will not affirm theistic beliefs that I view are harmful just to maintain the illusion the I’m a believer. For example, I will never recommend faith healing knowing real medical attention is needed.
4. I will not promote or defend doctrine that promotes inequality like popularized biblical marriage or the notion that women should be subservient to men.

Considering all this, I would like to know your opinions. I respect my readers and fellow bloggers a great deal. If the majority of you say I should come clean, I will.

What's the Meaning?

"Your life has no meaning without God."

Apologists often appeal to meaning when arguing for their deity. Let’s quickly look at what they mean by this claim.

Possible meaning #1

To have meaning you must have been created. Okay, then God has no meaning according to their own doctrine--which begs the question, how much meaning can we really have as the product of a meaningless being?

Possible meaning #2

To have meaning you must either have been created or create. This option gives meaning to God as well as us--but it also allows for our meaning without God. We create under our own power everything from art to life.

Possible meaning #3

To have meaning you must have a purpose ascribed by an authority higher than yourself. Again, this makes God meaningless which makes him a pretty weak authority and therefore us essentially meaningless by proxy. It also gives anyone meaning once they enter the workforce or are born into a family with defined expectations.

Possible meaning #4

To have meaning you must have a purpose ascribed by God. Ah, now we’re getting to the fallacious crux of the argument. By defining the word “meaning” as that which is prescribed by God, apologists guarantee a circular win via a linguistic trick only they accept. Atheists are confused because they get their definitions from dictionaries and /or common vernacular. Knowing what they mean by “meaning” in this case, we see what they are really appealing to is their own indoctrination.

Religion and Geography

The following is a syndicated post by the wise Ugo Cei.

"If you had been born in Saudi Arabia, you would have a 98% chance of being a Muslim."

You've heard that argument already, right? You have also probably heard the rebuttal that it's an example of the Genetic Fallacy: The fact that what you believe depends on where you were born does not mean that what you believe is false.

In a sense, those who object to the argument on those terms are right. When interpreted as an argument against god, it just doesn't hold. However, the true power of the argument is not as a tool to prove there is no god and I am not sure whether it is mostly the believers who like to interpret it as such, so they can have an easy job tearing it down, or the non believers, who didn't really think it through.

The fact that, exceedingly, religious affiliation depends on geography or family history, is only useful together with the fact that, for almost every believer, geography is the main reason why they choose to believe in a particular god. All other possible reasons play a very minor role. If this weren't true, we'd see much more of a patchwork in the map below.

The argument is not that, if your belief depends on geography and family history, your god is likely false. That would be an example of a genetic fallacy.

The argument is that, if your belief depends only on geography and family history, then it has no more chances of being true than the god of the muslim guy, or the hindu guy, or the christian guy who lives right across the border.

And this is not a genetic fallacy.

Gotta Keep Them Separated

Not to mention that "hell" is the absence of the omnipresent God.

God's Nature: Moral or Imaginary?

I recently joined a Google+ community meant to educate people on counter apologetics. This was my first post.

Here is a way to dismantle the moral argument for God without getting into the subjective vs. objective morality debate.

A more traditional take on the Euthyphro dilemma, a classic problem of the moral argument for God:

If God chooses what is good, does God have a reason for the actions to which he assigns a good value? If so, why can humans not come to the same reason? If not, then someone (God, in this case) arbitrarily assigned good and bad values, which is exactly what theists think is the problem with subjective morality. 

Modern apologists rarely say God decided anything, rather they claim what is morally good is simply part of God's nature. They expect this negates the dilemma. It doesn't. For this reason I recommend presenting a formation more like below to stay with the times.

If God's nature is good and it could be no other way...who made God's nature as such? If someone made God's nature good, then we should probably worship that God...if only we could know why that God made good what it is. There's a potential infinite regress of moral responsibility here which explains nothing. However, if no one made God's nature good, then it's possible for beings to have good natures without a higher being making them as such. Therefore, the same can apply to us.

It's a small distinction that most people should be able to come to on their own, but apologists are highly motivated to not think about how their arguments might fail. We need to show them, repeatedly.

Why History isn't Scientific (And Why It Can Still Tell Us About the Past)

The following is a post from Tim O'Neill who is much more knowledgeable than I on matters of history, but I'm still pretty sure I have him beat in James Bond trivia.

"History sucks."

In April last year Grundy, the usual writer of this blog, posted History Isn't My Area, commenting on the release of Bart Ehrman's critique of the Jesus Myth hypothesis, Did Jesus Exist?: A Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. Unlike the majority of actual historians, many prominent atheists find Jesus Mythicism convincing and many of them are unhappy with the generally sceptical and highly renowned Ehrman for criticizing this idea. Grundy, for his part, stated frankly "I honestly have little knowledge as to whether or not Jesus existed", though added "I tend to think he did". That said, he made it clear why the overwhelming consensus of historians and other relevant scholars that the Jesus Myth idea is junk was underwhelming for him:

"History sucks. Okay, that’s unfair, but it was never my subject. My confidence of the accuracy of historical events goes down exponentially with the paper trail. The idea that history is written by the victors highlights the biases of the past. Books are burned. Records fade. Who should I trust for an accurate portrayal of events two thousand years ago?"

Since history actually is my area, I responded by making some critical comments on this attitude and some points about how history , as an academic discipline, is studied. Grundy, unlike many so-called "rationalists" I've encountered over the years, was happy to listen, and he invited me to expand on my points in this guest post.

Atheists and Historical Illiteracy

I should begin, however, by pointing out that I am an atheist. I have been an atheist for my entire adult life, am a paid up member of several atheist and sceptical organizations and have a 21 year online record of posting to discussions as an unbeliever. I note this because I've found that when I begin to criticise my fellow atheists and their grasp of history or historiography, people tend to assume I must be some kind of theist apologist (which doesn't follow at all, but this happens all the time anyway).

After 30+ years of observing and taking part in debates about history with many of my fellow atheists I can safely claim that most atheists are historically illiterate. This is not particular to atheists: they tend to be about as historically illiterate as most people, since historical illiteracy is pretty much the norm. But it does mean that when most (not all) atheists comment about history or, worse, try to use history in debates about religion, they are usually doing so with a grasp of the subject that is stunted at about high school level.

This is hardly surprising, given that most people don't study history past high school. But it means their understanding of any given historical person, subject or event is (like that of most people), based on half-remembered school lessons, perhaps a TV documentary or two and popular culture: mainly novels and movies. Which is why most atheists (like most people) have a grasp of history which is, to be brutally frank, largely crap.

Worse, this also means that most atheists (again, like most people) have a grasp of how history is studied and the techniques of historical analysis and synthesis which is also stunted at high school level - i.e. virtually non-existent. With a few laudable exceptions, high school history teachers still tend to reduce history to facts and dates organized into themes or broad topics. How we can know what happened in the past, with what degree of certitude we can know it and the techniques used to arrive at these conclusions are rarely more than touched on at this level. This means that when the average atheist (yet again, like the average person generally) grasps that our knowledge of the past is not as cut and dried and clear as Mr Wilkins the history teacher gave us to understand, they tend to reject the whole thing as highly uncertain at best or subjective waffle at worst. Or, as Grundy put it, as "crap".

This rejection can be more pronounced in atheists, because many (not all) come to their atheism via a study of science. Science seems very certain compared to history. You can make hypotheses and test them in science. You can actually prove things. Scientific propositions are, by definition, falsifiable. Compared to science, history can seem like so much hand-waving, where anyone can pretty much argue anything they like.

History and Science

In fact, history is very much a rigorous academic discipline, with its own rules and methodology much like the hard sciences. This does not mean it is a science. It is sometimes referred to as one, especially in Europe, but this is only in the broader sense of the word; as in "a systematic way of ordering and analysing knowledge". But before looking at how the historical method works, it might be useful to look at how sciences differ from it.

The hard sciences are founded on the principle of probabilistic induction. A scientist uses an inductive or "bottom up" approach to work from observing specific particulars ("mice injected with this drug put on less fat") to general propositions ("the drug is reducing their appetite"). These propositions are falsifiable via empirical testing to rule out other explanations of the particulars ("the drug is increasing their metabolism" or "those mice are more stressed by being stuck with syringes") and so can be tested.

This is all possible in the hard sciences because of some well-established laws of cause and effect that form a basis for this kind of induction. If something is affecting the mice in my examples above today, it will affect them in the same way tomorrow, all things being equal. This allows a scientist to work from induction to make an assessment of probable causation via empirical assessment and do so with a high degree of confidence. And their assessment can be confirmed by others because the empirical measures are controlled and repeatable.

Unfortunately, none of this works for the study of the past. Events, large and small, occur and then are gone. A historian can only assess information about them from traces they may, if we are lucky, leave behind. But unlike a researcher from the hard sciences, a historian can't run the fall of the Western Roman Empire through a series of controlled lab experiments. He can't even observe the events, as a zoologist might observe the behaviour of a gorilla band, and draw conclusions. And there aren't well-defined laws and principles at work (apart from in a very broad and subjective sense) that allow him to, say, simulate the effects of the rise of the printing press or decide on the exact course of the downfall of Napoleon the way a theoretical physicist can with the composition of a distant galaxy or the formation of a long dead star.

All this leads some atheists, who have fallen in to the fallacy of scientism and reject anything that can't be definitively "proven", to reject the idea of any degree of certainty about the past. This is an extreme position and it's rarely a consistent one. As I've noted to some who have claimed this level of historical scepticism, I find it hard to believe they maintain this position when they read the newspaper, even though they should be just as sceptical about being able to know about a car accident yesterday as they are about knowing about a revolution 400 years ago.

The Historical Method

Just because history is not a hard science does not mean it can't tell us about the past or can't do so with a degree of certainty. Early historians like Herodotus established the beginnings of the methods used by modern historical researchers, though historians only began to develop a systematic methodology based on agreed principles from the later eighteenth century onwards, using the techniques of Barthold Niebuhr (1776-1831) and Leopold van Ranke (1795-1886).

The Historical Method is based on three fundamental steps, each of which has its own techniques:

1. Heuristic - This is the identification of relevant material to use as sources of information. These can range from the obvious, such as a historian of the time's account of events he witnessed personally, to the much less obvious, like a medieval manor's account book detailing purchases for the estate. Everything from archaeological finds to coins to heraldry can be relevant here. The key word here is "relevant", and there is a high degree of skill in working out which sources of information are pertinent to the subject in question.
2. Criticism - This is the process of appraisal of the source material in the light of the question being answered or subject being examined. It involves such things as determining the level of "authenticity" of a source (Is it what is seems to be?), its "integrity" (Can its account be trusted? What are its biases?), its context (What genre is it? Is it responding or reacting to another source? Is it using literary tropes that need to be treated with scepticism?) Material evidence, such are archaeology, architecture, art , coins etc needs to be firmly put into context to be understood. Documentary sources also need careful contextualisation - the social conditions of their production, their polemical intent (if any), their reason for production (more important for a political speech than a birth certificate, for example) , their intended audience and the background and biases of their writer (if known) all have to be taken into account.
3. Synthesis and Exposition - This is the formal statement of the findings from steps 1 and 2, which each finding supported by reference to the relevant evidence.

The key difference between this method and those used in the hard sciences is that the researcher lays all this material, its analysis and his conclusions out systematically, but the conclusions are a subjective assessment of likelihood rather than an objective statement of probabilistic induction. This subjectivity is what many trained in the sciences find alien about history and lead them to reject history as insubstantial.

But the key thing to understand here is that the historian is not working toward an absolute statement about what definitely happened in the past, since that is generally impossible except on trivial points (eg there is no doubt that Adolf Hitler was born on April 20 1889). A historian instead works to present what is called "the argument to the best explanation". In other words, the argument that best accounts for the largest amount of relevant evidence with the least number of suppositions. This means that the Principle of Parsimony, also known as Occam's Razor, is a key tool in historical analysis; historians always favour the most parsimonious interpretation that takes account of the most available evidence.

For example, regarding the existence of Jesus, it is far more parsimonious to conclude that Christianity's figure of "Jesus Christ" evolved out of the ideas of the followers of a historical Jewish preacher, since all of our earliest information tells us that this "Jesus Christ" was a historical Jewish preacher who had been executed circa 30 CE. People have tried to propose alternative origins for the figure of "Jesus Christ", positing an earlier Jewish sect that believed in a purely celestial figure who became "historicised" into an earthly, historical Jesus later. But there is no evidence of any such proto-Christian sect and no reason such a sect would exist and then vanish without leaving any trace in the historical record. This is why historians find these "Jesus Myth" hypotheses uncompelling - they are not the most parsimonious way of looking at the evidence and require us to imagine ad hoc, "what if" style suppositions to keep them from collapsing.

Ways Atheists (Sometimes) Get History Wrong

Managing this process of systematic historical analysis requires training, practice and a degree of skill. Without these, it's very easy to do something that looks a bit like historical analysis and arrive at flawed conclusions.

Take the initial heuristic process, for example. I've come across many atheists who don't accept that a historical Jesus existed on the grounds that "there are no contemporary references to him and all references to him are later hearsay" or even that "there are no eyewitness accounts of his career". So they rule out any evidence we do have referring to him on the basis that it is not contemporary and/or from eyewitnesses. But if we ruled out any reference to an ancient, medieval or pre-modern person or event on these grounds, we'd effectively have to abandon the study of early history: we don't have contemporary evidence for most people and events in the ancient world, so this would make almost all of our sources invalid, which is clearly absurd. Given that we have no eyewitness or contemporary sources for far more prominent figures, such as Hannibal, expecting them for a peasant preacher like Jesus is clearly ridiculous. No historian of the ancient world would regard this as a valid historical heuristic.

Atheists can often make similar elementary errors in the criticism of sources as well. There is no shortage of lurid material on the horrors of the Inquisition, with whole books detailing vile tortures and giving accounts of hundreds of thousands of wretched victims being consigned to the flames by the Catholic Church. In the past, nineteenth century writers took these sources at face value and until the early twentieth century this was essentially the story of the Inquisition to be found in textbooks, especially in the English-speaking (i.e. substantially Protestant) sphere.

But much of this was based on sources that had severe biases - mainly sixteenth and seventeenth century Protestant polemical material, usually produced in England which, as a political, religious and economic enemy of Spain, was hardly going to produce unbiased accounts of the Spanish church and crown's use of the Inquisition. Uncritical use of this material gives a warped, enemy's-eye-view of the Inquisition that has been substantially overturned by more careful analysis of the source material and the Inquisition's own records. The result is that it is now known that in the 160 years of its operation in Spain, the Inquisition resulted in 3,000-5,000 executions, not the hundreds of thousands alleged by uncritical nineteenth century writers like Henry Charles Lea. Basing an argument on the earlier, uncritical accounts of the Inquisition might suit many atheists' agendas, but it would be bad history nonetheless.

Finally, historical synthesis and exposition requires at least an attempt at a high degree of objectivity. An analyst of the past may have personal beliefs with the potential to bias their analysis and incline them towards certain conclusions. Worse, these beliefs could make them begin with assumptions about the past and so make them select only the evidence that supports this a priori idea. Historians strive to avoid both and examine the evidence on its merits, though polemicists often don't bother with this objective approach. All too often many atheists can be polemicists when dealing with the past, only crediting information or analysis that fits an argument against religion they are trying to make while downplaying, dismissing or ignoring evidence or analysis that does not fit their agenda. Again, this is bad history and rarely serves any function other than preaching to the converted.

So, for example, until the early twentieth century the history of science was popularly seen as a centuries-long conflict between forward thinking scientific minds trying to advance knowledge and human progress but constantly being persecuted and suppressed by retrograde religious forces determined to retard scientific progress. Again, in the mid-twentieth century historians of science reassessed this general idea and rejected what is now referred to as the "Conflict Thesis", presenting a far more complex, nuanced and well-founded analysis of the development of science that shows that while there were occasional conflicts, which were rarely as simple as "science versus religion", religion was usually neutral on the rational analysis of the physical world and often actively supportive of it. Overt conflicts, such as the Galileo Affair, were exceptions rather than the rule and, in that case as in many others, more complicated than simply “religion” repressing “science”.

Objectivity, Bias and Historical Fables

We atheists and freethinkers regularly deride believers for their irrational thinking, lack of critical analysis and tendency to cling to ideas out of faith even when confronted by contrary evidence. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to talk about being rational, and criticise others for not being so, than it is to practice what we preach. Everyone has their biases and “confirmation bias” - the tendency to favour information that confirms our prior beliefs - is an innate psychological propensity that is hard to counter even when we are aware of it. This means that atheists can, in many cases, be as bad as believers in accepting appealing ideas without checking their facts, holding to common misconceptions in the face of contrary evidence and liking neat, simple stories over messy, complex and more detailed alternatives that happen to be more solidly supported by the evidence.

The idea that the medieval Church taught the earth was flat, that Columbus bravely defied their primitive Biblical superstition and proved they were wrong by sailing to America is a great story. Unfortunately, it’s historical nonsense – a fable with zero basis in reality. It’s bad enough that I have had the experience of intelligent and educated atheists repeating this story as an example of the Church holding back progress without bothering to check if it’s true. What’s worse is that I have also experienced atheists who have been shown extensive, clear evidence that the medieval Church taught the earth was round and that the myth of medieval Flat Earth belief was invented by the novelist Washington Irving in 1828, and they have simply refused to believe that the myth could be wrong.

Neat historical fables such as the ones about Christians burning down the Great Library of Alexandria (they didn’t) or murdering Hypatia because of their hatred of her learning and science (ditto) are appealing parables. Which means some atheists fight tooth and nail to preserve them even when confronted with clear evidence that they are pseudo historical fairy tales. Fundamentalists aren’t the only ones who can be dogmatic about their myths.

One of the main reasons for studying history is to get a better understanding of why things today are as they are by grasping what has gone before. But it only works with a good grasp of how we can know about the past, the methods of analysis used and the relevant material our understanding should be based on. It also only works if we strive to put aside what we may like to be true along with any preconceptions (since they are often wrong) and look at the material objectively. Atheists who attempt to use history in their arguments who don’t do these things can not only end up getting things badly wrong, but can also wind up looking as stupid or even as dogmatic as fundamentalists. And that’s not a good look.

Tim O’Neill writes historical book reviews on the Armarium Magnum blog and is a regular contributor to online fora on ancient and medieval history, atheism and the history of religion. He is a subscribing member of the Atheist Foundation of Australia and a former state president of the Australian Skeptics.

Happy Halloween

Apologetics: The Second Best Defense

The Cause of the Big Bang

At it’s heart, the cosmological argument for God says that anything that begins to exist must have a cause. Used in conjunction with the Big Bang Theory, apologists can rightly argue that our universe at least seems to have a point of origin and therefore a cause. As an atheist, I reject a supernatural creator that did not begin to exist...so, what caused the Big Bang? Well, I don’t know (which is a valid response.) I only know of scientifically informed options.

Quantum foam. I can’t explain this better than Lawrence Krauss so I prefer that you come back after reading the book A Universe from Nothing or after watching a relevant lecture. The best layman explanation I can provide is that “nothing” (the absence of conventional matter, energy, space & time) is an unstable state and quantum fluctuations will give rise to something--even the singularity that became our universe.

Self-Causation. Violated causality is a logic no-no, however, it is a valid interpretation of quantum mechanics. If A can cause B which can cause A--then the first instants of the universe, while it was still at the quantum scale, could be it’s own catalyst. It’s counter-intuitive, but that’s the name of the quantum game and why we shouldn’t assume we know how things work at the literal dawn of time.

Result of a Collapsing Star on a Higher Dimension. I'll be honest, astrophysics is even less my area than quantum mechanics. Read this.

Result of a Multiversal Event. It has been theorized that bubble universes interacting could cause a new universe. Or a simulated universe could become complex enough to program a nested simulated universe. Or something. Theoretical physicist Brian Greene has suggested that there is a chance every mathematically possible universe exists.

Big Bang/Big Crunch Cycle. It’s the idea that the universe expands then contracts back into a singularity which expands into a new universe. The cycle is an older hypothesis that is now less likely than once thought.

The universe is essentially eternal and therefore causeless. Yes, there is a point of origin, but I’m not so sure we can regard the movement of time at it’s birth to our standards. For instance, if time moved exponentially slower the closer to it’s point of origin, the 13.8 billion years we think the universe has been around is only correct judging time from our perspective. In fact, it’s essentially eternal.

Magic. Theists draw upon the supernatural in support of their preferred god all the time, so I can just as easily suppose the supernatural as an option that abolishes the need for a god. I firmly believe there is a natural process that resulted in our universe, but even if there isn't, that doesn’t rule out that the supernatural process involved is unguided and spontaneous. Any argument against this can be dismissed with one word: magic.

*Events that precede space and time are nonsensical to our experience. Some of the above options require both a time-like dimension and a space-like dimension independent of our universe, but then so would an eternal deity.

**If you understand the latest in quantum mechanics or cosmology or theoretical physics, please comment with citations. I’ll gladly update this post with more accurate information.

Brain Death and Other Happy News

The belief of a soul or spirit that can exist independent of a brain is a romantic idea that I don’t often go out of my way to debate. After all, believing that the essence of one’s identity continues after death is an understandable comfort to those dealing with mortality. That said, I’ve been asked recently why exactly I don’t believe in disembodied consciousness and figure that here is the perfect place to record my thoughts.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t an atheist issue. The existence of a God doesn’t imply an afterlife nor does the absence of a deity imply that there can’t be a hereafter. The fact that the two beliefs are so often tied speaks to how religions have positioned themselves to appeal to desires in order to gain a following. By this I mean that a master who must be worshiped and a church that must be paid doesn’t fulfill many emotional wants, however, a master who can eternally reward worship and a church that serves as the proxy for heaven--that’s desirable to many. Still, the afterlife, like God, is an issue for skeptics. Neither can be proven or specifically understood and they both rely on supernatural assumptions. It’s impossible to say for certain that we don’t wake up somewhere else post-mortem, but below are my reasons for doubting.

There are many ways to show that my consciousness (or my mind/spirit/soul/self--depending on definitions) is directly tied to my physical brain. Drink too many beers and I become less inhibited, more friendly, and slower to process new information. Drink enough, and my consciousness goes on hiatus entirely--and booze is just the tip of the iceberg. When considering the full range of effects pharmacology has our brain, how can anyone deny that chemicals are a catalyst for how we think and behave? We observe higher levels of serotonin or dopamine when happy. Age wears down the brain as much as any other bodily organ--resulting in sluggish thinking, memory loss, and confusion--which in some cases are diagnosable as Alzheimer's or Dementia. There is a laundry list of contributing evidence that shows as goes the brain, so goes the mind. The reasonable conclusion is that when the brain goes completely, (dies) so does the self. I get it, it's a bummer, but desire does not dictate reality.

Links Shminks #15

The many possible outcomes of a Pascalian Wager render it useless.

The 10 weirdest right-wing Xian conspiracy theories

Vjack talks about Atheism+ and where it went wrong.

Richard Dawkins had a short interview on The Daily Show, and a longer interview with Jon Stewart on-line.

A great post for those wondering if a religion is harmful.

Rosa Rubicondior's take on the censorship tendencies of religion.

An atheist wonders if his rationalization to eat meat is religious in nature.

An atheist thinking about the kind of theist he could be.

And finally, a cartoon creationist needs representation.

Prayer Pamphlet

What Would Jesus Drink?