And so it ends... or, rather, begins....

The A-Unicornist

See you there!

Saying farewell....

Well, I've been thinking. And I think it is time to bid adieu to this blog. I'd really like to update more frequently, but the topic of religion and philosophy seems a bit too narrow for me to be making good, substantive posts on a regular basis. Ideally, I'd like to update about three times a week, but I don't want to just post news, YouTube videos, or whatever else. A lot of blogs thrive on daily updates, but I want quality over quantity.

So I've decided to leave this blog behind for the time being and begin anew, with a blog more broadly devoted to skepticism, science and reason rather than religion exclusively. That way I can discuss more topics that are of interest to me and update more frequently without resorting to cheap filler content. I'll likely be transplanting a lot of the content from this blog to the new one. I'll update with a link when it's ready. If you've been paying attention, thanks for reading – hope to see you on the new blog.

- Mike

Hey! I stuck a video on YouTube

Nothing fancy, just a rant, but here she be.

God or Nothing: The Fallacy of the False Dilemma

I really don't want this to be the unofficial William Lane Craig debunking blog, but it seems like I keep coming across references to him, and then I go to his website out of morbid curiosity, and then I see some idiotic fallacy he hubristically tries to pass off as sound logic.

He has a question and answer section on his site, which incidentally is where I found his face-palmingly retarded and shockingly hypocritical attempt to rationalize Yahweh-mandated genocide. This week, he commits the fallacy of the false dilemma (among many, many others in his face-palming "lightening round"). I'll get to the exact fallacy momentarily, but first a little insight into the fallacy itself:

2,000 years ago, nobody knew that the curvature of space-time explains the motion of the stars, planets and galaxies. Nobody knew that germs caused disease. Nobody knew that evolution explains the complexity and diversity of life. But if you were living 2,000 years ago, it still would have been false to say, for example, "Either you have to believe that demons make people sick, or you have to believe that it just happens for no reason." When skeptics debunk a fallacious hypothesis, they're not required to offer an alternative explanation in the process. 2,000 years ago, when asked what caused disease, an atheist would have rightly said, "I don't know." He wouldn't have to provide an alternative explanation in order to logically demonstrate that demon possession was a fallacious explanation.


The cosmological nothing


Theists use this lame canard all the time, and ol' Bill Craig is no exception. In the current Q&A, he unleashes this gem of stupidity:

God is causally prior to the Big Bang, not temporally prior. Something must be causally prior to the origin of the universe, unless you're ready to believe that something can come into being from nothing.

Now, I already addressed the fallacy of using observable material causality to infer some kind of supernatural causality in this post. But Craig commits a whole other fallacy here, suggesting that either you believe that God hand-crafted the universe, or you have to believe that the universe came into being from "nothing". This is a false dilemma.

Since it's fallacious to infer that the rules of causality apply "outside" the universe (whatever that means, exactly), it's absurd to suggest that the universe "came from" anything at all, including "nothing". [This, by the way, is distinct from the actual scientific hypothesis of the "universe from nothing", in which the observable universe spawned from quantum fluctuations in a timeless, pre-existing region of space-time – a hypothesis which is a) possible, b) testable, and c) increasingly probable.] We do not know how the universe got here. Most obviously, we do not have a quantum theory of gravity. We don't know why the universe is expanding, whether multiverses exist, whether branes exist, or any number of other great cosmological mysteries being investigated by today's brightest scientific minds. There is far too much that we don't know about the universe to suggest that is was either "God or nothing". In due time, we may very well have a workable, empirically validated model of the origin of the universe, and the God-created universe will be just as silly as the demon-created illness. Either way, the arguments for God's creation of the universe are still bologna, crumbling under the weight of their internal fallacies; we don't have to wait for a good explanation before we dismiss the bad ones.

"Believing Is Seeing"

A few months back I encountered a guy at a bar, who asked me about a blasphemous-looking tattoo I have on my right arm. I told him that I used to be religious, but now I'm not. He asked me why. Trying to keep things as terse as possible since I wanted to get back to having fun with my friends instead of getting sucked into a debate about theology, I explained that I had been a devout Christian for many years, but after studying theology and logic I found too many things wrong with it to keep believing.

He replied, "Like what?"

Oh boy. I knew where this was headed. I gave a very quick example or two, and finished with, "I believe it when I see it." By which I really meant that I accept it when it can be empirically verified, but I was at a bar for crying out loud. While an evangelical Christian would jump at an opportunity to talk to a nonbeliever, I'm not out to convert people and just wanted to get back to my friends.

Anyway.... He replied with the old, "Believing is seeing" canard. I've actually heard that one quite a bit. There are a lot of believers who insist that by requiring supernatural claims about reality to be subject to the same standard of evidence as any other statement about reality, that I'm missing the point – that if I believed first, without evidence, then the evidence would become apparent to me as God did his amazing work through me.


A load of crap by any other name....

Fortunately, there's a name for this kind of nonsense, and it's called confirmation bias. It means that when you make an unsubstantiated assumption, it will affect your perception of reality and you will subconsciously affirm information that supports your assumption while subconsciously discarding that which does not.

A good model to use to illustrate the mechanism of this fallacy would be the Person-Centered Theory model pioneered by the psychotherapist Carl Rogers, which YouTube personality TheraminTrees used in his video "Atheism as Congruence". In this model, information is divided into two parts: Experience, which is the multitude of raw data we receive through our senses, and Self-Structure, which is the means by which we organize the data into meaningful, useful information. Congruence describes the way we attempt to understand and function in the world by matching our self-structure with our experiences.

In the case of a confirmation bias, no experience has informed the belief, which is held as part of self-structure. In fact, the "seeing is believing" fallacy explicitly requires that we form a belief independently of our experiences. Thus, in order to seek congruence between self-structure and experiences, information will be selectively retained or discarded in order to reinforce the belief.
 


Believing is selectively filtering information which reinforces your bias

Prayer serves as an excellent example of confirmation bias. Imagine a loved one of yours has cancer, and you pray to God that they will recover. Sure enough, they recover. Now, improbable recoveries happen often enough – take Lance Armstrong's incredibly unlikely recovery from stage 3 testicular cancer, or any of the roughly 5% of people who will survive five years after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Indeed, the odds of surviving cancer is a statistically predictable phenomenon. "Beating the odds" means falling into that percentage of people who survive, no matter how unlikely. But to maintain congruence between your experiences and your self-structure, you would perceive your relative's survival as an answered prayer. Had your relative not survived, you would not discard the belief – after all, it's likely that you have found many other trivial events to selectively reinforce your belief, which have served to strongly integrate the belief with your self-structure. Rather, you would manipulate your interpretation of the events to allow your belief to thrive. You might say, "It was just God's will", or "I didn't have enough faith." 

Most people do not acquire their religious or spiritual beliefs through a rigorous study of logic, evidence, and comparative religion, rationally deducing which faith-based claims to knowledge are the correct ones. The vast majority of people acquire religious beliefs through familial and sociocultural pressures. This means that a confirmation bias is often powerfully integrated into someone's self-structure very early on in their life. Take my own experience as a Christian: I was raised to believe in Jesus and follow the tenants of Christianity, but was never deeply involved in church. But as a teenager, when I was introduced to a fanatical, charismatic group of my fellow teens who were guided by similarly charismatic adults, I had no reason to question the bizarre behavior that I encountered – casting out demons, falling on the floor in convulsions, speaking in tongues, miracle healing, etc. My confirmation bias was already deeply integrated with my self-structure, so the social pressures presented simply encouraged me to selectively reinforce beliefs I already held, rather than treating them with skepticism.

It's dangerous

Confirmation bias is not innocuous. It's one of the most fundamental components of religious belief, and it's one of the reasons why believers often seem impervious to reason. William Lane Craig, my favorite apologist punching bag, has gone so far as to state that even if he thought the evidence was against him, he would still believe in God because his belief is derived primarily from personal revelation – his encounter with the "holy spirit". It can lead to foolish and ridiculous behaviors as it did with me, as well as creating and deepening prejudices and contempt for those whose beliefs conflict with our own. To avoid the pitfalls of confirmation bias, evidence must always be the basis for our understanding of reality.

Tide yourself over...

I have a couple of essays in the works. In the meantime, here's another great video from NonStampCollector, which is a parody of Christianity's claims about "free will".

Two absolutely must-watch videos

These are two videos by a fellow atheist that I found myself relating to in virtually every respect. He describes his transition from devout Christian to atheist from both an emotional (first video) and cognitive (second video) standpoint. These are wonderfully done — clear, concise, and insightful — and are a must-watch for anyone who has experienced serious doubts about their faith, as well as anyone who truly desires an honest understanding of the atheist mind.

Part 1: Transition to atheism


Part 2: Atheism as congruence

One of the finest videos I've seen recently...

The Ontological Argument. Seriously?

I've addressed numerous so-called "proofs" of God's existence throughout this blog, but there's one that I have yet to devote a post to debunking – mainly because I think it's such a colossally stupid argument that it's hardly even worth the bandwidth to slap it on the internet. But some big time Christian theologians, including my favorite punching bag William Lane Craig, are totally convinced by this nonsense. As with the Cosmological Argument, there are numerous different forms of the Ontological Argument, which can basically be summed up as "If it is possible for God to exist, then God exists". Which is obviously nonsense, but theologians want to claim it's more sublime and incisive than that. So, here's a description of the Ontological Argument pulled from William Lane Craig's website reasonablefaith.org:

1. It is possible that a maximally great being (God) exists.
2. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.
3. If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.
4. If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
5. Therefore, a maximally great being exists in the actual world.
6. Therefore, a maximally great being exists.
7. Therefore, God exists.

If this sounds a little inane, that's because it is. Bertrand Russel famously commented that it's easier to feel like the argument is fallacious than to discern exactly where the fallacy lies. So, let's take a crack at it.

1. It is possible that a maximally great being (God) exists.

The problems start right out of the gate. "Maximally great" is an arbitrary description. It could just as easily be "maximally stupid", "maximally fat", or "maximally fairy-like". Moreover "great" is an arbitrarily defined concept; "maximally great" is similarly arbitrary and ultimately meaningless. Worse, suggesting that some human construct might exist is a pretty weak way to start an argument, since it's possible that anything we can dream up and define arbitrarily might exist. It's not a good sign when an argument can be used to "prove" the existence of anything you want simply by substituting one arbitrarily chosen quality for another.


2. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.

This is where the argument completely crumbles. Just because it's possible for something to exist, doesn't mean it actually does. With the odd use of the vaguely defined term "possible world", the argument is saying that in some description of reality, God's existence is possible. Of course it is. But it doesn't follow that simply because it is possible for it be true, that it actually is. The latter half of the phrase is circular; just because any arbitrarily chosen description of reality is possible does not mean that it is true.


A great deal of the folly of the Ontological Argument is assuming that human abstractions such as "maximally great" are not merely human constructs, but actual things. It's a use-mention error (just like Ravi's morality argument in the previous post), confusing an arbitrarily defined concept with something that actually exists. We define concepts like "great" arbitrarily, and can only speak of them in relation to other arbitrarily defined concepts. For example, the idea that we call someone "beautiful" does not imply that "beauty" is anything more than a human construct, nor that something called "maximal beauty" exists; we simply define "beauty" relative to things that we perceive as having more or less of the qualities which we have arbitrarily defined as encompassing the concept of "beauty". It's rather silly, then, to assume that something that is "maximally great" must exist, since "great" is nothing more than an arbitrarily defined human construct. There can't be any such thing as "maximally great", since that too would be arbitrarily defined.

Frankly, the argument doesn't really go anywhere after that. The premises that follow the second are circular, and are derived from the flawed logic of the second premise. Honestly, I'm surprised anyone is convinced by the Ontological Argument, but then again, people are convinced by the Cosmological and Moral arguments too. I guess it takes all kinds.

Ravi Zacharias on Morality: Can You Spot the Logical Fallacy?

I'm interested mainly in what Zacharias says from about 1:00 to 1:50 regarding the existence of moral law. See if you can spot the fallacy...



Ravi's argument for God's existence from morality can be summed up thus:

• To express moral judgments about good and evil, you must posit that good and evil exist
• If good and evil exist, you must posit a moral law by which we can distinguish between good and evil
• If a moral law exists, a moral law giver must exist

Did you spot the fallacy? The fallacy is a use-mention error, which is confusing the mention of a word with the use of the word. In this case, Ravi is conflating the existence of the concepts of good and evil with the existence of good and evil. Surely we all agree, for example, that the concept of God exists. But that isn't the same thing as saying that God actually exists. Similarly, we all agree that the concepts of good and evil exist, but that isn't the same thing as saying that good and evil actually exist in any capacity (metaphysical or otherwise) beyond their human constructs.

So where, then, do we derive the concept of good and evil – or, more pragmatically, right and wrong? We derive them not from imponderable metaphysical absolutes, but from human solidarity – the fact that we have shared needs, interests, and responsibilitys; that we are wholly dependent on our ability to cooperative with others in other to survive and thrive. We recognize that if we do not respect the needs and interests of others, we have no reason to expect others to respect our own needs and interests.

"Moral law" is cited by many apologists and theologians as evidence of God's existence, but it's a view rooted in fallacy. Don't fall for it!