Resurrection

I stopped blogging a long time back on this site. A main reason I did so is my desire to move into full-time employment and not offend any potential employers or customers/clients. Another reason I did so is that my views when I started writing here have softened over the years. I have been using Twitter for a few years now, and since I'm back in grad school I've decided to temporarily exhume the corpse of this blog in order to access its contents and merge in my Twitter feed with it.

Update 8/24/19:

My Twitter: @sdanielm
I now (occasionally) write at this site: non serviam ergo fiat lux
my personal web space: Steven Daniel Morgan

New public blogsite

*UPDATE* I'm going to have to leave the new site private for a few weeks as I go through and ensure that I didn't miss anything in making it anonymous. I expect to do little to no posting in the interim. You can bookmark the new page though for the future and subscribe to its RSS feed.

Theists and IQ

I've made it clear before that I don't think atheists are simply smarter than theists, or that theism is indicative of a low IQ.

I was joking around last week with the head football coach at my school (one of the two people at my school I've dialogued with on atheism) when I said, "I wouldn't mind if my wife left me for Tim Tebow," and he replied, "But then your kid would be raised a theist!" Completely unfazed, I replied, "Oh no, because my son would still have my genes and therefore a very high IQ and thus would never buy into that nonsense." I said it as a joke, but I know some people would take it seriously, although I know he didn't.

When some people ask me if I could ever believe in God again, I try to use Santa as an analogy. Not that I'm saying that I think god-belief is comparable to Santa-belief, but rather that when we learn about Santa's nonexistence through our own experience (seeing mom and dad buying toys or putting them together on Christmas morning) we are so completely deconverted from the belief that we would have to see comparable positive evidence to outweigh the negative evidence we've witnessed. In other words, I might believe in Santa again if he lands on my roof with his magic reindeer and flies off into the night in front of me. Ditto with God.

My experiences with witnessing human suffering are on the scale that I just simply cannot believe in any sort of powerful benevolent Being. If the problem of evil has some satisfactory solution (I don't think it does) then perhaps I could reconsider it, but I think all that would do is clear the logical obstacle that I think exists to prevent god-belief. In order to actually give me a reason to believe (rather than the capacity to do so) I think would actually require a burning bush or something just as dramatic in my own life.

Don't hold your breath waiting...God's propensity for all that miraculous stuff just so happened to go out of style around the time that technology started developing to record it.

It's great to be a Florida Gator

Two years ago and one day I last said this: It's great to be a Florida Gator!!!

Go Gators! Go Gators! Go Gators! Go Gators!

Go Gators! Go Gators! Go Gators! Go Gators!

Go Gators! Go Gators! Go Gators! Go Gators!

"...it's great...to be...a Flor-ida Ga-tor...yes it's great...to be...a Flor-ida Ga-tor...yes it's great..."

Just in case you're abysmally ignorant, the Gators (we) just won the national championship against the Sooners in an awesome fight.

On the BCS

The Hokies victory yesterday meant both of my teams may win their BCS bowls. Also, a note of analysis from the game showed me just how important defense is up against a good passing offense. Basically after losing Murray I think OU has a weake run option left, despite contrary assertions. After watching Cin give up 4 interceptions, I really think the Gators' D will win the game because Bradford hasn't been passing against such speedy defenders. The caveat is of course that Bradford's accuracy is much higher than Pike's and his wide outs are probably a lot better too. I also think that the OU defense won't contain our offense, and so we may have a pretty high score.

My prediction: Gators 45 - 27

The Place of Science in Federal Government

I am subscribed to Seed Magazine, and I read the interview with Bush's point man on science, National Science Advisor John Marburger, the other day with little surprise as he tried to boast of his president's accomplishments:

Seed: What do you regard as your greatest accomplishment?

JM: In a job like this, the most important accomplishment is to make sure that this vast machinery of science continues to move forward and produce the kind of results that have made America strong and great and an exciting place to be a scientist. And I believe that history will show that under this administration, science and technology have thrived as well as they could, given the constraints that we work under. Those constraints are very great. Not least of which is having a very unpopular president, very difficult foreign policy, wars, and unpopular policies of various kinds. Those notwithstanding, I'm satisfied that I've done everything that I could to make science work for the nation. I think that future presidents will find it difficult to compile a record as long as this one. In retrospect, it will be seen that this was a tough act to follow.

He went on in this vein, talking about how much of US GDP Bush invested and how that would be a "tough act to follow." The problem is this little thing called fact. From the NRC report in 2007*, quote, "In 2001 (the most recent year for which data are available), U.S. industry spent more on tort litigation than on research and development. Federal funding of research in the physical sciences, as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, was 45 percent less in FY 2004 than in FY 1976." Tough act to follow?

In part because of Republicans' views on trade and laissez-faire capitalism, science jobs and technology jobs are being exported like never before. From the same report, "The United States is today a net importer of high-technology products. Its trade balance in high-technology manufactured goods shifted from plus $54 billion in 1990 to negative $50 billion in 2001."

Also, the tendency for US students to go into science and technology fields is getting worse and worse, "In South Korea, 38 percent of all undergraduates receive their degrees in natural science or engineering. In France, the figure is 47 percent, in China, 50 percent, and in Singapore, 67 percent. In the United States, the corresponding figure is 15 percent."

I think that the Obama administration faces budget challenges (Bush squandered a surplus and left Obama a $1 TRILLION deficit his first year), but sees things exactly the way the NAS report does:

"Without a renewed effort to bolster the foundations of our competitiveness, we can expect to lose our privileged position. For the first time in generations, the nation’s children could face poorer prospects than their parents and grandparents did. We owe our current prosperity, security, and good health to the investments of past generations, and we are obliged to renew those commitments in education, research, and innovation policies to ensure that the American people continue to benefit from the remarkable opportunities provided by the rapid development of the global economy and its not inconsiderable underpinning in science and technology."

We'll wait and see. In the meanwhile, picking Holdren to replace Marburger was a very, very good decision.

One of the tough decisions that our president will have to make is shifting the billions and billions of dollars spent on weapons-technology programs and weapons R&D to creating jobs dealing with improving green technology and combatting climate change. People will say he's "soft" until they realize that our greatest threat is not China challenging us on a battlefield but the gaping hole in our economy that has partly resulted from our energy and technology policies, as well as fair versus free trade agreements.

* National Research Council, 2007, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.

Suffering and the Bible

Since I've had a little more free time this past two weeks, I've pondered a little on old philosophical problems and thus have felt the old familiar urge for an atheist apologetic post. I just got through reading a thought I've had before, but put well into words: that the Cinderella-esque nature of the Christian narrative makes the problem of evil even more difficult for the Christian than for the Muslim or Jew. I also saw Bart Ehrman's lecture (video) on suffering via DC. He also mentions Elie Wiesel and his God on Trial that you can watch on YouTube. He lists the following as the attempts in the Bible to explain or understand suffering in the world: as punishment for (or as a natural consequence of) sin, evil forces in the world (Satan) who are allowed to punish people, as a test of one's faith (Job), a "mystery" that even to ask "Why?" is a blasphemy, that sometimes chaos happens and we "get in the way".

Ross Douthat writes:

Any such revolution would affect atheism as well as belief. Consider, for instance, the way in which the dominance of the Christian story has actually sharpened one of the best arrows in the anti-theist's quiver. In Western society, especially, the oft-heard claim that the world is too cruel a place for a good omnipotence to have created derives a great deal of its power, whether implicitly or explicitly, from the person of Christ himself. The God of the New Testament seems more immediate, more personal, and more invested in his creation than He had heretofore revealed Himself to be. But this arguably makes Him seem more culpable for the world's suffering as well. Paradoxically, the God who addresses Job out of the whirlwind is far less vulnerable to complaints about the world's injustice than the God who suffers on the Cross - or the human God who cries in the manger. For many Christians, Christ's suffering provides a partial answer to the problem of theodicy. But for many atheists and agnostics, it only sharpens the question: How can a God who loves mankind enough to die for us allow us to suffer as much as we do?

Take that question away, and all the arguments that spin away from it disappear as well. Which is just one small reason why a world in which nobody had any reason any longer to believe that God had been born in human flesh to a poor Jewish woman in Bethlehem, or died a miserable death on a Roman cross, would be a world in which atheists as well as believers found themselves arguing about life, the universe and everything in very different ways than they do now.

This is true. For people like presuppositionalists, they prefer to use the whirlwind-style God along with their Calvinism and Rom 9 to say, "Who are you to question God's way of running the world?" To them, you either have no logical basis to even argue that God isn't good (a difficult argument for them to maintain) or you have no ability to cross over to disprove their beliefs because of your flawed fundamental premises. They are a small minority of Christians for good reason. For most Christians, they want to believe that the world as you see it is not the world that God wants it to be, but that He allows it to remain this way because of one thing or another (attempting to draw a distinction between what God permissively and what God perfectly wills has always been absurd to me). Free will is the typical theodicy.

I agree with one of the first things Ehrman says about suffering with respect to Americans: it is very, very difficult to relate to most Americans the scope and nature of suffering that occurs in the world on a daily (minute-by-minute) basis. The inability of Americans to grasp at such suffering, I am convinced, is at least in part the reason for the outlier nature of America in being a very religious country which is also very rich. As I said in a recent post,

The idea that God is listening to your requests and will fix that prostate, or give you that new job, or raise, or protect you from danger, is hilarious. While you're sitting there asking that, mothers are raising their dead children to the sky, after pleading with God to spare them. People are physically rotting from leprosy and mentally rotting from Alzheimer's. To think that God is letting all the billions of people on earth suffer and plead with no reprieve, but that he cares what job you have or mate you pick, is the height of hubris. The problem of evil has destroyed the faith of giants like Charles Templeton and unknowns like me.

When Bart Ehrman talks about free will theodicies, he labels them the "robot answer" defense of suffering in the world: humans are given the ability to obey or disobey and this leads to suffering in the world. He points out that this may help explain some suffering but not natural disasters. He doesn't take it to the next level and include animal suffering, accidents and the distinctions I've drawn before -- the question of why one person's (evil) will supersedes the others involved (including God's and the victims of the suffering), the question of why the physical contingencies allow for one person's (evil) will to actually physically occur rather than be a wish...[I won't rehash all that again, but it is essential to read that post as I feel I've dealt with nearly every single point that theists raise to the argument from evil against God's existence.]

Ehrman goes on to bring up the classic 3-point argument from evil:

1. God is all-powerful
2. God is all-loving
3. There is suffering

He establishes the common theodicies:

1. Deny one of the three premises (deny 1, deny 2, deny 3)
   
2. Bring in an "extenuating circumstance" to explain how the three premises are not logically imcompatible: as punishment for (or as a natural consequence of) sin, evil forces in the world (Satan) who are allowed to punish people, as a test of one's faith (Job), a "mystery", that even to ask "Why?" is a blasphemy, that sometimes chaos happens and we "get in the way" (think spiritual warfare here).

He then goes on to look at the two major overarching themes on suffering in the Bible -- one from the OT and one from the NT:

1. OT (the "Prophetic response") -- the Prophets nearly all had the same view on suffering, and it only concerned Israel, that suffering was punishment for sin. This is exemplified in the story of the Exodus and the obligation that Israel had towards God for saving them from Egypt. If Israel was God's "Chosen People" then all its suffering (war, drought, pestilence, famine) must be explained as some sort of breach of contract, and of course it must be man's (not God's) fault for this contract being breached (cf. Amos 3:2). The reason this is a supposed "solution" to the problem of evil is that the punishment is made with repentance in mind; if the people turn around from their "sin" then the suffering will have served a "greater good" of saving their souls. This is consistent with Adam & Eve's explusion from the Garden of Eden, with the Noachian Flood, with Sodom & Gomorrah, &c. The question of why people are supposed to believe that this sort of God is worth serving is left for the thinker...
   
2. NT (the "apocalyptic response") -- found in the latest book of the OT (Daniel) and dominated the NT: suffering was not coming as a punishment from God, but from "other sources" in the world. Enemies of God (cosmic forces in the world) cause our suffering (the devil and his demons). The devil was not found in the Prophets. Sin is not a specific wrong that you've done, but a sort of cosmic force in the world ("the flesh") and this is what leads to suffering. Eventually, God will remove these evil forces from the world and restore perfection to the world.
3. The Ecclesiastical Response -- "all is vanity" [vanity = Hebrew hevel: transcience, impermanence]. There is no justice in the world, therefore the idea that suffering is a just punishment for sin is false. Also, there will not be justice in the next world, which takes away the empty hope of Apocalypticists. Therefore, live life fully in the present. There is therefore no "answer" to suffering except to try to live and enjoy life. Paul's thoughts as he pondered this possibility? Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die! This third response is somewhat like that of atheism.
   

Ehrman points out four tenets of this apocalyptic response:
1) dualism [Manichaeism]: which groups everyone into either God's camp or the devil's, and also gives this world (the one of suffering) to the devil but the future world (the one of perfection) to God, is also intended to explain "why the wicked prosper but the righteous suffer", in the sense that the present age will "pass away";
2) pessimism: we can't really improve the present age, and even if we do, it won't matter in the cosmic sense, the present age is under the control of evil forces, and things will get worse and worse;
3) vindication: God will set things right, especially by judgment, and restore its own sovereignty, those in one camp will be rewarded and those in the other will be punished, this is why the suffering that occurred in this world is really inconsequential, this was the beginning of philosophical defenses within Judaism/Christianity of the afterlife;
4) imminence: the timing for all this is soon, the coming of the Lord is at hand, things were just about as bad as they could get/were going to be, Mark 9:1, the imminence seems necessary as it helps to make God less bad for letting all this suffering occur -- if God can stand this much suffering for much longer, it seems that God is less good;

Ehrman looks at the Apocalypticists as a contrast to the Prophets and points out the logical inconsistencies that any believer has to deal with. Moral complacency is a real issue for the former: why worry about evil if things will get better only in the next world? Along this same line, the belief that the end is coming soon is something that gives believers hope but also alarm and fear. Therefore, along with moral complacency, believers along the Apocalyptic response have a certain scary worldview that doesn't enrich their lives or the lives of those around. The conflict between the two major responses is obvious: either this world is rotten and you don't get what you deserve here because God doesn't fundamentally dole out punishment until a later judgment, or, people do get what they deserve in this life. Either you reap what you sow here in this world or you don't and you get it in the world to come.

One of the questions he was given at 48:00 or so in to the video was, "How do you know that suffering is bad if there is no God?" He dealt with it pretty simply: the traditional utilitarian view -- whatever brings about good (in the sense of health, wealth, happiness and pleasure) for the majority of people, acknowledging and using our human sense of empathy in avoiding suffering for ourselves and others as being foundational to this moral view. He also hinted at seeing the problem of Divine Command Theory in his transition from to becoming an agnostic from Christian.

I also liked a guy at the end (55:00 or so) who pointed out that the idea that "the poor you shall have with you always," and the general moral complacency brought about by the Apocalyptical view is harmful and wrong. We have the resources in the world, if they were redistributed and focused, to end the sort of starvation and ridiculous death rates from things like lack of drinking water and mosquito nets. And this guy's point was that a religious view keeps us from realizing that we could alleviate much suffering on earth, and thus in turn reduce the burden on a theist to explain/justify it with a theodicy.

Some of Ehrman's statistics (21:55):

• Every 5 seconds, a child starves to death
• Every minute, 25 people die from drinking unclean drinking water
• Every hour, 700 people die from malaria
  

Instamapper with G1

Did I mention I love this phone? Oh yeah. Although some of the features of instamapper may be Orwellian or have such consequences, for now, it's just cool:

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com




See more on this feature here.

The anthropic principle revisited

This month's issue of Seed alerted me to something that I have mentioned before and think may just destroy the factual basis of the fine-tuning argument for a God's existence. Imagine that instead of arguing that the physical constants are fine-tuned so that they cannot be independently varied, we actually did a mathematical analysis of them to see how the ratios of the constants could be changed but still produce life. In a peer-reviewed article entitled, "Limitations of anthropic predictions for the cosmological constant Λ: cosmic heat death of anthropic observers", Fred C. Adams at Michigan looked at the relationships of gravity and the nuclear forces as fundamental physical constants and found that so long as these are varied together, they produce a number of star-sustaining, and therefore life-sustaining, physical universes.

In this latter case, the bounds on a Λ [the cosmological constant] can be millions of times larger than previous estimates—and the observed value. We thus conclude that anthropic reasoning has limited predictive power.

Theists often use the anthropic principle to argue in favor of an intelligent designer of the universe. Given that the idea of the argument precludes the designer being a part of the universe, this is all but arguing for the existence of God, not just some alien somewhere. The argument usually goes, "If you changed the force of gravity by even one-quadrillionth of a N, then life couldn't exist..."

You can view this sort of argument here and here by Collins. A substantive reply to Collins' argument follows:

Collins is more persuasive, although certainly not original, when trotting out the Anthropic Principle, the argument that the universe is uniquely pre-tuned to bring about life in general and human life in particular. There are a number of physical constants and laws such that if any had been even slightly different, life might well have been impossible. For example, for roughly every billion quarks and antiquarks, there is an excess of one quark – otherwise, no matter. If the rate of expansion immediately after the Big Bang had been a teeny tiny fraction smaller than it was, the universe would have recollapsed long ago. If the strong nuclear forces holding atomic nuclei together had been just a smidgeon weaker, then only hydrogen would exist; if a hair stronger, all hydrogen would promptly have become helium, and the solar furnaces inside stars –which we can thank for the heavier elements – would never have existed.

Both Dawkins and Sagan also examine this argument, which Dawkins caricatures as "god-as-dial-twiddler." It is oddly tautological, in that if the universe were not as it is, we indeed would not be here to wonder about it. In Fred Hoyle's science fiction novel, The Black Cloud, it is explained that the probability of a golf ball landing on any particular spot is exceedingly low – and yet, it has to land somewhere! The Anthropic Principle can also be "solved" by multiple universes, of which ours could simply be the one in which we exist; this might apply not only to horizontally existing multi-verses, but to the same one occurring differently in time if there have been (and will be) unending expansions and contractions. Moreover, it isn't at all clear that the various physical dials are independent, or that the physical constants in the universe could be any different, given the nature of matter and energy.

This is a typical response to the theistic position --

1) pointing out that improbable events happen all the time without being of divine origin: each seven-card hand dealt in stud poker has a probability of (1/52*1/51*1/50*1/49*1/48*1/47*1/46) = 1 in 674,274,182,400. But does that make it a miracle?
2) questioning whether the constants can be changed at all, or if they are primally fixed by the nature of the universe
3) invoking the multiverse to reduce the significance of any one universe's "uniqueness" in a statistical sense (also see here)

But from a scientist's standpoint, it's much more interesting to wonder what ratios and relationships amongst the physical constants would still produce life if they were varied interdependently. And that's the question that has been answered by Fred Adams. There are many configurations of the constants that, when varied together, still produce life-friendly, or "Goldilocks"-zone universes. This makes the anthropic principle much less interesting. Yet another reason to give up on the idea of a God.

On contraception and religious right troglodytes

Sometimes I think it's easier just to look forward and try to put behind us the regressive and ridiculous policies of the past decade, and especially social conservatism spearheaded by religious right troglodytes. However, we have to raise awareness of the real harm done by programs run by people like this. For example, in many nations, people are so poor they scavenge garbage dumps but are not given access to birth control (and are threatened with excommunication) because of the shameful and absurd Catholic Church. In Africa, millions are dying from AIDS and hunger but Bush's programs (for all the legacy spin) cause more death because they place all emphasis on "abstinence" and do not provide the sort of comprehensive sex ed and contraception options that are effective.

Bush appointed a birth control opponent to head the agency in charge of family planning: the Dept. of Health and Human Services. The religious right doesn't just want to prevent abortion. They want to control your reproductive rights. Specifically, they want to end all forms of birth control and there's a clear (although perhaps subconscious) reason why: religion is hereditary. The one surefire way to increase the number of parishioners in the church is to breed them. The church could care the less what quality life your children have -- that's between you and Jesus -- but they want to make sure you have children who are in the pews.

If the religious right was actually interested in human welfare, they'd support comprehensive sex ed and realize that countries with no reproductive rights are those with the highest rates of abortion. But they don't live in the reality-based community.

*UPDATE: Add another study to document the failure of "abstinence pledges" to do anything but increase STDs and teen pregnancies*