Science incompatiblity with religion

As per my last posting, modern theology involves the transformation of sacred text "A" to "B" in order to match scientific fact "F".  This transformation can be expressed as a function:  f(A) = B.

Of course this means that A = f^-1(B)

Now, theology is based on the study of A, which is assumed to be constant. Since B is the only "correct" interpretation of A, the only way A can stay as A is if the antifact f^-1() is applied. Antifacts are a function of anti-science.

To put another way, sacred texts are only true in themselves if the anti-science function is applied to B.  Therefore science and religion are incompatible.

It's Pile on Michael Ruse Day today

Michael Ruse has written an article which states that Adam and Eve are a myth (hooray!) but don't worry, the important bits of the Christian Bible are still True (with a capital-T):

God is creator, Jesus is his son who died on the cross for our sake, this act of sacrifice made possible our eternal salvation -- these claims are unchanged. But what exactly this all might mean is another matter. 

*sigh* I will never have what it takes to be a philosopher, as keeping to an outdated text in light of new knowledge is a special art.  I can picture it: one day reading a sacred text sentence and understanding that it clearly states "A" and means "A".  Then upon receiving some revised scientific fact "F", mumbling to myself, 'Ah, this text says "A" but must mean "B" so that "F" fits.'  The text "A" does not and must not ever change.  Text "A" is assumed to be correct for whatever the definition of correct is now.  It is like numerology: Any number or sequence of numbers can be imagined to have any meaning you want with applied interpretation.  It seems that the philosopher's job is to do the same with sacred texts; keep the words, but have a mental transformation of the text from "A" to "B".  I don't have the mental fortitude to keep assuming such a flawed source text is correct, when so much of it is shown to be bunkum.  I would toss it out and get something more accurate and up to date.  Ah well, I can console myself with the fact I am better paid than a philosopher, without having to go through these mental gymnastics.

Note that the language can force changes to it - see The King James Bible, or the first bibles printed in English/Dutch/German instead of Latin, but the translation is very carefully kept intact.

Science will never be overtaken by theology or religion as far as relevance goes while theology continues to use a source book that is never revised or updated.  Old textbooks are not very useful as they contain outdated information, so are regularly updated and revised, and the old editions pulped for recycling.  Sacred religious texts (Bible, Koran etc) are kept as old as possible so the true word of god is not mistaken.  Anything stated as clear fact in a sacred text that disagrees with science is then classified as metaphor or reinterpreted by theologists; but why is the source text not updated to reflect this new understanding?  Where are the "F" and "B" footnotes?  These texts are the words of God;  his vital instructions to all humans on the most important subjects ever!  Is it not every theologists and philosophers duty to make sure the followers of these texts understand what they "really" mean?

It is almost as if the main goal is to prevent revised knowledge from getting to the vast majority of readers, otherwise they might question the validity of the source material.

How about theologists get together and annotate the bible by highlighting the bits to take literally, and use a different colour for metaphor, and footnote the metaphor to explain it.  Now there's a project just crying out for Templeton funding.

Another atheist conference finished, but what now?

Gosh I wish I was more awake now to add something coherent to this (00:50am here *yawn*)

Having seen some of the output of the conferences with issuing declarations of what we want in a modern secular society and it is all very nice having social outings, but what are they (the conferences) actually for?  If the goal is a secular, humane, critical thinking world, free of superstition and unthinking dogma, do these conferences come up with plans and objectives to reach these goals?  New lobby groups or expansion of the existing allied groups such as Humanist societies?  Media outreach and programs to increase awareness that critical thinking is a nice thing for humans to do?

Maybe if I had the time and money, I could attend a gathering to see for myself what they actually achieve, and I hope there is progress.  Although, as a teetotaller with a vegan diet, the I might not get so much out of the parties as other attendees might.  So, what happens next?

Oxford University finds Religion is pervasive; social confirmation at work

Over at WEIT, Jerry has pointed out an Oxford University study that is getting lots of media attention.  The study is of how pervasive and common religious thinking is throughout the world, and since religion is common, it deserves a sense of credibility and respect. 

“If you’ve got something so deep-rooted in human nature, thwarting it is in some sense not enabling humans to fulfill their basic interests,” Trigg said.

So, what they are saying is that large groups of humans are able to believe things that they have no evidence for over an extended period of time.  I am pretty sure this was covered in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.  Just because humans are able to share delusions doesn't make those delusions any more real.

I just finished reading the book, The Invisible Gorilla, and I highly recommend it if you are interested in cognitive processing.  It is "a book about six everyday illusions that profoundly influence our lives: the illusions of attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause and potential."  The authors describe through anecdotes and experiments how the human mind can easily and naturally fool itself into thinking it knows and remembers things that are just not true.  Given that it is quite natural for us humans to automatically delude ourselves in our everyday lives, it is not surprising that one of the areas of human cognition that is pervasive and common is to hold some religious belief; beliefs that are created with little or no evidence, and supported and encouraged exactly because they have so little proof or are fuzzily defined.

As for science vs religion, The Invisible Gorilla has a quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that is quite apt:

"The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something that you actually don’t."

This Templeton-funded study says that religion is common, and that is it. If there has not been an investigation into the truth of the beliefs, then this study’s purpose is really only to further belief in religion through the influence of a social proof; lots of people believe it, so it must be true. 

Sad news on the Eagle Cam

As reported on WEIT, the female eagle that has been observed on the EagleCam, has died after being hit by a jet plane. 

This is very sad news, as the eaglets (?) are still fledglings, and now have to be cared for by the father alone.  From what I read this morning, this mating pair had been together for 10 years.

There are a lot of emotional responses on the web stating how sad this news is, and hopes that the father will be able to cope with the loss, and be able to raise the chicks on his own. 

This has got me to thinking a few things about it:

Does the male know the female had been killed, or is it unaware of the fate of its mate?  For all I know, the male may only be experiencing a sense of loss as to why the female has not returned from hunting, or maybe even only being aware that the eaglets are more hungry than usual, and need more feeding.

I would not be surprised if the male is experiencing some emotion over it, as it is not out of the question that other animals can exhibit and express emotional responses.  Nearly everything about us as a living creature comes from our evolved past, and emotions seem to be a prime candidate for evolution.  Reacting to some event with an emotion can be a good short cut to the proper or appropriate reaction.  Some times it is misplaced, but generally it works out for the best.  It seems to me that emotions take place without engaging the rational parts of our brains; we experience some event, the emotional systems kick in first, we react, and then we rationalise our reaction in light of the event and our emotional response.

Empathy: We humans feel sad for the widower of another species, and it is not that mysterious.  The ability to feel empathy across species is not special to humans either.  For example, who has not experienced feeling sad, and having the family dog come over and lay their head in your lap and sigh?  The circuitry for feeling such emotions are built into all of us (us including non-human animals) and have been evolved into conscious creatures for a long time, although how far back I don’t know. It may be an interesting question for how closely we share these emotions with animals that branched from us in the distant past.

At a guess one way that can evolve in is to first have the kin protecting emotion to recognise when one of our relatives is in distress and to go to assist that relative.  As a social animal, this feeling is promoted in the well being of others of our herd and promotes a better means of survival for our herd, and the sense of empathy towards unrelated animals grows.  We then have the next step of recognising empathy towards unrelated species.  Remember that we are not typically enemies of other species, so without a sense of animosity towards them, we can imprint empathy to them.

Why are these particular animals so special that we invest emotions into their lives, while millions of other animals, some more conscious, some less, will die today due to human activities?  I know from my personal experience that humans do not need to kill or exploit animals to survive.  In fact, after tucking into my coffee and chocolate cake this morning (both vegan recipes) I know that we can have a rather luxurious life without exploiting conscious creatures.  So why is it so difficult to explain to people that the regretful emotion they are experiencing over animals they have known is just as valid to express over animals they have not known?

Sam Harris debated William Lane Craig - ugh

Just finished listening to the debate between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig, as discussed at Why Evolution is True, and there was one point that really annoyed me that it was not addressed, WLC argued:

If god exists, then we have an objective basis for morality. 

If god does not exist then we do not have an objective morality, therefore morality does not exist.

Of course this argument is for saying that god must exist, or we would not want to suffer the consequences.   Consequentialism is not a good reason for having an unfounded assumption.

I would have preferred a response to this argument that was reframed from an atheist point of view. A better response is that we know morality exists, and because god doesn't exist* morality must be intrinsic in how conscious creatures think.  Easy peasy.  I think that is what Sam Harris is getting at in his book, The Moral Landscape.

WLC also argued that we must have an objective morality, and the only way to have an objective morality is through some higher authority that dictates what that morality is.  Sam Harris responded that objective morality exists anyway.  To expand on that, what WLC is saying is that morality needs to be dictated by, well, a dictator.  Appointed for life, and as he is an immortal being, that is as big a dictatorship as one can get, this dictator has ultimate say in all things, and there is no avenue for redress.  Back here on Earth, in some countries we did away with kings and their absolute power a long time ago, and replaced them with representative democracy.  This is a good analogy as to why we don't even need the idea of a god.  Through parliamentary representation, common law and equality under law we have our own objective morality that is decided through the rules of law and the decisions of the people under which that law applies.  No need for kings.

* no evidence for god = no god.

Update: I should have mentioned in the beginning of this post that I thought Sam Harris did an excellent job in the debate, and enjoyed what he had to say.  My annoyance is just what popped into my head at the time.  As for WLC, not so much on the enjoyment front there. 

Languange and Gnu Atheism

This is a very good illustrated talk on language, and the purposes of veiled ways of taking that are needed in order to maintain relationships. Talking in a veiled manner is used in order to negotiate an outcome or come to an understanding when an awkwardness exists between the participants in that they may not know what the other knows, and know what they know what the other knows, and so on.

The important bit as far as Gnu Atheism is concerned is in the latter part of the presentation, in which the speaker explains why the little boy speaking his mind in the fable about the emperor with no clothes is so effective and necessary in order to bring about a change in thinking. It also applies to the Gnu Atheist movement advertising that tells people that it is OK to accept that gods do not exist. This example also shows why it is important for New Atheists (and their Gnu cousins) to be vocal, outspoken and public. It is so the other members of the public can feel the sense of social knowledge and have acceptance of non-belief, instead of the sense of awkwardness.



Religious organisations have known or instinctively acted on this. In the past it was blasphemy laws that enforced the limiting of questioning religious authority so that it could not be discussed with anyone, as anyone could inform on you. Totalitarian governments work in the same way. Opposition cannot be organised because you don't know who to trust, or how widespread the same feeling of opposition exists. What is true for all forms of oppression of a social group is that while the knowledge of rejection remains restricted to the individual no progress can be made. This is why the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt have been triggered by truth and social media, and why governments suppress them as a matter of course; facebook and twitter have become ways of spreading individual knowledge to the wider group that allows dissenting thought to be socially acceptable.

In these more enlightened days the blasphemy laws are reduced or removed from the state laws, so the religious organisations have to fall back to social pressures in order to keep dissenting voices silent. Religions know that the longer and more widespread the silence exists, the more that people can only go so far as to individually reject religion, but only in their own minds. So the power of religion remains. If one cannot know that one can safely be overtly non-religious, so one also has the social pressure for exhibiting religiousness for external appearances.

This is where the accomodationalism comes in. The accomodationalists want to have a veiled conversation about science and religion or superstition so that they can pretend to remain friends with the religious. The language used by accomodationalists is a veiled language, so the uncritical listeners get the message that they want to hear. The faithful hear that science does not contradict their faith (even though it does in reality) and the scientists hear that it is OK to teach science to the faithful as they are not contradicting the faithful beliefs (even though it does if done properly)

Conversely, Gnu Atheists have no interest in pretending to remain friends with religious persons they don't personally know, and so are quite happy to say that superstitions and myths are silly when there is evidence to show that they are silly. The price that the Gnus pay is they may lose some friends, but maintain their integrity and intellectual honesty. What it also says is that in the case of religions and superstitions Gnus tend to value a friendship based on honesty more than one based on the pretend veiling of conversations.

(h/t Andrew Sullivan)

An Implausibility of Gnus

According to that great and highly respected reference, Pub Quiz Help the collective noun for Gnus is an "Implausibility or Herd" of which I will ignore herd as it is too mundane :o

As the idea of being a Gnu Atheist is a bit of whimsy, I hope adding a bit of reason as to why it is appropriate to be referred to as an Implausibility of Gnu Atheists isn't too serious. Put simply:
1) Atheism exists as a counter to theism. If theism did not exist, there would be no atheists;
2) New Atheism exists because we are modern enough and have enough science behind us to know that any theism is extremely implausible, as there is no evidence to support it;
3) Gnu Atheism exists because New Atheists are not strident enough; and
4) The need to collect a disparate group of people with widely differing backgrounds together to unite and be strident against the ludicrous notion that adults that indulge in fairy stories and must be taken seriously is well, implausible.

So I put it that an Implausibility of Gnus is very apt, appropriate, and embraceable.

The Rightness of Wrongness

There is the story of a professor at a university that has taught the same theory, with passion, for decades, and one day hears a lecture by a visiting scientist. The contents of this lecture presents the data, reasoning and evidence that the basis of the lessons of the professor, that he had held so dear as part of his teaching, are wrong. The professor, upon the conclusion of the lecture, is said to have stood up and shook the hand of the visitor, thanking him for removing the fallacy and correcting his thinking. From memory, I think this was in one of Richard Dawkins books, I think it was The God Delusion, but I don't have a copy here to check.

In any case it is a nice story, and one that touches the heart. Perhaps it touches because it has the appearance of humility that we can aspire to; the admission of being wrong and being happy to be shown to be wrong. When I consider my feelings as to why this touches me emotionally, it is because I can put myself in that position, but to my internal shame, realise that my own reaction may not be so humble. You see, I have a problem of ego; I want to be considered to be right. Being right is quite a common feeling that humans have and is part of our cognitive makeup. We need to feel right so we can derive some stimulation that promotes the keeping of correct information in our brains.

I don’t like it when I am wrong. Being wrong leaves me with have uncomfortable feelings and emotions. It is hard to admit that I am wrong, and it is a failing that I need to be more aware of and correct so I can be a better person. Hopefully since I am aware of it I can act on it. It takes practice, but detaching the ego from the sense of rightness is a very important step.

Religions tend to have an insistence of having an absolutely infallible model of reality, which is really an old-fashioned dogma that has been whittled away since the enlightenment times of the 17th century. Our meat brains are the product of billions of years of evolution which means they are very good at survival, but not necessarily able to be right all the time about all of reality. Our brains are good at helping us survive, and have allowed us to make a complex, interrelated technological world, but that doesn’t mean we are right all the time. So we must expect that we can be wrong about a great many things. Nothing in human experience is permanent, or immutable; all findings are provisional.

The professional scientist, in fact any professional person, needs to have a sense of “rightness” so they can do their job and function with confidence. It would be quite debilitating to constantly second-guess all of the concepts that we hold in our heads all of the time. So we get comfortable with what we know. However, the thing that distinguishes a professional from the amateur is the ability to accept that when they are wrong they must correct their mistake. It is far more important to be correct than to be considered as right. The social and psychological pressure that resists this correction is that being considered right is one of the ways that a person can have the confidence of their employers, superiors, customers, peers, friends and relations. Having to admit being wrong gives the sense that this confidence has been misplaced, and leaves me feeling disappointed that I was not correct in the first place.

Scientists, like in the example in the first paragraph, have to confront the reality that they will be wrong many times, and learn that there is no shame in this. Being wrong, admitting it, and correcting the erroneous ideas are the way to approach reality in an adult fashion. In the wider society, it is rare for someone to admit they are wrong without getting some social stigma attached, and I would like to see that change. I would like to see a wider acceptance of being allowed to be wrong at some point in the past so it is easier to be correct oneself when new knowledge arises. Acknowledging wrongness and correcting mistakes should not have a significant social cost.

Wilfully remaining wrong, in the face of evidence, on the other hand, should have considerable social cost, although what that cost should be, I do not know.

The way a NASA PSA should be done

The Great Brisbane Flood of 2011

Well, we are on a huge island as my suburb is cut off from the rest of Brisbane
This is the view on the Centenary Highway this morning at 9:00am.








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More drafty ideas on ideas

To elaborate on an earlier point, I need to make progress on the idea blasphemy and why someone would be violently opposed to me having an idea in my brain that is different or contradicting an idea in that person's brain. Come to think of it, this is similar to the earlier post I made on truth-labeling in the brain, where the clinging to an idea (or, retaining the truth-label on the idea) is more important to scrubbing the idea of its truth-label. Combined with social validation of ideas (where if something is not true, at least if everyone else believes that falsehood, it removes the pain of believing something that is not true by having social confirmation of the false idea) makes some kind of sense... if only I had the words.

The ethics of belief

A nice read: The Ethics of Belief. I read the first part in another book... was it The God Delusion?

Self-validating belief systems

Just a quick note: This paper on self validating belief systems is very interesting. More reading needed, but a quick thought that occurred to me while I am part way through it; The human mind's ability to believe things that are not true, and hang onto those beliefs, may be evolved into our way of organising our thoughts and memories to process things that are useful to us to remember and act on. We attach an importance to continuing to remember that a belief is true, otherwise we would be too forgetful, so we have to hang on until other evidence is provided. This is short-circuited by a mistake in the processing, where the importance of keeping the previous concept labeled as "valid" or "true" is mis-prioritised over the need to correct erroneous thoughts.

The Christmas Myth and the rest

Andrew Sullivan adds to the controversy of the "You Know it Is a Myth?" billboard in the US. I think this entry is an excellent example of why Sullivan is so hard to read sometimes. He comes across as a lucid, thinking conservative (a rare and endangered species in the US) but then he says something that is so monumentally absurd and contradictory that I just don't know why I bother reading him. To wit:

The Christmas stories in the Bible - and they are multiple and contradictory - are obviously myths. They are obviously not to be taken literally.

So far so good. Then it goes off the rails:

They are meant as signs to the deeper, profounder truth that Christians hold to: that the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins.

How to begin? First of all, there is no "force behind all that exists" in so far as a god or Deity is concerned. Certainly there is no evidence for one, so there is no reason to make the assumption that one exists. This "profound truth" is no truth at all, as there is no evidence to support it, which makes it Orwellian newspeak. It is only an assumption, one that is perpetuated in this 21st century by intellectual dishonesty.

It is a good thing that I am reading God is not Great at the moment, as this sort of thing is covered in chapter 10: The Tawdriness of the Miraculous and the Decline of Hell. One point in this chapter is to show how events that were considered miracles thousands of years ago are looked upon now as just cheap magic tricks that any stage conjurer could perform.

This is so enormous and radical an idea that it is not suprising that
early Christian writers told stories to bring it more firmly to life.

If the christ-the-miracle-worker and son-of-god (doncha know) incarnating on this Earth is such an enormous and radical idea, why would it need a fictional embellishment? To do so is to cheapen it and debase it. Or maybe as at that time and place "miracle workers" were to be found on every street corner and market place, to make this particular myth more outstanding it had to be given the whole special effects routine to make it stand out and give it mass-market appeal.

But they were stories, telling of a deeper more ineffable truth. If only contemporary Christians could let go of the literalism in pursuit of the far more extraordinary fact of the Incarnation.

How can a false story told as a true story tell a deeper truth?

The serious problem with this is the lack of intellectual consistency. If the Christmas story is "obviously" a myth, why does the rest of the stories about Jesus get a free pass? If part of the story is complete fabrication, the rest of the stories have to be suspect as well. At what point does the myth become fact, and how can we determine where that delineating point is? It would be more intellectually honest to acknowledge that it the more miraculous the tale, the more of a myth it becomes. This sentence "If only contemporary Christians could let go of the literalism in pursuit of the far more extraordinary fact of the Incarnation." should really read "If only contemporary Christians could let go of the literalism in pursuit of the far more extraordinary myth of the Incarnation." If that truth were told, however, the point of the whole exercise would be lost. Maybe 2000 years ago the admonisment to be nice and charitable and forgiving had to be clothed in the cheap trinkets of magic tricks and fabulous tales to get the illiterate and uneducated masses to follow it. But now we live in a more enlightened, advanced world that, I hope, has learned something new in all that time, and that we can get along and live meaningfull lives without the baggage of supersition and myth-dressed-as-fact weighing us down.

Note to self - Draft

Self: Currently reading God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens. In reading, I recall an idea I had a little while ago, about the need for religion and salvation, and the somewhat common theme that the purpose of religion is to ultimately leave this suffering Earth behind us. There is a common theme on the suffering that one must endure in this world, and the lack of suffering in the next (nirvana, heaven or a place with grapes and lots of virgins) or if you are a "bad" person, a go to hell or return here to try again. (Respawn!)

In the modern western 21st century world it seems an anachronism to describe life as a continuous stream of suffering until our eventual, inevitable demise. This is most likely why the rise of secularism and rationalism, with its concordant fall in religiosity, is happening now. However this is only a very recent and modern event, that would require picturing what life was like 200 years ago to appreciate why religion has held on for so long. Looking at the previous post which shows life expectancy vs income over time, at the beginning of the 19th century life expectancy was only on average 40 years. This is a good indicator that life was harsh for most people all over the world, so the teaching of religion that "all of life is suffering" was evidenced all around you. There was no escaping that concept to be a truism, and the only offered salvation or release from this suffering was faith and progress after death.

Q: when was germ theory accepted? Standards of hygine and so on?

Visualisation and animation of data

This is so very, very cool. If you want to play with the data, and more, go to the source web site: GapMinder

h/t Pharyngula

Hitchens' Razor

I get tired of having to assert in many words something that Christopher Hitchens has already stated quite well.

Hitchens' Razor: what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

This phrase is found in a Christopher Hitchens Slate article on Mother Teresa. To me it is a beautiful phrase that can be used to save a lot of time, as chasing down why someones non-supported statements are wrong is wasteful. It puts the onus back onto the asserter to give evidence to support their baseless assertion. Much less tiresome than the refuter having to argue, yet again, why it is that when there is no evidence for an assertion it is not the refuters job to find it for them.

So, when someone tries to tell you that faeries live at the bottom of the garden, just because! Just apply Hitchens' Razor.

Important Edit: The correct use should be Hitchens's Razor.  Please see my entry for the correction.

Beauty and our Humanity

This is an interesting TED talk on the human conception of beauty, and where it comes from.


Not surprisingly it comes from evolution. Any living thing that can exhibit a preference based on some form of stimulus would form the basis for the concept of beauty.

The punchline of the talk is that beauty is the appreciation of something done well. I have to agree with this, and it is not just limited to the art world. There have been quite a few instances in my life where I have observed engineering done well and it moved me to tears. When a complex project is undertaken which incorporates planning, work, effort and skilled manufacturing, and it all works as it should giving the results we expect, then it is a work of art. I have experienced the feeling of great joy when a system I have been a part of developing works. I don't know if others feel the same way, but I like a good, filled-in checklist that shows all of the tasks have been completed. There is an aesthetic to have all of the boxes filled, just so.

I have heard it argued from some that our humanity is diminished if we acknowledge that it is all a product of random chance and chemistry that is below our conscious selves. There is the sense that we don't deserve the enjoyment or appreciation we get if it is not sourced from a conscious action, be that from ourselves or from some deity that gets all of the credit.

Strangely enough, it does not lessen the joy I feel for things done well even if I do know that it is the product of evolution, and the automatic mixture of stimulus and brain electro-chemistry that gives the sense of pleasure or contentment. In fact, thinking about it that way is also a form of beauty; we are machines ourselves, so complex that we even have consciousness. Knowing the source of feelings in no way diminishes them.

Earthlings - it is who we are

I recommend viewing the movie Earthlings, which shows what most of life is like for animals that are used for human purposes. Some animals are not treated this way, but I suspect that most are. Be warned, it is not pretty, and probably NSFW. The film cannot get classification in Australia, so it cannot be publicaly broadcast.

“If I could make everyone in the world see one film, I'd make them see Earthlings” — Professor Peter Singer