It just might be a one-shot deal

Part 2 of answering to answering these questions from Dr. Michael L. Brown

Dr. Brown's questions are:

1. Is Your Atheism Based on Study or Experience?
2. Do You Have Purpose and Destiny?
3. Does God Exist?
4. Can Science Explain the Origin of Life?
5. Have You Questioned Your Atheism?
6. Are You Materialistic?
7. Would You Be Willing to Follow God?

This afternoon's offering is #1 - Is Your Atheism Based on Study or Experience?

Both.

I grew up in a nominally Christian household, but my father was Lutheran by family tradition, and a non-participant in practice. My mother was Episcopalian by choice, so we children assumed that the Episcopal church was our flavor of Christianity. I did not have a fervent belief in God or Jesus until around age 21, when I became Born Again and joined a Four Square Pentecostal church. I aspired to be the best Christian I could be, and started by reading the New Testament word-for-word. So far, so good ... Jesus was the man. 

The next step was to get the background that (I assumed) only the Old Testament could give me, so I read that word-for-word as well. This is where the trouble starts. To paraphrase Richard Dawkins (of whom I was not familiar until 25 years later), Yahweh was a reprehensible character, and his actions absolutely betrayed what fellow believers told me I should believe about him. How could Jesus represent this cosmic dick? It was time for a quick reassurance that Jesus was good, and that Yahweh was not that relevant to one's place in the world and potential salvation. So I reread the New Testament.

After reading NT, then OT, then NT again in fairly quick succession (8-12 months?), I stepped away to get perspective. Far away. It would be another ten years before I would reconsider my rapid conversion, then deconversion. 

In brief, Round 2 was circa 1985, and included another reading of OT, then NT in fairly crisp order. I may have had a little outside study - it would have been only about who wrote the Bible, and when, but it did not reaffirm my earlier faith that God exists and that Jesus would save my soul.

Round 3 was mid-1990's, and occurred after I had gotten married. Same result as mid-90's, added by more internetz to highlight some of the issues (problems) such as the Synoptic Problem. I don't know that my wife ever knew about any of this until the last 10 or 15 years. She, btw, was never a believer, but neither did she consider herself an atheist. She just saw no reason for belief.

Round 4 was circa 2011, OT then NT again, and included an on-line Bible study group of both atheists and believers. I also took on-line courses (Yale videos, Great Courses CDs) and still more independent roaming the internetz.

That is it for me. There will be no more agonizing re-appraisal of religious beliefs. The idea that this is a physical universe behaving in accordance with observed "laws", and contains nothing supernatural, does not trouble me. To quote the great philosopher Frank Zappa, "it just might be a one-shot deal".

I can be wrong about some or all of this, but I don't think so. I don't see a reason to waste time on worry.

Questions about atheism.

 I ran across a tweet in my Twitter "Thinkers" list that got me thinking. Darn the luck!

A response by @RealAtheology (here)  to some questions by @DrMichaelLBrown got my blood going, and serves as an excuse to continue the train of thought that I left at the station in 2016 (here)

Dr. Brown's questions are:

1. Is Your Atheism Based on Study or Experience?
2. Do You Have Purpose and Destiny?
3. Does God Exist?
4. Can Science Explain the Origin of Life?
5. Have You Questioned Your Atheism?
6. Are You Materialistic?
7. Would You Be Willing to Follow God?

Although no one asked my opinion, I'll consider question 3 to be "Does God Exist?", and touch on the others in another post soon.

Since I can't say definitely that God does or does not exist, I'll consider it as a evaluation of my belief that the proposition "God Exists" is true.

First, I use the term "belief" as meaning "a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing". Specifically "a state of mind in which confidence is placed in some thing" ... the "thing" being the proposition that God exists.

Assuming that absolute knowledge is not possible, and that absolute certainty is thereby not possible, I end up establishing a credence value in the range 0.01 to 0.99, much as you might see a probability value expressed for some scientific topic. Mind you, I don't do this every day. Ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine percent of the time, "credence" and "probability" are just not things that pop into my head.

So, about that credence.

For this post, I presume God to be the omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, omnipotent creator of the universe and judge of all mankind. Let's examine only what the "creator of the universe" part means. First, if I accept that Genesis is notionally worthwhile as a starting point, God exists before the world does. That presents us with a puzzle, since we have to presume there is a realm occupied by God in order to perform the work of creating the heavens, the earth and all of creation. Taken literally, Genesis 1:1 through 1:31 doesn't reflect what humanity knows to be the case. What do we do?

It's here that I might estimate whether Genesis through verse 31 has a high likelihood of being true. It's helpful to have some other benchmark that can be used for comparison, so that, for example, claim A.1 can be said to be more or less likely than competing claim B.1.

Let A.1 be "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.". Then let B.1 be "The universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature."

Claim A.1 has as a prerequisite that there be a thing called God, while B.1 requires that there be space-time, matter and energy, and the physical laws that describe the interaction, structure and behavior of these. Right off the bat, we are presented with the bare assertion that God exists, in order to get to Genesis 1:1, the creation of the heavens and the earth. Likewise, the believer should ask, why is the pre-existence of "space-time, matter and energy...etc"  any more plausible? In both cases, you need a starting point.

At this point, you could make the claim that God is a simpler proposition than "space-time, matter and energy, and the physical laws that describe the interaction, structure and behavior of these" - thus Occam's Razor tells us God is a better starting point. But that's a gross over-simplification of God.

If we're being fair, claim B.1's prerequisites are also at question. Where did they come from? The main Big Bang models (the expansion of space; particle horizons; thermalization) do not make claims as to the provenance of the Big Bang prerequisites, but they can be observed and measured so that we can verify that they pertain in all cases. Can we put God on that same footing? Let's try.

Given that the prerequisites for claim B.1 are assumed to be real because they can always be verified under close examination, can we then make the claim that "God is assumed to be real because it can always be verified under close examination?"

This is where we run into a problem. For someone that conceives of reality as space-time, matter, energy and physical laws that describe them - no corresponding description of God - that I can find - is testable and would yield a confirmation. It sounds labored and dismissive to say, but proponents of God's existence never walk over to a window and point to God  directly. They never point to a flower and say God made that, and here's how. They never hop into a car and drive you to an institute of higher education and sho off the observations that could lead us to verify God's existence. Yet, you can go to a biologist and ask them to describe how the flower germinates and blooms, how it propagates for reproduction so that its species can persist. They can describe the chemistry that is required to perform these activities, or can defer to chemists who can explain the chemical activities in detail. The chemists can refer to the physics that describe how chemicals come to be, and cosmologists can then describe how the elements and molecules, monomers and polymers come to be so that chemical processes can take place. Cosmologists can also describe how the structures of the universe - stars, galaxies, planets, comets, asteroids etc. - come into existence. All of this can be traced back to a hot dense state in the universe some 13.8 billion years ago. 

So you can "net it out" by comparing the two claims and how well they explain the features and behavior of the universe. Claim A.1 relies on God, whose existence is more or less proposed in the Hebrew Bible, and assumed to be true by Hebrews, Christians and Muslims. God is assumed to be responsible for, or a participant in the narrative put forth in the Old and New Testaments and the Koran. You can somewhat infer what God is and what his leanings are by the writings in these books, but it is neither accurate, precise nor consistent in the way that a description of a chemical process (derived from claim B.1 and its results) is.

On this basis alone, I feel that God - as described in the Bible - very likely does not exist.

Hello World - 2022 version

I've spent more than six years not blogging. Is "not blogging" an activity that one can be said to spend time on?

One of the things I noticed this morning (Monday, 9/26/22) is how good it made me feel to consider a topic, draft an outline, and fill it out so that it says (what I hope is...) what I intended when I first conceived it. I'm a little rusty, but we'll see how it turns out.

Post #2 in this decade ... coming up shortly.

Validating God - for Dummies

I, the believer, get to define God.

Not completely, but I take what I have heard from my parents, my siblings, the kids in the neighborhood, and my Sunday School teachers, and I fashion a mental picture of God that may - or may not - resemble other concepts of God that others may have. Does my God-Concept match the one in the Bible? Maybe a little, but I’ll discover decades later the problem with that. Does my GC match the God of classical theism? You must be kidding! I won’t know what that is for another 30 or 40 years.

If and when I try to validate my GC against reality, you can imagine what I’ll come up with. If there’s a "Standard", mine won’t be it. Regardless of how far my God-Concept deviates from some norm, if I want to be justifiably confident of my GC, I should frame it as a hypothesis that can be compared against the real world to assess its validity.

As a bonus, developing a justificatory argument that defends my view of the proposition “God exists” prepares me to win hearts and change minds should I ever bring it out into public to debate a dissenter, and also helps me to identify gaps, weaknesses and outright flaws. Who knows, I might have to modify or discard some or all of my GC and adopt a new one that provides a better explanatory framework!

Now, where do I start? How can I test my God hypothesis against the real world to verify its plausibility? I’ll start with something accessible to me, like how often God answers prayers. Granted, this ability is not explicitly embodied in a “classical” definition of God, but seeing as how I don’t expect to see her, him, it as a physical person, the answering of prayers is the closest the lay person can get to detecting God's existence.

So ... I pray. And sometimes my prayers are answered - HALLELUJAH! But if I’m honest with myself, is it an expected result? Should I expect that a prayer is answered on occasion? Could there be a simpler explanation? Of course, so let’s try something tougher - let’s try praying for an amputee’s limb to be restored. And - as we know - this never happens. It. Never. Happens. So we have a negative result on our test of the hypothesis that God answers prayers. But there’s a snappy rejoinder to this disconfirmstion of God’s existence, the ever-useful “But God works in mysterious ways”. And the counter to that inane bit of apologia is that you’ve just declared God to be an unreliable subject for observation. Which means we can’t know anything about her. Which means we don’t know if God has our best interests in mind. Or which means we don’t know whether God is interested in us at all. Or which means God could be a trickster, or evil, or not there at all, because when we declare “But God works in mysterious ways”, we’ve pretty much ruled out any hope of doing more than speculating. So maybe we should shut up a while.

While there is lots more to be said here, I’ve summarized my initial thoughts on validating my (hypothetical) God-Concept. Keeping in mind the problems of reliability in going from a real-world occurrence to a human perception, to a human interpretation and eventual rationalization, you can see how many hurdles we face when trying to justify that the God that you (or I) believe to be real actually exists

A Natural Model of the Universe

I was reminded by SecularOutpost about a paper from Physicist Sean M. Carroll titled Why (Almost All) Cosmologists Are Atheists.

I’ve reread the entire paper twice in the last several days because I admire what Carroll says AND how he says it. One paragraph has always jumped out at me. Read it for yourself below, then I’ll explain why.

The essence of materialism is to model the world as a formal system, which is both unambiguous and complete as a description of reality. A materialist model may be said to consist of four elements. First, we model the world as some formal (mathematical) structure. (General relativity describes the world as a curved manifold with a Lorentzian metric, while quantum mechanics describes the world as a state in some Hilbert space. As a more trivial example, we could imagine a universe which consisted of nothing other that an infinitely long list of ”bits” taking on the values 0 or 1.) Second, this structure exhibits patterns (the ”laws of nature”), so that the amount of information needed to express the world is dramatically less than the structure would in principle allow. (In a world described by a string of bits, we might for example find that the bits were an infinitely repeated series of a single one followed by two zeroes: 100100100100…) Third, we need boundary conditions which specify the specific realization of the pattern. (The first bit in our list is a one.) Note that the distinction between the patterns and their boundary conditions is not perfectly well-defined; this is an issue which becomes relevant in cosmology, and we’ll discuss it more later. Finally, we need a way to relate this formal system to the world we see: an ”interpretation.”

Back when I stopped being Christian in the ’70’s, I still retained this slight suspicion that reality still contained some supernatural aspect. Years later, as I tried to assemble a somewhat accurate picture of reality, I backed in to the idea that the universe that I can observe consists of space and time (later, “spacetime”), matter and energy, and exhibits behaviors that could be observed, and could help me to validate my mental picture of it. Naturally, I tried to imagine where supernatural things might fit into this picture.

I once thought it obvious that there could be only a few ways to reconcile the supernatural with the natural. 1) the supernatural is the framework upon which the other things rest. 2) we exist wholly within some supernatural environment. 3) the supernatural is separate, but somehow meaningful in ways that are unclear. 4) we - and the universe - ARE wholly supernatural, and we just don’t recognize it (Or refuse to acknowledge it). Clearly some of these ideas overlap, but that’s what I can recall.

Once I had my framework for thinking about the universe to validate my (4) suspicions on what the supernatural might be, ideas of supernatural agency in the universe started to drop by the wayside. By the start of the new millenium, this informal process was complete - I was functionally - if not consciously - atheist. So what’s that have to do with Carroll’s paper?

When I read Why (Almost All) Cosmologists Are Atheists a few years ago, it validated the approach I had taken to arrive at a naturalistic world view. The specific paragraph that I quote above, although more eloquent and more complete than I was thinking, essentially turns into this for laypeople like me:

1. describe what entities there are in your system
   
2. describe how they behave
   
3. define the extent of the system
   
4. compare your model to reality and articulate it for review
   

Easy as pie!

Objective Moral Values - the 2016 Edition

I tried to post the following on The Secular Outpost , but Disqus yakked up a hairball when I tried to log in, so I’m posting it here. Read the post first, if you’d like context. Jeffrey Jay Lowder was inviting an open discussion on objective moral values.

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I’m with the “approachable scientifically” contingent.

As a non-philosopher, I get stuck on the term “objective”. Given that objective means true or false regardless of what people think about it, and that morality is a body of standards regarding right and wrong behavior, then I can imagine some spongy “globally recognized standards” that might obtain for long periods of time. I find truly objective morality - true or false regardless of what observers think about it, presumably eternally - impossible to pin down without stipulating some bedrock thing(s) that we agree not to investigate further.

I can envision it boiling down to this: We procreate, and adopt behaviors that make procreation more likely. To become social, we adopted more complex behavior to help families, kin, clans and communities thrive. So, I might be able to derive some objective moral values and duties that apply universally, eternally to basic social creatures.

If that is what we’re trying to discover, then yes, I’m convinced that objective moral values exist, as a set of properties and behaviors of biological creatures that succeed at being social.

Once we move beyond that, it starts to appear to this untrained eye as a bunch of engineering exercises performed by people with different outlooks and goals. Thought-provoking, but abstract.

Lrrr's Toothpick

I can’t remember what caused this to pop into my head, but it’s stuck. So I need to get it out.

Russell’s Teapot

is an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims rather than shifting the burden of proof to others, specifically in the case of religion.

It (kinda) takes the form “I claim there’s a china teapot orbiting the sun between the Earth and Mars. You can’t disprove it, therefore I expect you to accept that my assertion is true”.

Since claims of God and lesser supernatural things often take this general form, it surprised me to hear - not too long ago - a theistically-inclined correspondent claim that you could in principle prove that said teapot does not orbit the sun as described, thus the analogy does not apply to God (so if Russell's Teapot is your go-to rejoinder to the claim that God exists, well, you’ve failed, Mister Godless Heathen).

Huh?

When Russell first brought this analogy into the public consciousness c. 1952, it was in practice impossible to disprove the existence of the teapot. The technology didn’t yet exist, and certainly the will and resources to undertake such a low reward endeavor didn’t (and still don’t) exist. But wait - there’s more!

The Russell's Teapot analogy is actually too narrow in scope, given what we know about the cosmos today, if you take it literally. Which you shouldn’t. Because it’s an analogy.

Scale the analogy up to fit the cosmos that we observe today, and you could claim that there’s a pure diamond toothpick that was once owned by Lrrr, Ruler of Omicron Persei 8, that now floats freely between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy. In principle, it could be verified. In practice - extremely unlikely!

That crystallizes what I think is the point. You - Miss Straw Woman That I Constructed For This Exposition - want me to accept that God exists because I can’t prove she doesn’t. You - Miss SWTICFTE (for short) - present me with 2 equally fruitless options: believe in something that has never been verifiably observed in history, or commence my search of the cosmos to prove that it doesn't exist. That pisses me off. You're trying to get me to waste my life, and I won’t do it. There are other alternatives in life, and THAT is where I may find a fruitful path.