Thursday, March 24, 2011

On Brain Dumps

From a discussion on free will and the existence of a god. I really stepped it up here with the longest post yet...

You can't call your god knowing everything about you and everyone else a "guess", even if you call it a completely certain one. It's not just that he "knows you so well". He made the entire universe, knowing everything to come, right? He's making you do what you're doing right now, and there is no question about it. You ARE coerced into your choices in life, if you believe a god exists who created the universe. You are influenced by everything that you experience and the combinations of every person and event, natural or human. Your god made me reach the state I'm in now, where I will reject him until sufficient evidence is provided for his existence. For this, of course, I deserve eternal hellfire. Forever. Is he just stupid, or evil?

I don't think, if you really take a step back and look, that you could possibly think that free will and omnipotence are compatible. Let's approximate your claim with rats, cheese, and a maze, shall we? Let's say you've got hundreds of rats and run a test where the animals must navigate a maze to find the lovely food. Let's say you've done thousands of trials to know to that rats of certain characteristics will consistently find or not find the cheese. Obviously, a god doesn't need to run trials, but I want to make this comparable to the universe at large.

Now let's say you put in a rat that you know will fail. You watch it search, search, search, and it doesn't find the cheese. It fails. Here's the question: who are you frustrated at? Are you mad at the rat? Are you mad at the maze? Of course not. You should be mad at YOURSELF for wasting your time testing a rat that you knew would fail.

There are two things I would like to draw from this. The first is the idea that your god controls all variables. In this experiment, the scientist controlled most, but the rat could have had a good day or a lucky turn. Your god is not afforded that luxury by his definition: he absolutely knows the outcome. All unknowns are off the table. The mouse/person can't have a good or bad day and beat the odds, because the scientist/your god knows everything. Your god knows how the good and bad days and people and events are going to add up to put you where you'll be in 20 years.

The second thing I'll like to bring up is that, in the case of your god, he should feel ashamed at his actions. This naturally comes up from the described situation. He should be ridiculed for putting the blame on the rat, for condemning the rat to eternal hellfire for failing to find the cheese. The rat should not be responsible for not living up to godly expectations.

And now I'm mixing metaphors and have beaten this to death. Moving on...

Now you say that we don't understand your god because he might exist on some plane where this all make sense, that potentially defies our logic. If you are actually going to fall back on that argument, I can't talk with you. By saying this, you can justify anything and everything, and there's no room for discussion.

Consider if I proposed a new theory on magnetism that conflicted with out basic understanding of magnets and how they worked. Consider if I used the argument, "Well, it actually makes sense on a level that we don't understand." ...And that was my justification. You would rightfully laugh at me. If I was really serious about it, you'd ask for evidence.

And now we're back to extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. Only now you've dug the hole deeper by justifying an immensely complex god with an equally complex additional plane of existence. I shouldn't even have to mention Occam's razor.

Either you have an argument for how this isn't paradoxical or you say "God is beyond our comprehension." You can't do both. You can't try to explain it and at the same time throw your hands in the air and say it can't be explained. Still, I've explained how both are unreasonable here.

"It’s true that seeing people exercise free choice doesn’t prove free will, but I think it makes free will a more satisfactory explanation than having developed in a way to make it seem that we have choice."

The first half of that sentence is all that needs to be said. The second is unsubstantiated, and I confronted this idea in my last post. Just because you think or have intuition that you have choice doesn't make it so. Intuition tells me the sun goes around the Earth by just looking at the sky. It's a more satisfactory explanation that living in a universe that just makes it SEEM that the sun goes around us, so it must be right.

As for your last two questions...

1. "Random" is a name we give to something that has so much variance that we can't predict its outcome, at least in this context. That doesn't mean it's immune to the single path all particles take if the Big Bang made everything on a set trajectory (like I talked about in earlier posts).

2. This is actually called "non-overlapped magisteria", or NOMA. I'll quote Dawkins here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria#Criticisms

"[I]t is completely unrealistic to claim, as [Stephen Jay] Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims."

The question is simple: what other path to truth is there but science? Science is just using your eyes, ears, and brain, after all. Either your god is detectable in this way or he is not. If he is not, then he is indistinguishable from his non-existence.

Also, on the brain topic...


Tuesday, March 15, 2011

On Confrontation

The Technique, our college newspaper, had an ad (the page after the comics) in it this week for a lecture on the following:

"O Lord, How Manifold Are Your Works!": God and Biophilia
By Dr. William P. Brown

I read this and start to consider going. I'd like to hear him out, but more importantly, confront him. Usually there's a Q/A session afterward a lecture, right? I've been seeing so many of my favorite skeptics listen to these talks and ask dissenting questions that maybe I could give it a try.

Well, today is the day I remember what being profusely nervous is like. It's strange, because hours before, when I'm considering what the topic will be and what question to ask, I'm already getting on edge. It's mostly because I can imagine myself in the situation, in front of people, disagreeing with the guest. I do it so vividly that I very easily psyche myself out.

And so instead of trying to remember various questions to ask, I type them up. I find this to be reasonable, since the lecture topic is so broad that he could touch on or not touch on many issues. And surely it wouldn't be unreasonable to read a small bit for an initial statement.

Here's what I wrote down, with the topic of the book he's promoting in mind:

You've talked a bit today about how Biblical scripture coincides with the scientific concensus. I disagree.

Time and time again throughout history, I have seen rejection of scientific discoveries by religious institutions, ranging from Galileo's time to contemporary attempts to insert creation myths into biology classes. Only after evidence is completely, embarassingly overwhelming do the religious leaders concede.

The true test of whether the Bible has any scientific value is in its predictive capability, now or in the past. When has the Bible ever been used to make any scientific discovery, rather than used as post-hoc confirmation? Additionally, does the Bible hold any information concerning currently unknown (and testable) scientific facts?

---

The Bible is a large book of multiple choice. There exist passages that more readily posit the world to be flat than accurately detail the Big Bang.

Islamic scholars make the same claims as yourself. The Quran apparently explains the Big Bang, expanding universe, the solar system, the round Earth, and atoms! How do you respond to this?

The second bits are considerations for follow-ups.

I try to write these down on a little notepad, but I think it will take too much time. Plus, I'm a little shaky, which is annoying. As I'm running low on time, I grab my flash drive to print it off before I get there, go eat, and scamper across campus.

As a humorous aside, when considering that it would cost my 4 cents to print this page in a place on the way, I remember that I have but 3 cents on my Buzzcard. What an unlucky circumstance! Of course, we have plenty of free prints in certain places, so I hit one up and get my lines.

I walk to the place, and I don't see many people there. I'm familiar with the building somewhat, but I have no idea where the talk will take place. A walk around, subtly peering in. Looks like the guest and a few people are inside, but no one in the front rows (which are pews). With this in consideration... I leave.

A lot of things are going through my head while I'm outside of there, and they culminated in my chickening out, yes. My primary thought was that I didn't want to be one of very, very few audience members, and then disagree with him on major issues. My ideal situation would have been one in which many people were attending, going in, and I could be one of the crowd. Instead, I wasn't even quite sure if I should knock or walk on in... Well, now I'm just making stupid excuses.

I guess I wanted to be anonymous. I didn't want a private conversation where the argument could shift and I could be schooled on Biblical knowledge, scholarly consensus, and the like.

So yeah, I chickened out, but I felt like the episode deserved some recognition since it's been the focus of my thoughts and actions for the past few days.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

On Looking Away

In a bout of good taste and romantic idiocy, I bought Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs last month. I really like it, and throughout recent weeks I've been trying desperately to relate to it. Here's an example of what I mean: Start this song, which is the first on the album. The first split second you hear a single word, stop it.


That is the amount of that album I should be allowed to listen to. That is the amount I should even be able to fantasize being able to understand. No Bell Bottom Blues, no jealousy, no sense of loss. I'm Not Anyone's. When I do let these false sentiments stew, they boil up beyond any reasonable expectations; they lose focus. They do more than Keep On Growing, they grow without sunlight or water (maybe some dirt) into something unrecognizable and false.

I take steps back regularly to assess the great divide between how I'm feeling and what any reasonable person would be thinking. I just don't know what the difference between petty fantastical infatuation and genuine affection is. Worse: maybe I do, but I'm scared to say so.

I know I'm just an introspective snubby fellow who didn't pick up on cues then and shouldn't extrapolate now, but it's really, really frustrating when the few people I actually feel drawn to are just so unreceptive. At this point, I feel like asking is a waste of time, but it feels defeatist to just back away now.

Okay, you can finish the song, if you liked it. Or read this, since I put a lot of effort into it.

Monday, March 7, 2011

On Soft Hands

I really enjoyed this ACC Women's Tournament. I liked the trip up, when I got to see Megamind, which was surprisingly funny. I liked the first game, in which an arena of elementary school kids yelled and cheered for whichever side was winning. I liked buying a game I've been meaning to play. I liked the first night, when I saw The King's Speech.

I liked the second game, in which we upset Maryland (who might have lost sleep the night before). I liked taking with me those several dozen GT banners and tossing them out to super-excited kids behind us, doubling our team's crowd size. I liked Free Fryday. I liked going to the "Friendliest" part of Greensboro and spending way too much time messing around with puppets. I liked swapping interesting YouTube videos and was strangely okay with the tamest group of drunks I've ever seen.

I liked being the only band to play at Fanfest and getting T-shirts for it. I liked spending a few hours with not one person noticing a large stuffed snake in my pants. I liked keeping a close game with Duke and severely influencing their ability to play with puppet distractions.

I liked cheering hard and being appreciated for it. I liked heading home watching Scott Pilgrim. I liked when people liked that movie.

And seriously, that's it. A lot of cool and interesting things happened on this trip that I'd like to not quickly forget, so they go here. Lots of other pressing matters still linger over my head at the moment, but this is something best posted quickly afterwards.