What's in a word?

A friend of mine posted the meme shown below along with this comment:

The willful ignorance of true science that leads one to believe that the universe is intelligently designed and the stubborn rejection of the notion that there is a God that requires obedience.

I should note that my friend believes the Bible to be 100% compatible with science. So when he referred to "true science that leads one to believe that the universe is intelligently designed", you should understand the phrase in that light. For him, "true science" means "biblical science".

I responded as follows:

If you have a beef with cosmology, take it up with cosmologists. If you disagree with the claims of biology, then, by all means, engage with biologists. Ditto, the laws of physics. But once and for all, can we please stop glomming on to atheism all these unrelated notions?

Throughout history, humans have worshipped thousands, perhaps millions of different gods. You, friend, are an atheist with respect to every single one of those gods, but one. And a good number of those gods were claimed to be the one true and living God.

Why don't you believe in those gods? Well, largely because neither you nor anybody else remembers anything about them. But do you feel some responsibility to seriously study every one of their claims before you definitely reject them? I would be surprised if you did. You have too much sense for that. If one of these gods comes up in conversation, such as Zeus or Quetzalcoatl or Hanuman the monkey god, I imagine you place it in the same cognitive bucket as all the rest -- the "Mythical Creations Of The Human Imagination For Which There Is No Evidence" bucket.

Because of this, if you were to suddenly travel to the time and place where one of these gods was worshipped, obeyed, and sacrificed or murdered for, you would be considered an outcast or a heretic or an infidel for your heathen unbelief. You would be considered that most maligned of beings, An Atheist.

The people you dismiss, deride and mock for their unbelief in the God that you worship are exactly the same as you, except they have one more drop in their "Mythical Creations Of The Human Imagination For Which There Is No Evidence" bucket. That is all an atheist is, nothing more or less.

And regarding your equating the term "true science" to things found in the Bible, I must ask you to desist. You're only embarrassing yourself. There was an entire civilization that believed the notion that the universe was created by the epic ejaculation of a deity. Otherwise rational people killed or died in defense of this notion. Your claim that the bible contains "true science" is exactly equivalent to that civilization's beliefs.

This is not a question of which God is right. That is an unanswerable question and one for which millions have suffered torture and death because they have had the wrong opinion.

It is rather a question of epistemology. That is, which method we use for deciding what is Truth. I know you don't like that word, but it's the best one we have. It is the question that asks "should we form conclusions based on verifiable, testable, falsifiable facts and evidence" or "should we form our conclusion first and then choose or make the facts fit the conclusion"?

The former has given us every technological advance we enjoy in this world. The latter has given us millennia of war and bloodshed. So please, stop labeling people as ignorant or stubborn or evil who think the former is superior to the latter.

 

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A Belief in Belief

I have observed that evidence is inconsequential, one might even say irrelevant, to religious believers. When confronted with facts that appear to contradict their belief, I have observed people exhibiting a whole range of reactions. On the extreme 'accepting' end, my favorite type of comment is the mind-bending "this only serves to deepen my faith." On the extreme 'rejecting' end, my favorite comments are the ones that claim it is all the result of a conspiracy.

The common factor is that no evidence, however high the quality, however great the quantity, however reliable and disinterested the source, would ever suffice to alter the person's convictions.

This is because, at its root, religious belief is an epistemological approach to life where the conclusion is concrete and the facts are malleable. So, when confronted with a fact or claim, a person with this approach to belief will do whatever it takes to ensure that the conclusion is not ever jeopardized. Any claim, however incredible, that supports the conclusion will often be accepted with total credulity. Any claim that contradicts the conclusion, will be subjected to the utmost skepticism or simply rejected out of hand, or rationalized away, or treated as a lie, or disposed of in some other way. Or the presenter of that fact will be discounted as evil or 'anti' or having some other characteristic that nullifies his credibility.

This approach is the opposite of the scientific method, in which facts are concrete and the conclusion malleable.

When interacting with religious believers, then, if your aim is to persuade them that their conclusion is incorrect, the stating of facts or evidence does not advance your purpose. Every fact will ultimately end up supporting their conclusion either because it directly favors it or because it reinforces the notion that contrary facts must be the inventions of detractors.

To have any hope of success in curing people of belief, you must help them realize that their epistemological approach to life is faulty and ultimately harmful. The key is to help them start to wonder why 99% of their life is governed by the scientific approach, but the religious aspects are not. Many people don't see this until it is pointed out to them. They must start to wonder why it is necessary for them to suspend the faculty of reason and the standard rules of evidence in order to maintain their belief. They must ask themselves what type of person stands to benefit most from unquestioned belief: an honest one or a charlatan.

Only when one willingly accepts and embraces the notion that the epistemology of belief is faulty will one be amenable to altering one's conclusion to fit the facts and not vice-versa. It is at this point and only at this point that it becomes a productive exercise to introduce actual facts, evidence and logical reasoning. Of course once that epistemological shift occurs, the person usually no longer needs you to point out your evidence. He or she will seek it with more avidity and hunger than even you have.

 

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A Religion of Peace

No religion remains peaceful for long when it can manage to get political power for itself. It's like an 8 year old who steals the car keys or finds a loaded gun.

Islam differs from Christianity only in the fine details of its doctrines. But those details are entirely irrelevant. It's all the product of human invention from stem to stern.

The salient point - the only point, really - is that the adherents of religion remove Reason and Empiricism from their rightful throne and replace them with something else. It does not matter whether that something else is reverence for the mythological stories of illiterate nomadic goat herders, belief in the healing power of crystals, blind obedience to Chairman Mao, or the worship of an invisible Chameleon who poops Reese's Pieces.

Any ideology, however well-intentioned, that uses something other than observable, testable, falsifiable reality as the basis for its epistemology can be hijacked and used by the unscrupulous to gain power over the ignorant or the unwary. And when that happens, there is no knowing how bad the outcome will be. It can be mild and localized badness like a shunning, or it can be widespread and deadly badness, like the formation of the Soviet Union.

If a religion does manage to accomplish something good, it's only because of some amazing bit of good luck. But notice that, for every religion, the best one can ever hope for is that the good will outweigh the bad by some narrow margin.

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The Walls that Divide

Someone in a Facebook group I follow recently said that a family member posted this quote on their wall:

This person was wondering how to respond. I replied as follows:

I've rarely seen a more perfect example of how people's worldview filters can make it extremely difficult to communicate. In the Believer's worldview, 'faith' is a word that has only positive connotations. It is the epitome of goodness, righteousness, and what to strive for. 'Doubt', as the opposite of faith and its destroyer, is naturally vilified.

In the Skeptic's or the Non-believer's worldview, 'faith' is the epitome of all that is wrong with the world and 'doubt', as expressed in Robert Weston's famous poem quoted above, is a cherished virtue.

With this in mind, one can easily see how Elder Holland's quote is a perfect illustration of how clashing worldviews can present an obstacle to communication. When believers read this message, they see it as an affirmation of what is good and right. When non-believers read it, they see it as the worst sort of demagoguery.

So, my advice is to consider the source. The bigger person will respond to the intention behind the message and not to the message itself. I think this message might have had a positive intent before being encrypted by the sender's 'believing worldview' key. Then when you received the message and decrypted it with your 'non-believer worldview' key, the message came out garbled and its original good intent was obscured. To put it another way, passive-aggressive is often only in the eye of the beholder. To put it yet another way, "never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity" (Hanlon's razor).

With all that said, the bigger person can easily wind up being the doormat. The key to avoiding this is for all participants to transcend their respective worldviews and realize that a worldview is not the world. Giving the benefit of the doubt can help this. Putting yourself in the other's shoes can help also. But these are things only you can do. You can't force the other person to do this, especially if they're convinced they're right and you're wrong.

Sometimes it's possible to find a way to help the other person be more 'meta'. That is to say, help them realize that (1) a worldview is not the world, (2) they're stuck in their own worldview, (3) you have a different worldview, and (4) communication will go more smoothly if you both can rise up from behind the walls of your respective worldviews and converse directly. This is so much easier said than done, but sometimes it is enough to point out the existence the worldview walls to make the other person see them for the trap that they are.

 

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The Really Big Picture

This fascinating video about galactic superclusters recently came to my attention and the person who posted the link said it made him more than ever convinced that intelligent design must be involved in the organization of the universe.

I had to respond thus:

Everywhere I look with my mind and imagination, from the subatomic to the cosmic supercluster of galaxies, I perceive the incomparable power of the interaction of physical laws, each operating blindly, relentlessly, and with unerring precision in its sphere of influence. The end result is an impossibly grand yet mind-bogglingly intricate self-organizing dance of Newtonian cause and effect, Heisenbergian uncertainty, and Einsteinian relativity (among any number of other things I'm sure I'm not aware of).

In the infancy of our species, we conjured up an unending menagerie of omnipowerful beings in an effort to explain what we had not yet developed the tools to understand. This need to understand and to find the reasons things happen, part of our genetic endowment, conferred an important survival advantage and was part of how and why we evolved consciousness. It explains why we invented endless different gods. Now, thanks to hundreds of transformative inventions like the scientific method, books, microscopes, and telescopes, we are able to understand more things, more thoroughly than we ever have. In case after case -- every case, actually -- things we had long thought were the result of supernatural power were really only the result of the mundane interaction of discoverable, testable laws that arise naturally from the fundamental properties of energy/matter and space/time.

Now we understand that our world, that seems so big in comparison with us, is just one of a hundred billion, being pulled along by gravity around the center of our average-sized galaxy, also just one of the hundred billion of its sibling galaxies whose light has had time to reach us. We have no way of knowing how many others lie outside our light cone. We are as tiny to the universe as hydrogen atoms are tiny to us.

It is now time for us to let go of the insecurity and immaturity that keeps us from understanding and accepting our true place in the cosmos. Inventing deities no longer becomes us. They ceased to serve a valid purpose many centuries ago and now the mindset that created them has become the greatest impediment to our physical, moral, and ethical development as a species. When we impose the narrow limits of our minds, our customs, our imperfect notions of justice and mercy and morality on the cosmos through the intermediary of deities we invent, we only hamper and do ourselves a grave disservice. The sooner we see this, the better off we will be.

For the first four and a half decades of my life, Mormon theology did indeed shape my understanding of many things, cosmology included. I have outgrown that theology and now the cosmos has become incomparably more beautiful, more interesting, and more awe-inspiring since I stopped imagining I held a privileged place in it. To lose that terrible misconception was the greatest awakening and the premier transformative event of my life.

 

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If Any Limb Offend Thee

With regard to excommunication, I don't think anyone necessarily disputes the church's right to exclude people from among its ranks for publicly questioning it. Mostly, I think, people are just lamenting the fact that it has become a place that finds it necessary to do so. It used not to be this way. The church has altered significantly since the 70s when I grew up. It has gone, metaphorically, from an "employee owned and operated" enterprise to a strictly hierarchical command-and-control model that, it appears, brooks no insubordination.

Also, we obscure much when we say "the church does this" or "the church does that". Churches are not animate objects that "do" things. What this type of speaking obscures is the fact that WE are the church. If there's any doing of deeds, it is people who are doing them. In this case, what it boils down to is that some people in the church are deciding to kick other people out of the church.

The people ordering or doing the kicking out consider themselves authorized and justified in do so. Perhaps they are. We all understand how the church is set up. "Mine house is a house of order, saith the Lord." And in this house of order, power and authority flow, in one direction only, from the person at the top of the org chart, through various intermediate layers, and finally down to the worker bees.

It is generally assumed that the source of that power and authority is divine. Perhaps it is. But perhaps it is more accurate to say that the source of power is really people's *belief* that it is divine -- a subtle but important difference.

Either way, the hierarchical nature of the church makes it impossible to tell the difference between what is actually the Lord's will and the personal agenda of someone authorized to act in the name of The Lord. Of course we always have the option to ask The Lord directly for a testimony that a church leader is acting properly, but note that it is never, ever acceptable for the answer to be "no". And so, there is no way for people lower down the hierarchy to discover and remove corruption from a location higher up. Such an action, if it ever comes, could only come from above in the hierarchy.

However, we have learned as a people, through hard experience, the immutable law that any governing structure really derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. In the case of the church, this takes the form of belief on the members' part that The Lord is in control. Regardless of whether that's true, if the members suddenly ceased to believe it, the orderly hierarchy of control would cease to function.

And belief, it turns out, is a precarious thing to maintain in these days of Information. So the hierarchy, in order to maintain its legitimacy feels compelled to act when threatened by the prospect of unbelief. That is why public disagreement becomes an excommunicable offense.

The problem is that the sword of excommunication, which at one time could be wielded with impunity, is no longer the tool it used to be. The people in the hierarchy of control now run the terrible risk of appearing to be a self-serving organization interested only in maintaining their position of power. If a critical mass of the church members were to place such an interpretation on this event, who knows what the consequences would be?

In any case, "the church" is stuck between a rock and a hard place. The legitimacy of the strict hierarchy of the church is increasingly imperiled by the free flow of information. But to decentralize is also not without significant risks. Since the church -- any church -- largely exists because of the willing belief of its members, it must tread lightly lest in its efforts to maintain order it cut off too many valiant members who also happen to be independent thinkers and/or can't fit into the sanctioned gender molds.

Far better in the long run, I think, to expand the tent even at the risk of offending its hard-core base. Of course it is precisely that base that is in firm control right now, so that will not happen easily. But we have seen what pressure can be brought to bear by people voting with their feet. I hope things turn out for the best.

 

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Just imagine what you'll know tomorrow

As a "computer guy", I have frequently had people ask me to help them with their hardware or software problems. Many of the people I have helped have made statements like this: "this computer doesn't like me" or "this stupid thing is cursed" or "sometimes it just does that for no reason".

These are all statements of faith or belief, not statements of fact. Every time I have looked deeply into their claims of seemingly inexplicable behavior, I have invariably found the root cause to be a mundane one: user behavior, environmental factors, software defects, etc.

In this context, people's statements of belief are the result of ignorance, lack of expertise, or just being too lazy or not caring enough to get to the bottom of the problem.

I think that in the case of religious belief there is a similar but not identical phenomenon at work. People who believe that God exists start with the idea in their head that inexplicable things may sometimes be accounted for by the Will of God. They are willing, even anxious, to discover the hand of a benevolent deity at work in their lives. The very fact of this belief is sufficient to stop them from looking more deeply into the reasons why things around them happen. Someone overcomes an addiction? It's God's hand at work. But if you look deeply, I absolutely guarantee that you'll find it's really something like a change in neural wiring or brain chemistry that did the trick.

Ever since the introduction of conscious cognition in our genome, we humans have been trying to figure out why things are the way they are. Before we discovered the existence of the invisible world of microorganisms, we were perplexed and baffled by the appearance of illness and disease. Why did people get sick and die all the time? Our indomitable drive to identify cause and effect led us to conclude the existence of evil spirits, arbitrary deities, or other supernatural hypotheses to try to account for the seeming randomness of life because we simply could find no other explanation.

When Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology, first looked through a lens and discovered the first hints of existence of this unseen world, it forever altered our perception of illness and disease. From that point onward, we were in possession of knowledge that would forever banish the need to resort to supernatural explanations about illness and disease. As of that moment it officially became a cop-out to say "God did it" in reference to bodily sickness.

That pattern of the natural displacing the supernatural has continued consistently over the centuries. Whenever we have bothered to get to the root of any problem or previously unexplained occurrence, we have always, Always, ALWAYS found that the root cause could be explained by the regular action of discoverable, testable laws that arise naturally as an inevitable consequence of the fundamental properties of matter/energy/space/time. Not once, not one single time, have we ever been forced to conclude that something has been the result of an arbitrarily powerful deity.

So when I hear people testify that they "know" this or that thing that God has done, I am deeply cognizant of how that type of non-fact-based thinking is inherently impermanent and unreliable. To quote the great line from the movie, Men in Black: "Just imagine what you'll 'know' tomorrow."

 

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