23 Minutes in Hell
Mood:  on fire
Topic: Lectures On Doubt
I was stuck in Walmart last night with the fam. I'm not a big shopper, so I tried to find something in their book section and the most interesting publication I found was called "23 minutes in Hell" by some cross-eyed praiser of the Lord. But OMG, there are 40+ reviews of it on Amazon. 23 Minutes

It's one of these books where you can tell at the outset that the subject matter can be condensed into two pages but somehow they've got to stretch it out long enough to make it a book. So you can skip the lay preaching and his call to the ministry and all that and read the actual account of hell which takes five or ten minutes. First thing that's funny about this account is it's heavily annotated. Virtually every sentence he utters references some Bible scripture or another moron's NDE. Ron Livingston did the same thing with his "Sealed Portion." Some advice for up and coming prophets: follow Joseph Smith's example. Make up your story, publish it, and let others be the scholars and unravel the intricities. Don't show us all the stuff you read prior to your bad dream or episode of sleep paralysis. So what happens. He is taken from his bed, the knowledge that he's a Christian is stripped from him, and he is put in a 10x15x15 brick dungeon with two or three grotesque demons pacing about angry, smelly, and ready to hurt him. They beat him up, tear apart his flesh, throw him against the wall. Then from this enclosed space, he somehow can see outward a mile wide pit of fire. Inside the pit there are stone segregations so each person has their own individual fireplace. It's very important not to let the immates have any communication with each other - they have to be completely alone. I'll admit I was reading fast so I missed whether he was actually thrown in or just about to be thrown in and then Jesus came, gave him his memory back, and sent him away with the ole, "you had to experience this to warn the world" message. Some xtians are luckier than others I suppose. Some get to experience a lot of money, power, and sex and then repent, but had to go through all that stuff to warn the world about it.

The author goes on and on about how deformed the demons were, but I wonder what his standard of comparison was. The demons were faster, stronger, and endlessly superior to humans particularily in physical feats so it sounds to me like their design was rather sophisticated. The author also complains about how thirsty he was and there not being a drop of water anywhere in hell. Of course, human bodies are, as the sand entities in Star Trek put it, "bags of mostly water". And the demons were obviously constituted of water as well. If for no other reason, we know this because their flesh was hanging down, rotting, and smelling. Things don't rot without moisture, sorry. In heaven I suppose, he'd be drinking glacier water all the time and enjoying it with his wife - as he did on earth. Would he also be eating and having sex? Finally, he knows all this stuff about hell "intuitively" as he says, he doesn't know how he knows it, he just does. Like the demons are 1,000 times stronger than humans. That there is no water. That there are endlessly more pits like that one he described was a mile wide, and so on. Let me help you Mr. Wiess. You know these things because you're making up the story. The author of the story knows the answers about the story the characters inside don't.

Bad Theology or Just Bad Manners?
Topic: Lectures On Doubt

Adam Corolla inverviewed Shirley Phelps today on his radio show. She's the daughter, I think, of Fred.  What she wanted to tell the world in this instance was, that the recent Amish girls who were murdered were perfectly deserving of the 'crime' and that there is no difference between the Amish and the Taliban. As outrageous as her position sounds, the difference between Shirley and most Christians (and otherwise religious folks) who understand their own theology is mostly a matter of social grace.  Virtually every incarnation of God damns the greater portion of humanity with a lot of misery and pain and retribution for, ultimately, incorrectly placed beliefs. If religious belief were like the contents of an irritable bowel, then the governing criteria for social acceptability isn't so much the precise constitution of that content, but whether those contents are released publically or privately.

That I believe, is a very real, serious distinction that needs to go into the evaluation of religious rationality. Civilized professionals with a degree of self-reflection typically try to nuance the manifistation of God's hand in the real world and blurr the lines on who might be taking it hard in the end. Even if they have secret hopes or beliefs, or are constrained when pressed to logically commit to a God who's damnation is way overdone and mostly arbitrary, our evaluation of that theology should ultimately take such public resistance into consideration.

 I remember pushing a wealthy and very nice Calvinist once on my mission into admitting that God is going to damn babies, and that the attitude one takes toward that situation is simply, "Well, that's tough for them, isn't it?" If reduced to it's ultimate logical implications alone, this man's doctrine was most likely as despicable as Shirley's. But, "this man's doctrine" was clearly superior in its community expression. When that's taken into account, the victory I felt during the encounter in retrospect should have been deflated a great deal. On the one hand, it might be said that I provoked his thought, yet on the other, perhaps all I did was akin to badgering a well-adjusted non-theist into admitting he has (inappropriate) sexual fantasies.

 

Sociology of Knowledge
Now Playing: To Be Edited!
Topic: Lectures On Doubt
Knowledge as a social institution is most certainly an idea that most atheists aren't going to have much patience for. The typical fear, and in some cases for good reason, is that what's being argued for allows anything to become knowledge so long as everyone believes it and that there is no world external to our minds. Of course, many religious folks in all their simplicity really latch on to this idea because they think it means that if a lot of people believe in something nuts, like their God, then it must be true. This is similar to the tactic I've discussed before about Christian penchant for radical skepticism when they're backed into a corner.

I tried to argue in favor of constructivism as an experiment on FAIR the other day, sort of an unconventional angle to take I know, but then again, why not deny them of their belief that if they can get rid of the enlightenment their problems are over?

Now, I really don't have it in me to do a technical post tonight. Maybe that's a good thing, keep it simple to understand, and me from stumbling over myself. I pick Kuhn for my example here because he's relatively well known and he himself or some variation of his "paradigms" are invoked all the time by religionists who are trying to save their beliefs by making them a "paradigm" without a common ground shared with today's science establishment whereby they could ever risk being wrong.

Well, according to Kuhn, not any old idea with a following qualified as science. Science in fact, was a relatively recent phenomena that required a high level of organization to acheive. A science has an extensive core body of research that everyone agrees on and those working within normal science should strive to work within the paradigm. So not just any rogue professor with a website and an ax to grind against the institution "has a paradigm." It would be difficult to argue that even a large body of informal researches united in more or less the same cause could have a paradigm. Paranormal studies are a good example. In a later post, I might fill in the details on why I believe that. UFO studies are something I follow and fit the bill perfectly I think.

I need to emphasize something I said above. According to Kuhn, researchers should stick with the paradigm. One of the things very troubling to the enlightenment was the opressiveness of religion, and even with the huge success of science as an institution in today's world, the enlightenments glowing ashes are no less concerned. That way of thinking holds out for an ideal where nothing is sacred. Where the institution can never put to death another Galileo. Where the lowliest waif can revolutionize the entire institution overnight given a profound discovery. But the problem here is a practical one. How many straws of hay do we have to pull out of the bail before we draw blood? Shout's like Feynman's "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts" seem to assure us that never again will superstition and beaurocracy stiffle progress, but in practice, how much sense does it really make for a large, complex institution to proceed like that? The downside is that pseudoscientists, apologists, and downright cranks LOVE this philosophy! Because to them, today's science is the church and they're justified from the outset to apostatize. Now we might sit back comfortably and say fine, let them bring the evidence! Well, the problem with that is, bringing in extraordinary evidence for review is hard to do even within the establishment. It's not as simple as providing a literal smoking gun picked up from the crime scene. Testing ideas often require funding. Giving research a fair hearing and reviewing the evidence also takes time and costs money. None of this stuff happens in a vacuum where only pure truth zips around as an eternal constant. All those voices challenging the status quo demand to be heard. But if evolution is our goal, giving them all a fair shake would be akin to being open to every mutation, fragmenting the herd and winding up with genetic drift, loosly interconnected colonies of mutants that are doomed to die rather than a stronger species. Kuhn recognized this problem and was therefore, against science as open to all ideas. Revolutions would come, but not everyday or from just any source. As new discoveries are made within normal science, evidence would eventually surface that doesn't fit right, leading to a crisis and a need for possibly a new framework.

I brought up John Gee's apologetics for the Book of Abraham on a post a couple months ago. Gee has invoked Kuhn in the past to make the point that Egyptology might not yet be ready for the Book of Abraham. While it may hypothetically be true that someday the BOA might be vindicated, Kuhn's position would actually be that Gee's apologetics are counterproductive to science - he should be doing "normal Egyptology." And further, Gee's research couldn't really be properly considered science. Whereas from the enlightenment heritage, it's tougher to rule him out of court without sitting down and carefully reviewing his, and every other fringe researcher's, "evidence" and giving him a fair hearing.

That ended up being kind of a long post. To sum up the scope of what I'm trying to say, a lot of atheists when they think of Kuhn or more broadly, any philosophy that considers science a social institution, they think of backs turning on reality. Well, that's a valid concern that I obviously don't have room to talk about in this post, but that's only a small part of what constructive theories are trying to get at. The truth is, and it's ironic for some apologists, that constructivists ideas can actually guard science from the dangers of religion and crackpots better than traditional enlightenment ideas, in some ways at least.

Faith is Bad
Topic: Lectures On Doubt
One of the things believers can't decide on is whether they have faith in their religious beliefs or if their beliefs are more or less an established fact.

In the last Skeptic's Boot Camp installment we learned that believers love to take the position of radical skepticism, denying the possibility of knowing anything, apparently in order to make all knowledge appear as worthless as their own religious beliefs. But what I'd like to know is, what happened to the importance of faith? what happened to being blessed for not seeing yet believing? Why do believers feel they need to make arguments like this?

Under the Christian-backed-into-a-corner problem of induction, since the existence of China "can't be proven either(!)" how can we criticize people who believe in Jesus? A very interesting situation as now not only do Christians admit the weak factual standing of their beliefs by lowering the bar down to about a millimeter above ground level but they also deny the potency of their faith as it's nothing more extraordinary than inferring the existence of China.

Interesting indeed, because we also hear of "Evidence That Demands A Verdict," and Jesus "Lunatic, Liar, or Lord" arguments intended to more or less establish the factual proof of Jesus. In Mormon apologetics you have the similar kind of arguments surrounding the credibility of the 11 witnesses. You'll often hear that the integrity and circumstance of those witnesses are so solid as to meet the highest judicial standards. But if that's true, then why are we also told that Moroni took back the Gold Plates because otherwise we wouldn't need faith? It's like God is up there scratching his beard, "Now let's see, we'll give them 11 of the most credible witnesses who could ever be asked to testify in a court room but it's going to be the difference between faith and absolute knowledge if we let them have the murder weapon!"

Another way of looking at it would be, if we throw out the Bible or throw out the Book of Mormon witnesses, we might as well throw out our entire legal system. But provided we don't throw out our legal system, we still require faith! Because even the most open and shut court ruling doesn't give us absolute certainty! Nothing, of course, could be more absurd. That's the kind of faith that moves molehills not mountains.

So what's exactly wrong with Faith anyway? It is in fact faith to a Christian, that is precisely what's wrong with the beliefs they are opposed to. Christians will accuse atheists of having greater faith than believers for holding positions they believe are dubious like evolution. They'll regularily point out that science is often wrong, rigid, and overconfident -- because it's just a religion too!

There is little choice for Christians then. Either they have to allow all other religions and beliefs to be justified on grounds of faith as they are and secular knowledge to be more objectively established, or they have to appeal to evidence and try and make it look as if their religion offers the best evidential case amongst competitors. And when they go the latter route, they turn to a position of faith that makes faith at best, mundane, and at worst, the achillies heal that brings down everyone else.

All or Nothing
Topic: Lectures On Doubt

One of the tactics of believers is to invoke, typically unwittingly, the problem of induction in the favor of their favorite deity. The problem of induction, to those skeptics out there new to the game, is the problem of making general inferences from finite samples.  It doesn't follow that if one only observes white ducks throughout their life, then there exist only white ducks. As opposed to deductive reasoning which provides certainty.¹ If a black duck is discovered, it follows deductively and immediately that the statement "All ducks are white" is false.  In a previous Skeptic's Boot Camp I gave the example of Newtonian physics. It didn't matter how many observations seemed to prove it, the problem of induction held that it could not be considered ultimately true.  There has never been a satisfactory solution to the problem of induction. 

Many times, when a believer is getting his time piece polished by an atheist, the believer will reach down and revealing all he has left demand, "But how can we know anything at all? Look how often science is wrong!"  At that instant, the atheist can raise his hands in the air victorious. Although, further instruction should be provided for the sake of hoping to improve the world just a little bit.  The obvious route to go from here is to point out that if this reasoning bolsters God, it also bolsters every heinous crime imaginable. The believer should be requested not to object if a pedophile justifies his actions on the same grounds.

Sometimes I'm surprised that even some of the more articulate religious thinkers take this line of argument.  Mormon Egyptologist John Gee has made the point that since Egyptology is controversial, then the Book of Abraham just might be vindicated one day.² Of course, it would be interesting if he'd give any other theory in his field of equal controversy more than five minutes of thoughtful consideration.

Today, James Faulconer, a Mormon BYU philosopher who I respect quite a bit to be honest, made this point on a blog:³

"If a person insists on a certain, rationalist and Enlightenment understanding of intelligibility and reasonableness, then the gospel doesn’t make sense. No religion can be reduced to a rational system with neither remainder nor absence and without contradiction. But, as Godel proved, neither can arithmetic, so that inability on the part of religion isn’t much of a strike against it."

I was pretty surprised by that statement.  It's probably the most verbally sophisticated articulation of this fallacious reasoning I've ever seen. While not invoking induction here, but rather a very obscure subject in logic, the result is the same.  While this isn't a strike against religion, it's also not a strike against Time Cubeism, flat earthism, masochism, or any other insane or destructive belief. I'd bet everything I own that no Enlightenment thinker would have ever expected Mormonism or any other religion to be demonstrated formally complete before it could be considered "reasonable."

If absolute metaphysical certitude isn't achievable, then who dares to criticize any religion as irrational?

1. The problem of induction lurks behind deduction too when considered epistemically.
2. References to Kuhn in Abracadabra, Isaac, and Jacob
3. Times and Seasons
 

Catch-Phrase Philosophy
Topic: Lectures On Doubt

Skeptics Boot Camp (II)

Nothing reveals ignorance more readily to the informed than the use of popular slogans which are believed to bear great philosophical significance but in reality, are either quite meaningless, ambiguous, or just don't hold the gravity those to whom the slogan is popular among assume.  In this installment we'll go over a few loosely related catch phrases.  Unfortunately, I'm afraid these may have been popularized by atheists and skeptics. Though their use is growing uncritically amongst amateur apologists and if I had to keep a tally, probably have been used more often by believers than critics on the message boards I post at. The danger in these is that they are often used in the form: (catch phrase), therefore, whatever I've argued is true.

"You can't prove a negative!" or
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

These are not concepts you will ever read about in philosophy of science discussions.  They are vague, loose formulations of the problem of induction (probably) and really, they are just false.  Is the statement, "There are no living Tyrannosaurus" any less of a fact than, "There are living lions and tigers?"  If you'd been arrested and tried in a court of law for murder, and not a shred of evidence whatsoever could be linked to you, should that not count as "evidence" in your favor? 

The problem of induction holds that just because the sun rises today, it doesn't logically follow that it will rise tomorrow.  If one were to come up empty handed after searching two thousand years for a Dodo bird, that wouldn't guarantee no Dodo birds exist.  All the experiments in the world seemed to confirm Newtonian mechanics, nevertheless along came Relativity.  Same problem.  So here we have three examples, the first is a "positive" that can't escape induction, the second a "negative" and the final, sort of an inversion where "proving a negative" comes with more certainty than proving a positive.

"...burden of proof.."
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

"Burden of Proof" may have a place in the rules of a formal debate or in academic convention, but is there really a universal standard for assigning "burden of proof" in any given real-world argument?  What criteria is there for determining the most "extraordinary claim?" The problem is, those who assign the burden seem to believe the force of the assignment comes by way of security of their own position.  But it's quite obvious that, historically, the burden of proof doesn't necessarily lie with the most "extraordinary" claim with respect to some universal rules of evidence because the "ordinary claim" is often just the popular claim.  From what we know today about astronomy, Galileo should have been able to scoff at his peers and demand them to bring the evidence on for the geocentric model, sit back, and wait.  Obviously, independent of how wrong the geocentric model was, Galileo clearly had the "burden of proof," and his claim was in fact, the "extraordinary" one.

Skeptics shouldn't merely dismiss the ideas of believers and pretend to wait patiently for the evidence they know will never come.  They should be anxiously engaged in demonstrating how wrong the beliefs are.

"Ockham's Razor tells us..."

Ockham was a key figure in philosophy and it's true that simplicity should be a goal of any theory.  I'm not knocking Ockham here at all, but rather slogans that substitute appeal to Ockham for argument.  It's very difficult to conjure up real-world situations where the deciding factor is Ockham's razor.  Assumptions that we make can be big factors in what constitutes "simplicity" in the first place and it's those assumptions which seem to me, tip the balance in the mind of those appealing to Ockham, and not parsimony per se.

To sum up, any of these catch-phrases could be merely thrown out for rhetorical flair in context of a very cogent argument. We all use catch phrases out of habit at some time or another.  But more often than not, the slogans above will serve as a warning flag for a problematic argument ahead.

Abusing Logical Fallacies
Topic: Lectures On Doubt

Skeptic's Boot Camp

The reasoning of skeptics, on average, should be a cut above that of religious believers. To this end, I've decided to post a few installments discussing some basic problems I've noticed in the day-to-day argumentation I follow online. I hope these suggestions will be helpful to especially, new skeptics, not just as a lesson in what to avoid themselves, but as immediate clues to identify an opponent who doesn't know what they are talking about.

Abusing Logical Fallacies

To my satisfaction, I've noticed skeptics, even new skeptics are far less likely to abuse a logical fallacy than an apologist. It seems to me that it has become part of the apologist culture to view themselves as master logicians and not hesitate to point out the supposed fallacies of their skeptical opponents. It's my belief, that skeptics should restrain themselves from identifying by name the fallacies of believers and just point out plainly what is wrong with the argument. Spending too much time pointing out logical fallacies looks petty and like you're trying to hard to impress everyone. It's not unlike fanatically pointing out spelling and grammar errors. Pointing out logical fallacies by name, should be reserved for those believers most worthy of scorn, or to teach a lesson to those believers who erroneously point out fallacies in others.

Straw Man: Look for this accusation being used broadly to cover virtually anything the believer doesn't like about an opponents argument. Note that the "absurd" portion of a correctly formulated reductio ad absurdum argument is often misidentified as a "straw man." This seems to be a reocurring error in FAIR moderating calls. Saying, "If a Mormon believes X, then he must be a Q" is different from saying, "If a Mormon believes X for reasons Y, then how do you deny a Q from believing Z for reasons Y?"

Begging The Question: This refers to circular reasoning, not "raising a question." Even if brute ignorance secures this phrase acceptence in casual vernacular, it should be avoided. The biggest problem I see is that those who typically use this terminology seem to think that they are pointing out a fallacy. They've heard the term in conjuction with fallacies from somewhere and reason that it means if what the opponent is saying is true, it raises very hard questions that the opponent probably can't answer. Also, unless you've already established a respected persona, it will take you down a notch in the eyes of the lurkers who think you don't know what it means.

Ad Hominem: A personal insult doesn't constitute a fallacy. It has to be suggested that from the insult, it follows that the insultee's argument doesn't work.

Appeal To Authority: It's ok to cite an authority to back a claim. And there is a lot of gray area here, but the problem is when the stature of the authority overshadows the actual content of the claim. Also, be aware of the appeal to (false) authority. This happens frequently with apologetics groups. Where experts in one area, wanting to help with the cause of faith, apply their skills to areas where that expertise counts far less, or not at all.

False Dichotomy: Many have been wrongly charged with a false dichotomy because the accuser doesn't understand that the word "or" has both an exclusive and non-exclusive sense. Make sure what's presented really is, first, a dichotomy before inspecting it for a fallacy. Often times, it's just natural to give two or three options of what's in mind as examples, not meaning to be exclusive.

"You can eat oranges or bananas to get your vitamins."

"What, you're saying I can't get vitamins from apples?!!"

Also keep in mind, that sometimes a fallacy like this will be knowingly committed by the author for rhetorical effect or humor. Pointing it out triumphantly might make it look like you didn't quite "get it."