A Near Universal Expression of Skepticism

I love the apocalypse. It seems to come around once a year or so, and every time it gets any mainstream attention I enjoy the comments and memes all over my facebook and twitter accounts. It's a fairly universal expression of skepticism (save for a few true believers), and I was thinking on why it is that this is the case.

I think the apocalypse is a pretty attractive area of skepticism, mainly because it's a very easy claim to test: just wait for the day to pass and then give yourself a pat on the back for not being so gullible. Pretty easy.

But until that day comes, we're all faced with a problem: what should our opinion be until that day comes? I find that whenever the apocalypse is mentioned, almost everyone finds it to be ridiculous, but we haven't run the test yet -- how could we predict what's actually going to happen, and how should we come to the opinion that no apocalypse will occur? It depends on the claim, but I submit that until any actual evidence is presented to demonstrate that the world is ending, I can safely dismiss the claim without having to prove that it's not. The burden of proof lies with whomever is making the positive claim in the first place.

Why is this important? It's important to me because it's one of the few times that my approach to skepticism is almost exactly in line with everyone elses. I think through the same process every time I'm approached with a claim. The very same logic and skepticism that you and I apply to the apocalypse is the process I apply to alternative medicine, conspiracy theories, religious claims, cryptozoology, political ideology... you name it. Not everything has such an easy and lazy test as does the apocalypse, but the initial approach is still consistent -- don't believe it unless there's compelling evidence.

Normally at this point I'd go into some examples of commonly held irrational beliefs and invite you to employ the same skeptical approach to analysing them, but for once I don't think that's necessary -- the apocalypse is clearly a perfect example that in many ways we're already skeptical. It's getting rid of our favourite pet belief that can often be the problem.

Even though we technically don't know if the world will end, we still don't believe it. Everyone seems comfortable with that, and if someone told you, "YOU CAN'T PROVE THE WORLD WON'T END!!" you'd probably reject their logic. So how come I often hear the same phrase when talking about god?

On the Inside Looking Out

I’ve personally never been a believer, so I really don’t understand what it’s like to have a crisis of faith or to attempt to reconcile my doubts without using sources outside of my worldview. I think it’s just one of those things that’ll always make me somewhat of an outsider.

I’ve known a few people who have lost their faith, and for the most part it was a fairly emotional experience. The subject of religion doesn’t come up as often with them as it does with people who still believe, mainly because it’s just a sour situation that many would rather not relive. For me, the process of thinking about faith was rarely emotional, and the conclusions I drew about faith came from the outsider’s perspective to begin with. It may put me at odds with society, but I do believe there’s some advantages.

Let’s imagine that you’re 14 years old and you’re just now realizing that people are taking religion seriously (having not had much experience with it). How would you react? I suspect that most would approach the topic with skepticism:“Really? 2 of every animal!? And what’s with the talking snake? And how could god create light AFTER creating the sun the moon and the stars?”  Without the context of indoctrination or even the cultural context of a society of believers, it would be very difficult to accept these claims. Looking at things from the outside in forces you to come in to acceptance of the faith rather than be born into them, and I don’t think it’s something a lot of believers understand when dealing with their heathen friends.

From the outside in is also an advantageous approach to learning in general, even when you take indoctrination out of the mix. Think of our political views; when I hear something like, “If you lower taxes, the government will be more efficient!” I am approaching the claim with skepticism: “Wait… if you take funds out of the government, wouldn’t that fuck up the funding and make it less efficient? Do you actually mean ‘less complex’?”  Or how about the environment? When someone says, ”Global warming may be a reality, but it’s not due to man’s interference, it’s simply a natural process based on the sun’s energy” I have to approach the situation without any prior knowledge. “How do you know that? Can I see where you’re getting your information and judge its credibility?”

With new information comes a vetting process that we’re all familiar with. Someone says something you think is crazy or outlandish, and the response is either curiosity or rejection. I personally prefer curiosity, especially when someone challenges my pre-held beliefs. This idea is not unfamiliar to people, and even the most gullible people in my circle of friends use and understand this process in skepticism. What boggles my mind is that it’s inconsistent; why wouldn’t you apply this process to everything?

Religion is always the elephant in the room when it comes to compartmentalizing rational beliefs from irrational ones, and I suspect it has a lot to do with indoctrination and the fear of what many would call “shunning.” It seems like every other week I read about an atheist who’s been disowned by his or her family for coming out as an atheist, or people being thrown in prison or killed for blasphemy. It’s not easy to lose one’s faith, and while I have no experience with the process, I can certainly empathize. Especially when the entire social structure can come crashing down in the blink of an eye, with no hope in sight.

In a nutshell, this is why I support being an “out” atheist and publicly challenging the popular notion that without god, there is no hope. The atheist community doesn’t just exist to rain on everyone’s parade and bitch about how things ain’t true. It exists to advance the notion that people can be good without god, and that there is a social group waiting for those who feel alone in their lack of faith. This community, like any community, is not perfect.

Dealing with an internal battle (on the inside looking in) is a great way to confirm your own biases and pull your own beliefs out of context. I think it’s much better to validate your beliefs by testing it against a larger reality, looking out at the world as it is.

Just about to finish this. If you’re looking to think about the universe from the cosmic perspective and lose your fear of large numbers, I’d recommend the read. The chapters are nice and short (it is an essay collection) and the points are concise and kind to the layperson, so it’s not at all a chore to read.
Astrophysics is awesome to think about.

Going to reddit's r/atheism page to learn about the atheist community is like reading the comments section on Jezebel to learn about the behaviour of men.

Let's leave the trolls under the bridge and have honest interactions with people who want to make a difference

Bigfoot, be little

I tried to come up with a more clever title for this post, but alas, my creativity is stifled.

So I’ve been thinking lately about “the old standby’s” of skepticism that often circulate through blogs and news articles when journalists are looking for filler. You know, Bigfoot, Nessie, UFO’s, the Chupacabra, Homeopathy, Psychics, Ghost hunting etc. There’s a whole host of people that buy into all this hokum, and there is real harm in those beliefs (the story of Shawn Hornbeck comes to mind), and they’re still very important to talk about, but I just don’t bother.

The main reason I don’t bother with these issues that much is that I really don’t care about them; for all intensive purposes, my position on bigfoot will not change (at least until some strong positive evidence is shown ie. bring me the body!) and homeopathy will always be at its worst, mathematically impossible. Most people I meet on a regular basis also readily admit that Bigfoot is ridiculous, psychics are just for fun and ghost hunting is irrelivant, unconvincing and at its best may be mildly entertaining.

Now, I’m not going to go about debunking these things because you can do that yourself, you might be more interested than I am, and that’s not the point of this post. My point is that a good deal of skeptics will take arguments against these things and equate them to other beliefs, and I just don’t think that strategy is ultimately effective.

I sense I might not be making complete sense, so I’m going to back up a little bit. I’m going to go ahead and assume that whoever’s reading this doesn’t believe in Bigfoot but believes in God (yeah I know, religion again….) I think it’s reasonable that this combination of beliefs & non beliefs is pretty common. Now, I come along, and in an effort to reach common ground in an argument about the existence of god, I start talking about bigfoot. I refer to the fact that you do not believe in the existence of bigfeet for the exact same reasons as you believe in god, and try to get you to realize that on two separate issues your logic is inconsistent. At this point, you’d probably get pissed off.

It took me a while to realize why people got pissed at such comparisons, and it’s because I was thinking about the logic in a vacuum. The real issue at stake to the person I’m arguing against is: “Wait…. you just equated my entire worldview and spiritual meaning to an imaginary bi pedaled ape!?! FUCK YOU!” And of course, that person would be right in many ways. Seriously, if we’re comparing things to god as a proper analogy, bigfoot belongs in the same category as the watchmaker. It’s just not a good argument, and neither are the comparisons to any other popular pseudosciences. Yes, we can both agree that bigfoot doesn’t exist, but I really don’t think it’s the best way to frame an argument that isn’t purely intellectual. When talking about things like religion, alternative medicine, conspiracy theories and how governments should be structured, there is a lot of emotions, personal histories and whole ways of life at stake — they can’t just be compared to something the believer thinks is ridiculous. It just doesn’t work.

Maybe it depends on the conversation, but when discussing important issues like the origin of life and the universe, I’ve found it more destructive than useful to bring up the old standbys. They can stand by on their own, and while the arguments against bigfoot may still be important for public education, bigfoot belittles people when we’re talking about the elephants in the room (see how I snuck my awful blog title in there… yeah…. I rule…. -_-)

I wish I loved science in high school as much as I do now. That's probably the most important lesson I'll ever learn as a future parent. For that alone, I'm grateful for that mistake.

Alberta Endorses Bullshit Medicine

Alberta creates college to oversee naturopathic doctors (National Post)

Ugh. Thanks Health Minister. Now we’re legitimizing quacks and putting the health of Albertans at risk by endorsing treatments that don’t work. Wasting taxpayer money on placebos and turning people away from medicine that really could help them is a failure of our government.

An Atheist's Worldview

This.

A Hollow Foundation

I get awfully confused when people say the word "Faith."

Not quite as confused as I get when people use vague phrases like "spiritual" or "rational" but I find that more often than not I don't know what people are talking about.

Here's my basic definition of faith: A belief without supporting evidence or proof. Am I wrong? Is the word not being used this way by the faithful? Maybe someone can help me out.

In any case, if my definition is correct... what's so virtuous about it? I mean seriously, if you're faithful in religion or whatever else, apply this principle to almost anything else and it wouldn't even make sense to you! I believe in x in spite of having no evidence to support my belief is not a responsible or enlightened way to think.

Despite often having no real evidence to back up certain beliefs, there are lots of reasons people give for holding those beliefs, and as of yet I've not heard one that passes the test for being a reasonable argument. Am I talking to the wrong people? Do the faithful just not take my criticism seriously because I'm not on their team? Maybe I'm not supposed to understand it.

Some of the reasons I've been given for believing in a god are as follows (and you can substitute god in for almost any supernatural claim and the same criticism will hold true)

• You can't prove he DOESN'T exist!! True, I can't. However, this is an argument from ignorance -- we can't use knowledge we don't have to make a positive claim, nor can we use a lack of refutation as reasonable justification for belief. Using this logic, I can claim that anything exists simply because we have no evidence to say otherwise. Don't believe in unicorns? Well you can't say there aren't any. Would I be justified in believing in unicorns? Probably not.
  
  Unfortunately, that's kind of the standard analogy atheists like to give to make belief in god seem ridiculous. It's not a very good analogy, as omnipotent supernatural beings that exist outside of time and space are in no way analogous to natural beings that may or may not exist in space in time. However, the fact that we have no evidence for either one of these things is the most important point to stress here.
  
•  If there's no god, how would we know right from wrong? This response always seems a little dishonest to me. Most human beings know full well that they have a knowledge of right and wrong, and it often doesn't mesh with the scriptures themselves. So, rather than modify their morality to fit the scriptures, the scriptures must be reinterpreted to fit the modern morality. It's a tale all too common. I was once told by a friend that without his faith in god, he would just go out and kill and rape whoever he'd like. I didn't believe him. Why? Because there are real world consequences for that kind of crap that no human being in his right mind would accept (incarceration, the loss of respect and love from friends and family, the empathy the attacker would have on the victim, the painful and not always successful process of rehabilitation, the shunning of the attacker by society even after time is served, etc.) Knowledge of right and wrong is something that's clearly a secular thing (separate from religion), and that's a good thing! In fact, it doesn't even have to have anything to do with religion! In any case, even if we had no way to tell right from wrong without a divine authority, it still would not prove that that authority exists.
  
• I have a personal relationship with [insert messiah here] and without him I would still be the horrible human being I used to be! This argument is often heard after someone goes through a difficult period in their life, and converts to the religion of their choice. "Being saved" basically. I have a lot of sympathy for this form of belief, though I still disagree with it. The main reason is that it's simply an anecdote, with all the biases in place. When someone is in a bad place in their life, there are many avenues of rehabilitation, and religion likes to set up camp in that territory. It works. Just look at the popularity of Alcoholics Anonymous, a religion disguised as drug rehab. The logic falls apart when you realize that this particular argument assumes its assertion right there in its premise: "I believe in god because I have a relationship with the god I believe in." Would that be good enough for any other belief?
  
• You just gotta have faith

When all is said and done, it seems to come down to this. I've left out all of the anti-evolution arguments that people use, because those are all buried as far as I'm concerned. If you don't believe in evolution, just bring to mind any of your favourite anti-evolution arguments and cross-check it with talkorigins.org.

Anyway, once you start telling me that you believe in god because of your faith, and that that's a good thing, there's one last step you have to take before you convince me your argument is valid: convince me that faith is a good thing, a good way to construct a philosophical reality. Good luck with that, based of the definition I've given (which I'd still my faithful friends to clarify). All the logical fallacies, bad evidence, philosophical filler and scripture you can lay on top of your belief simply does not change the fact that the reason you believe what you do is based on faith. That's a hollow foundation, and all the justification in the world cannot change that without fixing the foundation with scientific evidence. Judaism alone is a huge pill to swallow without evidence for the truth of its scriptures, and piling Christianity, Islam or Mormonism on top of that certainly doesn't help the case. (I exclude other religions from this criticism based on my unfamiliarity with them, not because they are unworthy of criticism. For all I know, they're just as wrong).

Preaching with a secular flag

As glad as I am that most Christians are not fundamentalists that want to kill me, I often wonder how they justify their more moderate opinions without forcing themselves to appeal to secular values, the very same values that stand against the dogma of their book.

Human rights are not very well represented in the bible itself, so it seems odd that someone could read it as the unalterable word of god and see human rights within the pages. More often than not, we learn our values from the society we live in, and impose those values onto whatever we'd like to believe. Jesus is the perfect character to exonerate in this case because Jesus' reputation is really quite good, even among people who don't generally care about him. From the grim crucifix all the way to the "Buddy Christ" and "Passion of the Christ 2: Crucify This" he's quite popular, and is generally held up as the ultimate good guy who not only was supernaturally awesome, but also a regular dude just like you me.

Too bad it misses the big picture. In the context of the bible, Jesus is god reincarnate, which means that he is a representation of god (an eternal god who can punish and reward you in the afterlife). If Jesus is god, then he can't die. This means he didn't make any sacrifices for anyone's sins, did he? He lived on and continued to judge others based on whether or not people followed his example. Seriously, this is not much different that the bullying god of the Old Testament.

How can anyone read human rights into this story? Regardless of some of the wonderful nuggets of wisdom that Jesus' character can sometimes offer (though they aren't very original, even for the time), he's still the same sort of prick that can't stand to see anyone doing good and disobeying authority. To read this story and interpret it as a universal morality is to miss the point of the story and not see the forest for the trees. The big picture of the story is quite clear, and quite unpleasant.

But perhaps I'm reading the bible wrong, right? Well, who's reading it right then? How would we decide which bits of wisdom in the bible are correct and which were not? How would we decide with which scope we should view these stories? Is there some way we can test these bits of wisdom to decide which parts are good and which are bad? YES! It's called science, but if you're going to do science, why bother using the bible as a source material for your hypotheses? It doesn't make sense, because most of the phenomena in the bible are not observable in the real world.

My overall point is that moderate Christianity (and other forms of moderate theism, though I'm not as familiar with many of those viewpoints) is great because it's closer to secularism than fundamentalism, but it misses the main reason why secular values are important: evidence and reason! If you're going to support secular and humanist values, you ought to be able to back up those values with good reasons. Using your own moral values that you've learned in modern society to modify the message of your bible is not good enough. At some point, we have to admit that our society has evolved beyond the morals of the society the bible was written, and come up with new moral values based on what's happening to real people today.

There's no harm in learning from our historical mistakes, so the bible has value in that sense, but here's the big problem: if people everywhere are still to believe that the bible is the word of god, and its interpretation causes this many schisms, the bible is fucked up! If you're a Christian, here's my advice: Pray to god for a new book. One that's clear, makes logical sense, and appeals to modern human values. A supreme being ought to be able to do that, shouldn't he? If not, then it's better to abandon it as moral philosophy. If you're not comfortable with throwing it out, you can at least acknowledge its genuine problems, and stand in the moral high ground waving the flag of the enemy.