IDoNotGetIt

Miracles (God is the absent father)

A plane crashed in freezing water the other day, everyone survived.  Every news article I’ve read about it mentioned “miracle” at least once.  What is a miracle?  The word is use cavalierly these days.  Judging by its usage, it just means something highly improbable.  However, when I point this out to a theist, they categorically deny that and say that it means God’s direct intervention.

The miracles I was thinking about were quite different.  In the bible, God speaks directly to people, causes seemingly magical transformations of water into wine, parts seas to let people cross, and much much more.  God was all over the place, telling people who to attack, what to do with the spoils, who to take prisoner, who to kill, how to kill them, what to do with their foreskin (not kidding).  What happened to this God?  You would be a fool to not believe in God if you lived in the Old Testament.  He was obvious to them.  Today he the opposite of obvious.  Today, if we want vehicles to fly, we have to invent technology to make it happen.  If we want to keep people alive when the technology fails to keep the plane in the air, we have to extensively train the pilots who will be flying them to handle specific emergency situations.  What happened to this God?  Today, we have discovered genetics and have used science to come to an understanding of how species have evolved over the eons.  The more we learned about how things work, the more absent God became.  Today, God is totally irrelevant, and not surprisingly, he is totally gone also.  No more miracles because they aren’t necessary.  How sad is it that God went from parting a sea to helping our favorite sports team win their game?

The lack of miracles today when they were a dime-a-dozen in the old testament was a huge problem.  It is just more evidence of the true source of the bible, man.

Heaven

Heaven was described to me as a place where we can have what ever we want.  Well get to see long dead relatives and friends and live forever without ever being unhappy.  The first time I questioned this was when I started to realize that there were people that I didn’t like.  I thought, what would happen if both of us went to heaven, would we magically get along there?  Or what if there was a girl that I liked but she didn’t like me.  Surely if we both went to heaven and I wanted to spend time with her but she didn’t want to spend time with me, that would be a conflict.  How would this work?  Additionally, how about the people that I loved and who didn’t go to heaven?  How could I possibly be happy knowing that someone I care about was being tortured in Hell?  Querying adults about this returned answers like, “you won’t remember those people,” “you’ll be so overwhelmed by Gods presents that you won’t care about that,” and of course the gift that keeps on giving “God doesn’t expect us to know all of this now, we’ll understand it when we die.”

What an awesome con job religion is.  How often can you get millions of people to buy your product when you are promising to give it to them after they are dead?  I hated that response more than anything, anytime I had a decent question, that seemed to be the stock answer, “you’ll find out when you die.”  But lets look at the other responses, they are, essentially, the same.  So assuming that I go to this Heaven, how will I be happy knowing that many people I care about are being tortured?  Will my memory of them be erased?  Will I just not care?  That person, in heaven, would not be me.  Part of who I am is the people I care about.  If I suddenly didn’t care about them or was unaware of them altogether, that would change me fundamentally.  I would not be the same person I am with the knowledge of them.  But alas, we’ve got the good ‘ol standby, you’re not meant to understand it now.  Hogwash!

One person even explained to me that my ideas about heaven were wrong.  He said Heaven was just being in the presents of God.  I thought, it’s no wonder they don’t teach that to the masses.  It sounds boring.  An eternity sitting at God’s feet telling him how great he is.  I can hardly stand the wait.

Pascal’s Wager

Oh yes.  Not an argument goes by without hearing it.  When I was a child, I was told that there was a specific god with specific properties and who was responsible for certain events, like creating the universe and more importantly this god was the records keeper for the actions of every living person on this planet and would decide upon their death whether they went to Heaven or Hell.  You get the picture, basic Christianity.  Obviously, I was not interested in being tortured forever so when it was explained to me that all I needed to do was accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, blah blah.  I thought, no problem.  Not to mention the great comfort it gave me to be able to pray for help with what ever problems I was having.  Oh sure, I still had to take the initiative to actually solve these problems but surely it was my prayers to God that enabled me to take that initiative in the first place, right?

I remember early in my teens when I began to question these beliefs.  I didn’t think too deeply about it and, unfortunately, didn’t have access to the internet (it didn’t exist yet).  Sure I could have gone to the library and checked out a few books but that would have been a lot of work and on second thought, what if I stop believing in God and I’m wrong?  My immature mind didn’t see the inherent logical fallacy in that question.  So rather than investigating this god thing more and risk going to Hell as a punishment, I just got more religious.  When I started driving, I went to church by myself sometimes.  I got saved twice because I wasn’t sure the first person did it right.  My uncle AJ told me that when he got saved he started crying and could barely control his emotions.  I didn’t respond this way when I was saved so I got saved again but was rather disappointed that it had the same result.  I chalked it up to different people just react differently, plus supposedly, he was a pretty bad character before he turned to Jesus.  My worst crimes were probably lying… oh wait, surely there was plenty of lust too, I was a teenager after all.  So perhaps the reaction to being saved was stronger if you were going from really bad to being a good person versus just normal bad to good.

Then I went to college.  In my first semester, I took a class on logic.  I loved it, it was probably the most interesting class I took throughout my entire college career.  The next semester I took an intro philosophy class.  There were many discussions in that class about whether or not god exists.  The professor was the same one who taught the logic class and he was excellent at keeping his own beliefs ambiguous.  I made an A on my final paper on why I believe God does exist.  The a year or so later I started a new job.  I became friends with the first atheist I’d ever met in my life (as far as I knew).  We had many arguments about theism.  None of these arguments convinced me that I was wrong but they did get me thinking.  Additionally, the internet had been invented which gave me a more accessible resource for researching the subject.

So it wasn’t long before I realized that there was not enough evidence to conclude that any god I had ever heard defined actually existed.  Thus began the final stage of my trek to reason, I became a deist.  After all, what if I say there is no god and I’m wrong.  It took a while but I remember vividly coming to the conclusion that I was an atheist.  Here was my reasoning.  Suppose there is a god, I’ve already accepted that the god of the bible probably doesn’t exist.  But even if he does, he created a universe that we can explore and learn about, what sense does it make to believe that he would design everything such that we couldn’t tell that it had been designed.  And then insist that we believe that it was designed against all evidence to the contrary.  And do this insistence via an old book that has problems of its own.  And punish those who refuse to believe the silly old book even though it is totally unbelievable.  I refuse to believe that any being would do that.  Further I believe any being who would do such a thing is inherently evil.  Most importantly though, I accepted that I really didn’t believe and hadn’t for some time.  I was just pretending.  I honestly, couldn’t believe these stories.  I’m not gullible enough, sorry.  It is not possible for me to force myself to believe this stuff.  So with this realization, I was officially an atheist.

I get asked, often, to explain why I don’t believe in god.  I’ve posted about this before but I want to revisit the subject.  I think this will take a few post to cover thoroughly because there isn’t a reason.  There are many.  Yesterday, I was asked to just articulate the main reason.  So I started thinking, “what is the main reason?”  I can’t decide, I don’t think there is one, I think all of the reasons are the main reasons.  So today’s post will focus on one of them, this one is no more or less important than any of the other reasons I’ll cover in future post.

The Bible

As I began to think about it, the fact that different people could read the bible and get different understandings from it severely weakened it as a source of valid information.  Not only were there many different interpretations of the same text, some of those interpretations were diametrically opposed to one another.  In addition to the ambiguity of the bible, there are many factual errors.  My earliest memory of questioning the bible was concerning dinosaurs.  I used to stay with my uncle AJ in the summer and he was very religious.  I was probably 9 or so when I asked him to reconcile what the bible said about Adam and Eve with what I had learned in school about dinosaurs existing millions of years before humans.  His reply… “God doesn’t want us to understand everything now, he’ll explain it when we get to heaven.”  I let it go with that explanation but it definitely didn’t sit well with me.

Before I read any of the bible I was told that God was perfect.  He was omnipotent, omnipresent, well suffice it to say he was omni-everything.  And I asked myself, how could a being who knows everything not articulate his thoughts in writing such that they couldn’t be misinterpreted by anyone.  The answer, in my mind, was that he could.  The fact that the bible isn’t clear about anything, pretty much makes it useless as a tool.  Even the parts that don’t have multiple interpretations, can be dismissed as allegory or something else.

So with the bible eliminated from the pool of evidence, I must have found myself lost in an amoral abyss right?  No, I knew that everyone always said that the bible was the source of morals but when I started to look into it, I really couldn’t find the evidence to back up these claims.  People who have never seen the bible before still have codes of law that are nearly identical to our most fundamental laws (i.e. murder, thievery, etc.)

At this point, I decided that the bible was terrible evidence for anything.  It is, demonstrably, false at best and intentionally misleading usually and immoral at worst.  I now refuse to accept it as an authority on pretty much anything other than as a demonstration of how reprehensible people used to be (on a regular basis, I’m aware that people can still be pretty awful).

I want to make it clear that I don’t consider the failure of the bible, to be “proof” that there is no god.  I only consider it to be insufficient evidence that there is one.  However, I do point out to those who consider it to be the word of god and whom believe that god is omni-everything, that they are flat out wrong.  Perfect could not produce anything as idiotic and asinine as the bible.  So either the god they believe in is not perfect or it had nothing to do with that ancient book of tripe.

I love Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid podcast.  He is also one of the many awesome contributors to the skepticblog.  Following is a paragraph from one if his blog postings that I thought was noteworthy.

Interestingly, both ends of the spectrum accuse each other of similar irrationality. True believers accuse skeptics of ignoring evidence. Skeptics accuse true believers of believing anything they hear. If I have to be in one crazy end of the spectrum or another, I’ll happily stay in the “null hypothesis” camp. I’m open to any evidence you want to present, but if it’s ambiguous, explainable by known or natural phenomena, anecdotal or otherwise of poor quality, don’t expect me to adopt your beliefs. Even if you have lots of such evidence, mountains of such evidence: As I often say, you can stack cowpies as high as you want, they won’t turn into a bar of gold. Good evidence is composed of good evidence, not lots of bad evidence.

Good evidence is composed of good evidence, there is no doubt about that.  This came up in a discussion I was having with a coworker the other day.  He was telling me why he was a ‘believer’.

When he was young, one night he prayed for an angel to help him.  He then went to sleep on his waterbed.  When he awoke the next morning, he discovered an angel pin in his bed.  As if the pin itself wasn’t proof enough, the fact that it didn’t puncture his bed during the night further strengthened his belief that this was a miracle.

In his mind, this “miracle” is evidence that:

1. There is a god.
2. God listens to prayers.
3. God answers prayers.

My interpretation is quite different and has nothing to do with the fact that god is apparently an ass because even I know that my friend wasn’t asking for a pin.

My reaction to this anecdote was simply that it didn’t prove anything and that there were much more likely, mundane explanations for this “miracle” than that god did it.  Since I don’t believe that he is outright lying to me, here were some of my possible theories.  Memories suck.  Some aspects of this memory may be based on fact but others may have been invented by his brain over the years.  It’s possible that he found this pin in his bed one morning and was amazed that it didn’t puncture his bed while he was sleeping and thought that god must have protected his bed.  It wouldn’t take much for his brain to manufacture the rest of the story over years of telling and retelling.  Or perhaps he prayed out loud (he swears that he never did this but I believe it is possible that he did occasionally and just forgot) and his mother overheard his prayer and decided to give god a helping hand.  He says that he asked his mother about the pin and she said she knew nothing about it but if she did put it there, of course that is what she would say.

Of course, I’m not saying that either of these is actually what happened, what I am saying is that these are two rational, possible explanations that don’t require any supernatural beings.  My final thoughts to him were, do you really think that god heard you pray, went shopping at Wal-Mart to pick up an angel pin and took that to your house and placed it in your bed?  And really, give me a break, he was not asking god for a pin when he prayed for an angel to help him!  This evidence is not even a huge stack of cowpies, it’s just one cowpie.  And that is all the consideration it is worth.

This is an attack that I have to defend against often.  I’ll be pleading my case against the claims that some theist is making and suddenly, they say something like:

You think you know everything!

I am not just some arrogant know-it-all.  But that is the way these attacks are designed to make me feel.  I always have to remind myself that this is just an ad hominem attack.  But it is really difficult to make the theist understand that I’m not just being an arrogant know-it-all.  Once this attack has been made, I’ve never gotten the theist who made it to acknowledge that there is a difference between believing something that has a basis in fact and believing something for no reason.  I don’t have a problem with them having belief in something, or that they are certain of their beliefs.  My problem lies in the fact that their beliefs are not based on facts, yet they are still just as certain that their beliefs are true.

The critical difference is where our certainty comes from.  My certainty comes from the facts that were used to draw conclusions that are testable and true.  Their certainty comes from… their minds, aka faith.

Tuesday night, I had a long argument with one of my co-workers.  We were talking about the election and he said “something funny” was going on because, allegedly, if you chose to vote straight democrat on our voting machines, when it went to the review page, it didn’t have Obama listed as one of the candidates that you were voting for.  This, in his mind, suggested that there was a deliberate act on “their” part to cheat Obama out of votes.

My skeptical mind immediately kicks into gear and doubts that a conspiracy is the most reasonable explanation for this occurrence.  I said this to my co-worker and explained why it was more likely that these reports were exaggerated, or the people were mistaken or even intentionally lied, etc. than that the voting machines were tampered with.  He then stated that this wasn’t just South Carolina but all over the country (although, still only a hand-full of complaints).  My reply to this was considering the extremely small number of complaints and considering that they are spread out over such a wide area, the entire country, it is even more likely that it isn’t true.  Because now we have a conspiracy that involves government and civilian officials all over the country which wouldn’t be an easy task even in a small election much less one as closely watched as this one.  Given the difficulty of such a large conspiracy, it is more likely that these people are mistaken or a machine malfunctioned and I would discard the testimony of these hand-full of people.

His reply was that I lived in a fantasy world.  WTF, I live in a fantasy world?  My initial reaction at this point was anger because I had just been insulted.  And from my point of view it was a pretty decent insult.  I’ve overcome a significant amount of fantasy based living, in my past, to get back into the world of reality.  Telling me that I live in a fantasy world is as bad as calling me a Scientologist or worse, a Christian.  But I quickly realized that he had just made an attack against me rather than my arguments.  I asked him to address where I was wrong in my reasoning as I certainly do not live in a fantasy world!  I even tried to explain Occam’s razor to him and tried to show how many unwarranted and unlikely assumptions he has to make about everyone involved with the voting process to come to the conclusion that these isolated reports are true and in fact represent some sort of conspiracy to cheat Obama out of votes.

He also assumed that, just because I don’t believe these few peoples stories, as they were relayed to me through him, that I must think these people and everyone else who believed them to be liars.  This is not so, there are other possibilities, they could have been mistaken or the machines could have been malfunctioning.  It is naive to believe everything you are told, even if the story comes from someone you trust.  When the claim is hard to believe, it requires more in-depth vetting before acceptance.

One other problem I had with his side of the argument was when he insinuated that I was being naive because I don’t know everything about these computerized voting machines.  As in specifics about how they are programmed, who can program them, etc.  I tried to explain to him that I wasn’t trying to prove to him that it isn’t possible to manipulate these machines in order to cheat Obama.  I was only trying to show why it was not only unlikely, but unlikely enough to not warrant further research on my part.

Even after all this, I’m not sure if I got through to him at all, if I did he wouldn’t admit it.  I never could get him to point out specific problems with my side of the argument.  It was pretty much decided that “I just don’t understand”, which is the generic version of “god doesn’t want you to understand this yet” or “god works in mysterious ways.”

One other thing (just to beat this dead horse one last time) I just thought about.  If there was a conspiracy to cheat Obama out of votes using these computerized voting machines, why would you design it to not show Obama when someone selects the straight democrat option, thereby giving a clue to your devious plot.  It would be smarter to have it show Obama but just not give him the vote.  And if they are dumb enough to not think of that they can’t be smart enough to pull off this huge conspiracy otherwise.