Jesus and the New Deal

Time and again, whenever you point out the immorality in the Old Testament, things like the command to kill disobedient children and to stone a raped woman if she didn’t scream loudly enough; sanctioning slavery, selling daughters, genocide, etc, you’ll be told that Jesus overturned all that. That Jesus brought with him a ‘new covenant’ or a new deal between Man and God.

You’ll be told this despite the very clear statement to the contrary:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 5:17-19

Well, let’s grant that this passage by Matthew was a mistake (and not just Jesus telling a little porky pie or something added later by some scribe or other to justify something else he was pushing at the time). Let’s grant that Jesus did come to abolish the OT laws and start over again with some new ones.

Basically, what we’re accepting now is that God realised there were so many mistakes in the Bible as it was then, that he needed to send someone to correct them all. Of course we need to suspend belief that an inerrant god wrote the Bible in the first place otherwise we would find it impossible to think there was anything in the Bible which needed correcting.

But let’s indulge our fantasy a little longer see where we get to.

We now have a situation where we ‘know’ Jesus came to overthrow, or at best to correct the Old Testament, because of all the mistakes in it. And we know this for certain because we can read about it in the Bible, which doesn’t have any mistakes in it...

Oops!

Well, let’s ignore the obvious contradiction there and press on.

We also know that we need the salvation that Jesus offers us, in other words, we need to sign up to the New Deal, because it says in the Old Testament, which Jesus has overthrown (or corrected), that we are all sinners...

And we know this because it says so in the inerrant Bible, which Jesus has overthrown (or corrected)...

Forgive me if I started to go round in circles there trying to follow the circular logic...

Even some otherwise intelligent adults will tell you this with complete conviction and will even tell you you have gone wrong if you can’t see the good sense in it...

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The God of Personal Necessity

Words of Delusion

This is probably the second most popular religious fallacy and, like the God of the Gaps fallacy is accepted by very many otherwise intelligent people. Like the God of the Gaps fallacy it too is so ludicrous when spelled out that it's astonishing that it's even attempted, yet it crops up time and again in discussion with believers of all creeds.

It takes several forms but essentially the argument is always, there must be a god otherwise the consequences would be [something undesirable, unpleasant or otherwise unacceptable].

Some examples are:

God of The Gaps

Almost invariably, any discussion with Creationists or their thinly disguised fashionable version, Intelligent Design advocates, will revolve around their challenge to explain how something happened. Popular subjects are:

• How could matter come from nothing
• How could ‘life’ come from non-life
• How could an eye evolve
• Who created the law of gravity
• Any other gap in understanding / knowledge / education

Ignoring for a moment the fact that all these questions have been addresses or are being address by science and are firmly within the domain of science, what’s going on here? What we have are various different versions of the God of the Gaps argument which seems to convince so many Creationists and even some intelligent Christians, Muslims or Jews. Creationists apparently find this utterly convincing, even citing the erroneous claim that these questions can’t be answered by science as their reason to believe in their god.

But... There are three huge and inescapable assumptions here, even if we allow that some questions have not been fully answered yet by science.

1. Because science hasn’t explained something it never will be able to explain it.
2. A natural explanation is impossible therefore the only possible explanation must be supernatural.
3. Only the god in question could have caused it; no other god could possibly have done it, therefore it is proof of [insert whichever god you require].

Creationists chant this fallacy endlessly and triumphantly, assuming it trumps any argument science can put up, and very conscientiously ignore any information, arguments or reasoning which is offered, dismissing it with a shrug and usually just repeating the same questions over and over like some protective mantra.

A few moments thought with more than a faint inkling of history, will tell you that the history of the last 500 years has been one of headlong retreat of religion in the face of science, as the god of the gaps has been evicted from more and more gaps and has had to be constantly re-located and fitted into ever-shrinking and fewer and fewer gaps in human knowledge. So desperate has this process become that many charlatans now make a very good living inventing false gaps into which to fit their false god. The currently fashionable Intelligent Design movement is but one example of this.

So what’s going on here in the Creationist mind? How is the very clear, almost embarrassingly so, fallacy not seen through?

These same Creationists would readily admit that no medical or scientific advance was ever made by scientists who just accepted the gap in knowledge as proof of a god and gave up looking for an answer.

Clearly some proponents of ID/Creationism can see through this fallacy but are relying on the general ignorance of their target marks whom they are seeking to exploit with cynical dishonesty. These are usually easy to spot as they are normally keen to lure people to their websites where there are Creationist books or other materials for sale, or simply naked e-begging appeals for ‘support spreading the word of God’ or some such appeal to gullible people desperate to have their superstition validated.

However, very many Creationists are victims of these charlatans, so clearly they have rationalised holding a blatantly absurd position with respect to their religion whilst finding no problem at all with a holding the opposite view with respect to normal life. They could research the subject and look for the answer themselves. Many of the questions they raise have been fully answered and the answers are readily available in books or on the Internet. Most can be found with a few mouse-clicks on the same computer they are using to post their questions. Very obviously they do not want answers to the questions; it's as though the 'mystery' of the question is far too valuable an asset to spoil with information.

The answer of course, is wilful self-deception and delusion. Some people seem to have the capacity to trick themselves into holding absurd views with utter conviction. The origins of this are childhood gullibility reinforced by peer-pressure and phobia and the desire to fit in and be part of a group. It's as though an adult still believed in Santa or the Tooth Fairy.

Arrogant personal incredulity also plays a part - "I can't understand how that happened, therefore it can't have happened" - as also does the arrogantly parochial assumption, "I don't know how it happened, therefore no one does, therefore it is unknowable, therefore it must have been supernatural". This arrogance is itself reinforced by the equally arrogant assumption that ignorant superstition is a far better way to measure reality than all that learning and reason, so the victim of religion gets a spurious smug feeling of superiority which 'validates' his/her failure to bother learning in the first place.

Some people go further, into the realms of paranoia, and assume any answers science has to offer are part of some conspiracy or other organised by Atheists, Jews, Socialist, etc., or are based on false evidence planted by Satan. The fear of even doubting prevents them seeing the absurdity of their argument and, for them, the constant repetition of it in the presence of, and with the enthusiastic approval of, others with the same delusion, simply reinforces it, as indeed it’s intended to.

This is precisely why the charlatans who parasites these unfortunate victims work so hard to maintain their delusion and feed them this constant drip-feed of fallacies and misinformation to spout proudly to an incredulous public.

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God The Sadist Almighty

If we are to believe the Old Testament, the God of the Jews, Christians and Muslims is inerrantly omniscient; it knows all things past, present and future. It knows absolutely, and in every last detail, everything about you and your future.

If you’re bound for Hellfire, as all Christians, Jews and Muslims believe many or most of us are, the Biblical god has always known this, for all time, way before it created you. It created you in the sure and certain knowledge that you would end up being thrown into the fiery lake of Hellfire.

How then is this god any different to a man whose hobby is breeding kittens to throw them into a fire, or to pour petrol (gasoline) on them and throw a match onto them? If you knew of such a man in your street, what would be your opinion of him?

Is Religion a Phobia?

‘God-fearing’: a term used approvingly by Christians and no doubt by Jews and Moslems, as well as other monotheist traditions, to describe those of their religion who believe in their god and act according to its directions as revealed in their respective holy books or by the priests and prophets who represent it.

But what if we substitute the word ‘spider’ for god? What if we talk about spider-fearing people? How about closed spaces, or open spaces; about lifts or flying; about walking through doorways or using new technology?

Would we consider those who feared any of these things rational and worthy of special respect because of their fear, or would we maybe see their condition as a problem which they need help and support to overcome? Would we see it as something which they could, given time and the right treatment, eventually overcome and return to living a normal life?

What I’m talking about here is morbid phobia; irrational, life-changing fears. The sort of fear which becomes part of the sufferer’s identity and around which they, and their family, may have to fit their life and take special measures to accommodate.

A phobia is defined as an irrational and intense fear of a specific object or situation. Phobias are classified as anxiety disorders by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (4th Ed; DSM-IV)

Source: http://phobias.about.com/od/symptomsanddiagnosis/tp/phobiasymptoms.htm).

So, how much of a religious person’s life is conditioned by God-fearing, or theophobia to give it it’s correct medical name? How much of a religious person time is spent thinking about their god, and how to avoid it hurting them? How much time is spent seeking its forgiveness or its approval for fear of the consequences of not doing so? How much time do they spend assuring it of their ‘love and obedience’ and otherwise trying to placate, reassure and mollify it?

The answer of course is a great deal of it. Their 'faith' often defines them as people. Asked to describe themselves, most fundamentalists will immediately identify with their religion. "I am a Christian/Moslem who...".

Unlike other phobia, where the response is avoidance and even fleeing the scene, with an omnipresent god this is not an option. The only recourse is to bargain and try to placate and curry favour with it. Watch the reaction of a seriously arachnophobic person to the suggestion that they come close and examine a harmless spider to see for them self there is nothing to worry about. Try talking to them about how a spider's eyes work, or how their silk is made. Now compare that to the reactions of a seriously devout religious fundamentalist when you ask them to examine a few simple questions about their god. Questions like, "Can it create an object so heavy it can’t lift it?", or "Can it create a Euclidean triangle whose internal angles don’t add up to 180 degrees?"

Forced to confront questions of this sort, many religious people can become extremely aggressive, often resorting to verbal abuse and threats, and frequently by avoidance techniques, and even casting protective spells in the form of quotes from their hand-book of ‘faith’ or by attempting to mollify their god by telling you they will ‘pray for you’; even calling on others to assist in this ritual. They clearly perceive these harmless questions as a serious threat much as an arachnophobe perceives a harmless Tegenaria or Araneus not as a thing of beauty but as an object of terror, and so show symptoms of irrational fear.

It’s my contention that much of the behaviour of religious people, especially fundamentalists, is the result not of faith, but of fear; the severity of symptoms being directly related to the degree of extremism of belief from moderate to fundamentalist.

I contend that religion is merely a phobia inculcated into people in childhood by parents and authority figures who suffer from it themselves and who are afraid to NOT infect their unfortunate children with it, just as some sufferers feel compelled to mutilate their children's genitalia. These children often grow up too afraid even to think of escaping from the phobia and so the cycle is repeated in the next generation.

Religious peoples’ irrational responses, irrational behaviour and irrational reasoning is a direct consequence of an irrational, morbidly paranoid phobia – theophobia. We should recognise religions for what they are and call them by their name.

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What Does Rapture Theology Say About Christians?

Why do some Christians crave for the 'Rapture'? What do they think it'll do for them?

And what does this tell us about their morality and their 'Christian love' for their fellow man?

• The greatest event they can imagine is their god destroying all life on Earth, especially those humans who don't share their 'faith'.
• They believe that they alone, of all the humans who have ever lived, and of all the human societies throughout history, have got it right; everyone else, without exception, got it wrong.
• They believe they will be given a grandstand seat to watch everyone else suffering eternal agony, and that this will be a reward for being such good people.
• They believe they are such good people that they deserve to have everything for themselves when all the 'undeserving' humans have been killed off.
• They believe they alone are good enough to occupy an exalted place alongside their god whom they believe is creator and ruler of the entire Universe. No one else is, or has ever been, that special.
• They know this because they have been told by someone else that it's true and despite the complete lack of any corroborating evidence. They believe it simply because they can't imagine NOT being that special.

They actually think that watching other people, and even their loved ones, suffering unimaginable horrors is a reward!

And these Christians condescend to lecture other people on matters of morality, ethics and love, and demand the right to meddle in our legislatures, our courts, our schools, our science, and in all aspects of our lives, including what we do in the privacy of our own homes...

[Later note] If any Christians feel they've been unfairly tarred with the same brush, perhaps they would explain why they don't believe in the Second Coming of Jesus.

The Evolution of Gullibility.

Gullible Donald Trump supporters fooled by lies and wackadoodle conspiracy theories attept a coup d'etat to keep him in office

Gullible: easily fooled or cheated ; especially: quick to believe something that is not true
(Miriam-Webster’s http://www.learnersdictionary.com/search/gullible)

Atheists are often quick to point out that religious people are usually religious because they were indoctrinated as children when they were young and gullible. They point to the strong association between geography and religious belief so that you can make a guess about the religion someone was brought up with based on where they were born. In some parts of the world, the Balkans and Northern Ireland for example, this often holds down to the level of the town or village or even the street or housing estate you were born in.

This of course strongly suggests that religious ‘faith’ isn’t something which most people arrive at through independent thought or through examination of the evidence; rather is suggests that they were given their beliefs by their parents, their peers and authority figures in their immediate culture. Any later justification for that belief in terms of presumed evidence or ‘personal experience’, or on the basis of ‘faith’ alone, is a post hoc rationalisation of pre-existing beliefs. For example, if someone has a ‘religious experience’ it is rare for them to interpret this as anything other than a manifestation in some form of the god they were brought up to believe in or in whom many or most of their friends and associates believe. It is rare for a ‘religious experience' to result in conversion to a ‘foreign’ religion. The same applies to so-called out-of-body experience where recalled memories recorded by a malfunctioning, usually anoxic, brain are often interpreted in terms of the locally popular religion.

Do You Want to Convert an Atheist?

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

If you want to convert an Atheist your task should be simple. Atheists believe in evidence; our opinions are based on it and when the evidence changes, or we discover new evidence, we change our opinions. We have no sacred dogmas which can't be questioned; no tenets of 'faith' to which we must subscribe.

This should make us very easy to convert with the following three-step process:

1. Produce the evidence that you found convincing.
2. Explain why it is evidence only for your god and not any other. Since people have believed in over 3000 different gods in recorded human history, obviously you will need to show why your evidence couldn't be evidence for any of those.
3. Explain how a god is the only possible explanation for your evidence and why it can't possibly be explained as the result of a natural process.

Now, since, presumably, you were convinced of your god's existence by just such evidence and just such a process, it shouldn't be too difficult to tell us Atheists where it's to be found and how it meets the above criteria.

In your own time....

Ten Questions for Creationists

Creationists insist their theory of creation is at least as good, if not better, than any scientific theory at explaining the observable facts and that it leaves nothing unexplained. In that case it must easily be able to answer the following questions with little difficulty.

1. Creationists insist that nothing can come from nothing and everything must have a cause, and that this implies a creator. They claim this to be a fundamental law with no exceptions.
   

   Holding to this law, out of what was the creator made and who or what caused its creation?
   
   Alternatively, please explain what your god made the universe from if it couldn't have been from nothing, and who or what created this substance and out of what.
   
   Alternatively, please explain the reasoning behind the implicit assumption that non-existence rather than existence is the default state, in other words, why there would be nothing rather than something.
   
   

The Faith Fallacy

What’s so good about Faith?

Faith: The thing held most dearly and proudly by the ‘faithful’; the means by which the ‘faithful’ know things without evidence; the means by which no evidence is needed to believe in a god, the nature of gods, and that the things attributed to gods were indeed performed by them.

Faith: The knowledge of things not seen.

For a Christian, faith is the means by which they know with complete confidence that there is a god and a heaven and the ONLY way to get to Heaven is by acceptance of God’s son, Jesus and by following his teaching as revealed in the Bible which faith tells them was unquestionably either dictated by or at least inspired by the god in Heaven.

Faith is also the means by which Christians know with absolute confidence that all the other religions are wrong.

For a Moslem, faith is the means by which they know with complete confidence that there is a god and a heaven and the ONLY way to get to Heaven is by acceptance that Mohammed was the last prophet of that god and wrote a book with clear and concise instructions which must be followed without question.

Faith is also the means by which Muslims know with absolute confidence that all the other religions are wrong.

For a Jew, faith is the means by which they know with complete confidence that there is a god and a heaven and the ONLY way to get to Heaven is by following the laws and rules as revealed by God to Moses, Elijah and other prophets and which include strict dietary rules, dress codes and observance of special days when life is lived differently to normal days.

Faith is also the means by which Jews know with absolute confidence that all the other religions are wrong.

For a Sikh... but you're probably getting bored by now and have recognised a pattern here.

But hold on! If faith is telling different people completely contradictory things and leading them to mutually exclusive conclusions, how can it be the sure and certain way to know the truth?

Clearly it can't, so what good is faith as a measure of physical reality, or even of mystical ‘transcendent reality’?

Let’s do a little mind experiment.

Imagine you’re the unfortunate victim of mistaken identity and find yourself in a court of law, charged with some offence or other of which you are completely innocent. Your defence team has brought in expert witnesses who have presented undeniable scientific evidence showing that, not only could you not have committed the crime, but you weren’t even in the same town at the time the offence was committed.

Well, that’s just about clinched it, hasn't it? Innocence proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. Case dismissed! Phew! I expect you’re wondering why you were ever prosecuted in the first place. And you WOULD be so acquitted in a society in which guilt or innocence is decided by a rational examination of evidence and logically deduced conclusions from that examination.

Imagine now you live in a society which holds that faith is a superior form of knowledge; that faith is a sure and certain way to determine the truth. So sure and certain in fact that evidence is regarded as inferior and not to be trusted, especially when it contradicts faith; a society which is, in fact, founded on good Christian, Islamic and/or Jewish principles; principles which were used to justify the society having that form in the first place. A society founded on the faith of the faithful.

The prosecution have put up a witness who has sworn on a holy book that he has faith that you are guilty. He freely admits he has no evidence but explains that his faith is strong; he has no doubt at all that you are guilty because this has been revealed to him by faith. Since faith is superior to evidence as a measure of reality, the jury should ignore the defence evidence and go with faith. In fact, he argues, it would show a lack of faith amounting to heresy to believe mere scientific evidence in the face of strong faith. So weak is mere evidence compared to faith that he did not look for it nor at the defence evidence. He had no need. His faith is strong.  The jury should understand, as good followers of the faith, that all the so-called defence 'evidence' shows is just how misleading science is and why it should not be trusted... and anyone who doesn't see that is showing suspiciously heretical arrogance and is betraying the oath they swore when they entered the jury box...

Who would you want the jury to believe?

Suddenly faith is not so reliable after all. Faith can lead to completely wrong conclusions. Faith can convict the innocent and free the guilty. Faith can lead to wrong being mistaken for right.

Faith can lead the faithful to convict those with the 'wrong' faith of being unfaithful...

That’s why the same process of faith leads Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and all the other religions, and every different sect to conclude that they, and they alone, are right and all the others are wrong.

Faith is a trap set to catch the unwary. It was invented by religious leaders because they had no evidence.  Had they had real evidence, you can be sure they would be forever trumpeting that fact and citing it at every opportunity. Children the world over would be herded in droves to see this wonderful evidence. "There's your reason to believe", the priests would shout. "You don't need 'faith'! We have the evidence!"

Faith is not a virtue; faith is unquestioning obedience to dogma, and that is a sin.

To believe through faith alone is to make the assumption that something MUST be true just because you believe it. The arrogance of that belief would be breathtaking if the notion of faith had not poisoned our culture to the extent that this arrogance is considered an admirable quality; that being ‘faithful’ is assumed to equate to being good.

Faith is the trick by which the unscrupulous control the credulous and gullible, and make people ashamed and guilty for having doubt and asking questions.

Faith is the means by which Jewish, Islamic, Christian and other religion’s clerics and theologians have sought to exercise control and hold back human cultural, ethical and scientific development to a level it attained in the Bronze Age, at the nomadic pastoralist stage, when the myths and superstitions were first written down.

Faith is the means by which charlatans seek to prevent us asking the questions and accepting the answers which would break their grip on society.

Faith is the mind-numbing toxin of the religion parasite, in all it's different varieties.

Do not have faith in faith for that way leads to insanity.

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Speciation.

Rather than write a blog going over old ground, I'll simply give a  few links to articles on the subject of speciation and to the many observed instanced of it occurring.

Speciation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Scholarly articles for observed speciation events

Observed Instances of Speciation

More Observed Instances of Speciation

Nature: Evidence for Speciation.

Study catches 2 bird populations as they split into separate species

On Omniscience And Freewill

Despite my blog exposing the logical fallacy of an inerrantly omniscient god and free will, it seems the full implications of this have gone unnoticed by many.

Let’s recap:

We are discussing the god of the Bible which Christians, Jews and Moslem all regard as omniscient (all-knowing) and whom they believe has granted mankind free will.

Following from this is the idea that, by exercising this free will, mankind committed the ultimate sin of disobeying God and must now seek God’s forgiveness. God does not pre-ordain our decisions so we bear sole responsibility for our own actions and are accountable to God for them. At the same time, God is all knowing and inerrant and so knows everything with absolute certainty. He knows everything about the past, present and future and is never wrong, ever.

Christians, Jews and Muslims and their various sects all believe they alone know the special secrets for gaining this god’s forgiveness for this supposed supreme sin of disobeying God. The only way to achieve this is by joining them, accepting their dogmas and following their rituals.

Furthermore, mankind knows about this sin, about God’s inerrant omniscience, about mankind’s free will and about the need for forgiveness, because it’s all written down in a book either written by, dictated by or inspired by this inerrant (and perfect) god, so it too is inerrant and absolutely true.

Surprisingly though, a simple question which can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” answer seems to put Christians, Jews and Muslims all into the same flat panic.

The simple question is:

On Quantum Cats and Future History

Hold onto your hat. This could get a little rough.

At the heart of quantum mechanics lies a paradox. All experimentation has shown that a particle has a dual nature - the so-called quantum duality. It is, at the same time, a particle or 'quanta' of energy, and a wave. It has been shown that a single photon, fired at two slits in a screen, passes through both slits simultaneously and creates an interference pattern with itself on a photosensitive detector behind the slits. And it's not just two slits. The same effect will be seen with three, four, five slits or as many slits as you like.

Furthermore, it has also been shown that, when we try to observe a particle on its journey through the two slits, by placing a detector behind one of them, the interference pattern disappears and the particle behaves like a perfectly respectable single entity and passes dutifully through the slit with the detector and not through the other one.

Observation has (apparently) caused the waveform to collapse into a particle. Seemingly, our observation of it has changed the nature of reality with respect to the particle being observed and it now only has one future.

The conclusion is inescapable, even if a little disturbing. All particles have many futures, possibly infinitely many futures, and they all take all of them.

The experimental data showing the collapse of the wave into a single future by our observation of it has also lead some people to conclude that somehow we create reality by detecting it, even leading some to speculate that there was no reality until mankind was there to observe it.

This conclusion is the 'Copenhagen Interpretation' of quantum duality and has lead to the multiverse hypothesis, where all possible universes, representing all possible futures potentially co-exist but we determine which one by our observation.

Cue, Schrödinger's Cat.

In an attempt to repudiate this view, Erwin Schrödinger devised a thought experiment in which a live cat is placed in a sealed box, with air, food and water, and a phial of cyanide linked to a device which breaks it, so killing the cat, on detecting a particle emitted by a single atom of a radioactive isotope.

In this system, the cat's future is inevitably linked to a single quantum event - a radioactive decay - which is purely random and independent of any other event. The future of the isotope is either decayed or not and the future of the cat is either alive or dead. However, since the emitted particle will exist simultaneously in both possible futures, and the isotope will thus be both decayed and not decayed at the same time, so the cat will be simultaneously both alive and dead.

However, if the Copenhagen Interpretation is correct, this paradox will only be resolved when we open the box and observe the state of the isotope. Only then will the cat's future be determined; until that point, according Copenhagen, the cat will be both dead and alive.

This, of course, is a highly anthropocentric view of reality and assumes that observation is a uniquely human ability. In fact, it's naive. 'Observation' is carried out by detecting the effect(s) of a particle interacting with one or more other particles. Observation is witnessing the effects of quantum entanglement, when the future of one particle becomes entangled with that of another, and this has been happening since the beginning of time regardless of whether humans were present to witness it or not.

Schrödinger had intended his thought experiment to show the illogicality of the Copenhagen Interpretation but it failed to do that. What it lead people to conclude is that we discover which future we are in when we observe reality. When we open the box we discover whether we are in a future in which the cat is alive, or one in which it is dead. The multiverse hypothesis is not scratched by Schrödinger's cat.

The late, great Richard Feynman, working at Caltech, went some way towards resolving this problem. He showed that all possible histories with respect to a single particle can be expressed as a probability distribution expressing the 'sum over histories' and that this distribution is the wave we see when we observe the wave nature of a quantum event.

He has also shown that for complex systems, these waves 'decohere' to produce what may be a single future. This apparently refutes the multiverse hypothesis, but it may not do. It is still possible to view the future histories of small objects like atoms and molecules as having multiple possible futures because we know they, like particles, take all possible paths through spacetime. It could be that decoherence occurs only above a certain level of complexity.

The largest objects which have been shown to pass simultaneously through both slits in a two slit experiment are molecules of buckminsterfullerene (C60) consisting of sixty carbon atoms arranged in a geodesic - the dome-shaped structures designed by the architect Buckminster Fuller. Sixty atoms is large for inorganic molecules but still quite small for organic molecules, and many orders of magnitude smaller than an organism such as a cat, dead or alive. And we know that if we throw a dead cat at a couple of slots in a wall, it won't go through both, don't we? In fact, unless our aim is good, it'll most likely go through neither and we'll see the dead cat bounce.

So what do we make of this? Small objects have many possible futures, yet larger objects have only one - and we don't yet know where the dividing line is...

Rosa's speculation:
It could also be that what we see as 'now' is an advancing front of decoherence as we move into an array of futures. That NOW is only the interface between our macro-reality and micro-futures operating at the quantum level.

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The Joy of Living

The Joy of Living - although this was not the last song Ewan MacColl wrote, it was meant as a farewell to the world and to the people he loved.

Farewell you northern hills, you mountains all goodbye
Moorlands and stony ridges, crags and peaks goodbye
Glyder Fach farewell, Culbeg, Scafell, cloud bearing Suilven
Sun warmed rocks and the cold of Bleaklow's frozen sea
The snow and the wind and the rain of hills and mountains
Days in the sun and the tempered wind and the air like wine
And you drink and you drink till you’re drunk on the joy of living

Farewell to you my love, my time is almost done
Lie in my arms once more until the darkness comes
You filled all my days, held the night at bay, dearest companion
Years pass by and they're gone with the speed of birds in flight
Our lives like the verse of a song heard in the mountains
Give me your hand and love and join your voice with mine
And we'll sing of the hurt and the pain and the joy of living

Farewell to you my chicks, soon you must fly alone
Flesh of my flesh, my future life, bone of my bone
May your wings be strong, may your days be long, safe be your journey
Each of you bears inside of you the gift of love
May it bring you light and warmth and the pleasure of giving
Eagerly savour each new day and the taste of its mouth
Never lose sight of the thrill and the joy of living

Take me to some high place of heather, rock and ling
Scatter my dust and ashes, feed me to the wind
So that I may be part of all you see, the air you are breathing
I'll be part of the curlew's cry and the soaring hawk
The blue milkwort and the sundew hung with diamonds
I'll be riding the gentle wind that blows through your hair
Reminding you how we shared in the joy of living

© Ewan MacColl Ltd 1986. Black And White

Ewan MacColl, whom I had the pleasure of meeting twice, spending a great couple of evenings with him and his partner Peggy Seeger, died in 1989, aged 74.

more info : http://www.ewanmaccoll.com/
www.dickgaughan.co.uk/chain/ewan-maccoll.html

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What Makes You So Special?

Your Story

[Edit. This article has now been greatly expanded into my book, What Makes You So Special? : From the Big Bang to You, available in paperback or ebook for Kindle]

Bear with me a while because yours is a long story but it's a story very much worth telling.

About 13.7 billion years ago the universe came into existence as a singularity. We know this because the universe is expanding in all directions at a measurable rate. Projecting this backwards leads to a time when the entire universe occupied a single point of nearly infinite density; a black hole or singularity.

We also know that time and space are part of the universe and do not exist independently of it, so there is no sense in which we can talk of where and when this singularity occurred in some pre-existing space-time dimension.

Reasons Why Atheists Should Speak Out - Inspiring Words for Rational Thinkers

A short collection of writings, poems and other stuff.

First they came...,

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
after all I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
after all I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
after all I was not a trade unionist.

[When they came for the Jews and the Romani
I did not speak out;
after all I was not a Jew or a Roma]

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

Pastor Martin Niemöller (with additional verse by me)

The Doublethink of the God Delusion

Doublethink or the ability to simultaneously hold two mutually contradictory opinions.

This blog is a response to the challenge from @TweetMinistries on Twitter to comment on a blog by Gary Gutting, a philosophy teacher at the University of Notre Dame. The blog was a critique of, “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins.

Gutting's orginal blog may be read at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/on-dawkinss-atheism-a-response/

Gutting starts off badly and shows he hasn't understood what he is criticising by summarising Dawkins as saying natural selection explains the complexity of the universe. Dawkins only ever argues that natural selection accounts for the diversity and complexity of life, not of the universe. However, this is not the central argument of Gutting’s case.

The central argument is that Dawkins failed to take into account the theological argument that God is a special case and can be regarded as irrational, therefore it should be exempt from arguments aimed at showing there is no rational basis for a belief in one.

Gutting correctly points out that Dawkins' argument is that a creator god would necessarily be more complex than the universe it created, therefore the argument for a god from complexity is unsatisfactory in that it simply introduces another unexplained layer of complexity, so not only failing to solve the problem but actually making it worse.

He then complains that Dawkins never addressed the fact that, “philosophers from Thomas Aquinas through contemporary thinkers have offered detailed discussions of the question that provide intelligent suggestions about how to think coherently about a simple substance that has the power and knowledge attributed to God”.

This neatly sidesteps the problem of the necessary knowledge and information required to create a universe with all its complexity. The definition of God is shifted dramatically away from an omniscient, omnipotent god capable of emotions such as love and anger, able to formulate morality, hand down laws of behaviour and to monitor and record our thoughts, and in whose image we were created, to something much easier to fit into the debate at hand. This god is now a simple substance, presumably having no complexity whatsoever, yet still has the “power and knowledge attributed to it”.

In other words, this god has complexity without having complexity. Yep! That IS irrational, but that’s not a problem either. You see there is always “the possibility that God is a necessary being (that is, a being that, by its very nature, must exist, no matter what). On this traditional view, God’s existence would be, so to speak, self-explanatory and so need no explanation...”, something Gutting also complains that Dawkins didn’t take into account.

What Gutting is complaining of here is that Dawkins should have accepted the workarounds for the difficult questions which theologians have assiduously devised to help them ignore them, and that he cheated by not allowing for them.

Yes indeed, Dawkins, in his argument that there was no rational explanation for a god did not take into account that there is an irrational explanation which should have been regarded as rational because it’s not fair to subject it to rational analysis (because it would fail that test).

Gutting then attempts to support this view by reference to Bertrand Russell’s point that we would require very strong evidence to believe that there is a teapot in orbit around the sun. Dawkins agrees with Russell that an extraordinary claim such as that requires an extraordinary level of supporting evidence to justify its acceptance.

He points out that, if astronauts had reported a teapot shaped object in orbit and satellite data had strongly suggested that there was indeed a teapot in orbit, this would be sufficient evidence to at least cause us to allow for the possibility of the teapot hypothesis being correct.

Gutting then tries to argue that there is indeed just such strong evidence to support the god hypothesis. Unfortunately the only evidence he has to offer is, “There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being”, neglecting to point out that none have ever produced evidence of a reality, and, “there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God’s existence”, as though arguments from authority are a good as real evidence.

What Gutting is attempting to do here is to suggest that somehow, the subjective interpretations of perception and the opinions of philosophers should be place on an equal footing with scientific data and independent eye-witness accounts. This is, of course, nothing more than special pleading again. The god hypothesis will only work if you exempt it from the normal tests you apply to other hypotheses, therefore it should be granted these exemption without further justification.

Gutting reinforces this claim with, “But religious believers will plausibly reply that science is suited to discover only what is material (indeed, the best definition of “material” may be just “the sort of thing that science can discover”). They will also cite our experiences of our own conscious life (thoughts, feelings, desires, etc.) as excellent evidence for the existence of immaterial realities that cannot be fully understood by science”.

He has ignored the fact that neurophysiology is material and so consciousness, thoughts, feelings, etc, are not evidence of the immaterial at all (‘plausible’ seems to mean ‘convenient’ in this context). And there again is that plea of special status for the god hypothesis. Now the reason is that this god should be exempt from ALL tests of existence because it is now assumed to be immaterial and so beyond the reach of science.

In summary then, Gutting is arguing that Dawkins was wrong to argue that there is no rational basis for belief in a god because belief in god is irrational and Dawkins should have accepted that as er... rational.

Presumably this form of 'logic' is perfectly acceptable in theological circles.

We also have here yet another example of the special pleading which theologians use to defend their god hypothesis. Their little hypothesis wants to play with the big boys of science and compete on an equal footing, but it needs affirmative action and special assistance to get by. It’s not fair that it should have to take the same tests scientific hypotheses have to pass. It’s perfectly fair to claim it is as rational as scientific hypotheses even though it is irrational.

This compartmentalised doublethink is a perfect example of Dawkins’ God Delusion.

It's really rather sad that humans, in attempting to create a god, have only managed to create a seriously handicapped one.

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Refuting the Arguments For God

These arguments for God appear on http://snapshotsofgod.com/evidence.htm .

This blog examines them one by one and shows the fallacy behind them.

“If you live in a desert and never leave it, you won't find a shred of evidence for the existence for polar ice caps or polar bears.”

True, but if you had never heard of polar icecaps and bears, why would you even think of looking for them? You won’t find any evidence of Martians either but is that a reason to believe they exist? Of course not. Whilst absence of evidence is far from being proof of absence, it is most certainly supporting evidence for the idea of absence.  It is a very long way from being proof or even evidence of presence.

The extraordinary thing is that the blogger opens his blog with what amounts to a claim that the absence of evidence is in some way evidence of presence!

The temptation is to walk away right now.  Let’s hope things get better...

Biblical Contradictions

For a long list of Biblical contradictions please see  http://www.evilbible.com/Biblical%20Contradictions.htm

Also see http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/ for an annotated Bible pointing out the errors and contradictions.  Something like 1616 of them in all.

The Special Needs God of Creationism

Science works by applying a set of agreed fundamental requirements, based on the principles of logic, mathematics, and established accepted scientific axioms, to all hypotheses. All competing hypotheses must meet these basic requirements and each will stand or fall according to how well or badly the presented supporting evidence, when view according to these principles, supports the hypothesis. No serious scientist would expect to get away with pleading that his favourite hypotheses should be exempt from, say, an accepted fundamental law and least of all from one which is fundamental to his hypothesis.

For example, imagine a scientist who is proposing a new hypothesis explaining flight and claiming it is a much better account of how an aircraft flies than any other. In fact, it is so brilliant that it utterly destroys the science of aerodynamics and will require the fundamental laws of physics to be re-written.

He has rightly pointed out that a fundamental requirement of any aerodynamic theory is that it must explain how an object in flight in air is apparently defying gravity and is able to move up and down in a controlled manner in a gravity field. However, it has been pointed out to him that, applying HIS hypothesis would not actually explain anything. If it were true, no object would actually be able to leave the ground, let alone move up or down in the air, in a controlled manner or not.

Imagine the reaction from his fellow scientists when he retorted that this was not a problem for his hypothesis because it was a special case and was exempt from any principle or principles which rendered it false. How long do you think this scientist’s credibility would last? About as long as it took his fellow scientists to stop laughing and persuade their incredulous colleagues that he had really made that claim - and was not even joking!

Now, consider the Creationist hypothesis concerning causality. They will argue that all things must have a cause (ignoring things like spontaneous decay of radioactive isotopes, which don’t, but let’s ignore that with them for the time being). The argument goes that, since everything must have a cause, there must have been a prime cause for all things and that the only possible prime cause must have been their favourite god. They also argue that this is an absolute universal law of logic from which nothing can escape and to which all scientific theories must be subject, with absolutely no exceptions.

We can also ignore the fact that, even if this was true, it would not establish that this prime causing is their favourite god, or anything even remotely like it. Assume for a moment that creationists have established somehow that the need for a prime cause IS an absolute and immutable fundamental law of the universe and that any such prime cause can only be their god.

“Ah!” You’ll no doubt now be saying, “What was the cause of the creationist god?” And you’d be entirely correct. Applying our universal immutable law to which all things must be subject, the creationist god must also have had a cause. The ‘prime cause’ is not prime at all.

Okay, so let’s hypothesise a cause before the prime cause (a sub-prime cause?). In fact, we now have to hypothesis an infinitely regressing continuum of pre-pre-pre- (ad infinitum) prime causes. In fact our prime cause hypothesis does not explain causality at all. The prime cause hypothesis has just collapsed under its own absurd logic. It has spectacularly falsified itself, something only possible for the more absurd hypotheses.

“No!” Creationists will retort. “My hypothesis is a special case and is exempt from its own fundamental law! Everything else is obliged to pass the test of my first cause hypothesis, but my god is exempt. It is a special case to which special laws apply. It is not fair to expect it to compete with science on an equal footing”.  And they are not even joking. Special pleading is a fundamental part of almost all theology!

The creationist’s god is like a special needs child which can’t be expected to compete on an equal footing with normal children. It needs affirmative action and special provisions to be able to lead the semblance of a normal existence. These sentiments would be quite understandable, even laudable from the point of view of parents who have such an unfortunate child, but why have creationists created a god with so many handicaps and challenges that it needs to be treated as a special needs child?

The answer of course, is that they had no choice. Their problem is that their god IS handicapped. These handicaps were inherited from its parents. It was created by people who find reality difficult to understand and so constantly strive to live in an alternate one: one with simplistic answers, carefully constructed so as to be amenable to people with little or no learning and who take comfort in ignorance.

So of course it too can’t cope with reality either.  Imaginary friends are only as good as the minds that imagine them.

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