Existential Angst

This post is about the anxiety of existence. An acquaintance of mine at a message board I go to asked the following questions (reproduced, as is):

Do you think satire was correct that knowledge of ones own freedom brings despair?
I ask because from his perspective (atheist existentilism) we define ourselves by what limitations we put on ourselves in the face of absolute freedom. when you deconverted did it feel as if you lost a part of yourself because you lost some of the self imposed limitations that serving God requires?

I responded there, but I thought that a more complete answer would make a good post here.

The paragraph above is a mix of issues, questions, and assumptions each of which I intend to address. The first is how did I feel when I deconverted. Didn't I feel a loss? The second is: Shouldn't I have felt a loss? That is, was Sartre correct? (Sartre is what the correspondent meant by “satire”.) Another question: Is there such a thing as “absolute freedom”. And lastly, how do we or should we define ourselves.

Note: I am not an existentialist, so far as I know, and as such I do not intend to speak for that philosophical position.

How did I feel when I deconverted? Relieved. Loss and incompleteness simply weren't among the panoply of feelings I had. In the years leading up to my deconversion, most of my waking moments were consumed with reconciling my beliefs with my perceptions of reality. I had developed quite an extensive theology where I tried to reconcile the existence of evil with the goodness of God, the transcendence of God without an attendant arbitrariness, the immanence of God with the personalness of God, etc. Every day was a struggle to pull in a new piece of the puzzle without losing something gained earlier.

Once I realized that I didn't actually believe any of it—that I had neither inductive nor deductive reasons to believe any of the original propositions or my reformulated ones—the the struggle vanished. (Now, I vacillate between finding something else to do and playing with Theology simply because I enjoy it. I must say it is easier to go with inertia.)

This feeling I've experienced I'd say is akin to freedom. But it is different than the sense of the original question. My freedom is a freedom from struggle and other things. It is a freedom from not a freedom to. In that sense, this freedom from cannot bring anxiety. However, the freedom to choose to do something can be overwhelming in the face of too many options. Anyone who has raised children has had an opportunity to see this in a somewhat safe environment. My wife would ask my daughter what she wanted as a snack before bedtime. She'd ask, "Do you want eggs, Cheerios, Cap'n Crunch, toast, apple sauce ..." and the list would go on. My daughter (I'm thinking of when she was about 4) simply could not handle the array of choices. If you said, "Your choices are: Cheerios or Apple sauce or nothing", she'd make a choice almost immediately. Too much freedom creates a deadlock in the brain.

If then there were such a thing as absolute freedom, one can imagine that it would bring a certain sort of paralysis. The question is what would one mean by absolute freedom. It is difficult to know what anyone might mean by that. In debates on the question of Free Will, some will assert that there is no Free Will if we cannot fly unaided simply by willing to do so. I find such requirements unhelpful. I think that if absolute freedom entails the freedom to do impossible things, then it is a useless term in the pursuit of knowledge. All one can do with that requirement is to say, “OK, I agree that that doesn't exist. Can we now discuss something practical?”

Rather than worry about what “absolute freedom” might mean, let me focus on our limitations. By doing so, I think we can agree that we are not unlimited and that those limitations give us sufficient freedom to act—assuming we acknowledge those limitations. In other words, for a philosophical thinker there need not be paralysis.

I contend that my disbelief brought with it a more secure sense of who I am--and the constraints that go with it. I am free to be who I am. I am free to know who I am. But I am not free to be who I am not. For example, I cannot (should not) be an entrepreneur—I simply lack the imagination. I could work for one. I can make things happen. But I can't imagine a product or service that someone needs that doesn't yet exist. To be able to understand who I am is to define who I am. To define is to limit. If I am 6 feet tall, then I am not 7 feet tall. If I am male, I am not female. If I am an atheist, I do not believe in God. If I am human, I cannot fly unaided. What defines me, limits me. Understanding those limitations enables me to act as I can without attempting to act as I cannot.

This I hold is both healthy and in contrast to theism in general and Christianity in particular. In giving up Christianity, I gave up despair of the idea that I had to be something other than what I am—to be "like Jesus". I gave up feeling guilty about not being perfect. The idea of personal perfection in Christianity entails "dying to self", the renunciation of what you truly are. Repentance entails that one thinks one can get rid of flaws simply by pushing them aside.

I am a lazy person. I cannot simply deny this and have the laziness vanish. I must own it. I must acknowledge that I can be active and motivated only when I act in the face of what I am—lazy. I must ask myself, am I not doing X simply because I am giving in to my nature or do I really have a good reason—and does it matter in this case? As a theist, I'd find myself saying "I must not be lazy. Therefore I should X simply to show that I am not lazy; that my sanctification is well under way."

Christianity, for me, was the ultimate slavery of deluding myself and denying myself and a failure to truly grow. There is an inherent dishonesty in it. I lie to myself that I am not the way I am and can be other by saying to a god that I'm sorry. If I truly repent, then sin will leave me—because it isn't really me anyway.

The freedom to be who you are and accept it is achievable for both the atheist and the theist. However, Christianity entails a desire to be other than what you are—a sadness that you are not other than you are; that you are utterly worthless; that you are worthy only of eternal punishment. A theist is free only to the extent he or she denies these premises.

Leaving faith did not cause despair for me. It didn't create an array of options too vast to cope with. Rather it provided a framework for living more realistic than any I had before.

I am free and unparalyzed.

Emotions and Manipulation

My daughter called me this week. She is at a mission thing for almost six months. The first half of this is training. The second half is a trip abroad to share the gospel.

I'm at work attempting to resolve some programming design issues with a colleague when the call comes. She never calls me. So naturally I think this could be bad: someone died, she decided to marry someone she's now known for a month, something.

It was none of these things though it involved a lot of tears on her part and befuddlement on mine. In essence, she called to confess to me her short comings towards me. The gist of her confession was this: She was sorry she hadn't lived her life honestly before me; that she hadn't shared the things that were important to her; that she should have shared how she saw God working in her life and just how important God was to her. This was important to confess because if she couldn't share all this with me how then could she share God in the country she was going to.

So did anyone else in the family get this phone call? Nope, just me. Why would that be? Because I am the only non-believer in the family? Yeah, I think so. I don't honestly know what she was thinking. The phone call lasted less than 10 minutes and I had work to do. I just wanted to say the right things and get back to work. This may sound a little cold but I was under a lot of stress at work and the last thing I really needed was this emotionally overwrought daughter confessing imaginary sins. And, too, what could I say? I suppose I could have responded with caustic remarks about her imaginary friend. I did tell her that if she imagined a lack of honesty in her life, it must be toward herself since I had no particular expectations. I know she is a committed Christian. I know she has an interest in long term missions. Though I am against such things, I wrote a sizable check to finance this trip. Why? I'll have to think about an answer to that, but for now we can say that I acknowledge that each person's journey is his or her own.

So here is my theory as to what was happening noting that for the purpose of this post that it doesn't actually matter whether I am right: The group she was with created this environment in which it was possible to believe that she was unworthy for various short comings but also one in which she could be redeemed. If it sounds a little cult like, it is because it is. The group isn't particularly dangerous; it's just that this is the way all religious groups work. Hell, it's the way that all groups operate in which membership and belonging are highly prized. Perhaps my daughter decided that my loss of faith was her fault like a child who thinks that its parents' divorce is its fault. Perhaps she imagined that if she said all these things and professed strongly that “My God is everything” that maybe I would become a Christian.

My befuddlement comes from this. I had been a Christian for 44 years before I changed my mind. I, I, raised my daughter to be a Christian. She sat as a preteen and teenager under my teaching of adults so she could get the deeper, more intellectual, components of Christian thought. Though my wife was very important to answering tough questions, I got the toughest. Why is it she would think these things? Doesn't she know I have thought her thoughts? Doesn't she know I've had her doubts? Doesn't she know I've prayed until my tears dried up? Doesn't she know I wanted to save the world? “Daddy, I've seen lives changed!” Yeah, kiddo, so have I ... and lived long enough to see through the illusion. She wants to be come from church and tell me what profound new thing she's learned. Well, that's fine. I want my children to be able to talk to me. Nevertheless, in the context of the confession one supposes that she wants to use each and every opportunity to convert me. Not only is that a nuisance, it is offensive. Am I prize to be won? Am I an object? How about treating me like a person who does not wish to be importuned? This desire of hers (however, temporary I may hope it to be) doesn't seem to be about connecting with her father, but rather to absolve guilt.

The first time I remember becoming aware of emotional manipulation I was a freshman in high school. I attended a Christian school. They actually took the better part of a week off from classes to have a team from some conservative college come and minister to us. (It might have been Bob Jones University or Pensacola Bible College; I don't quite recall but it would have been a school very much like these.) For the entire time, they had rooms set aside where people could go to pray and be ministered to by those team members who weren't singing, acting, or preaching. On the last day or perhaps the next to last day, I felt the call to go and get right with God. The pressure was intense. One of my fellow sympathetic students commented after we were dismissed that he could see my conflict. I rocked back and forth in my seat trying to decide whether to go or to stay seated. Eventually, I went to one of the rooms. As it happened, nobody came to minister to me. I was on my own. I cried out to God. I confessed sins I had confessed many years before though we are reassured that once forgiven, always forgiven. I confessed real sins those that I might possibly be guilty of though I had never thought of them before that very moment. Eventually, I was worn out. I had managed to catch my breath and feel like I had re-established an equilibrium. So I returned to the auditorium. Immediately, immediately(!), I felt the pressure return. I interpreted this as a sign I needed to go forward and share my experience. (They had a microphone set aside for people to do that.) Almost as soon as I decided to do that, the service was over. And, as quickly as it came, the pressure left.

This all was very odd to me. I'm glad I was mature enough to grasp what was occurring, though it took me a few years to articulate it. In a setting with my peers who were responding to the message, I felt intense pressure. I would leave and the feeling would leave. (Yes, it left the first time too; I just felt the need to follow through with the decision to call out to God.) I would enter and the pressure came again. Time to go? Pressure gone again. Now one would think that if God were talking to me, he would continue to do so as I walked out for some privacy. However even as I called out to God in one of the back rooms, I was met with cold, dead silence. You would think if I were “convicted,” God would give guidance as to what was expected of me. Nothing. Nada. Silence. Yet when I returned to the auditorium, the feeling returned too. As the day and even weeks progressed, there was no internal sense that there was anything real about the spiritualness of the experience. You would think that the touch of the hand of God would persist beyond the moment.

I suppose that there are those for whom the experience persists. Nevertheless, it did not for me. So what conclusion could I draw from this but that emotions are illusory. I mean, surely God could communicate to me outside the auditorium, couldn't he? Was I manipulated? I think so. Emotions do not seem to be an indication of a should or ought but rather are a barometer of one's response to one's environment. I would not suggest that one should ignore one's emotions, but rather that one should pay attention to them as a means of self assessment.

I imagine that all of us have witnessed people's feelings manipulated by an experience only to have them dissolve when removed from the experience. Movies are made of people who make decisions based on passionate feelings only to have disastrous consequences. Movies are also made of those who follow their brains only to have that backfire, too. I am not suggesting that movies are an indication of importance, but rather it is an indication of the human experience.

Since that time, years ago, I have distrusted environments that are designed or contrived to make you feel something. I don't like movies architected to make you feel a particular way. (Of late, I've grown sympathetic to movies that make me feel—if and only if I am convinced that people would really behave that way and that the movie isn't artificial in telling the story. Fiddler On The Roof moves me to tears sometimes. It feels authentic to me.) When I was a Christian, I could get involved in the music but I disliked services that seemed designed to work people up emotionally. It always seemed to me that if one didn't feel the emotion, then you weren't truly worshiping. Such a perspective always seem to favor a particular kind of person. Those of us who were born to respond to our environment as rationally as we can muster are defined into the class of the unspiritual. Though that doesn't bother me now, the implication of being a lesser person still makes me angry. Those that are supposed to understand people best completely fail to understand the range of personality types this world has.

These days, though I try not to be cocky, I feel somewhat immune to being emotionally manipulated into doing something I would not otherwise do. It is probable that I can be manipulated into doing something that doesn't inherently violate my integrity.

I'll have to think longer on what I may do or say with respect to my daughter. I think she was manipulated into feeling guilt about who she was. In turn, I think she was manipulating me. I don't think that this is necessarily a conscious thing that Christians (or any religionists) do, though for some it certainly calculated. It is however a natural tool in the human arsenal to get what we want.

Awareness of this tactic, I think, is the single most effective way to disarm the manipulator. If someone is manipulating you with emotions, take a cold hard look at the situation and then act according to your integrity.

First Steps to Disbelief

In this post, I'd like to recount what, as best I can recall, were my first steps toward disbelief. I call these first steps baby steps since these events did not immediately make me a non-believer. In fact, it took another 5 or 6 years.

Isaac Asimov said, “Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” Indeed, this was how my journey to my current state began.

Around 2000 or 2001, I went to a men's retreat wherein the pastor recounted a story of a young man (a teen, I think) read the entire Bible in one month. Now I had read the Bible before in its entirety—at least twice—but, I'd never read it with the intensity I'd usually reserved for a good novel. So I resolved I would try to read the Bible in one month. I almost made it. If it hadn't been for the Thanksgiving holiday, I would made it. With the wind out of my sails, it took me another couple of months to finish. However, the damage had been done.

It was in someways an unremarkable experience: long genealogies, lots of laws, depressing psalms and prophetical rants about how Israel disappoints God. Nevertheless, when you attempt to read the Bible as a single unit and quickly enough, you notice things you didn't notice before. For example, in Job one of the speakers says how God is able to make man eat grass like a beast of the field. Plowing on ahead, within a day or two you read that Daniel tells of Nebuchadnezzar's insanity using almost exactly the same phrase: making man eat grass like a beast of the field.

This seems trivial and in some ways it is, but growing up I was told that Job was probably the oldest book in the Bible. The reason for this seems to be that the places associated with Job's friends have no archaeological evidence for existing. The problem seems less troubling if we assume that the book is older than Moses and the places have been ground into dust. Finding the similarity in language usage suggested to me that perhaps the book was comparatively recent and was written during the Babylonian period. For some, this may be a problem but it needn't be. The story could have been maintained by oral tradition. It may not have happened at all, but rather the book was a play written to explain evil. After all, since Jesus told parables perhaps the author of Job was inspired to write this parable. Oddly, you rarely hear of a religionist taking the position that the Song of Solomon is a literal retelling of someone's sex life. Obviously, it is a metaphor for the relationship between God and Israel or the church depending on whether the theologian is representing Judaism or Christianity, respectively. (Incidentally, there is works explaining just how graphic this book is.) If one insists on the Song of Solomon being a metaphor, then certainly one should allow that Job is a parable. Does being a parable reduce the meaning of Job? If so, should Jesus have told stories of real people instead of telling parables?

As it turned out, my guess was right. That is, many modern Bible scholars consider Job a rather recent work. Their reasons probably don't include mine which is just as well since my guess is probably just a spurious correlation of text. I may be right on my example, but I haven't researched it.

What I learned from this that there are those that will impose an explanation to preserve a preconception. In this example, this is where we need as literal a translation as possible and therefore insist on an ancient dating for Job contrary to whatever evidence exists. (Ironically, the need to avoid the suggestion that sex can be sexy overrides literalness of the Song of Solomon.)

The second discovery was the almost complete absence of Satan in the old testament (the Hebrew Bible for our Jewish friends). In fact, he is explicitly referenced 3 times: 1) in 1 Chronicles 21:1 where he is said to tempt David to number the people, 2) in Job where he bargains with God to torture Job, and 3) and Zechariah 3, where he argues against Joshua (not the Joshua) becoming high priest. Conspicuously absent here is Genesis chapter 1 where the serpent tempts Adam and Eve. Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible is Satan accused of tempting in the Garden. In fact, Jewish tradition has Satan as a functionary in God's court carrying out the role analogous to Prosecuting Attorney. The word satan means accuser.

In Zechariah, Satan accuses Joshua. In Job, he accuses Job. I Chronicles is a little bit of a mystery, but even Christians in attempting to harmonize this passage with 2 Samuel 24 will rely on Satan being the instrument of God's punishment of David. (2 Samuel 24 say God moved David to number the people.)

Typically, Isaiah 14 is used as a description of the fall of Lucifer along with Ezekiel 28. Interestingly, the Rabbis associate these passages with who the passages reference (Imagine!), those being the King of Babylon (Nebuchadnezzar) and the Prince of Tyre, respectively. (The name Lucifer was the name of the morning star and modern translations have no reference to Lucifer anywhere. So Satan has no name given in the Bible, although I'm told in Jewish tradition his name is Samael.) Ezekiel, interestingly, refers to the Garden of Eden. Nevertheless, as noted the Jews have no trouble understanding this as metaphor.

It would seem that to the Jewish mind that God is an absolute sovereign. This is more consistent with the omnipotent God of Christianity. Nothing including evil happened without God's say so. I don't want to speculate too much on the Jewish mindset since it would only be gleanings. Still here are some references that support this position:

1. “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.” Isaiah 45:7
2. “Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?” Amos 3:6
3. “Out of the mouth of the most High proceedeth not evil and good?” Lamentations 3:38

Alright, so what? The question that arose for me was how did Satan arise to such prominence in the New Testament. Or why? After all, if Satan is a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour and if Satan “hath desired thee that he might sift thee like wheat”, where are the warnings that seem necessary to our survival in the Old Testament? Didn't the Jews require them? Didn't they need warnings? As noted above, this apparently wouldn't have been consistent with the Jewish mindset, but if Satan were real and really evil seeking our destruction, why wouldn't there be warnings?

So where did Satan come from? One could suppose the Jesus invented him. However, of the many things that the Pharisees and Sadducees argued with Jesus about, the doctrine of Satan wasn't one of them. The disciples questioned Jesus on many things but not the teachings about Satan. It seems, therefore, a reasonable guess that Satan became a notable personage before Jesus was born.

This is another place where the dating of the documents is useful. All of the documents that reference Satan date from the Babylonian exile. In the intervening years between then and Christ, the Jews were captive in Babylon, the Medo-Persians, the Greeks and then the Romans. Sometime after the beginning of the Babylonian captivity, the Zoroastrian religion started. In this religion, Ahura Mazda is the all-good god. Evil originates from Angra Mainyu. At the end of all things, those souls that were banished will be reunited with Ahura Mazda. Note that we see God and Satan, heaven and hell with universalism thrown in for good measure.

I don't know if my speculations are valid about the source, but my point is that it certainly is plausible that these “Jewish” belief originated with the Pagan with whom they were forced to associate.

So we have that Judaism arrives in the first century CE having been corrupted by the pagan religions they came in contact with. Jesus, however, in his many corrections of Judaism doesn't correct these perceptions. Nobody questions his teachings on hell. Nobody questions his teachings on heaven. Nobody questions his teachings on Satan. And yet, today's Judaism has none of these things nor does the Hebrew Bible from which it has its grounding.

If this is right, Jesus' teachings are pagan. Either God revealed information to the pagans so that it might purposefully seep into Jewish teaching, or Jesus was subject to the culture in which he found himself. This in and of itself wasn't too troubling to this budding theologian. The book of Philippians (2:7) has it that Jesus emptied himself of the God head. From this we get the fancy theological term, kenosis. We use this to say that Jesus didn't know everything. If Jesus was to be tempted in every way “such as we”, then it is only fair that he faces that on the same terms else it would be a pointless exercise. C. S. Lewis uses this when he says not only is it evident that Jesus didn't know when the second coming would be (actually Jesus says this explicitly) but Jesus was wrong when he says it would be soon. Here is the reference:

The apocalyptic beliefs of the first Christians have been proved to be false. It is clear from the New Testament that they all expected the Second Coming in their own lifetime. And, worse still, they had a reason, and one which you will find very embarrassing. Their Master had told them so. He shared, and indeed created, their delusion. He said in so many words, "This generation shall not pass till all these things be done." And He was wrong. He clearly knew no more about the end of the world than anyone else. This is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible. (Essay "The World's Last Night" (1960), found in The Essential C.S. Lewis, p. 385)

It is to Lewis' credit that he admits this. In addition, I admire his unwillingness to equivocate on the straightforward meaning of Jesus' words.

So I found myself with this weird emphasis on Satan and confronted by fellow Christians who find him hiding behind every rock. I found this strange evidence that Satan was invented after the Babylonian captivity and that this invention was uncorrected by Jesus or Christianity—though oddly, Judaism itself dropped the teaching assuming I'm correct that it had had it.

This then was the beginning as I remember it of my journey to discover what the truth was. It was the beginnings of understanding that our beliefs are often habitual and unquestioned. It was the beginning of the conviction that we should not hold unquestioned beliefs. This is the beginning of my understanding that beliefs without evidence should not be entertained.

Faith & Revelation (How do you know? -- Part 2)

This post is a continuation of How do you know? (Part 1). In Part 1, I discussed the methods by which we collect information and how we process that information. We know through our senses and reasoning is the means by which we process this information.
Part II considers considers Revelation as a means to information and  faith as a means of processing information.

There are two aspects about knowing that the western theists believe about how we can beyond the ways of knowing I discussed in the previous essay: How do you know? Part 1.

The first way is that of revelation. Purportedly, God or gods or angels or djinns or what have you reveal knowledge directly to our brains. I say directly to the brain because most will admit that they do not hear God with their ears nor see him with their eyes nor smell, taste, or touch him. So God's communication comes directly to the brain, bypassing all sensory perception.

What should we make of this? How do we determine that any thing like this is actually occurring or has occurred? If something cannot be measured either directly by our senses nor by an extension of our senses such as a microphone or microscope, does it exist? Well, certainly there could be aliens out there in the universe and the fact that we don't know of them doesn't mean that they don't exist. However, in principle we could measure them. The problem with supernatural revelation is that we are to imagine there is an effect that we cannot detect due to a cause we cannot detect.

We know that physical effects are due to physical causes. If something acts as a cause, we can detect it. This awkward idea makes a supernatural being essentially physical if we imagine that it can change things in the physical world.

Do people have experiences that can be interpreted as spiritual? Certainly they do interpret them that way. But really I don't deny that they have experiences. What those experiences really are, however, is another question.

The first principle in interpreting data is Occam's razor. This principle is that give two equally plausible explanations, the simpler one is preferred. I'm not exactly sure what Douglas Adams meant, but I think this quote applies: Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? If evolution, for example, is sufficient to explain the diversity of life, then God in the God+Evolution equation is unnecessary.

To use our induction, anything we have ever seen happen has happened due to physical causes. Every physical event has been preceded by another physical event all the way back to the beginning of the universe. If we don't know the cause of the universe, a physical state of affairs seems infinitely more probable than a metaphysical one.

So if we have an explanation that stems from what we observe, then one that stems from that which we cannot observe even in principle can be dispensed with.

The relates to the question of revelation because we have an idea about these experiences that is observable. Actually there are two separate things that we know. If you, like me, sometimes deal with emotionally troubled people, you know that people are very capable of working themselves into an emotional state. If you've visited churches that emphasize the emotional, you've watched people work themselves into a euphoria. If you've visited the same type of church for longer than one Sunday, it is likely you've seen the same people do the same things week after week.

We also know very well that drugs can induce these feelings. And, too, we know that scientists have induced these feelings by applying focused magnetic fields around the brain. If there were a supernatural being communicating with a person, not only should we see areas of the brain stimulated but we ought to be able to detect what it is that is stimulating it.

So we know some of the causes, though perhaps not all, of such experiences. What we do not know is that there is any “spiritual” cause at all. (Indeed, we do not know that there is something called a spirit!) So why imagine something other than a physical cause? I can't think of any other reason beside wishful thinking. Again, there could be something spiritual, but why believe it without evidence? Or why believe something in addition to the physical if the physical is sufficient? I'm sure it would be argued that for some of these questions, the physical isn't sufficient. Nevertheless, without evidence of something else holding to it as dogma seems worse than the uncertainty of not knowing.

The discussion of revelation corresponds to the discussion of the senses in Part 1 of this essay. Reasoning's counterpoint for this essay is faith. Some would assert faith is a way of analyzing the world around us.

Let's suppose that some piece of information is directly communicated to your brain. Now you wish to articulate this to a friend. The very act of articulating the information, saying what it is, involves reasoning. Where is faith in this? Anywhere where faith is used to consider and evaluate data, it is indistinguishable from reason. Under those conditions, it is reason. Having another name for it is redundant. So what can faith be if it is distinct from reason? I can think of no other definition for it than wishful thinking.

This essay has been difficult to write. It is hard to say anything other than “if there is nothing there, why do you believe in it.” Or, “You can't measure it, so it isn't there.” (I should note that in philosophical discussions, it is generally agreed that it isn't just that we can't measure it now, but that we cannot measure the metaphysical even in principle.)

In short, there seems no reason to believe in the supernatural other than wanting to. I don't know that this a problem as long as one admits that that is the case.

How do you know? (Part 1)

The subject is epistemology. It is a question of knowing and how we do it. The longest portion of this essay will be about that. The shorter part is about how this relates to faith. In my last essay, I wrote that I was an atheist. The reason I bring up faith here is that there are those that claim to know by faith. I hope to be able to demonstrate that this doesn't make sense. I will do this in Part 2 as this essay is quite long enough.

The above paragraph may seem to imply that all atheists are rational. This is not necessarily the case. You may recall that all that is required to be an atheist is a lack of belief in gods. Being an atheist is a non-position. Though I wear the label proudly (mostly because it provokes) I aspire to be acknowledged as a skeptic and an intellectual. The terms imply that I give careful consideration to positions before accepting them. Atheism is the lack of acceptance of gods. It is a negative stance. That doesn't mean a bad stance. It just means that to define yourself solely as an atheist is to define yourself solely by what you are not. Skepticism and intellectualism implies something positive (not necessarily good): that I posses certain attributes.

So, how do we know? This question has been the subject of much debate for several thousand years. So it seems improbable that I'll answer that question definitively. Indeed, how the brain works is a subject as yet unmastered. I can't answer the question of how the brain stores and retrieves information. But perhaps we can address how we acquire knowledge and how we know that we really really know it.

The way we acquire information is through our senses. As far as I know, there is no other way. If we learn something by reading, we use our eyes (or fingers, if one is blind). If we learn something in school, we add to our use of eyes our use of ears. We learn that fire is hot through touch. We learn that skunks can smell bad through our noses and that chocolate is wonderful through taste. There is no information that we acquire that comes to our brains any other way. There are those that dispute this, but I'll deal with that in Part 2.

So information comes to the brain. What do we do with it? This is where reasoning comes in. Broadly speaking we may say that reasoning is the name that we give the process of analyzing the input. Some of us may have bad reasoning and some of us may have good reasoning. What distinguishes good and bad reasoning? Good reasoning is simply that reasoning which when we apply it to the world around us we see what we were expecting. That is, good reasoning is that which tells the truth about the world.

The pinnacle of reasoning is usually considered to be deductive reasoning. Two examples of this are seen in my last essay: modus ponens and modus tollens. In general, deductive reasoning is where we infer a conclusion from a set of premises. A sound syllogism (a group of premises with a conclusion) is one where the conclusion is correctly derived via the rules of logic. A conclusion may be false even if the syllogism is sound. Soundness is determined by whether the rules are followed. This can happen when the premises are false. The rules of deductive logic don't saying anything about where the premises come from. The rules are about getting to a conclusion from those premises, whatever they may be. So when you are engaged in a logical argument, if your opponent's conclusion is sound you can still win by attacking the premises.

The reason, I think, that deductive reasoning is considered primary is that it gives a certain amount of certainty. If the rules are followed, we know with certainty that the conclusion is true. Well, provided that the premises are true. That's the catch. How does one know that the premises are true?

There two ways that a premise can be established as true. The first is inductive logic (I'll deal with this a little later); the second is more deductive logic. A premise may be the conclusion of some other syllogism. This is very seductive. Perhaps we can demonstrate that everything derives from somewhere and everything that is true is also provable and absolutely certain. Wouldn't it be lovely.

As it turns out, this cannot be done. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead published a book titled Principia Mathematica. The goal of this book was to ground mathematics in logic and to show that the logic was both consistent and complete. Unfortunately, after it was published, Kurt Gödel proved that it was impossible to be both consistent and complete. As far as I know, this conclusion is not in dispute. A short discussion can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica#G.C3.B6del_1930.2C_1931

This means that any consistent logical system of thought must rest on unprovable axioms—at least unprovable deductively. Some get around this by certain things are properly basic. By this, as best I can tell, they mean that certain things are self-evident and require neither evidence nor deduction. Something is true because it is true and everyone knows it. In the cases, I've seen this it seems obvious that this is an excuse to not deal with lack of evidence for propositions that the arguer wants to be taken as a given. For example, William Lane Craig wants the proposition that God exists to be considered properly basic. (A discussion of “Basic belief” can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_belief. You can find a 4-part lecture by Craig on Youtube.) I have my doubts that anything at all is properly basic.

An example of a properly basic idea is Descartes's Cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” This idea isn't considered an axiom, per se, but rather incorrigible. That is to say, so persistent that we can't get rid of it. Here is why I disagree: the sense of self is something acquired by children as they grow. The narcissist, I think, is a narcissist because he fails to distinguish in his own mind the difference between himself and the rest of the world. In some sense, though this is more properly solipsism, we can see that the narcissist sees others as an extension of himself; they exist to serve him. Such a person gets unreasonably angry when one those that ought to be under his control won't do what he wants. I see this as a failure to grow out of infancy. An infant, perhaps, perceives his mother as an extension of itself. When it wants food, it gets it. When its diaper is dirty, it gets changed. As a child matures, it learns that its mother is a distinct person with distinct feelings and desires. This observation is not innate. It is acquired through induction and analogy. The idea of analogy can be seen in this ... um ... analogy: Somebody hits me with a rock, I cry; I hit someone else with a rock, they cry; ergo, they feel what I felt. Various psychological problems, I think, can be seen as a failure to make the analogy.

I remember when my daughter came into this awareness. She was about 8 as I recall. She and her mother were having a fight. My daughter kept insisting that my wife do something for her and that she should want to do that for her and how much it bothered her that my wife wouldn't. My wife kept telling her that she had feelings too. Every time my daughter would say something such as “But I wanted that,” my wife would respond, “But I didn't.” After sometime the light came on. She got it. I can almost remember a literal “ohhhhh.” Suddenly, she was able to put herself in someone else' shoes.

If someone understands the words “I think, therefore I am”, then I think they've ready inductively begun to understand his separateness. The idea is only incorrigible inasmuch as the person has already acquired it inductively and cannot conceive of not being or not thinking.

So what is this induction? It is the process by which we infer from what has happened before what will happen next. This is generally considered secondary to deductive reasoning because there is no absolute certainty about knowledge acquired this way. Indeed, this is known as the problem of induction. The fact the sun has risen every day of every year for at least 4 billion years does not allow us 100% certainty that it will rise tomorrow (speaking phenomenologically). I contend however that it is justification for believing it. Nevertheless, a asteroid of sufficient mass and angle of approach smacking the Earth could stop our rotation. But in the absence of information that contradicts our induction, we are justified in persisting in holding the conclusion.

Imagine that you overhear me counting “three, five, seven”, you might reasonably conclude that I was counting odd numbers. I would say you are justified in saying so. However, imagine that I then say “eleven.” Well, if you are somewhat mathematically inclined you'd probably guess that I was actually counting prime numbers. (For this example, you didn't here me counting until I said "three".) You would be justified. But suppose the next number was fifteen. That's not prime. You might puzzle for a while, but if you felt inclined to make a guess you might I had a pattern that involved the differences between the numbers. The first two differences were two. Now you have two differences of four, perhaps the next number will be nineteen. But it is likely you are wrong. I already had two steps of 4. Perhaps I will go back to two or perhaps I will go to six or even 8. And the guessing game could go on indefinitely involving cycles of repetition and layers upon layers. In each case you make an inference. In each case you are justified. But, in each case you could be wrong and in this example you were.

My point then is this. Everything that anyone might contend is properly basic is in fact induced. You might object that “1 + 1 = 2” is properly basic. Think about how you might teach a three year old this concept. You hold up a pencil and say “one”. Then you hold up a second pencil and say “two”. Then you repeat. If you are strategic in your teaching, you then pick up oranges to show that it applies to other things. What confuses the issue is the idea of categories or, more precisely, the naming of things that are. When there is one object, we say “one”. When there are two objects, we say “two”. It is the name of the circumstance that there are two objects there. Addition is the name we give the process of the state of “one” becoming the state of “two”. Children probably notice this subconsciously over and over again by the time someone tries to teach the words that go with observation. We call it obvious, but only because it always matches up with reality. Is this reality always the case? Actually no. Sort of. When we add one liter of water to one liter of water to one liter of water we get two liters. However, if we add a liter of water to a liter of vinegar (if I recall correctly) we get less than 2 liters of solution. Why? Because the molecules of one fill in some of the space between the molecules of the other. So we learn that if one wants to add two things they need to be in the same category and the answer will be in the same category. One object plus one object equals two objects. However, one apple and one orange is neither two apples nor two oranges. Since an apple is an object and an orange is an object, we could still say we have two objects, or even two specimens of fruit.

Some have argued that I should believe in God since I believe in love. The problem here is twofold. One is that even though I cannot measure love, I observe that which I call love. I don't observe whatever it is that people call god. The second problem is what love actually is. I aver that love is the name we give to a category of behavior. It isn't a thing at all. If people didn't behave in a way that could be called love as we recognize it in this reality then we wouldn't have a name for it.

So how do you know? You observe the world around you, you make inferences about how the world is, you act on that knowledge, revise, rinse and repeat. This is reasoning; this is learning; success indicates knowledge.

In Part 2, we will consider the claim that faith is a means of knowing.

Atheism, Agnosticism and Bears (Oh my)

I am an atheist. Most of my friends know what I mean when I say that, but there is enough confusion (or possibly dissembling) out there on the internet that I think it is worth spending some time on.

First, it is rather frustrating in internet debates to have someone who, by their own admission, isn't in the same category of thought as you are tell you what you think.

So this is what I mean and what most of atheist friends mean when we talk about atheism. To be an atheist is to be without theism. This definition derives straight from its etymology: a-theism -- without theism. It doesn't mean that I believe that gods don't exist. It means that I don't believe in gods exist. This may seem like a strange quibble, but it is not. Most atheists I know are willing to believe if there were enough evidence to do so. We do not assert that gods don't exist; we just don't believe in them.

Some might claim that to be an atheist is to claim that we can prove that gods don't exist. This is not so. It just means that we find no reason to believe in them. Now, it also true that if someone makes claims that contradict then those claims can be dismissed. A common debate is whether the omniscient Abrahamic god and the idea of free will are compatible. I'm not going to argue that here, but you can see that if you were convinced that these ideas are incompatible, you'd have to give up Yahweh's omniscience or give up the idea of free will. Thus if both positions were required for someone's religious stance and you became convinced that those ideas are incompatible, then you'd have to reject their position. This is important because some atheists (and I'm pretty close to being on board) assert that common positions on the gods worshiped by humans are self-contradictory. Perhaps the specifics may become the basis of another post.

Atheism, in short, is the position that the religious position is unconvincing. That's it.

Second, atheism and theism are both positions dealing with belief. The atheist does not believe; the theist does. Neither position is a religion. Religion generally has specific propositions for dealing with 'the other'. The other could be a universal mind, or nirvana, or fate, or Yahweh, or Poseidon. Theism in and of itself specifies nothing about how to cope with 'the other'. Nor does atheism. Thus neither is a religion. I bring this up because some arguers insist that atheism is a religion.

A side point here is that the whole argument that atheism is a religion or requires faith is rather backwards. (You can buy a popular Christian book called, I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, by a relatively famous apologist, Norman Geisler.)  Faith is supposed to be virtue. It supposed to be something a theist is proud of. So is the apologist saying we are as bad as he is or as good as he is? It seems that the apologist intrinsically saying that faith is bad. He is arguing with an inferiority complex.


If you have doubts as to whether the atheist position I've describe requires faith, ask yourself whether it requires faith to not believe in leprechauns.

Third, there are in fact those atheists that do claim to know that gods don't exist. Many of these, as I hinted at earlier, assert that no known definition of gods are coherent.

In any case, those that claim to know might be gnostic atheists. This position is also sometimes known as hard atheism. The position that the evidence is unconvincing but that gods might exist is agnostic, or soft atheism.

So then if atheism and theism is about belief, then agnosticism and gnosticism are about knowledge. One can be an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist. One can be a gnostic atheist or a gnostic theist. (Gnosticism here does not equate to gnostic Christianity which is a whole 'nother thing.)

Agnosticism however need not merely refer to the idea that "I do not know". It also relates to the idea of whether we can know. Thomas Huxley, who coined the term (atheism is much older), seems to have meant that metaphysical question are open to dispute, i.e., "I don't know." (Thomas Huxley's position on agnosticism can be seen here.) But when it comes to metaphysics, it is a real question as whether any such thing that is metaphysical can be known to exist at all let whether the properties of such a thing can be disputed.

So, I like the categories of agnosticism I've run across: hard agnosticism, the position that supernatural & metaphysical things are simply unknowable, and soft agnosticism, the simple admission that "I don't know."

Using the terms as I've defined them, I think of myself as a hard-agnostic atheist. I find so-called evidence for God (and gods) insufficient. I don't know that gods don't exist, but I think it improbable that it is logically possible to demonstrate the existence of the supernatural.

Consider if a being came down and offered to move Mt. Kilimanjaro into your backyard in order to prove that he/she/it was God...and then actually did it! Would you believe that that being was God? Though I would tread carefully around such a being, I would not believe. Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke's most famous quote is this: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Is it possible to imagine something you might ask of a powerful being that could convince you? Perhaps the most challenging thing you could ask is that the being create another universe. Even if it appeared that it did that, could you ever be sure that your mind wasn't thoroughly messed with. If such a being might take on that challenge, it might also simply convince you that it did succeed. Perhaps you might ask that just for a moment that your mind be opened and be possessed of all knowledge. Could you ever be sure that you weren't merely given a convincing delusion that you knew everything?

This is why I say that I call myself a hard-agnostic atheist. To be honest, however, part of this depends on the idea of the omniscient omnipotent god of Abraham. A super-powerful but fallible godling like, say, Zeus is very easily believed--and any of the beings I described above would certainly qualify. But they would not qualify for the ultimate everything of modern western religion.

One last point about logic and the plausibility of gods:

In logic, there are two fundamental syllogisms. The first is called modus ponens. It looks as follows:

• If p then q
• p 
• Therefore, q

That is, if we agree that if p happens, then q happens, then we agree that p did happen, then q also did happen.

The more interesting one (for this discussion) is modus tolens. It is this:

• If p then q
• not q
• Therefore, not p

If it follows that q must happen if p does, then it also follows that if q didn't happen, then neither did p.

If seems a major premise of western theism that god(s) is active in our world. If I do not see any effect that can be attributable to a god, then I am justified in supposing there is no god. I could be wrong. But given that I am unconvinced by so-called evidence for gods justifies my lack of belief in them.


Oh right, I almost forgot ... bears. Here ya go!

Profanity, swearing, cursing and being offended

WARNING: This post contains bad words.

There are several types of language generally considered offensive: Profanity, swearing, cursing, and in the western world, using God's name in vain. The question here is why are any of them offensive.

Swearing and cursing are terms generally synonymous with saying bad words and that is the emphasis of this post. Profanity and using God's name in vain is not really part of this post, though it is interesting that many Christians seem more concerned with the word fuck that with saying "oh my god." Technically, of course, "God" is not the name of the Abrahamic god (that of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). But that is a different subject.

So on to bad words. Why are they offensive? Words, of course, are our primary means of communication. Body language, facial expressions, and the arts are all arguably communication, but if you really want someone to understand, you tell them. (There is a whole rant that could go along with this.)

Presumably, if we say something is a bad word then we are indicating that there is something offensive in their communication. Something about their meaning is taken to be ... what? Insulting? Rude? Why?

Often we take technical words, such as feces, and replace them with words that somehow seem less embarrassing, such as poop. For reasons unknown, however, words like crap and shit are deemed offensive. For the life of me, I don't understand why. Feces, poop, shit, scheisse, merde, et al., are refer to the solid waste product that our bodies and that of other animals produce.

It is notable that we don't seem to be offended if people use bad words in other languages. In the preceding paragraph, scheisse is German for shit as is merde in French.

A story a former employer told was that they had a Chinese co-worker who would sit at his keyboard programming all day long. All day long he would mutter to himself, "fuck". Finally, apparently amused, my former employer asked him what the Chinese equivalent was. His response: "Oooh, very bad word!"

My point here is mostly this: Any word is a sequence of sounds and cannot be offensive by themselves. A word is offensive because we deem it such. Also, if there is an equivalent word that is not offensive, then the 'slang' term should not be offensive nor censored. Shit should not be anymore offensive than feces.

Intent goes a long way to explaining our reactions to such things. If someone calls my mother a cunt, I am offended. Why? Because the speaker intends me or my mother to be offended. Somehow the speech would carry less weight if the speaker called my mother a vagina. If someone calls this essay shit, it isn't the brown stuff that makes this statement offensive, but that they don't find value in what I've written.

I wouldn't want to discourage the ability to express our displeasure with life or circumstances. In some cases, it would seem that profanity helps. See this article. But I think that taking offense merely from overhearing words that others speak especially when not directed at oneself is just silly. Fuck that.

Tinker's Damn: Intro

The origins of the phrase Tinker's Damn is somewhat in dispute. An alternative phrasing is Tinker's Dam.

In medieval times, there were traveling repairmen who fixed pots, pans, and various other things. The word damn or dam could either come from a tinker's propensity to curse or from the shoddy patches to holes in pots--a dam. A longer discussion can be found here.

In any case, a Tinker's damn isn't worth much. So the title of this blog indicates that this really is just my 2 cents.

My on-line persona has been Tinker Grey since 2000. So it all fits together...at least in my mind.

I hope you enjoy.