Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Video Series 4: Music and Life
Alan Watts was a British philosopher and was famous for his talks on Eastern philosophy and Buddhist ideas.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Video Series 3: Critical Thinking
Qualiasoup's YouTube channel is a full of video gems about belief, knowledge, morality, and reason. They are some of the most eloquently-spoken, well-animated, engaging, and effective discussions of these topics on the web.
Video Series 2: Space Station Time-lapse
An amazing view of the blue marble, our home, shot in time-lapse from the International Space Station.
Video Series 1: The Lung Fish
I have returned :) A series of short videos for the next several posts, on science, reason, morality, and humanity. Enjoy!
An amazing little creature, using its swim bladder to breathe air during yearly droughts, then hibernating until the rains come.
An amazing little creature, using its swim bladder to breathe air during yearly droughts, then hibernating until the rains come.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Atheists: brave agnostics
There is not a big difference between an atheist and an agnostic. They both don’t know whether or not a god exists. The difference is that atheists aren’t afraid to just lump god in with all the other stuff that we don’t have evidence for. There is no evidence against fairies or leprechauns, and no one knows that they don’t exist. But you don’t believe in fairies, they aren’t real. If someone were to ask you if fairies were real, you would say “no” with a good bit of certainty. This is because in our day-to-day lives, we don’t think in terms of absolute knowledge, but rather practical knowledge. There is no evidence for fairies, so we don’t believe. It would be pointless to spend the rest of our lives debating in our heads whether or not they exist. An atheist treats God the same way. No atheist knows there is no god (even Richard Dawkins admits this), but can still say with certainty that one doesn’t exist based on a lack of evidence. So come on agnostics, make the switch! Treat god like everything else.
Similar to fairies, leprechauns, the Lochness monster, and Bigfoot, God to me seems to be a human construct. Who wrote the Bible? Humans, of course. Whether or not God guided the hands of those humans is something that Christians cannot demonstrate, so why believe it?
Being agnostic is good in that you recognize the state of your knowledge about god. You don’t know, and may never know. There’s no proof either way. These are true statements. However, they are also true for other issues such as mythological creatures. So in reality, an agnostic doesn’t believe, and is simply admitting the fragility of their knowledge. However, we shouldn’t hold God on such a pedestal. Your knowledge is fragile in every area, and you can’t be agnostic about everything. What you believe and don’t believe is all about evidence.
- Evan
Similar to fairies, leprechauns, the Lochness monster, and Bigfoot, God to me seems to be a human construct. Who wrote the Bible? Humans, of course. Whether or not God guided the hands of those humans is something that Christians cannot demonstrate, so why believe it?
Being agnostic is good in that you recognize the state of your knowledge about god. You don’t know, and may never know. There’s no proof either way. These are true statements. However, they are also true for other issues such as mythological creatures. So in reality, an agnostic doesn’t believe, and is simply admitting the fragility of their knowledge. However, we shouldn’t hold God on such a pedestal. Your knowledge is fragile in every area, and you can’t be agnostic about everything. What you believe and don’t believe is all about evidence.
- Evan
Monday, February 8, 2010
“Intelligent Design” = Religious Creationism
Creationism is a religious idea of the beginning of the universe. There have been as many creation myths as religions, and no one myth is better than the other. The high amount of Christianity in the United States has led to a movement seeking to belittle the scientific advances we’ve had on the origin of life and advance the Christian creation myth, having it taught as if it were science. The movement has made many claims that certain scientific facts back up creationism, but most of these claims have revealed the movement’s lack of scientific literacy and have been debunked. I will address these specific claims in later blogs, but today I will talk about the credibility of the creationism movement.
Merely believing in creationism is one thing, but many try to make it appear as a scientific theory, giving it a credible-sounding name (“Intelligent Design” or ID), wanting it taught in schools, and saying that it’s an “alternative” theory with much evidence in its favor, all the while making ill-informed criticisms of evolution. ID is not mainstream science as its proponents claim. The movement has shown itself time and time again to simply be a propaganda machine trying to give the appearance of respectability:
In order for creationism to even be plausible, you must first show that there is a God, which is impossible to do. The “evidence” that the creationism movement shows for God (alleged failings of evolution and the big bang) is the same “evidence” they use to try and validate creationism, so there is a circular argument going on. It is no mystery why the scientific community doesn’t acknowledge creationism as an alternative: it is clearly motivated by religious theology and lacks the properties of a scientific theory.
- Evan
Merely believing in creationism is one thing, but many try to make it appear as a scientific theory, giving it a credible-sounding name (“Intelligent Design” or ID), wanting it taught in schools, and saying that it’s an “alternative” theory with much evidence in its favor, all the while making ill-informed criticisms of evolution. ID is not mainstream science as its proponents claim. The movement has shown itself time and time again to simply be a propaganda machine trying to give the appearance of respectability:
- a 2003 poll showed support for teaching of intelligent design, but was found to be falsely reported and worthless to begin with
- the Discovery Institute presented a bibliography listing reputable scientists who had dissented with evolution and supported ID. When the scientists were contacted, they said their work did not support ID or challenge evolution, and many said their work was evidence against ID
- in order to get their promotional video on television, the ID movement deliberately hid the fact that it was about intelligent design
In order for creationism to even be plausible, you must first show that there is a God, which is impossible to do. The “evidence” that the creationism movement shows for God (alleged failings of evolution and the big bang) is the same “evidence” they use to try and validate creationism, so there is a circular argument going on. It is no mystery why the scientific community doesn’t acknowledge creationism as an alternative: it is clearly motivated by religious theology and lacks the properties of a scientific theory.
- Evan
Sunday, February 7, 2010
An Open Mind: seeking truth rather than knowing it
It has been commonly assumed that life started in some ‘primordial soup’ of chemicals on the planet, and that somehow these chemicals begat life. How life began was still a mystery, but this ‘primordial soup’ idea seemed the most plausible. However, on February 3rd, the 80-year-old theory involving the origin of life was overturned. Quoting the linked article, the primordial soup idea could not provide the “sustained driving force to make anything react, and without an energy source, life as we know it can’t exist.” The new idea is that life began at hydrothermal vents in the ocean, where there is bountiful energy and already-existing chemical processes that resemble what today’s cells use for respiration.
One goal of reasonable people is to never become attached to your beliefs about the world in any way. If we do this, we can easily and happily accept new and better ideas, discarding the old. This is how science works: being able to converge on truth by letting the evidence speak for itself. It can be a slow process sometimes - in this case an 80-year process - but it is sure and steady.
One reason I reject religion is its inability to find truth. There is no objective guide to what is correct and incorrect in religion; things cannot be falsified. So when someone has a new idea, who is to say whether they are right or wrong? This is why there are so many sects of all the different religions instead of a single unified one. How can we know which ideas are right? There are many competing ideas in science too, but they will be resolved eventually, just like all the other debates before them.
When we compare science to religion as far as a branching tree of ideas, we can visualize that religion, since the beginning, has branched off constantly, wandering about and creating thousands of incompatible and unverifiable ideologies, and has so far discovered nothing about the world. Visualizing the creation and discarding of ideas in science, we can see that science converges on itself, slowly weeding out the incorrect ideas and replacing them with good ones. New branches of ideas are common, but unless observations continue to validate their claims, the branch disappears entirely. If the new idea is validated, the entire scientific community accepts the idea and jumps on the train. Using this objective and evidence-based method, science has been our one and only way of making discoveries about the world.
To me, humbly and slowly approaching the truth by studying the world is better than having a faith-based belief that you already know the truth. Which one sounds better to you?
- Evan
One goal of reasonable people is to never become attached to your beliefs about the world in any way. If we do this, we can easily and happily accept new and better ideas, discarding the old. This is how science works: being able to converge on truth by letting the evidence speak for itself. It can be a slow process sometimes - in this case an 80-year process - but it is sure and steady.
One reason I reject religion is its inability to find truth. There is no objective guide to what is correct and incorrect in religion; things cannot be falsified. So when someone has a new idea, who is to say whether they are right or wrong? This is why there are so many sects of all the different religions instead of a single unified one. How can we know which ideas are right? There are many competing ideas in science too, but they will be resolved eventually, just like all the other debates before them.
When we compare science to religion as far as a branching tree of ideas, we can visualize that religion, since the beginning, has branched off constantly, wandering about and creating thousands of incompatible and unverifiable ideologies, and has so far discovered nothing about the world. Visualizing the creation and discarding of ideas in science, we can see that science converges on itself, slowly weeding out the incorrect ideas and replacing them with good ones. New branches of ideas are common, but unless observations continue to validate their claims, the branch disappears entirely. If the new idea is validated, the entire scientific community accepts the idea and jumps on the train. Using this objective and evidence-based method, science has been our one and only way of making discoveries about the world.
To me, humbly and slowly approaching the truth by studying the world is better than having a faith-based belief that you already know the truth. Which one sounds better to you?
- Evan
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Inerrant Errors, Infallible Fallacies
At the center of Christianity sits the Bible. This book is said to be instructions from a non-physical, supremely omnipotent, and perfectly good being - God - on how to live and get into Heaven. Heaven is a place of happiness and bliss that, if you follow God’s commands, you will go to after you’re dead. It also includes stories on how the universe was made, why humans are innately evil (as God says they are), and many stories of humans and their dealings with God, back when he used to show himself all the time. This book cannot contain errors, because if it did, it couldn’t be the word of an omnipotent being.
This book has glaring errors. There are scientific errors, historical errors, conflicting accounts of events, contradicting statements on right/wrong, contradicting statements on the nature of God, accounts of acts sanctified by God that are immoral today, and in general a lot of strange passages that don’t seem to belong in a perfect book. About half of the contradictions I have used here are taken from The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible, which is an invaluable source for this stuff.
Jesus himself states that religious laws are not absolute:
- Evan
This book has glaring errors. There are scientific errors, historical errors, conflicting accounts of events, contradicting statements on right/wrong, contradicting statements on the nature of God, accounts of acts sanctified by God that are immoral today, and in general a lot of strange passages that don’t seem to belong in a perfect book. About half of the contradictions I have used here are taken from The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible, which is an invaluable source for this stuff.
Jesus himself states that religious laws are not absolute:
- in Matthew 5:38-39, he rejects the “eye for an eye” law (Exod. 21:23-25, Lev. 24:19-20, Deut. 19:21)
- in Mark 7:18-19, Jesus rejects all dietary law as described in Lev. 11
- in Mark 2:27-28, Jesus rejects the commandment (from THE ten commandments) about working on the Sabbath
- if Jesus consideredthat even the ten commandments were not inerrant, why should we consider the entire Bible to be inerrant?
- Lev. 11:6 states rabbits chew their cud
- Lev. 11:20-23 talks about four-legged insects, including grasshoppers
- 1 Chronicles 16:30 and Psalm 93:1 states that the Earth is immobile, but not only does in revolve around the sun, it is gravitationally influenced by other bodies
- Genesis 1: 1) states that the Earth was created from the beginning of the universe, when in fact the Earth formed 9.5 billion years after the beginning of our universe. 2) God creates light before he makes light-producing objects. 3) “night” and “day” existed before there was a sun to mark them.
- no flood ever happened: Egypt had a flourishing civilization, starting long before Noah, and it was never interrupted by a flood
- there were a multitude of Egyptian scholars a the time of God’s ten curses on the Egyptians. You’d think someone would’ve mentioned raining frogs, devastating plagues, or all of the nation’s firstborn sons dying
- Daniel 5 states that Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, was succeeded on the throne by his son, Belshazzar. but historians tell us that Belshazzar was not the son of Nebuchadnezzar, and was never king.
- the family lines of the Bible add up to an Earth that is about 6,000 years old. This is inconsistent with everything we know about the universe. Chemistry, physics, biology, geology, astronomy - all these fields tell us this isn’t true.
- there are two differing genesis accounts: one where the animals were created first, then the first man and woman created simultaneously (Gen. 1:25-27), and a second where man was created first, then the animals, then the woman from the man’s rib (Gen. 2:18-22)
- differing accounts of where Jesus first appeared to the eleven disciples after the resurrection: Matthew 28:16 says on top of a mountain in Galilee, while Mark 16:14, Luke 24:33-37, and John 20:19 state that it was in a room in Jerusalem.
- when did Jesus ascend into Heaven after the resurrection? On the day of his resurrection: Luke 24:1-51, Mark 16:9-19. At least 8 days after the resurrection: John 20:26. “Many” days after the resurrection: Acts 13:31. 40 days after the resurrection: Acts 1:2-3, 9
- who buried Jesus? Joseph of Arimathea: Matthew 27:57-60, Mark 15:43-46, Luke 23:50-53. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus: John 19:38-42. The Jews and their rulers: Acts 13:27-29
- two very conflicting genealogies of Jesus: Mark 1:6-16 and Luke 3:21-31
- I have also posted a video in the links on the right of the page about the many glaring contradictions between the Four Gospels’ account of Jesus’ tomb after the resurrection.
- Can God do anything? Yes: Luke 1:37, Jeremiah 32:27. No: Judges 1:19, Hebrews 6:18
- Is God the creator of evil? Yes: Isaiah 45:7. No: 1 John 4:8
- Should we fear God? Yes: Lev. 25:17. No: 2 Timothy 1:7
- Does God lie? Yes: Ezekiel 14:9, 2 Thessalonians 2:11. No: Titus 1:2, Hebrews 6:18
- Does God love everyone? Yes: 1 John 4:16, John 3:16. No: Psalm 11:5, Romans 9:13
- Does God know and see everything? Yes: Jeremiah 23:24, Proverbs 15:3. No: Gen. 3:8, Gen 18:9.
- How should you treat your enemies? Love and be kind to them: Matthew 5:44, Proverbs 25:21. Hate and wish evil upon them: Psalm 35:6, 8, Psalm 69:22-28
- Should we judge people? Yes: Lev. 19:15, John 7:24. No: Matthew 7:1, Luke 6:37.
- Is it okay to lie? Yes: 1 Kings 22:21-22, 2 Kings 8:10. No: Exod. 20:16, Proverbs 12:22.
- Is it wrong to steal? Yes: Exodus 20:15, Mark 10:19. No: Ezekiel 39:10, Exod. 3:22
- What must you do to be saved?
- Story of Jephthah, Judges 11: Jephthah asks God for military victory, and in return Jephthah promises to kill whoever comes out of his house first to greet him when he returns, and offer the body up to God (trade military victory for human sacrifice). God accepts his deal, and helps Jephthah commit a “great slaughter.” Jephthah then goes home and sacrifices his daughter.
- Sodom and Gomorrah, Genesis 19: God basically nukes two cities. Surely there were innocent children? He also chooses Lot and his family to be allowed to escape before the nuking, because they are good and should not be killed. But then Lot’s wife turns back to look at the destruction, and gets turned into a pillar of salt, and Lot himself gets drunk in a cave and impregnates his two daughters.
- Evan
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
We Humans on the Ancient Earth
The human line hails from humble origins. An unsurprising fact, since most life does. The rise of humanity from a lemur-like creature to an ape-like creature to an upright-walker to today’s humans is a remarkable story, one far more imaginative, universal, ancient, and more solidly based in fact and observation than any religion. If God were to have a way to create life, evolution would be a far more amazing and beautiful way to do it than making things instantly appear as they are. Evolution gives living things a history, an ancient and glorious heritage.
The Earth is a greater thing than us. It has been around for 4.5 billion years, and has been teeming with live for 3.5 billion years of that. The Paleozoic era alone is 325 million years long (570 - 245 million years ago), and is even divided into seven smaller periods, each lasting from 30 to 70 million years (thumbnail the image right to view it larger). To really think about and comprehend these numbers bewilders me. Each period in Earth’s history sees further development in living things, with scores of brand new species and scores of extinctions from the previous period. The relatively rapid change that evolution is capable of guarantees a great amount of variation, increasing with time. As Carl Sagan once said, evolution “makes life more beautiful as the aeons pass.”
Using the theory of evolution and comparative anatomy, our picture of hominid evolution is quite complete. The “missing link” is no longer missing. Those claiming a lack of transitional fossils in evolution need only look at our own hominid tree (and other very complete transitions like those of horses, whales, and tetrapods) to see a smooth progression from ape-like species into more human-like species over a period of 6 - 7.8 million years.
When we look at nature - at plants, animals, fish - we see beauty. The evidence shows us that all this beauty evolved over time, over billions of years. The overwhelming ancientness of life places us as a very young and fledgling line. After all, the first known civilization of humans was Sumer, dating back to 5400 BC, and only 10,000 years ago all humans on the planet were hunter-gatherers. These are very small lengths of time compared to even the smallest period in the Paleozoic, a mind-blowing 30 million years. In fact, the entire hominid line has only been around for about 0.2% of the history of life. Humans may be the first life with higher intelligence, but we are demonstrably not the reason for the Earth’s existence.
This fact however does not make our existence meaningless. The same beauty that we see in nature is also present in us: we came about in the same way. We are part of life’s grand story, and we are special in our intelligence, imagination, and drive. To be part of nature, not just an observer of it, is enthralling, fascinating, and, dare I say it, mystifying.
- Evan
The Earth is a greater thing than us. It has been around for 4.5 billion years, and has been teeming with live for 3.5 billion years of that. The Paleozoic era alone is 325 million years long (570 - 245 million years ago), and is even divided into seven smaller periods, each lasting from 30 to 70 million years (thumbnail the image right to view it larger). To really think about and comprehend these numbers bewilders me. Each period in Earth’s history sees further development in living things, with scores of brand new species and scores of extinctions from the previous period. The relatively rapid change that evolution is capable of guarantees a great amount of variation, increasing with time. As Carl Sagan once said, evolution “makes life more beautiful as the aeons pass.”Using the theory of evolution and comparative anatomy, our picture of hominid evolution is quite complete. The “missing link” is no longer missing. Those claiming a lack of transitional fossils in evolution need only look at our own hominid tree (and other very complete transitions like those of horses, whales, and tetrapods) to see a smooth progression from ape-like species into more human-like species over a period of 6 - 7.8 million years.
When we look at nature - at plants, animals, fish - we see beauty. The evidence shows us that all this beauty evolved over time, over billions of years. The overwhelming ancientness of life places us as a very young and fledgling line. After all, the first known civilization of humans was Sumer, dating back to 5400 BC, and only 10,000 years ago all humans on the planet were hunter-gatherers. These are very small lengths of time compared to even the smallest period in the Paleozoic, a mind-blowing 30 million years. In fact, the entire hominid line has only been around for about 0.2% of the history of life. Humans may be the first life with higher intelligence, but we are demonstrably not the reason for the Earth’s existence.
This fact however does not make our existence meaningless. The same beauty that we see in nature is also present in us: we came about in the same way. We are part of life’s grand story, and we are special in our intelligence, imagination, and drive. To be part of nature, not just an observer of it, is enthralling, fascinating, and, dare I say it, mystifying.
- Evan
Thursday, January 21, 2010
The Universe: one big family
This is the story of the universe, according to science:
1) The Beginning: 14 billion years ago, everything in the universe was contained in a single infinitesimally small point. This point, smaller than an atom, had an infinite density and contained all the matter, space, and time of the universe. The point began to rapidly expand, and as the volume of the universe increased, the heat decreased, and atoms were able to form. The first atoms consisted of mostly hydrogen and helium, since these are the lightest, simplest elements. Through the force of gravity, these atoms began to accrete and accumulate in progressively larger and larger clumps.
2) Creation of Elements: Especially large clumps would be stars, which would get so massive that the matter on the inside of them experienced insanely high pressure from gravity. This pressure produced incredible heat, so much heat that the hydrogen and helium atoms were moving fast enough to overcome their repulsion to one another, and began to crash into each other and fuse. Bigger, heavier atoms began to form. Stars that were very high in mass were able to heat their cores enough to create every element up to iron (fusing iron takes more energy than it gives out), and if one of these stars died in a supernova explosion, the massive heat of the explosion was able to create even heavier elements than iron. The dusty, gassy remains of these dead stars were the building material for new solar systems. Our sun and planets formed through the same gravitational accretion process, and each had on it many elements, including those of life: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.
3) Life Stirs: After our planet cooled and formed its huge bodies of water, organic molecules began to form naturally form. There are a few different ideas on how life first began, and none are confirmed, but the following is the most plausible. The first life forms could not have been anything like a cell today; modern cells are far too complex. The first life may have been a single self-replicating molecule, a predecessor to RNA. In the water, there were organic molecules which had one end that was repelled from water and one that was attracted. This led to naturally forming spheres. If self-replicating molecule got caught up in on of these spheres, it would be protected and had a better chance to reproduce. These were the first cells: a self-replicating molecule surrounded by a layer of other molecules.
4) Adaption and Complexity: Single-celled organisms ruled Earth for billions of years. The most dominant form during this time was cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae. These algae are responsible for putting a significant amount of oxygen on the planet, and the presence of oxygen caused a diversification of life. Some cells could now metabolize oxygen, which was more energy-packed. The first multicellular life was colonial, then some cells in the colonies began specializing in one thing. These were the first organs. To talk of our own evolution in detail would be too lengthy, but it had operated on the same naturally selecting powers as the unicellular life before it. The tree of life (for humans) goes as follows:
Bacteria --> Colonial multicellular --> Polyps --> Fish --> Amphibians --> Reptiles --> Mammals --> Tree-dwellers --> Early hominids --> Humans
5) Our Place: According to science so far, life on Earth is literally one big family. All life today are very distantly related cousins; we are all offspring of previous organisms. However, life itself is made of atoms created in the cores of high-mass stars. So the cosmos, while not alive, are by definition our family, because they gave rise to life. Despite any overtones of silly new-age mysticism, the universe is literally all one. We are part of the universe, not merely observers.
- Evan
1) The Beginning: 14 billion years ago, everything in the universe was contained in a single infinitesimally small point. This point, smaller than an atom, had an infinite density and contained all the matter, space, and time of the universe. The point began to rapidly expand, and as the volume of the universe increased, the heat decreased, and atoms were able to form. The first atoms consisted of mostly hydrogen and helium, since these are the lightest, simplest elements. Through the force of gravity, these atoms began to accrete and accumulate in progressively larger and larger clumps.
2) Creation of Elements: Especially large clumps would be stars, which would get so massive that the matter on the inside of them experienced insanely high pressure from gravity. This pressure produced incredible heat, so much heat that the hydrogen and helium atoms were moving fast enough to overcome their repulsion to one another, and began to crash into each other and fuse. Bigger, heavier atoms began to form. Stars that were very high in mass were able to heat their cores enough to create every element up to iron (fusing iron takes more energy than it gives out), and if one of these stars died in a supernova explosion, the massive heat of the explosion was able to create even heavier elements than iron. The dusty, gassy remains of these dead stars were the building material for new solar systems. Our sun and planets formed through the same gravitational accretion process, and each had on it many elements, including those of life: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.
3) Life Stirs: After our planet cooled and formed its huge bodies of water, organic molecules began to form naturally form. There are a few different ideas on how life first began, and none are confirmed, but the following is the most plausible. The first life forms could not have been anything like a cell today; modern cells are far too complex. The first life may have been a single self-replicating molecule, a predecessor to RNA. In the water, there were organic molecules which had one end that was repelled from water and one that was attracted. This led to naturally forming spheres. If self-replicating molecule got caught up in on of these spheres, it would be protected and had a better chance to reproduce. These were the first cells: a self-replicating molecule surrounded by a layer of other molecules.
4) Adaption and Complexity: Single-celled organisms ruled Earth for billions of years. The most dominant form during this time was cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae. These algae are responsible for putting a significant amount of oxygen on the planet, and the presence of oxygen caused a diversification of life. Some cells could now metabolize oxygen, which was more energy-packed. The first multicellular life was colonial, then some cells in the colonies began specializing in one thing. These were the first organs. To talk of our own evolution in detail would be too lengthy, but it had operated on the same naturally selecting powers as the unicellular life before it. The tree of life (for humans) goes as follows:
Bacteria --> Colonial multicellular --> Polyps --> Fish --> Amphibians --> Reptiles --> Mammals --> Tree-dwellers --> Early hominids --> Humans
5) Our Place: According to science so far, life on Earth is literally one big family. All life today are very distantly related cousins; we are all offspring of previous organisms. However, life itself is made of atoms created in the cores of high-mass stars. So the cosmos, while not alive, are by definition our family, because they gave rise to life. Despite any overtones of silly new-age mysticism, the universe is literally all one. We are part of the universe, not merely observers.
- Evan
Monday, January 18, 2010
Might Makes Right: one Hell of a problem
Let us examine the concept of eternity. It is a concept, and is something that our minds literally cannot grasp. There is a video I have linked on the side of this page ("Hell: an excessive punishment") that has a good analogy for how long eternity is. Imagine a huge planet, made completely of bronze. Every hundred years a bird flies by, brushing its wing against the side of the planet. When the planet is completely worn down to nothing, that will have been the first day of eternity. It is too long a time for us humans to even understand. By God’s own book, no Christian should wish death or pain upon a non-believer, but God chooses to burn and torture people for eternity. Because he is all-powerful and this is his universe, he has the power to pull people out of Hell, or make it disappear completely. But no, he consciously chooses to torture people. Christians are more moral than their own God.What kind of omniscient, perfectly good being would burn and torture a living thing for any expanse of time? You and I certainly wouldn’t. But God is excused because he is so holy that he is above our morality. This creates a problem: is God good because he has good qualities, or is he good because he’s God? The existence of Hell, accompanied by the millions of people God killed in the Bible, leaves us to assume that God is good because he’s God - he is so far above us that whatever he does goes. This is a dictionary definition of might-makes-right, or a dictator. God obviously does not have the good qualities that his followers insist upon, but rather has such a high position that we are victims to whatever he wants. Does this sound like a supreme, perfect, and good being?
Such a supreme being wants and needs nothing. So what is he doing? Why do we concern him? Why did he come down to this tiny planet on the outskirts of one random galaxy in one corner of the universe and make little miniscule, material creations that have to prove themselves to him? Why is he so offended by these insignificant creatures if they don’t worship him? Why does he want people in Heaven? To have company? These questions are simply unanswerable by Christianity; they don’t know God’s true motives or his actual plan for us. All they know is that they must unquestioningly worship and praise him. They must realize that to someone who is outside of religion, it all seems very strange.
- Evan
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Trees Grow Out of the Air
Richard Feynman is a renowned physicist, known for his lectures and interviews, and known in the physics world for his contributions to quantum mechanics and particle physics. In his interviews he often enjoyed talking about everyday objects or occurrences that are “fun to imagine” on the atomic level. There is a “Fun to Imagine” series of Feynman clips on YouTube, and I’d like to share one in particular that blew my mind. In the beginning of the 5-minute video, he speaks of how fire works, then he goes on to explain how a tree works. It’s the tree segment that I will paraphrase:
People think that trees grow out of the ground. In actuality, trees grow out of the air. The substance of a tree is mostly carbon, which comes from the air in the form of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide goes into the tree, and the tree changes it, kicking out the oxygen, and uses the carbon as the base of all the new material it creates. The tree also uses water from the ground, but that water rained from the sky. There’s a little from the ground, some minerals and such, but most of the actual substance of a tree comes from the air.
We mentioned that carbon dioxide is changed by the tree to retrieve just the carbon. How is the tree so smart as to manage to separate the carbon from carbon dioxide? Ah, life! Life has some mysterious way! No - the sun is shining, and it’s the sunlight that comes down and knocks the carbon free. So it takes sunlight to get the plant to work.
What an amazing world we live in. As Feynman himself said, “nature’s imagination is so much greater than man’s, it’s never gonna let him relax!” My explanation can’t give the video justice, you’ll just have to watch it yourself!
- Evan
People think that trees grow out of the ground. In actuality, trees grow out of the air. The substance of a tree is mostly carbon, which comes from the air in the form of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide goes into the tree, and the tree changes it, kicking out the oxygen, and uses the carbon as the base of all the new material it creates. The tree also uses water from the ground, but that water rained from the sky. There’s a little from the ground, some minerals and such, but most of the actual substance of a tree comes from the air.
We mentioned that carbon dioxide is changed by the tree to retrieve just the carbon. How is the tree so smart as to manage to separate the carbon from carbon dioxide? Ah, life! Life has some mysterious way! No - the sun is shining, and it’s the sunlight that comes down and knocks the carbon free. So it takes sunlight to get the plant to work.
What an amazing world we live in. As Feynman himself said, “nature’s imagination is so much greater than man’s, it’s never gonna let him relax!” My explanation can’t give the video justice, you’ll just have to watch it yourself!
- Evan
Thursday, January 14, 2010
School Science Projects > Creationism
Remember when you were in elementary school and you had to do a science project? The steps of your project were to line up with the scientific method, which was taught to you in science class. Here were the steps:- Ask a question
- Do background research
- Construct a hypothesis
- Test your hypothesis (perform an experiment)
- Analyze your data
- Draw a conclusion
Creationism claims to be scientific. The main argument of creationism is that life appears designed, and is too complex to have arisen naturally. Therefore, the Christian god designed all life. The problem with this is that they skip all the actual science of the scientific method. I have never heard a creationist hypothesis (in the form of “if I do this, then this should happen”), and I have never heard of any creationist experiments or collected data. So let’s plug creationism into the scientific method:
- Ask a question: From where did life originate?
- Do background research: Life is very complex, it could not have arisen naturally (even though evolution has shown that it can), and the Bible says God created life.
- Construct a hypothesis: *missing*
- Test you hypothesis: *missing*
- Analyze your data: *missing*
- Draw your conclusion: God did indeed design and create all life.
The sentence “if life is complex, then God created it” is not a hypothesis, let alone a theory. It is not testable, because God is an immaterial being that does not show himself in any knowable way. There is no known sign or mark that he would leave on material things to show that he has intervened. The only things that are testable are physical realities.
From this, we can safely say that your science project in elementary school was more scientific that creationism (if you did it right!).
- Evan
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
The Appeal to Ignorance: religion's secret weapon
Ever since humanity’s beginnings, religion has been inserting knowledge where there previously was none. Needless to say, so far no religion has ever been correct about the workings of the universe. For thousands of years, science has advanced its understandings, theories, and methods, while religion has retreated. During the heyday of ancient Greece, no one knew what the sun actually was. This was a spiritual question back then, because not only was it a complete mystery, but the sun was the giver of all life. So the Greek religion claimed that it was Helios, the sun god, riding across the sky in his chariot. No one knew what the seasons were, so their mythology said that the goddess of summer and growth had her daughter stolen by Hades every year, causing winter, then returned to her later, reinitiating summer. Christianity is no stranger to propagating incorrect ideas that align with its theology (i.e. geocentrism, young earth, creationism), so why should we trust Christianity’s claims of today?
The only thing that Christians can do is appeal to ignorance in an attempt to increase the validity of their claims. Even a successful dismantling of evolution and the big bang would merely reduce us to a state of ignorance about life and the universe, it wouldn’t validate some other claim. Today’s religious people move from absolute ignorance to absolute knowledge by saying that because we don’t know the answer, it must be God.
The problem is that “we don’t know” should be the end of the conversation. “We don’t know” in no way justifies any claim about the subject, so it cannot justify religion. On top of this, criticisms from the religious against scientific theories more often than not reveal an ignorance of the theories, research, and methods themselves, and are not even valid criticisms. Such statements include:
This also happens at the macro level in Christian theology. What is the meaning of existence? Why is this universe the way it is? It must be God. It couldn’t possibly be anything else. But why must it be God? Is there an actual reason besides “it couldn’t be anything else”? No there is not. The fact we cannot begin to answer some of these questions yet in no way validates belief in God. When it comes down to it, there is no actual positive evidence that God has done any of the things that Christian theology claims. The dependence of Christian apologetics on these so-called “god-of-the-gaps” arguments is staggering, and is one of my main reasons for not being religious.
- Evan
The only thing that Christians can do is appeal to ignorance in an attempt to increase the validity of their claims. Even a successful dismantling of evolution and the big bang would merely reduce us to a state of ignorance about life and the universe, it wouldn’t validate some other claim. Today’s religious people move from absolute ignorance to absolute knowledge by saying that because we don’t know the answer, it must be God.
The problem is that “we don’t know” should be the end of the conversation. “We don’t know” in no way justifies any claim about the subject, so it cannot justify religion. On top of this, criticisms from the religious against scientific theories more often than not reveal an ignorance of the theories, research, and methods themselves, and are not even valid criticisms. Such statements include:
- evolution cannot produce irreducible complexity
- carbon dating is a lie and shouldn’t be used to tell the age of the earth
- saying that life evolved is like saying a tornado assembled a jet in a junkyard
- if crocodiles and ducks are related we should see half-crocodiles, half-ducks today
This also happens at the macro level in Christian theology. What is the meaning of existence? Why is this universe the way it is? It must be God. It couldn’t possibly be anything else. But why must it be God? Is there an actual reason besides “it couldn’t be anything else”? No there is not. The fact we cannot begin to answer some of these questions yet in no way validates belief in God. When it comes down to it, there is no actual positive evidence that God has done any of the things that Christian theology claims. The dependence of Christian apologetics on these so-called “god-of-the-gaps” arguments is staggering, and is one of my main reasons for not being religious.
- Evan
A Beautiful Reality
My first post on this blog spoke of religious people caring about how their beliefs make them feel, and atheists caring about whether their beliefs are true. However, it is important to ask, why not both? The original purpose of this blog is to show people that being a non-believer feels good, and I have not yet addressed that.
1) Everything is as it is.
You and I are living, breathing, thinking, loving creatures. Our purpose is not to be a servant or a worshipper. The universe is ancient, mind-boggling and strange in every aspect (but always follows consistent natural laws), and living in it is a privilege. Living things come from other living things, they are not created. Evolution allows life to become more beautiful as the aeons pass. When the wind hits your face, it has traveled thousands of miles, from across the planet. It may have even been in the lungs of a Roman soldier or a dinosaur, through the leaves of a plant in the Philippines, or struck by a meteor as it entered our atmosphere. Clouds sit on the gas our atmosphere like ice in a glass of water. We don’t see any spirit realm, no ghosts, no demons, no Heaven or Hell (phew! The idea of spending eternity anywhere is just strange). Just here and now, in this self-propelling, natural world. Now that I am full-fledged atheist (with an interest in science and how the world works), my eyes are open: the universe is so amazing, vibrant, grand, strange, and with such a greater imagination than man. I am humbled, empowered, and awestruck, all at the same time.
2) You do good for the sake of doing good.
When we see others feeling pain, we feel pain. When we see others feel happiness, we feel happiness (we are not the only creatures to do this either). I do good for the sake of doing good, I care about others, I want good things to happen to everyone. This happens not because anyone tells me to do so. It is a result of being human, and we all have these impulses. Problems that I have are my own that I should solve, and the mistakes I make are my own to ponder over. There is no one accounting for my actions but myself, and I am trying the best I can.
This method of living can be said to be more reliable than religion overall, given some facts:
3) Reason is awesome.
Going off of evidence is so much more reliable in discerning truth than going off of faith. Not only am I much more secure in what I believe, but those beliefs are completely open to whatever the evidence says (whatever reality is), and that feels good, it feels right. I should never be attached to my beliefs, because then I may then be closed off to changing them, and the malleability of my beliefs to fit reality is essential to finding truth. I rather like this position and strategy for evaluating the world. It makes me okay with not knowing the answer to something, and helps me to recognize that my worldview is completely dependent on what I see. I feel that using reason reflects the nature of human understanding.
There has never been any good evidence for God, supernatural realms and beings, or even an immaterial plane separate from a material one. What the evidence says is what my views will mold to.
- Evan
1) Everything is as it is.
You and I are living, breathing, thinking, loving creatures. Our purpose is not to be a servant or a worshipper. The universe is ancient, mind-boggling and strange in every aspect (but always follows consistent natural laws), and living in it is a privilege. Living things come from other living things, they are not created. Evolution allows life to become more beautiful as the aeons pass. When the wind hits your face, it has traveled thousands of miles, from across the planet. It may have even been in the lungs of a Roman soldier or a dinosaur, through the leaves of a plant in the Philippines, or struck by a meteor as it entered our atmosphere. Clouds sit on the gas our atmosphere like ice in a glass of water. We don’t see any spirit realm, no ghosts, no demons, no Heaven or Hell (phew! The idea of spending eternity anywhere is just strange). Just here and now, in this self-propelling, natural world. Now that I am full-fledged atheist (with an interest in science and how the world works), my eyes are open: the universe is so amazing, vibrant, grand, strange, and with such a greater imagination than man. I am humbled, empowered, and awestruck, all at the same time.
2) You do good for the sake of doing good.
When we see others feeling pain, we feel pain. When we see others feel happiness, we feel happiness (we are not the only creatures to do this either). I do good for the sake of doing good, I care about others, I want good things to happen to everyone. This happens not because anyone tells me to do so. It is a result of being human, and we all have these impulses. Problems that I have are my own that I should solve, and the mistakes I make are my own to ponder over. There is no one accounting for my actions but myself, and I am trying the best I can.
This method of living can be said to be more reliable than religion overall, given some facts:
- atheists consist of 0.25% of the prison population.
- more secular nations have far lower violent crime and teen pregnancy rates (ex. Japan: less than 10% are certain a god exists, has lowest crime rates and teen pregnancy rates in the world, other good examples include Norway, U.K., Germany, and the Netherlands)
- high levels of atheism are strongly correlated with high levels of societal health, such as low homicide rates, low poverty rates, low infant mortality rates, low illiteracy rates, high levels of educational attainment, per capita income, and gender equality
- the U.S. is one of the most religious countries in the world, and has some of the highest crime rates and teen pregnancy rates
- ironically, atheists and agnostics have lower divorce rates, less abortions, and lower STD infection rates than the religious
- countries that have very low percentages of atheists in their population have either high crime rates, low quality of life, or social and political problems, such as: Somalia, Tanzania, Yemen, the Philippines, Romania, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Iran.
3) Reason is awesome.
Going off of evidence is so much more reliable in discerning truth than going off of faith. Not only am I much more secure in what I believe, but those beliefs are completely open to whatever the evidence says (whatever reality is), and that feels good, it feels right. I should never be attached to my beliefs, because then I may then be closed off to changing them, and the malleability of my beliefs to fit reality is essential to finding truth. I rather like this position and strategy for evaluating the world. It makes me okay with not knowing the answer to something, and helps me to recognize that my worldview is completely dependent on what I see. I feel that using reason reflects the nature of human understanding.
There has never been any good evidence for God, supernatural realms and beings, or even an immaterial plane separate from a material one. What the evidence says is what my views will mold to.
- Evan
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