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.

Observe-->Hypothesize-->Test-->Analyse-->Conclude

That's how to find the truth. Far too often, we forget parts of this equation.

Some will observe an event, make a guess about its cause, and then make a conclusion about what it is without testing and analyzing the results of the test. A good example is when someone sees an unfamiliar object in the sky, postulates that it might be extraterrestrial is nature, and then makes that conclusion.

Others will forget the first 3 steps, and simply analyze a subject and make conclusions in a vacuum. A good example of this is when a religious person interprets the meaning of scripture, making moral conclusions and applying it to their life without ever observing or testing the existence of god

Many others will simply skip the analysis. They'll observe something, test it on themselves, take the results as they are and conclude based on that. A good example is the hiccup: Someone who has the hiccups hypothesizes that by holding their breath the hiccups will go away. Then when the hiccups go away, the conclusion is made that the holding of breath was the cause. Not necessarily. This is called 'confirmation bias'. It may well have been something else.

You can also skip every step that does the work by forgetting to observe, test or analyze. This is called making shit up because you like the sound of it. For example, "I feel in my heart that human beings are one with the universe, and nothing you can say can change my mind." Beware of anyone that says "nothing can change my mind" because that's a dangerous thought indeed.

These flaws in procedure are VERY easy to understand. The people making the mistakes (myself included, more often that I'd like to admit) have a lot of trouble letting go of these flaws, especially when they relate to the very core of their being. We are far more happy being wrong when the comfort of the lie is so much more appealing than the truth.... I'm pretty sure that sentence is grammatically incorrect. Hopefully my message is understood through the flaws.

My point in this post is that most of the time, we follow the procedure outlined in the title of this post. Observation: Two object dropped at equal distance from the ground fall at different speeds with respect to each other, but at the same speed with respect to themselves. Hypothesis: a universal force acts on both objects, and another force causes the difference in speed. Test: control for one variable and test for the other. Analyze: look at the data, cross reference with similar experiments, have your own experiment replicated by others. Conclusion: gravity is a separate force from wind resistance.

That's a pretty bad explanation, but if you remove any of those steps, you've got a problem. Forget to observe, and you'd have no information to draw from. Forget to hypothesize and you'd end up running toward the nearest conclusion that anyone could come up with. Forget to test, and there's no way to determine true events from false ones. Forget to analyze, and you may never see the flaws in the experiment. Forget to conclude, and no one would ever agree on a shared experience.

It's very, very easy to miss something here. Recently, I've read blogs that completely forget the first 2 or 3 steps in this process, and attempt to determine reality through only the lens of Christianity. I've read news stories that skip the middle steps and forget all the work involved in making good medical decisions. I've read awesome blogs from people I respect, yet forget to analyze their own biases, only to find myself represented as a villain when I should be an ally. FUCK your biases, and fuck your conclusions if you lean on them.

If you want to get to the bottom of something and make social change happen, do the work. If you'd rather skip the work and go straight to the conclusion by your own illogical means, don't expect anyone to take you seriously.

Just a thought

How much will I miss my parents when I'm 86? My grandparents never talk about their parents, but I know they  think about them. How much, I wonder?

Till the Summer Came

Till the Summer Came

Check out the new EP in its entirety here. =)

Non Believer (feat. Eric Heitmann on Keys)

New Song!

For those who don't know, I'm a musician. Above is a link to my new tune, hope you enjoy it.