No Such Thing as a Wrong Answer

I recently attended a lecture by George H. Smith, best known as the author of Atheism: The Case Against God, entitled “10 Questions about Atheism" in Bloomington, IL. He made a point later on during the Q & A that I want to expand on.

Smith described how, if you go to a professor of academic philosophy and tell him about a significant conclusion you’ve reached, he may ask you “oh really, how did you figure that out?” You go over your process, and he says “well, that’s interesting, but you’ve based it on unsound reasoning here, you’re working on a couple of fallacies at this point and this other point, and I think you probably want to fix these problems.” Philosophy professors, he said, are not so much concerned with your conclusion as they are with the process by which you got there. If you have fundamental problems, they’ll send you back to square one.

Now, contrast that with a Christian philosopher. Smith pointed out how, if you go to one of them and say you’ve accepted Christianity, they won’t question your reasons one bit. There’s no wrong answer you can give, Smith said, you might as well say you saw the face of the Virgin Mary on a potato chip. (I’ve seen others talk about songs they heard at apropos moments, religious bumper stickers that crossed their path, and other such coincidental agency-detection.) Smith asked the audience: can you think of any reason, any motivation, any process or evidence you could give that would cause a religious philosopher or apologist to say, “sorry, that’s no good, you need to go back to the drawing board?” Of course not. The baptismal font is right this way, we’re so glad to have you.

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Quicktake - Morality and Altruism

I witnessed the momentary aftermath of two car accidents today. The first was midafternoon--we were driving along a city street, the car in front of us turned onto a side street and there were two cars, surrounded by four or five angry people with cell phones out. We drove around, and it was only as we passed by an ambulance, fire truck, and several police cars heading in the way we'd came that it came to me...how do I know that everything was okay? I just assumed.

Only a few minutes ago, just outside our apartment, a loud bang rattled the windows. Outside, we saw two wrecked vehicles. I shoved my feet into my shoes, ran downstairs and spent a tense few moments comforting a frail old woman who seemed, at least to me, to have a rather terrifying concussion. She was disoriented, forgetful and had a nasty goose-egg the size of a quarter just above her temple. I held her hand and kept her talking until the ambulance arrived.

When I was in college, I learned about the bystander effect. If two people are alone and one has a heart attack, the other will certainly render aid. If that other person is one of ten, a dozen, twenty or more...nobody moves. I saw this happen once when I was in high school when a co-worker at my summer restaurant job had a stroke, turned gray, and collapsed in the middle of the kitchen. Ten people stared and didn't move.

Say what you will about morality in the absence of god--if this world is all we have and this life is all we get, then it makes it a better world for all of us if people are willing to help a stranger for no reason and with no hope of reward, be it immediate or eternal. I don't know how much good I did, but I did what I could and I didn't stand around gawking, and that's the way I prefer it to be. I didn't realize that my small, personal promise to myself not to be one who stands inactive would be put into practice a mere four hours later.

I think about a certain person I've been having conversations with, and the person I used to be. I suspect both of those people would attribute it to a god, who heard a silent prayer and made sure I'd be where I was needed. I don't need it to be that, I just know I did a good thing, and I'll do it again next time I get the chance, and the time after that.

The flashing lights seem to have gone, I think I will look and see how things are.

Fool me once

So here I am, watching "The Walking Dead" on the AMC website, and I see this banner ad on the side saying "Acai Berry 'Diet Warning'." The URL given is www ConsumerNews24 dot com. Oho, I say to myself, did some news site grow a brain and actually write a skeptical article? I've long known that Acai Berry is comparable to blueberries and strawberries for dietary antioxidants, but its marketing these days is pure rattlesnake oil.

The top of the page is festooned with the corporate logos of ABC, Forbes, CBS News, CNN, and USA Today. The header and sidebar are festooned with woo-woo, but I'm taking this with a grain of salt, since many are generated purely by keywords, and I frequently see pseudoscience advertised on Pharyngula, Bad Astronomy and Skeptoid. I begin to skim the article.

I'm left in suspense for all of about five seconds.

"Here, we are a little skeptical and aren't sure that we've seen any real proof that these pills work for weight loss...what better way to find out the truth than to conduct our own study?"

I don't know, maybe a large scale, double-blinded, placebo-controlled clinical trial? Scroll, scroll, scroll...

"Week One--After one week on the diet using both products I was surprised at the dramatic results. My energy level was up, and I wasn't even hungry, an apparent side effect of the Acai Berry which curbs the appetite."

Sure you are, the placebo effect is a wonderful thing. Scroll, scroll...

"Week Two--After two weeks of using both supplements...I was no longer waking up during the night and tossing and turning because my body was actually able to relax (this is a result of getting rid of the toxins I think)...I must admit that I'm starting to believe that this diet is more than just a gimmick."

You know, I think this diet may work for bulimics: I just threw up a little in my mouth.

"Week Three--After 3 weeks all my doubts and skepticism had absolutely vanished!"

Warning: Acai Diet pills may cause brain damage.

"Week Four--"Everyone at Consumer News is kicking themselves for not having volunteered to be the guinea pig."

Scroll, Scroll--oh look, shopping links for Acai LeanSpa™ and Natura Cleanse™. Some comments, just like a real news story, all from happy and satisfied customers.

As is obvious by now, this faux-consumer-reports site is nothing but a front for the woo-woo peddlers. The cherry on top is when I leave the site and am tripped by a pop-up warning:

Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page?

IMPORTANT: Are you sure you don't want to take advantage of the Acai Lean Spa and Natura Cleanse Free Trial?

Don't forget - they will only be available for a limited time. Since these trials are completely free, there is not cost or risk to you. You can also give them away if you'd like. Or start on the 4 week test that Julia completed.

If you are wondering why these trials are free, the simple answer is because the manufacturers are confident that their products will help you, and that you will continue to use their products. You will probably refer friends, family and even people you don't really like that much. That's how great these offers are.

Don't miss out on these great products!

Press OK to continue, or Cancel to stay on the current page.

I'm not sure if they're dropping the act at this point or if they're just insulting my intelligence that any Consumer-Report-type organization would be so won over as to actually promote the product they reviewed by name, even.* Either way, they probably have no shortage of suckers.

What really burns me up is not that they're selling a product that doesn't do anything--as they say, a fool and his money were lucky to get together in the first place. It's not even that the "reporter" gives a bullet list of dodgy claims before even embarking upon her "research." What infuriates me is the blatant deceit in play. This crosses the line from marketing into outright fraud.

***

*I, on the other hand, am free to be completely won over and will happily say that The Walking Dead a DAMN GOOD SHOW that you should definitely be watching. These people GET what about horror makes for good drama—it’s not the fright, it’s the dread.

On Dualism

Taken from an apologist blog, arguing whether the mind can exist without the body. I don't think context is all that necessary, I just wanted to capture some of the things I said, and anyone who thinks that the mind isn't dependent upon the brain, or that the mind can survive the death of the brain, can feel free to comment

"The mind uses the brain to operate the body, so obviously there would be correlations," you said. That doesn't address anything. Someone who has frontal lobe damage isn't trapped behind their eyes, railing against behaviors they can no longer control. Their inner life is changed. Their thoughts are changed. Their "mind" is altered.

You have no explanation for how this supposedly disembodied mind uses the brain to control the body. How does it interface with neurons? How does it carry memory? How does it regulate its emotions? Scientists have predicted with quite good accuracy (and this should be relevant to you) how closely a mother will hold her infant, how often she will check on it during the night, the amount of time she will spend gazing at it, all by measuring levels of neurotransmitters. Does a mother's "mind" hover inside her skull, saying "a little more oxytocin there, I think"?

Your explanation also doesn't address the deficits of those born with brain impairment. Mental retardation, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Down's Syndrome. One of my relatives has Prader-Willi Syndrome, which is all of the above rolled into one.

How smart will she be once she has shuffled off this mortal coil, with its 63 IQ brain?

What will her personality be, never having read a novel, fallen in love, fought for something she believes in?

What will her interests be when she is no longer compelled to sort and resort playing cards for hours, when Spongebob and Dora no longer hold her attention?

What will her desires be when she is no longer driven to eat and eat until it literally kills her?

You have no answers to these other than your own intuitive sense of cognition and a little doggerel "logic." The simplest explanation that fits the facts isn't necessarily always correct, but it would be nice for an explanation to fit *any* of the facts if we want to consider that it is, in a word, possible.

While the tone here is quite confrontational, many of these questions have been troubling me, ever since it got back to me that her mother took solace from her belief that in the next life, her daughter might be free of all that, and that (as is possible within her Mormon theology) her daughter might fall in love, marry, and have children. It is heartwrenching to me to that comfort could be had from from a belief that makes the situation so much more tragic.

She is more than just the deficits of her condition. She is a beautiful, loving person who is thriving and learning and growing as best she can. But it is unthinkable to me to imagine that there is a "normal" person trapped inside, suffering all the more.

Better Know a Pseudoscience

Science enthusiasts and critical thinkers cannot escape the reality that human culture world-wide is absolutely chockablock with fake science. The word "scientific" has a cachet that I've seen co-opted for homeopathy, energy-harmonized aluminum plates, even Biblical "scientific discoveries" (always good for a laugh.) Science seems to be all about the results, the inventions, the breakthroughs. It's never about the process, the codified critical thinking that keeps those end products from being complete hokum. We humans have a tendency to see what we want to see, to see what agrees with our preconceptions, to see what benefits us and justifies our beliefs. The scientific method is what developed in order to boil out the biases, the fallacies, the unconscious assumptions which corrupt our cognition.

Pseudoscience has been a bugbear of mine for quite some time. So, let's talk about UFOs, and why the pseudoscience of UFOlogy fails on so many counts.

FALSIFIABILITY: UFOlogy prominently displays a hallmark of many pseudosciences—it begins with its conclusion, and then goes looking for whatever disparate facts might support it. One of the most common misconceptions about science is that you start with a hypothesis—a question that you're testing, which you then gather data or do experiments to support. However, one requirement of a good hypothesis is that it is willing and able to be proved wrong. If it is not, you are setting yourself upon a primrose path of Confirmation Bias.

Without falsifiability, your so-called “research” is nothing more than a grand exercise in a fallacy called Affirming the Consequent\. It's easily represented symbolically: [If A=true, then B=true]; [B=true, therefore A=true]. "If a movie is/was shooting a rain scene outdoors, then the sidewalk is wet." The fallacy is to say "if the sidewalk is wet, then a movie is/was being filmed." How many different ways can the sidewalk be wet that don't include such a rare and unlikely event as a movie shoot? How about rain? Automatic sprinklers? The high school cheerleaders doing a car wash down the block? It doesn't follow. Let's say that unexplained lights in the sky are seen nearby, and so you take your "scientific instruments" and you go out to whatever area you believe to be nearby the phenomenon. You believe that if an advanced vehicle were there, its exotic technology would produce…well, "something." You observe that there are some unexpected readings in the local magnetic fields. This is "something," therefore some kind of UFO caused it.

The real scientific method ultimately does most of its work primarily to falsify hypotheses through experiment and observation. It took Thomas Edison years to devise an incandescent filament, to the point where one waggish reporter asked him why he had failed so many times. He had not failed, he said, he had successfully found ten thousand compounds which did not work. If a cotton filament vaporizes under current, then it’s back to the drawing board. There is no such result which would invalidate the presence of a sufficiently futuristic craft, especially when empty-handed results can be explained away as due to the stealthy capabilities of such a ship. How do you generate a well-formed hypothesis, one which has definite criteria to tell you you’re barking up the wrong tree? That’s one more aspect of the scientific method where UFOlogy completely falls on its face.

THEORY: Creationists love to say Evolution is "only a theory," as though it meant something speculative and, if you will, hypothetical. It doesn't. A theory is an explanatory model, based on observations, which generates testable hypotheses and points the way to acquire new knowledge. UFOlogy has no such thing. Going back to the Theory of Movie Production, we can generate multiple testable hypotheses from a basic model of what goes on in such an event. Our hypothetical movie shoot would not only dampen the sidewalk, you’d also find classified ads calling for extras, permits on file with the police and fire departments, a spike in bulk catering revenues, or sightings of heavily laden trucks carrying sets and equipment. Even if you missed the event itself, you’d know what to look for to see if Oliver Stone was in town. You might never know for sure—affirming the consequent prevents absolute certainty, even with a good foundation—but you’d have a start, and you’d figure out you were wrong pretty quick if that were the truth of the matter.


UFOlogy has no theoretical model. What they have instead is a grab-bag of anecdotes, recollections and speculation, and like I said above, any unexplained physical traces. UFOs can be lights in the sky. They can be flying saucers. They can be silvery wreckage entirely consistent with weather balloons known to be in use in 1947, at the time of the Roswell so-called "incident." UFOs can leave circular depressions in leaf litter. UFOs can produce magnetic anomalies. Et cetera et cetera. There is no one phenomenon, no model to provide a framework to unify and explain the observations attributed to UFOs over the years--speculation runs from aircraft as small as three feet across to more than a hundred. There are hundreds of conflicting accounts, and the presence or absence of any given aspects are almost irrelevant.

If our skies are being patrolled by advanced, science-fiction vehicles, whether of human or non-human origin, they seem to come in a dizzying and unpredictable variety, very few of which ever make any repeat performances. You can never predict what a UFO will look like, sound like, or act like. It could leave no trace, or it could scorch the ground. It could seem to be at extreme altitudes, or nearly brush the treetops. UFOs can look like anything, it seems, and if you go looking for them, you can rest assured you’ll never be proved wrong, no matter how implausible the claim. Plausibility is also key, and it’s really both the most important and least intuitive reason that UFOlogy is a non-starter as any serious explanation of strange events.

PLAUSIBILITY: Clarke’s Law, where any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, is all around us. If you showed a man from 1910 an iPhone, he’d have only the most rudimentary idea of its function and no idea at all of how it works. Heck, I don’t really know how it works. In our lives and most especially in our TV shows and movies, the fantastical is commonplace. It is becoming very counterintuitive to learn that certain areas have very real engineering challenges—where words like “inefficient” and “diminishing returns” take on inflexible, technical definitions quite apart from their everyday usage. In terms of thermodynamics, internal combustion is not very efficient, and so 100 MPG cars are not easy to build without major design sacrifices. Fuel is very heavy and gravity relatively strong, and so it takes massive rockets to lift small amounts of cargo into space. Jet packs are ludicrously inefficient, and all the fuel they can carry is used up in two minutes’ flight. Because the design envelope for a lifting body doesn’t overlap much with the design envelope for a car, any shape which can do both is basically going to stink on ice in whichever role it’s operating. Flying cars will not be filling our skies.

No matter, you say. UFOs obviously must run on technologies yet undiscovered. That doesn’t solve the problems, though. The laws of motion and thermodynamics still hold. A hovering ship must accelerate upwards at 9.8 meters per second, every second, or it will, shall we say, accelerate downwards. That takes power, reaction mass, either to use a jet or aerodynamic forces to stay aloft. No account I’m aware of ever sees a UFO slow too quickly or climb too steeply, stall, and fall to earth due to lack of lift. Nor could any kind of electromagnetic repulsion account for UFOs’ reported aerial antics. Perhaps they use something even more exotic, like antimatter. Sadly, no. The annihilation reaction of antimatter is not free energy. Energy, by definition, is the ability to do work, and flying a UFO through the sky does take a lot of both. So, whatever your energy source, you still have to power an engine—loosely enough defined as “a machine which does the work” in order to get around. That’s leaving aside that antimatter is so stupidly inefficient to obtain and store in the first place, with only a few vast facilities on the planet available to manufacture even trace amounts.

I’ve bent over backwards to avoid the word “alien” or “spaceship” thus far, but don’t really think I need to be coy. UFOlogists who hold out that UFOs may be of human, perhaps secret military origin sound like “cDesign proponentsists” who say the Intelligent Designer might not be God. Who are they kidding? But in reality, alien visitation is hardly any less improbable than the hand of God tickling our DNA. Science fiction has made us ignorant of the real limits of the universe, with hyperdrive-equipped X-Wings and antimatter-fueled starships in every adventure show ever to sew sequins onto black velvet and hang it outside the set’s window.

Space is unimaginably vast—no, I'm saying that literally, your visual cortex can’t accurately model it but I appreciate the effort. Plus, the universe doesn’t just have a speed limit, it actually cheats. To accelerate a midsized car to two-thirds the speed of light would take all the energy in all the power plants in the entire country for one year, assuming you could translate that to kinetic energy with magical 100% efficiency. Two years’ worth doesn’t get you to one-and-a-third lightspeed, because when you go very fast, you start gaining mass, so that it takes much more energy just to get you going faster in progressively smaller increments. It’s not fair! Then, when you get where you’re going, you’ve got to burn exactly as much energy again just to slow down. Your best option is to accelerate constantly to halfway, then turn around and blast your engine in reverse, so that you zero out just as you arrive. It doesn't matter what your engine runs on or what breakthrough your hive-brother Snrxlvbrrr made to build it.

Ships in science fiction don’t seem to lug around gas, either. It took a skyscraper of rocket fuel just to send three humans to our own moon, and almost all of that fuel was used just to move fuel. The more you carry, the more you need just to get what you’re already carrying in motion, for which you need more fuel, for which you need more fuel, etc. Needless to say, we have not seen any decelerating fusion torches pointed directly at our planet from deep in the sky, as city-sized ships, mostly empty fuel storage, decelerate from turnover, coasting to a stop where they detach comparatively tiny habitation modules to flit mysteriously around small rural towns. Interstellar travel is unsexy.

To sum up, we never know whether UFOs are really there or not, we wouldn’t know in advance what to look for if they were, there’s no good reason to think that there are in the first place, and no plausible technology for them to use to get here because General Relativity and the Laws of Motion just aren't amenable to large-scale space travel. I have heard one UFO enthusiast opine that perhaps the laws of relativity are wrong, and faster-than-light travel isn’t known to be impossible, and that about sums up for me that it’s a completely faith-based belief. If they’re so wedded to their preconceived desire that they’re willing to play fast and loose with the fabric of the universe, then their cognitive process is well and truly off the rails.

A Moment

Today, while washing my hands, just for fun I laid my thumb and forefinger together and drew them apart until just my fingertips were touching. The film thus encircled by my thumbs and fingers fascinated me for over a full minute. Which is quite a long time, if you were to contemplate simply standing there with the water running.

I marveled at it. So much chaos! So much swirling, turbulent complexity! So unpredictable, so unrepeatable, so unique and strange. And yet a moment of beauty. I saw bands and hurricanes of color, fuchsia and teal; oxblood and goldenrod; cobalt and argent and emerald.

I mused over how such transcendent complexity emerged from such simple elements: The interaction of water and detergent, whose properties are so simple and even naturally occurring. The movement of liquids confined in two dimensions. The wavelengths of light captured from the fluorescent tubes overhead. Even as I watched, even as I held my hands at a slight angle to catch the light, I saw order emerging, after a fashion. The swirling colors differentiated, organizing themselves into bands which, though storms and vortexes troubled their borders, were nevertheless distinct. Near my thumbs, chartreuse and ruby currents danced around each other. Above them, an almost-crimson in a shade I'd never seen and didn't know existed. Above that a deep blue, and above that, a triangle of straw-colored light nestled under my forefingers.

Reluctantly, I slowly opened my fingertips. I watched the film pull on the foam that held its rim, sliding the tiny bubbles aside until they parted. And then it was gone, as though it had never been. It never needed to have been there in the first place. Its unique beauty would never be captured or seen again, and no part of it remains except the memory of a moment.

Any further implication is left as an exercise for the reader.

A Dialogue

Skeptical Rationalist: So, you're a Christian?
John Doe:That's right. I believe that Jesus died for our sins.
SR: Well, that's interesting. Let me ask you this. Do you believe in heaven?
JD: Of course!
SR: How about hell?
JD: Well, I don't know. Some people say that hell is separation from god, or it's just you cease to exist. We don't know.
SR: Well, it's in the book, the everlasting fire, all that. I mean, is Hitler just "separated from God?"
JD: All right, I suppose.
SR: Hold that thought. If somebody offered to let you be on a jury for a murderer who's obviously guilty. Enough that the trial is going to be pretty short. Do you think you would, if the per diem didn't put you in hardship?
JD: Okay.
SR: And you'd send him to jail if that's what the truth was.
JD: Yeah.
SR: And he deserves that.
JD: At least that much.
SR: So, going back to Hitler, if he'd lived to stand trial for his crimes, he'd deserve to go to jail or be executed, right? And you'd be okay with it.
JD: Yes.
SR: At any rate, he died before he was captured, so let's assume Hitler's in hell, right?
JD: Sure. He started a war that killed millions, and tried to exterminate any people that weren't part of his master race.
SR: What was the death toll overall...Let's say fifty million deaths can be laid at his feet.
JD: I guess. Hell is hell, right?
SR: Well, answer me this: how many trillion years will Adolf Hitler be tortured for each single death?
JD: Forever is forever...
SR: Exactly. After a thousand thousand trillion years, after every star has burnt out, he still won't have paid for one percent of the first death on his conscience. No matter what, he will never be finished paying for his crimes, right?
JD: Well...no. There'll never be a time ever when he won't have killed all those people.
SR: At least he'll have Anne Frank to keep him company. She was a Jew, right, so she's in hell.
JD: Well, no, the Jews were God's chosen people.
SR: But if you look at the Bible, that was a limited time offer. Once Jesus came, he said "no man comes to the father except through me."
JD: Well, it's really up to God, I guess.
SR: Maybe. Let me ask you another question.
JD: Okay.
SR: Do you remember that plane from New York that crashed on the Hudson River after takeoff? The pilot brought it down on its belly, and all the passengers and crew were saved?
JD: Yeah, that was a miracle!
SR: Perhaps. But the pilot was a hero, right?
JD: Sure.
SR: You ever think you would buy him a drink for that, if you ran into him and knew who he was?
JD: I might.
SR: He'd deserve it, right?
JD: Yeah, I suppose he does.
SR: Great. Now, stay with me here: I'm not a Christian. I don't believe in God, I don't believe that Jesus died for my sins. That's pretty bad, right?
JD: Well, I certainly hope that you let Jesus into your heart some day.
SR: But if I died right now, I'd go to hell, right?
JD: Well, that's up to God. It's not my place to say.
SR: But according to what the book says.
JD: Yeah, I mean, if you died today, you'd go to hell. We're all sinners, I just have Jesus to forgive me.
SR: So I hear. All right, do you see that pair of pliers there? Go ahead and pick those up.
JD: Why?
SR: Well, I want you to use them to grab hold of my fingernail, tear it back, and then pull it out by the root.
JD: No way! You're crazy!
SR: What, you don't want to?
JD: No!
SR: But I deserve it, right?
JD: Why?
SR: Because if I died right now, that would be the least of my tortures. I'd be thrown into the lake of fire just for starters.
JD: Yeah, but that doesn't mean you deserve it now!
SR: I could be dead five minutes from now. What would I have done in the meantime?
JD: But it's God's choice whether you do or not! It's not up to me what happens to you!
SR: But you'd send a mass murderer to jail. You'd hand the death penalty to Adolf Hitler. And you're okay with rewarding courage and virtue if you got the chance and it didn't inconvenience you.
JD: Yeah, why not?
SR: So, back to the pliers then. On the count of three...
JD: No!
SR: What's different? I'm a sinful person, according to your book. It says any man who is angry, has committed murder in his heart. Any man who looks on a woman with desire, has committed adultery in his heart. For my many sins, I deserve to be tortured forever, and I'm just saying to give me a bit of what I've got coming to me. Don't I deserve it?
JD: It's not my place to say!
SR: Do I deserve to have my fingernails pulled out, my skin peeled off, my flesh burned?
JD: Just stop! You're talking about what happens when you sin against God. He's the judge!
SR: Oh, but that’s the beauty of it. It’s already done. You see, he already knows everything I’ve ever done or ever will do, and whoever does not believe stands condemned already: John three-eighteen. Unless you don’t think I deserve to have my fingernails ripped out. Unless you don’t think I deserve exactly the same hell that Hitler and Anne Frank have. You might want to think about it.