beechgrovejoe

Circumcision and Abortion

2011-11-25T08:29:00.001-05:00

One of the strangest groups of people I have come across is the anti-circumcision lobby. Basically their position is that circumcision should be banned until a person is legally an adult. Now don’t get me wrong here. I am not saying their position is good or bad. All I do is ask them for their justifications for something as drastic as banning a practice that has been performed for thousands of years.

It generally breaks along two lines. Some defenders of the position use the argument that religious belief is not a justification for harming someone else. The other group attempts to argue that it’s the fact that the child didn’t consent as justification for the ban.

Nobody is going to deny that religious rights granted by the constitution are limited to not using them to cause harm to someone else. However, this first camp fails because what they define as harm so it can be used to justify denying religious rights is not the political reality of the situation. Society as a whole sets what defines harm when it enacts laws. Given that circumcision is legal in most countries, these societies have spoken and said it’s not harm, so therefore stopping it is a violation of constitutionally guaranteed religious rights.

The second camp introduces a really odd idea. They are claiming that the child didn’t give consent. True, but then again you can only ever give consent if you have that right in the first place. Even they agree that children don’t have the right to consent. It’s normally based on the usual mental capability argument you would expect. However it has this strange effect of turning a right to consent after reaching adulthood into some kind of object that the parents are holding for the child until they become of age.

Both camps try to argue that children are not slaves so harming them or doing something without their consent, especially if it’s a permanent change to their body, is some offence against some unwritten code of conduct. This code of conduct appears more restrictive than existing law as it would ban circumcision.

But what they fail to understand is that slaves you can sell. Since you cannot sell your kids it would seem quite obvious that children are not slaves. Forcing someone to do something that they don’t consent to do is not making them slaves. So obviously, their reason for making this argument is that are looking for sympathy for their position. They want to paint the children as the oppressed peoples and the parents out to be the evil slave owners.

The “it’s really harm” argument can be answered with a simple question, “Has a law been passed that bans circumcision?” If not the answer is no. These people are arguing that when and if they get a law passed they will be right. They are just forgetting that until that law passes they are just factually wrong. It’s not harm. Declaring it as harm is exactly the same thing as declaring abortion harm and calling for it to be banned.

This is actually quite odd that the anti-abortion fans and anti-circumcision fans are trying to use the same “protect the children from their evil parents” argument. Normally these two groups are diametrically opposed on most issues. At least it’s good the anti-circumcision crowd is learning from how the anti-abortion crowd did their thing.

Considering that most people who are anti-circumcision are also pro-abortion this is REALLY odd. You would think pro-abortion fans would want to remove restrictions on the rights of the parents. However in this case they want to place restrictions on what a parent can do.

When you question them on this oddity, they of course claim that abortion is much different from circumcision. This of course can only be described as completely obvious to anyone that thinks about the subject. So abortion is killing a small cluster of cells and circumcision is removing some arguably excess skin. That doesn’t sound to me like a whole lot of difference.

But the question of the parent having the right to chose to have the procedure or not have the procedure is exactly the same. The question is whether or not it makes sense for the parent to have the right to make the decision.

And this is where the real motivations begin to show up. Banning an abortion is basically an idea that is pushed by religious groups on the grounds of some kind of sanctity of life basis. Of course the anti-religious types push the other direction and want the parents to have rights that override the religious concerns of the opposing group.

But when it comes to circumcision, the roles get reversed. In this case circumcision is traditionally a religious practice so the religious groups are pushing to keep it legal while the anti-religious groups are the ones that want to ban it. I find this VERY telling of what is really going on here. The anti-religion groups appear to be trying to punish the religious groups by banning practices that are central to their faiths. Just the same as the religious groups are trying to ban practices they consider immoral.

As has been shown many times in history, pushing something based on a like or a dislike of some religious idea doesn’t really work. Whether you are trying to force some moral position on the population or you are trying to ban some religious practice, the attempt to do so only causes the opposing camp to harden their position and fight back even more.

In addition, the escalation of the positions will lead each side to take more and more irrational positions. In the case of abortion, you get people pushing to ban medical procedures based on when a child is declared born. For example, consider the partial birth abortion issue.

In this case, the procedure simply moves the unborn child out of the uterus before terminating it, instead of killing it before it leaves the uterus. This has medical advantages because it places less risk on the mother. However, by trying to define birth as when the child leaves the uterus, there is an obvious attempt to get the child protected with the rights of an officially “born” person earlier to restrict the number of abortions that are performed.

However, look at what a law like this actually does. It takes away the mother’s right to the safer medical procedure. It delegates the mother to being a second class citizen. It raises the unborn child with little if any rights under the law to a first class citizen and declares that its OK for the mother to have to suffer more or even die to keep the child alive. Picking one person as more important than another is a hallmark of any wacked out line of thinking regardless of if religion is a factor or not.

Another example the extremes people will go to is the recently defeated “Personhood Amendment”. This was an attempt to define unborn children as having the exact same rights as people that have been born. Of course, this was nothing more than an attempt to ban abortions by giving the rights to these unborn children so that abortions could be classified as murder. And as the defeat shows, not what the general public considers acceptable.

People pushing this kind of position are simply insane and they are trying to redefine two separate groups as being the same so that they can push their political agenda. While they focus on their proposed redefinition giving rights to some group of people, they ignore how they are taking away rights from other people.

And just the same the anti-circumcision fans are doing the same thing. By trying to pretend that children have the same rights to make decisions that adults do, they are seeking to remove rights from those parents. It makes no difference that they even concede that the children don’t have the rights and shouldn’t have adult rights. The fact that their kooky ideas will not change the children’s right to choose anything, and actually will not given them any more freedoms, they still want to pursue a position that would reduce the rights of a parent to decide what is best for their children.

To outdo the anti-abortion fascists, the anti-circumcision fascists came up with one better. In an attempt to get a circumcision banned on a limited basis, they convinced a group of stupid people to propose a referendum to ban circumcision in the city of San Francisco. By limiting the geographic reach of law and limiting the number of people that had a say in making the law they where hoping to get the law passed.

However, as in typical wacked out extremist style, they didn’t bother to study the history of why laws allowing circumcision where in place nor did they bother to check on the state laws. Before the referendum even got on the ballot, a judge struck the proposal because if violated state laws that said only the state could regulate medical procedures.

To make matters worse, news coverage of the issue lead a couple of politicians to propose a new state laws that made it illegal for a municipality to attempt to ban circumcision. The ballot initiative was proposed in February 2011 and the new law passed in the October 2011, so in less than a year, the anti-circumcision lobby was successful in getting their own well crafted political tactics outlawed by the state.

As with the personhood amendment, the banning of circumcision really only showed that the people pushing these positions are really outside the mainstream of political thought. When you bring the defeats up with these supporters, you generally get some looser comment, like “It’s not really a loss. We raised awareness of the issue.”

In reality the only awareness they raised is for more people to understand how insane those political positions actually are. Now tell me, do you think a personhood amendment or a ban on circumcision are more or less likely after major defeats of both camps in the same year?

Their response to that is generally “Well changing laws is a long hard process. Look at how long it took to get abortion rights or gay rights.” But of course, those issues where ones of what rights adults actually have not ones of what rights children, born or not, actually have. While abortion rights or gay rights as adult rights do seem to make sense, a circumcision ban based on the child’s rights seems dubious at best.

So for me it seems very inconsistent to not be either anti-abortion and anti-circumcision at the same time or pro-abortion and pro-circumcision at the same time. Either you believe parental rights should be restricted based on some religious or non-religious justification or you believe parental rights should be maintained based or some religious or non-religious justification.

Trying to split the difference and take different pro/anti positions at the same time on the two issues seems to cause one position to undermine the validity of the other position.

But then again, I am an evil non-confirming amoral atheist that thinks the first thing to do is make sure all adults have equal rights to practice their religious beliefs as long as they don’t hurt someone else. Then I am free to not practice those religions and those religions won’t hurt me.

But as all politics goes. Given I’m 50 years old, I not going to be having kids in the future, and have been already circumscribed, I really couldn’t give a rat’s ass what abortion or circumcision laws you put in place. Neither would affect me in any way. For that matter if you want to pass a law where children under the age of 18 must be kept on leashes in public, that’s fine with me too J Once again, it doesn’t affect me.

Maybe someone should ask: How many anti-abortion fans where planning to have an abortion or how many anti-circumcision fans where planning that for their kids? Seems like both groups are power hungry douche bags that want to force others to do what they want without affecting themselves.

The Kindom of Douche

2011-08-30T05:44:00.000-04:00

In a land very close to where you are and in a time very close to now was the Kingdom of Douche. The Kingdom of Douche was impoverished by a great war that had been raging for hundreds of generations. The two sides are known as the Lords of Right and the Lords of Wrong. Both groups are totally convinced of the correctness of their views and simply couldn’t allow any part of what the other side thought was true to be considered correct.

Both sides have their own holy books that espouse the teachings they believe in. To spread the teachings each side has an elitist class of educators who where deemed to be the only ones qualified to spread the sacred word. For each side, any utterance of something that sounded anything like what the other side taught was immediate grounds for condemnation and ridicule.

Each faction claimes that their views are proven fact. The only explanation for stating something that didn’t conform to their proven facts is that the person stating these untruths must be defective in some way. Both groups have a great fear of defectiveness. For if a defective could be correct about something they said, then surely that meant that there was something wrong with what the non-defectives said.

In the early days of the Great War everybody lived in the vicinity of what was known as the greater metropolitan city of Correctness. The city started out as a small group of people that agreed with each other.

Everybody around Correctness has the same problem. They didn’t have all the things they wanted. It was just too much work to run around and find all the things they thought where needed. There where simply not enough hours in the day. The only practical thing a person could do was to choose the things most important to them and spend all their time looking for those things.

This had a major problem. It meant that a person could never get those less important things. This made the people very unhappy. They felt that it was very unfair the world would only let them get so few things that made them happy and yet denied them so many things they thought it would be good to have.

They had noticed that if you spend all your time looking for one thing, over time you get very good at finding that one thing. In fact you get so good at it that you can find so much of what you are looking for that you can never use all of it. The same thing could be said of the people that make things. The longer they made something the better and faster they got at making it. Before long, they could make things so fast and of such high quality that they could never use all the things they made.

At the founding of the city of Correctness, a small group decided that it would be a good idea to cooperate with each other. If one person looked around for raw materials and another used those raw materials to make something, the two could trade with each other and both where better off. This idea caught wind like a wild fire.

The first thing they found was there was one minor problem with their plans. Sometimes what they got when they traded was not quite the quality they had been expecting. Some traders tried to meet some minimum level of requirements for a trade, but sold then at a very low price. Others sold very high quality things, but they generally wanted much more for the trade. And as one would expect, there where many people that tried to sell low quality things at very high prices.

Anybody that had gotten the short end of one of these not so fair trades would feel cheated and want to reverse the trade. As one would expect, the person that got the better end of the bargain would not want to reverse the trade. It became common to hear "All sales final". And so began the Great War.

Everybody agreed that trade was a good thing. But sometimes trade was not such a good thing. So they started to work out what was fair and what was not fair. As they got around to agreeing on something they wrote it down in a book and declared it the correct way of doing things.

Over time the book got bigger and bigger. As generations came and went, they added more and more to the Big Book as it was called. However, as new generations where born a problem arose. The things that had been agreed upon by past generations, where not agreed to by some members of the new generation.

This was a threat to the authority of the people that agreed with the Big Book. This was especially true for the people that taught the Big Book to the young. Any time, if a person young or old could disagree with the Big Book, that meant the students could turn the tables on the educators and rightfully claim the teachers where stupid and ignorant. Without the order of the teacher being the authority and students being expected to accept whatever the teacher was espousing, it was clear that anarchy would ensue.

So to quell this propensity for nonconformity in the young, they invented the idea of punishment. If a student was to be such a douche bag that they disagreed with a teacher, the teacher had the right to be a douche bag themselves and do something the student didn’t like.

At first this seemed to work quite well. All of a sudden, not so many where willing to publicly state that the teachers where wrong. Emboldened by this discovery, the Big Book took on a new role in the society. It was now the Law. Anybody that disagreed with the Big Book could be subject to punishment.

At first simply saying you disagreed with the Big Book could easily get you killed. That period of time is known as the Uber-Douche period. During this time a single leader known as the Uber-Douche was the sole person that was allowed to decide if someone had violated the Big Book and was therefore subject to punishment or death.

For a while, this worked quite well. The people of Correctness prospered as their standard of living got better and better. They where getting more and more stuff to make them happy. Life was good. But there was a problem. People had just learned not to say there was something wrong with the Big Book.

But one day they ran into a real problem. With their population growing and everybody needing more and more stuff, the natural resources in the area of Correctness started to get depleted. This meant that the gathers in the society needed to journey farther and farther away from Correctness to find what the people needed.

Eventually, the gatherers strayed into the lands of other Uber-Douches. According to the Big Book of the people of Correctness, the correct thing for a gatherer to do was to gather so it could be traded with other people in Correctness and nobody else. But just like in the land of Correctness, taking something without giving something in return was a crime. So the first of the gatherers to reach the new lands where simply killed.

This was a real threat to the way of life for the people of Correctness so their Uber-Douche ordered that
the people of Correctness would embark on a great crusade to rid the world of false Uber-Douches. This of course also happened in the other kingdoms, so there where many generations of war between rival Uber-Douches.

Eventually the people got tired of the perpetual wars and the Uber-Douches began to fall out of favor. Those doubts about the correctness of the Big Book started to surface again. People began to understand that the older wisdom of cooperation was much more beneficial than constantly warring with your neighbors. So trade started between the various lands and the wars began to die down.

As the members of the various lands began to trade with each other, they also began to talk about their societies. Everyone was surprised to find that each land had its own Big Book and there where lots of similarities between them. For some, the differences where confirmation that those underlying doubts about the Big Book where justified.

This formed the basis of the time known as the Great Reconciliation. Lands that where close together, seemed to have very similar Big Books. None was really better than any other, but all of them had good ideas that none of the others had. The great thinkers of the various lands started to work together to identity all the things in common between all the great Big Books. They even went so far as to find all the good things that where just in one of the Big Books.

From all of this they created a new master Big Book known as the “Good Words”. And just as before, a group of clergy was formed to teach the Good Words to the young. This time the land of Correctness was much larger. Because of this, the idea of Uber-Douches just couldn’t be feasible anymore. A single person could not decide everything, so a whole series of Demi-Douches was created to act like the Uber-Douche for some small regions.

Since each Demi-Douche couldn’t add to any other Big Books than the local one, groups of the Demi-Douches would get together periodically and argue over what new additions should be added to the great “Good Words” document.

But just like the original Big Books had detractors, the Good Words book had its detractors. Eventually the Good Words started to include things that people could easily demonstrate as simply incorrect. It was no longer a question of what you could imagine, but one of what you could demonstrate to others.

Very quickly this new class of thinkers, known as the Demonstrators, began to realize that their demonstrations really didn’t show they where right. They could only show when somebody else was wrong. Instead of claiming what they thought was right they focused on finding all the things in the Good Words that where wrong.

This lead to many more years of war and bloodshed. But no matter how hard the followers of the Good Words tried, they couldn’t refute what the Demonstrators where showing. The success of the things the Demonstrators where finding brought the old doubts back to the surface with a vengeance.

Because the Demonstrators where very good at what they did, they where very good at making weapons. They made bigger and bigger weapons. For a time, even the followers of the Good Words started to use what the Demonstrators had found to destroy the non-believers. In the long run both sides found that continuing to make bigger and bigger weapons would only lead to their opponents making bigger and bigger weapons. The only outcome would be for both sides to totally destroy each other. So a truce was called.

The agreement was that each group would only talk about the things they believed. For example the Demonstrators would only claim the Good Words was wrong when they could demonstrate that incorrectness. On the other had, the followers of the Good Words could not punish people just because they disagreed with the Good Words.

This created the age of the Lords of Right and Lords of Wrong. For the Lords of Right, the book of Good Words was the only absolute statement of truth. On the other had where the Lords of Wrong that believed the only absolute things where the things that had been demonstrated as wrong. This worked of a little while.

But as successive generations where born, the non-conformity of the young popped up once again. Some young of the Lords of Right began to assert the correctness the Good Words again and called for the punishment of the non-faithful. In response, some of the young from the Lords of Wrong began to claim the Good Words was wrong even about things they couldn’t demonstrate it.

As the Lords of Right began to learn more and more about what the Lords of Wrong where saying, they noticed a little problem. Nothing the Lords of Wrong ever said was an absolute. By their own admission, the Lords of Wrong always claimed that anything they said was subject to being falsified. If someone would come along and show something was wrong with what they said they would change their opinion.

So the kids of Lords of Right, the “Rightites”, asked some questions specifically designed to confound the radical young of the Lords of Wrong. First they asked “Do you believe in ideas you cannot demonstrate”? The “Wrongite” kiddies quickly said no, they didn’t believe in something that could not be demonstrated.

With the trap laid, the Rightites began their attack. Please demonstrate that light moving between Alpha-Centuri and Wolf 359 is moving a constant speed. The Wrongites where taken aback at this question. It was an obvious attack on one of their most precious theories. Of course they couldn’t get there to actually measure the speed so they could never demonstrate it. They knew their pet theory said the speed of light was constant and they suddenly realized their pet theory was making claims that could not be demonstrated.

What was the poor Wrongite going to do to counter the sacrilegious claims of those low life Rightites? They chose to end the conversation. They began to claim the Righties where stupid, uneducated, irrational, deluded, dishonest, and any other derogatory term they could think of. The Righties walked away laughing at how gullible the Wrongites had been.

The Wrongites didn’t like this very much. They went back to their laboratories and started working on a response. The older more experienced Lords of Wrong tried to tell them they should have just admitted it was belief that has no supporting evidence, but the kiddies didn’t like that either. Only those low life Rightites believe unfounded ideas.

So they began to try to change the definitions of terms to make their position correct. Falsifiable no longer would mean, not an absolute. From now one falsifiable would mean that in principle, if you could imagine a way to falsify something, it was a valid statement. Once you had valid statement, until someone actually performed the falsification, the statement would be an absolute.

There had always been a group of people that disagreed with the Good Words. For years they had been called the Agooders. They had seemed to consistently come up with ideas that openly opposed the Lords of Right. Not many people knew much about the Agooders, so they assumed the Agooders where primarily a group of people opposed to the Gooders.

So the Wrongites began to call themselves Agooders. They also started to say that an Agooder was a person that didn’t believe the Good Words. One group even admitted they where too stupid to make up their minds so they would be called Agnostic Agooders. The one thing all these Wrongites had in common is that all agreed that there was something wrong with the Lords of Right.

What the Wrongites had failed to see was what the real Agooders had been saying all along. When you demand that your position is an absolute certainty you are member of the Lords of Right. You are claiming you are right and anything that opposes you is wrong. If you say you only believe in things that can be demonstrated and are therefore a Lord of Wrong, when you cannot demonstrate your position you are simply a lying sack of shit and people will see you for what you are.

Those Amoral Agooders have a point. If you are going declare things good or bad, you have a morality. If you speak of morality you are a religious kook that is simply declaring your opponents bad and your friends good. So just admit you are a member of the Lords of Right.

If you are want to claim you are a Lord of Wrong. Fine, there is nothing wrong with you until you take the classroom environment and try to apply it to the real world. We are not all your students. When you claim you are right and cannot demonstrate it to OUR satisfaction, you are no longed a Lord of Wrong. You have become a traitor and joined the Lords of Right.

For the reality has always been that those old time hard core Agooders have NEVER agreed with the Lords of Right or the Lords of Wrong. They realize that both sides have their correct points and incorrect points. Choosing to be one or the other is the act of a religious kook whether they say they are a Lord of Right or a Lord of Wrong. To the Agooder they are both douche bags, hence it is called the Kingdom of Douche.

The dishonesty of an evolution fan.

2011-08-13T16:46:00.000-04:00

I recently had an exchange with an evolution fan that highlights some serious problems with evolution. First the idiot asked the question “So do you think evolution occurs?” I responded with a comment saying that his question was overly broad and he needed to get more specific if I was going to answer the question.

My point was that evolution is a very broad subject with some parts that are very well established and other parts are pure speculation. His question is a kin to a theist question of “Do you believe in what the bible says?” It was an obvious attempt to paint me as one of those evil creationists and a video he made after the exchange confirmed my suspicion.

First he attempted to send me a video he had made where he tried to lay out ground rules for talking about evolution. In the video he made claims that evolution is an absolute certainty and it was unacceptable to even suggest that the theory was wrong. Then he started demanding that any challenge to evolution had to be made with an alternative explanation that was supported by evidence.

I tried to point out to him that I was not claiming anything. I was just pointing out that some parts of modern evolutionary thinking are well established and others have no supporting evidence what so ever. Needless to say, he was not very happy with that response. For him it was a simple black or white question and no shade of gray was acceptable.

When he asked what parts of evolution I disagreed with, I listed a few of the most common objections. For example, classifying fossils by their morphology is many times claimed to be evidence of evolution. I tried to point out that for evolution to be valid there would have to be a demonstrated genetic relationship between the fossils and that once the fossils get old enough, you don’t have any genetic material to compare.

He even admitted that we cannot get genetic information from the older fossils. But that didn’t stop him from asserting that they where still evolutionarily related. When I pushed him to show how two different species with similar body shapes had to be evolutionarily related he continued to fall back on “Well they have similar morphology”.

As I pushed him with the difference between an ancestral relationship and a simple classification relationship he began to go off the deep end. Obviously I was trying to get him to demonstrate that there was a genetic relationship between the fossils he claimed where related and he couldn’t do it because he had already admitted that there was no genetic material to compare.

This gets at a big flaw in evolution theory. The assumption that similar body shapes must mean there is some kind of genetic relationship. While this may be an assumption that is stronger than most claims, it is by no means an absolute certainty.

If two species developed in the same environment and used similar strategies to move around and collect food, it only makes sense that they would develop similar body shapes. While it may be possible for them to be genetically related, that is by no means a certainty. Assuming the genetic relationship when it has not been demonstrated with a comparison of the genetic material is intellectual dishonesty at best.

As I pushed him to show the parent/child relationships that supported his claim that the species where genetically related he began to claim that ancestral relationships where irrelevant and the shape of the fossils was all that mattered. He claimed that we are not talking about parent/child relationships we are talking about a comparison of species. So how does evolution work without reproduction?

So he was trying to assert that offspring from one species was not relevant to an evolutionary relationship with another species. Of course he never proposed any mechanism by which the evolutionary relationship could be accomplished without the genetic relationship. But I guess he thinks the rocks on a bottom of a fast flowing stream are evolutionarily related because they have similar shapes.

The point here is that the genetic relationship required for evolution to be correct has never been demonstrated with fossils of any significant age. Making the assumption that the genetic relationship is present when no comparisons have been made is the worst kind of scientific fraud that can be created. We call it fabricating evidence.

If he would simply admit he has no genetic evidence of the relationship between the species he claims are evolutionarily related there wouldn’t be a problem other than his claim of the certainty of evolution.

Besides his assertion that evolution was a certainty, when it clearly is not, he claimed that any objection to evolution must be backed up with evidence. Never once did I make a claim that would require any evidence to support it. All I was saying is that the evidence used to support evolution was not sufficient to justify a claim of certainty.

This is no different than a claim that the evidence used to support the teachings in the bible is not sufficient to support the existence of a god. His response was very similar to a typical fundamentalist theist’s demand that an opponent must produce evidence that a god doesn’t exist.

When I brought up the reality that the vast majority of the population does not accept evolution, he started to claim science is not a democracy. But still he claimed that there was a consensus in the scientific community that evolution was correct.

So how is that any different from a theist claiming there is consensus in the theist community that god exists? If it’s not a democracy than the number of scientists that agree with the position is simply not relevant.

His excuse for his claim was that just because the general population doesn’t understand evolution doesn’t make it wrong. However I was not claiming it was wrong. I was claiming was that all of it is not supported by the evidence. Once again, how is this any different than theists claiming that just because most people don’t understand the bible doesn’t make the bible is wrong?

Simply put, he seems to be having an identity problem. I was stating that the evidence does not support evolution. In other words, I don’t find the evidence convincing enough for me to accept all of evolution. He on the other hand is saying that yes the evidence is sufficient. So tell me how is his assessment of the evidence in any way relevant to my assessment of the evidence?

He believes evolution is supported by the evidence. I don’t believe it is supported by the evidence. We have a simple disagreement about what to believe. I am asking for him to present evidence that will convince me and he even admits he cannot provide the evidence I am asking for.

So this all boils down to him asserting I am wrong and that I am claiming evolution is not correct when all I am doing is saying the theory is not convincing. Doesn’t his position sound an awful lot like a fundamentalist theist position that demands you believe the same way they do?

He is abandoning all pretenses that his position is based on evidence and raising it to the level of what can only be described as a religion. He is demanding that I accept his religion and claiming that because I don’t I am wrong. He does this while claiming he follows the scientific method that only accepts ideas that are supported with evidence. Yet he admits he has no evidence to support a particular aspect of his position.

In effect, he is throwing a temper tantrum because somebody didn’t agree with the stupidity that he pushing. In all actuality is he really pissed because his argument is so weak and he as invested a great deal of his self worth into the assertion that his position is correct.

He claimed he has no vested interest in the correctness of his position yet he is willing to go to great lengths to show I am wrong. The old saying is “I think he protests too much”. My question is “Why does he feel such a need to show I am wrong simply because I disagree with him?”

To me it looks like he is engaging in a high school level say the right things to be in the cool crowd type of behavior. The actual correctness of what he is saying is no longer relevant. If it pleases the crowd he wants to be popular with, it’s correct and if not, it must be wrong.

His final act was to block me so I could not post responses to his comments. I guess I just do too much damage to his self esteem.

DNA is NOT information.

2011-07-16T20:40:00.000-04:00

A common theme in the childish arguments between theists and anti-theists is the question of DNA being information. The theists claim that evolution can only remove information from the genome and the anti-theist evolution fans claim that mutation adds information to the genome.

The interesting thing is neither group seems to have much understanding of the term “information”. It’s as if they agree we live in the information age and they can operate a computer so therefore they actually understand what the term means.

One of the earliest things I remember from my collage days was the computer science classes where the professor made a strong point about the difference between information and data. His lecture started with a warning that the vast majority of people don’t really understand the difference. And after getting out on the internet and seeing how people use the term, he was absolutely correct.

The standard definition of information is “a message received and understood”. The place where the misunderstanding appears to come from is what happens after the message has been received and understood.

Most people seem to think that as you collect up information the result is a pile of information. But to think of it this way is to fundamentally misunderstand the term. The result of collecting information is a pile of data not a pile of information.

Information is data that is in transit from one location to another. In the context of the internet, data starts out on some server. It gets replicated into a set of messages and is transmitted to another location. There it is received and if it is in an understandable format it is converted back into data.

Another example: As information is read into a computer, it is organized and most commonly stored on a hard disk. However, there is no information on a hard disk. There is only data. It’s not until that data is taken off of the hard disk and sent somewhere else that it is considered information again. And just as before, when it finally arrives at its destination the result is data at that location.

There is a very good reason we call large collections of data on a computer data bases and not information bases. An information management system is used to control the dissemination of information to various locations. While a database management system is used control data stored at one location.

Claiming DNA is information is a kin to claiming information is stored in a database. It is an uneducated attempt to make that data seem more important than it really is. While it might be a good marketing spin, the reality is that it actually shows the lack of understanding a person has about basic computer science concepts.

Another aspect of the misunderstanding is the fight that information is being lost or gained via the process of evolution. Adding information would be adding elements to the data that where not expressible previously. For example, adding a person’s address to an information stream that was not previously expressible would be adding information. Removing that address and the ability to express it would be removing information.

Simply including more of the same information is not adding information it is simply expanding the size of the message. In the case of DNA more or less base pairs is not adding or removing information. To add information you would need to be able to add something that was not expressible in earlier versions of the data format. To remove information you need to make it impossible to send what was being sent in the older versions.

With DNA this is NEVER the case. The format of the data is always the same set of four nucleotides. Sure the order and size changes from data set to data set but no additional information is included nor is any information removed.

Another key aspect of information is the need for transmission. To address this issue one must first define the location where the information is transmitted from and where the information is being received.

Many times, the colloquial description is that DNA is passed from parent to offspring. But that is wildly inaccurate. For that to happen, the offspring would need to first exist for the DNA to be passed to them. However this is not what happens in the real world.

A more accurate portrayal would be that the DNA is replicated and once it is separated from the parent cell, the offspring grows based on the copy of the DNA. In other words until the separation of the offspring DNA from the parent cell, there is no destination for any information to be sent to. So in reality, there is no transmission of information from parent to offspring.

Now of course, when you get up to the diploid life forms like most animals, there is an information transfer in the form of sperm to the egg. But the egg is not the offspring. Once the DNA from the male arrives and we can legitimately claim the offspring has been created, no additional DNA transfers happen. So DNA is not being transferred from parent to offspring.

Another attempt to claim DNA is information is when talking about protein synthesis using RNA. In this case the separate locations are the nucleolus and the site where the protein is actually synthesized. DNA is used to form RNA that is transferred to the synthesis location and the RNA is information at that time. However the DNA is not being used as information. It is the data used to form the message that is represented by the RNA.

Once the RNA arrives, it no longer information. It is simply a special kind of data most commonly known as code. It is a set of instructions that guide the production of the protein. Once again, the RNA is no longer functioning as information it is functioning as the program that guides the protein production.

At best, DNA and RNA only sometimes function as information. However most of the time they are nothing more than simple data. To claim that DNA and RNA are information to fundamentally misunderstand the term.

When looked at from this standpoint both the theist lost of information theory and the anti-theist gain of information theory are childishly naive views. Whether this is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the term or an intentional attempt to make their theory sound more convincing, both are wrong at a fundamental level.

If you want to test to see if the theist or anti-theist is being dishonest or just dumb. Restate their argument replacing the word information with the word data. Chances are the argument will have the same or better level of validity however it won’t sound so sexy.

Also be aware that most of these arguments are coming from people that are not very skilled in computer science or computer technology. They are normally biologists and theology majors without the necessary training to really understand the words they are using.

Looking For The Wrong Answer

2011-06-21T04:30:00.000-04:00

Many times while attempting to come to a conclusion concerning a religious question people seem to want to NOT actually consider what the possible answers are. For both the theist and anti-theist groups the question seems to be does a god exist or not. They appear to want to cast the question as a strictly black or white issue. However like most things in life viewing it as a simply Boolean question is over simplistic at best. At worst it is a major act of intellectual dishonesty.

If we lived in the 19^th century or before, it would be perfectly reasonable to think that a question of a god’s existence had to be a simple yes or no answer. There was nothing in logic that indicated that any other kind of answer was possible. The prevailing thought was that a god had to exist or had to not exist. There was no middle ground and there could be no middle ground.

This dramatically changed in the 20^th century. The work of many of the greatest mathematicians showed beyond a reasonable doubt that considering a question to only have a true or false answer was over simplistic. Before their work it was considered rational to view all questions as ultimately having an answer. If we didn’t yet have the answer, with enough work and intelligence, we would eventually figure out what the correct answer was.

Unfortunately for people attempting to push that world view, the 20^th century demonstrated just how incorrect they where. The failure of the 19^th century view can be summed up with the word “undecidability”. For the first time, people began to create questions that could not be answered and where taking it a step further and proving that the questions were impossible to answer.

This was not just the old view that the problem was so complex that it would take more time to solve. This was actually showing that there was no solution nor could there ever be a solution. It was not a matter of what evidence was available or the intelligence level of the researcher. The questions where formulated in an environment where every single detail that could be used as evidence was available. In addition, because of the environment of these questions, it was not difficult to try every possible way of solving the problem and show that every approach would fail.

If you don’t think this affects you, consider the question of is it possible for you to predict when your computer will lock up. The actual answer is no. In the general case it is not possible to predict that and any claim that it can be is simply wrong. While in some special cases, it is possible to predict the lock up, attempting to answer the question in general is simply not possible.

Strangely enough, if you could answer that question, it would immediately put into doubt all the previous questions that you had thought you had answered. But exploring that aspect is another posting all in itself.

For the purposes of this post, the important thing is to get people to realize sometimes the question does not have a simple yes or no answer. It’s very possible that the question can have a third answer which is that we cannot decide if the answer is yes or no.

Placed in general terms, there are cases where there simply is not enough information in a system for a decision to be reached. It’s not like we will come across new evidence in the future, there simply is not enough no matter how hard you look for it. You cannot find it because it simply does not exist.

There has even been work where one of these problems is augmented with some additional information that should make it possible to answer the question. Unfortunately, when you do this you change the system at a fundamental level and all of a sudden you are back in the same boat and you still cannot answer the question.

My favorite version of these kinds of problems is the recursive language test. The question is can you design a method to test a language to see if it is recursive. It’s not important what a recursive language is. If you want to learn there are numerous sources.

The important thing to understand is that if the language is actually recursive, your test will eventually complete and return a definite positive response. However, if the language is not recursive, your test will run forever and will never return a definite negative result.

In fact, it’s not hard to show this is actually quite common. Consider the decimal expansion of PI. Is there a sequence of seven seven’s in a row in that expansion. Obviously the ultimate answer is either yes or no. But how would you go about answering the question? Given that it is transcendental and has an infinite number of digits, all you could is start generating digits one after another and check to see if you found the seven seven’s as you where doing it.

Once again, obviously if you ever came across the pattern you where looking for, you could stop and return a definite positive response to the question. But what if that pattern never appears? You would search forever and never come across a definite negative response.

Until the definite positive response is found, any claim that the pattern exists or doesn’t exist is simply incorrect on a trivial level. It is nothing more than a guess backed up with no evidence. While assuming one or the other answer may be useful to some reasoning processes, assuming the validity of that reasoning process can only be one of two cardinal sins of reasoning. It is either woefully ignorant of the facts, or it’s blatantly dishonest.

The same thing can be said of a question of a god’s existence. Until there is absolute proof of the existence, any claim that a god exists or doesn’t exist is simply wrong on a fundamental basis. Choosing to accept either position is belief plain and simple. This is why there are so many agnostics in the atheist community.

However many atheists actually fail to understand the ramifications of the position they are in and fall into the same childish trap that the worst of the theists fall into. Simply put, they begin to believe their own bullshit. Though they cannot prove that their position is correct, they begin to act like the opposing position is wrong. When in reality, by definition, if they cannot prove they are correct, they surely cannot prove the opposing position is wrong.

What both variations on crazy do is begin to believe a dogma that their position is correct. They gain a delusion that they are right. From there they quite commonly begin to think the other side is out to get them. Whether it’s the evil non-believers corrupting the faithful, or the evil bible thumper’s taking away our human rights, both are vilifying the other group in an attempt to make their flavor of crazy look better.

The worst of the theists will find examples of non-theists doing distasteful things and then claim all the non-believers are evil and the anti-theists will find examples of theists doing distasteful things and then claim all theists are evil. All you have to do if find examples of people claiming all Muslims are terrorists, or all Christians want to take away abortion rights to find these paranoid delusions of grandeur.

Notice that both groups are doing the same thing. They are declaring their position is right or good and the opposing position is wrong or evil. They are both acting moralistically and assigning good and evil labels for various groups of people.

The only possible reason to do this is to try and suppress the position to which you are opposed. It’s no more or less than an attempt to kill the messenger because you don’t like the message. It’s why you see so many ad hominem fallacies used by both groups against the other. If you cannot attack the message, attack the messenger.

So as a round about way of getting at what is different between an atheist and an anti-theist, consider the differences. Without a definite positive answer to the question of a god’s existence, choosing to believe a god exists or doesn’t exist is simply childishly stupid. It is jumping to a conclusion without the evidence to support the position. Without a belief in either position, claiming one or the other position is wrong is nothing but a demonstration that you hold a belief.

If the theists are wrong for holding unsubstantiated beliefs, the anti-theists are wrong for holding their unsubstantiated beliefs. Simply put you cannot show the other side is wrong by doing the same thing you claim is wrong.

Get it through your thick heads, the reason there is nothing wrong with atheism is because there is nothing wrong with theism. There is nothing wrong with theism because there is nothing wrong with atheism. If you want to find something wrong, all you got to do is find the person that thinks either position is wrong and you will have found the wrong you where looking for.

Why I don't respect most anti-theists.

2011-05-14T02:52:00.000-04:00

You may have noticed from my previous postings that I have very little respect for most anti-theists. Occasionally I come across anti-theists that I can respect, but they are generally few and far between. Conversely, most of the theists I come across are very respectable people and only occasionally do I find theists that worthy of real contempt.

Strangely enough, I attribute this to religion. Most theists learn at a very early age that if they want to follow some religion, they are going to come across people with different religions. If they want to be respected enough to be allowed to believe what they want, they need to be respectful of others and allow them to believe what they want.

The anti-theists on the other hand don’t think they follow any religion. By definition, anti-theism is a position that is opposed to theism and they all seem to be sure that theism is a religion so there is no way that they could be following something they are opposed to.

What the anti-theists fail to see is that a religion is nothing more than a way of running one’s life based on a faith. A faith is nothing more than holding one or more beliefs. And a belief is holding some unproven idea as true without the evidence to support that position.

Placed in a mathematical context, a belief is some assumption, being held as true for the sake of reasoning. There is nothing wrong with it, but for the anti-theists, when this is done in a religious context it is faith and it is bad. But if the same thing is done in science it is sound logical reasoning and is good.

It all sounds like the actual correct answer to the question: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin”. Which of course is: “Whatever number makes my argument sound stronger”.

Theists might try to evangelize me, but they stop pretty quickly to avoid me doing the same thing back to them. I have no problem being as irritating to them as they are to me. This tit for tat type of response seems to quickly settle down to a position of mutually disagreeing with each other’s position, but with respect for each others right to think what they want.

Anti-theists on the other hand are quite different. They seem to want to play an “I’m superior to you” type of position. If you don’t agree with their positions, they begin to sling insults and logical fallacies your way. If you respond in kind, it quickly turns into a childish “Whose daddy’s dick is bigger” type of argument.

The main difference is that only a small number of theists will actually resort to such childish tactics. Most of them, once they realize they can’t convert you to their position, will at least have the decency to allow you to believe the way you want to.

On the other hand, most of the anti-theists will actually resort to such tactics as their primary means to push their agenda. It’s much less common for the anti-theists to realize they have picked a loosing battle, give up and simply get on with life.

I suspect this is due to how most anti-theists come into existence. For the vast majority of them, they started out as theists. At some point in time, something happened that that destroyed their faith. It doesn’t seem to matter if it was something they felt was right was condemned by their religion, they where treated unfairly, or they logically deduced how wrong their faith was.

One way or another they got the idea that theism was wrong and now they are against it. Hence the reason I call them anti-theists. They are specifically about being opposed to theism. For many of them, this amounts to throwing their lot in with what they see as the strongest position opposing religion which of course is science.

The reality is that science is totally separate from religion and there is not a single place where the two schools of thought overlap. Sure there are idiot theists that try to use science to promote their positions, but even most theists consider those idiots to be whack jobs.

However, in the anti-theist camps, the norm seem to be people that think science is a reasonable way to show the theists are wrong. Problem is, without evidence, science says nothing about the correctness or wrongness of any position. It is simply unscientific to talk about something without evidence, yet that doesn’t stop the anti-theists from claiming rational thought is a good tool to refute theism.

You will notice a distinct push, especially by the most extreme anti-theists, to take on a position known as scientism. It is a position that only science can be used to answer questions, and includes a distinct tendency to ridicule non-scientific arguments.

It appears to be a kind of delusions of grandeur. The vast majority of the things people talk about are non-scientific so therefore they are unimportant. On the other hand, only a small elite group of intelligent people are qualified to talk about the really important things. The delusion is that if this “real important” stuff was actually so important, more people would be talking about it.

It’s almost like an upper classman, ridiculing as lower classman for not knowing something. It can only be described as a kind of undue arrogance. What makes the arrogance worse, it that it leads the anti-theists to have an over inflated confidence in the soundness of their position.

The reality is when it comes to a question of the existence of a god; there is no evidence one way or another. To claim that science can shed any light on the issue is either ignorant of what science is, or a down right dishonest attempt to baffle their opponent with scientific sounding bullshit.

So the school of hard knocks has taught me that to start with theists should be given the benefit of the doubt and be respected until they show they don’t deserve it. On the other hand anti-theists need to earn their respect.

As an atheist, I don’t believe a god exists and I don’t believe a god doesn’t exist. From my standpoint, the only thing wrong is the declaration that either position is wrong. What decides the question of the level of respect I will give is the level of respect I receive.

Evolution and Origins of Life

2011-05-09T00:56:00.000-04:00

So how many times have you heard an anti-theist talk about how stupid the theists are when they talk about both evolution and the origins of life? The argument is generally stated as “evolution doesn’t speak to the question of the origins of life”.

While this may be true, the theists where never talking about it in that way. Contrary to the popular anti-theistic belief it is quite possible to talk about a scientific subject and just not restrict oneself to scientific views. It may not be the stuff of a scientific paper, but then again neither is most of the conversations in this world.

Many anti-theists try to claim that the only thing that is real is what science defines as real. However, ever since the empiricist movement from several hundred years ago, it has been quite clear that what is real is not defined by science. Some choose to believe what science defines as real actually is the same as reality, but that is only a belief.

What science does do is define what is acceptable in a scientific conversation. It sets guidelines of what can be considered evidence and limits thinking to the verifiable conditions that it was founded on.

But thinking that evolution can only be thought of in a scientific context, is a childish bigoted view that presupposes that only science is worthy of conversation. This is the general starting point for what is known as scientism. The religion of believing science is the only valid way to describe the universe.

While many of the theists can’t describe why they want to talk about evolution and origins at the same time doesn’t mean they are wrong to do so. In fact I see it as actually a very good sign of the theists having a strong intuitive understanding of some of the flaws in evolution.

When someone says that they don’t accept evolution, there are at least two possible meanings of what they are saying. On one hand they could be saying they reject everything stated in the theory. But on the other hand they could simply be saying that they don’t accept ALL of evolution. The insane anti-theists only ever hear the first one and don’t bother to ask before they start into their normal insult and logical fallacy side show acts.

So lets say we have a theist or an atheist (which of course if not an anti-theist), and they don’t accept evolution. They would agree that the parts that can be demonstrated in solid scientific experiments are acceptable and they don’t have a problem with those parts.

This most likely means they don’t have a problem with modern generics. If you can do a test in a lab over and over again, varying the conditions, and observing the outcomes, that’s pretty solid evidence and accepting what is found is not all that hard.

But consider archeology. All you can do is dig up stuff and attempt to classify it into your favorite categories. The older and older the things you dig up are, the less likely there is that you could get any genetic material for comparison. And as the geologists are so fond of saying, only some environments are conducive to the creation of fossils.

So archeology gives us by definition a VERY incomplete view of what was alive at some point in time. The further back in time we go the less information we can actually glean from what we find. Not only are a small number of the members of a species fossilized, a potentially large number of species could have existed in an environment that didn’t produce fossils.

Also notice that there is no real experimentation. Nobody has buried something and dug it up millions of years later to see how it was changed. Simply looking at the results without knowing the exact initial conditions, is not an experiment. It’s just digging up pretty artifacts and organizing them in your display box.

So how does this relate to evolution and the origins of life?

One of the core concepts of evolution is the tree of life otherwise know as the common ancestor theory. This theory in its most extreme form postulates that all life on earth is related genetically and the process of natural selection accounts for all the diversity of life.

Here is where the origin question enters the picture. Was there a single unique instance where life began (however it happened) or where there many instances where matter somehow managed to get organized in such a way to make the jump from not life to life?

Of course the theists say that a god did it once a long time ago. The anti-theists, just the same, say it also happened one time a long time ago. But consider the possibility that life actually got started many times. If this was the case, not all life is related in a parent/child relationship. Different life forms could have formed totally independently of each other and survived until today meaning there are life forms that don’t have a common ancestor between them.

Simply talking the scientific side, going back in time one would expect to life to get simpler and simpler. The earliest forms of life would most likely be very simple single cell organisms. As you get closer and closer to this postulated first life form, we would also expect that the genetic sequences used for reproduction would also be simpler and simpler.

No matter how you slice it, simpler and simpler genetic sequences mean fewer and less complicated proteins could have formed. This would mean the basic chemistry of life would have to get simpler the further you went back in time. It is easy to infer that as the chemistry gets simpler, the likelihood of it happening goes up.

So we are on a trajectory of life becoming simpler and the chances of those chemical reactions randomly happening increasing as we go. At some point, we would have to reach a point where the chemical reactions are so commonplace that they happen in many places at many times.

For the single occurrence model to be correct, life would need to have started late in this sequence of events. The multiple occurrence models favor an earlier start to life. And this brings us to the real question. What is your definition of life?

There is no generally accepted definition of the term. It’s kind of like the definition for pornography. “I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it”.

With so many possible definitions, all the factions are free to choose whatever definition they want. Simply put, this means everyone is right or everyone is wrong. Since some of the positions are diametrically opposed, it’s not actually possible for everybody to be right so the only sane answer is that everybody is wrong including the scientismistic (is that a word) fans of evolution.

This really goes to the question of how you would tell the difference between to the two positions. The ignostic position is that like the question of the existence of a god, the question of the validity of the common ancestor theory is meaningless until you define precisely what you mean with the term “life”.

So here are a few questions that need to be answered first:

1. What is the minimal genetic sequence(s) that qualifies as a life form?

2. Starting with that, what are the sequences of mutations that lead to all modern life forms?

3. What additional supporting chemistry needs to be in place within this entity to qualify as an original life form?

4. What are the minimal environmental conditions needed around the life form for it to survive?

5. What does this original life form consume and secrete?

Until there are accepted definitions for at least some of these questions, arguing over the question of single or multiple occurrences of life starting is just another example of arguing the number of angels that can dance of the head of a pin.

It also means that theistic questions about how evolution and the origins of life are related are well founded. In addition it means that anti-theists that say evolution doesn’t speak to the origins of life, while being scientifically correct, are simply being intellectually dishonest.

Unless you can precisely define what life is, any claim that there are common ancestors between all species is just a religious dogma. To think it isn’t, is precisely to be an anti-theist (a person with a religion that hates different religions).

Math is not a subset of science, math is a tool used by science

2011-05-06T05:25:00.000-04:00

It really surprises me that there is a need for this posting, but again and again I see scientism fans claiming that math is a subset of science or some other such nonsense. It seems like what they are just trying to make science seem stronger than it actually is.

To begin with, math was invented literally thousands of years before the idea of science was even conceived. There is solid evidence of the use of mathematic way back into ancient times. In contrast science, at best, is only a few hundred years old.

In general, the longer some subject is around the broader and more evolved we would expect that subject to be. Considering that math has been around for much longer than science we would expect math to be much more intricate than science and this is exactly what we find.

The diversity of subjects that fall into a math category is simply enormous. If you can think of a subject that involves using numbers or equations to solve a problem, there most likely has been something written about it.

Science on the other hand is comparatively quite limited. To argue otherwise would be to claim that in a few hundred years, science has been able to amass more information than thousands of years of math did. This is a simple cardinality argument. If you want to play asshole, given that mathematics has named all the integer values and that set is infinite, there are simply names for more things in mathematics that science can ever have.

But playing whose daddy has the bigger dick games is not really telling of much more than the opinions of the various pundits. But a differentiation between math and science can be made on a much more fundamental level. And this appears to be where many scientism fans fail because they don’t have a basic understanding of some of the fundamentals of mathematics.

At their cores mathematics and science are fundamentally different. Science is based on the idea that for something to be valid it must be a falsifiable idea. The idea must be subject to being challenged and there must be a way for that challenge to be tested. Mathematics on the other hand is based on ideas that are not falsifiable (also known as proven). For math the real significance of an idea is when it is shown that it is correct and can never again be challenged.

In fact if you really push a real degreed scientist to show some scientific idea is proven, he will correct you with a statement saying that nothing in science is proven correct. The best science can do is prove something is wrong.

Any idea in science is subject to being changed when new evidence is presented. However, in math, once a theory has been proven, it is not possible for new evidence to be presented. In fact this gets at exactly what a mathematical proof actually is and why the idea of a scientific proof is an oxymoron.

In both science and math, we have what is known as a hypothesis. This can be best described as a half baked idea. It’s generally vague, all the consequences of the idea have not been worked out, and nobody would ever claim that it is in any way proven.

In both fields, once all the consequences of the hypothesis are worked out and we can show that everything is consistent, we reach the level of a theory (a fully baked idea). Notice that at this level, if we assume the theory is correct, we can be assured that everything works and any possible result the theory produces makes sense.

In science the best we can do is begin to look for evidence that a theory is not correct. While evidence that doesn’t contradict some theory is important, by far, evidence that refutes a theory is much more important because it definitively shows that the theory is wrong. But science never achieves a level of certainty where it is legitimate to claim the theory if correct. The best science can do is show that some theory has not been proven wrong.

However, in math, reaching the level of a theory starts the process of trying to prove the theory. While this process may have similarities to the experimental process in science the outcomes are considerably different.

In mathematics, the process of proving a theory is a process where all possible opposing ideas are ruled out leaving the theory as the only possible solution. Because all the alternative ideas have been ruled out, the level of certainty of the theory being correct is enormously larger than what science achieves with its experimentation. In fact when math does succeed in proving a theory, we no longer call it a theory and start calling it a law or a fact to differentiate it from a theory which is by definition unproven.

Because of the rigors of being forced to find all alternative ideas and then rule each and every one out, mathematics guarantees that a proven theory can never be disproven. Put in scientific terms, that means the idea is no longer falsifiable and therefore it is now unscientific.

If math was a part of science, every time it accomplished its goals, another piece of science would suddenly become an invalid idea. While math is a useful tool to science, it is extremely misguided to think that math is a subset of science. It’s not misguided to think that math is a subset of the tools that are at science’s disposal.

But to think math is a subset of science is a kin to thinking a hammer is a subset of a carpenter. At best to make that argument you would have to be rather naive. At worst, it would be a blatant attempt to raise the level of importance of the hammer to the carpenter.

Of course, a carpenter knows what a hammer is good for, doesn’t need a pep-rally on the virtues of the hammer, and surely doesn’t argue that he’s better than everyone because he uses a hammer. Any fool can use a hammer.

If only seems to be the anti-theistic wacko’s, trying to muster some additional credibility that make the argument that math is a part of science. They are obviously only trying to lend the certainty levels found in math to science so they appear to have a better alternative to the theists they seem to hate.

The Anti-Theist Creation Myth; The Big Bang.

2011-04-23T19:23:00.000-04:00

While the Christians have their Genesis creation myth, the anti-theist crowd has their own creation myth in the form of the Big Bang theory. If you listen to the anti-theists they would have you believe the theory is established scientific fact just the same as the Christians would claim the Genesis story is established fact.

In reality the Big Bang theory has absolutely no evidence to support it just as the Genesis story has no evidence. Now of course the anti-theists will start claiming that things like relativity, Hubble’s law, and cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) are evidence of the correctness of the Big Bang theory. But are they?

Most of this claim there is evidence comes from the observation of the Doppler affect and the observation that light coming from distant sources appears shifted in frequency. The assumption is that this entire shift in frequency is caused by the Doppler affect. However, what evidence is there that this is actually so. Simply put none.

First they assume that light travels unchanged, at a constant speed, for the entirety of its journey from its source to here on earth where we see it. But what evidence is there for that? The furthest that humans have ever transmitted an EM signal is only about 0.002 light years. These signals are the transmissions from the Voyager space craft. So would someone please explain to me how a transmission of such a short length provides any evidence of things working the same way over distances that are billions of times longer?

The Quantum Theory fans would have you believe that the laws of physics are quite different on extremely small scales, so why should we believe they are the same on extremely large scales? At least the quantum fans have some evidence to support their claim.

It is interesting that part of Planck’s kicking off the quantum theory was the relationship between frequency and energy. The higher the frequency of the light, we find the higher the energy level of the light. In general, the light coming from distant objects is red shifted to a lower energy level. The objects further away have a greater red shift.

If light simply lost a little energy during its long travel, we would see what would look like a Doppler shift when we received the light. All it would take is slight drag or loss of energy for this effect to be real. In addition, there would be no way for us to find this experimentally because we cannot transmit and receive light over any significant distance.

Given that some nearby galaxies have a blue shift; it’s not hard to imagine that both a Doppler shift and a slight drag could both be real phenomenon. All observations that we would have made are still valid, only the interpretation of those observations would change.

Most importantly, it would mean that the universe is not expanding. And therefore since it’s not, there is no reason to believe that all the matter used to be closer together, so there is no evidence that a big bang happened.

Recently, a real kink in the big bang theory has come to light (pun intended). Measurements of the red shift from various objects have shown that the rate at which the universe is supposes to be expanding is accelerating. But this is a problem in itself.

According the conservation of energy laws, no new energy is supposes to be created. However to accelerate, you must add energy to the objects that are accelerating. So where is new energy coming from? If the universe is accelerating its expansion must be being caused by additional energy that was not present in the past, or it is being released from someplace where it has been locked up for the entire past of the universe.

Interestingly enough, if the universe was simply cooling down and becoming denser, you might expect that the drag it produces on light would increase. A simple explanation might be that over time the existing energy is getting more and more evenly distributed across the universe. As energy gets more evenly distributed the amount of energy that light has to interact with on its long journey increases. So, this would cause the amount of drag and therefore red shift to increase. This would look like the rate of expansion is increasing when viewed from here on Earth.

About this time the anti-theists will start so say, “You don’t have any evidence for this”. The appropriate response, “Well you don’t have any evidence for your position either”. At which point they generally bring up cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). They generally ask well how do you explain CMBR? Well actually quite easily.

If light is loosing energy as it travels, CMBR is simply light from much further away that has been red shifted down into the microwave range. At this point the smarter ones go after "but we have no evidence the universe is that large". This of course leads to the question of the sensitivity of the instruments being used to see distant objects.

Ever noticed that as equipment has been getting more and more sensitive, the estimated size of the universe has been getting bigger? The simple reality is that to focus light that has longer and longer wavelength (and therefore smaller and smaller frequency) you need a bigger and bigger detector.

Once you have instruments the size of the diameter of the Earth or even the diameter of the Earth’s orbit you MIGHT be able to claim you are actually seeing to the edge of the universe, but any estimate that you are making now, is just you trying to make up a theory that fits the observations you do have.

Give me 1000 years of increases in the sensitivity of detecting equipment without seeing anything further away and you may have some evidence. But claiming there is nothing out there because you haven’t seen it, is just intellectual dishonesty.

The main point of this post was to highlight the fact that given any set of observations it quite easy to come up with alternative explanations that fit those observations perfectly. To choose one particular interpretation and demand that others agree with it is exactly why so many anti-theists are simply pushing their flavor of religion on others.

Anybody can write something in a book and get some group of people to believe it. After a while you get a clergy of people that have studied the book and are somehow qualified to tell others what it means. It doesn’t matter if it religion or science, the same thing is being done.

Belief in relativity, IS just another religion.

2011-04-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

If you listen to many anti-theists, you will no doubt have come across their tendency to try and use the scientific method as a justification of their ideas. It generally is presented that verifiable evidence is preferable to unverifiable evidence. Leaving a side the obvious question of the validity of only considering verifiable evidence, this approach is misguided mostly by the fact that there are an awful lot of cases in science where the established explanation is based on unverified assumptions that have no evidence to support them.

If you are going to require that when an explanation is formulated, only verifiable evidence is allowed to be considered, that leaves you will a big logical problem when the final explanation contains ideas that have never been verified with any experiment.

The best known and most misunderstood example of this is the theory of relativity. If you ask most people if they think that relativity is a correct, they will say yes. But if you ask them to explain the theory, very few, even college professors, are able to explain the theory in an adequate way.

The reality is that with some high school level mathematics training, relativity is an extremely simple idea. It is also quite easy to understand where the theory is useful and where people use it incorrectly. But a real good question is just how verified is the theory?

Proponents of the theory will claim that it's been verified when actuality, even more than 100 years after it was published, its core concepts have never been tested. Several tangential aspects of the theory have been verified, but they only show that theory has not been proven wrong. They are a far cry from showing that the theory is correct.

One thing, most people fail to understand is that there are entire families of theories that predict exactly the same thing relativity does. Every single observation ever made is equally well explained by those theories as it is by relativity. But if you ask people about WHY relativity is better than those alternative theories, there are even less people that can give that answer than there are people that can explain the basics of relativity itself.

So you may be asking, what is unverified. Simply put the two postulates that form the basis of the whole theory. The easiest one to deal with is the invariance of the speed of light. The issue has to do with exactly how you measure that speed. Basically this can be done one of two ways.

The first way is to setup a light and a clock at one end of some distance, and put a mirror at the other end. You turn on the light and measure the time it takes for the light to travel to the mirror and return. This is known as the two way speed of light.

The other way, known as the one way speed of light, is where there are two points at some distance apart that each have clocks that have been synchronized so the time difference for light to travel the distance can be measured.

You would have to be an idiot to not realize that a more complicated test with two clocks that have to be synchronized is less precise than the single clock test. A major assumption that the two clocks run at the same speed has to be added for the two clock model to hold any validity. We already know that where you are can absolutely affect the speed a clock runs.

Simply take two identical atomic clocks and place one on the ground floor of a tall building and place the other one on the top floor. They actually run at different speeds. This fact is why the GPS system must account for the difference in clock rates in orbit and on the ground.

The relativity proponents will claim that the issue is because of the gravitational field and special relativity does not account for it. But where exactly have they performed any experiments that are free of any gravitational field?

So we know that clocks DON'T always run at the same speed and we don't have a lab to perform the tests outside of a gravitational field. So how is the two clock method anything more than being told we should ignore the man behind the curtain? No experiment is ever actually performed that meets the requirements, and any experiment that is performed must take into account they fact the assumption of the clocks working at the same rate is wrong.

So if we turn our attention to the two way, one clock test, we get around the synchronization and clock rate problems. But all of a sudden relativity is NOT so assured any more. Some simple calculations show that whether the speed of light is constant or the speed of light is variable, all possible observations are exactly the same.

The only serious argument that has been made is one that Ritz and deSitter had years ago. deSitter argued that if light was not constant in speed the observed orbits of binary star systems would be distorted. But that argument adds another big assumption. The assumption is that the speed of light is constant over the whole distance regardless of the length of that distance.

Given that today, the farthest any EM signal has been transmitted and received is about 0.002 light years. That's quite a bit away from being anything near the distance between star systems. To assert that the speed of light is constant of such a large distance is nothing more than a guess. Once again no experiment has ever verified the assumption.

So we are left with a situation where the only reliable test is over a very short distance using a method that doesn't rule out the possibility of the assumption being wrong. So given no experiment has been performed using either of the methods that is not open to serious questions, how can anybody claim relativity is right or wrong? Simply put there is no verifiable evidence for either position.

So how exactly is belief in relativity any different than a belief in a religion?

If they use the word objective, they are religious kooks, unless they are talking about linguistics.

2011-04-05T00:58:00.000-04:00

We have all heard both the theists and anti-theists talk about objective versus subjective this or that. The theists have their objective morality and the anti-theists have their objective reality. They are both doing the same thing. They are using the linguistic concepts of the subjective and objective parts of speech to try and add some level of credibility to their statements

For anybody that has studied linguistics, the subjective part represents the entity performing the action, the verb part represents the action, and the objective part represent what is being acted on. So the use of the term objective outside of linguistics is just an attempt to make something sound independent of the subjective part of the statement. This is an obvious attempt to make it sound immune to personal biases.

The theists use this to assert that morality is completely independent of how somebody thinks about it. The anti-theists use it to assert that reality is independent of how anybody thinks about it. But when you start to look at it from this perspective and how they justify this increased level of independence, you quickly find that there is no real basis for the assertion. You begin to see that all the adjective is being used for is to make the argument SOUND more convincing than it really is.

The question boils down to what is the difference between subjective and objective outside of linguistics. The simplest way I can come up with to describe it is that subjective refers to cases where a mind is involved and objective is when a mind is not involved. The theists suggest that their morality would exist regardless of the existence of people and the anti-theists suggest the universe would exist without the existence of people.

But doesn't that beg the question: How could you possibly know anything for certain about a place or time that cannot by definition have anybody experiencing it? Without anybody there to verify the assertion, any claim to having evidence to support the position must be a bold faced lie. The theists try to use the excuse of divine inspiration and the anti-theists try to use the claim that processes worked the same in the past as they do today.

But look closely at those excuses. How could anybody ever show that either of those is more valid than an assertion of exactly the opposite? Basically the theists are claiming divine inspiration must have happened because we have their objective morality. And the anti-theists are claiming that processes must be the same in the past because of what they see now. So how is it with absolutely no evidence, either position is anything but a personal guess?

Both are a bit of trickery known as a logical implication. If you have studied logic, you will know that an implication is a two input Boolean function where one input is the premise and the other is what is being tested. The truth table for this function is that when the premise is true, the output follows the value of what is being tested. However, when the premises is false the output is ALWAYS true.

For example, it the premise is that "Guns kill people" it makes sense to ban guns. But if the reality is that actually "People kill people" then the original argument is just a ruse to get you to agree with the logic. If the premise is true the output is meaningful, but if the premise is false the output is meaninglessly always the same.

So if the premise is wrong, the use of a logical argument has absolutely no power to shed any light on the question. What the person making the argument was doing was simply being intellectually dishonest. Either that, or they where just plain stupid, in which case there is even less reason to agree with their argument.

In either case, this amounts to a need for a major red flag to be raised whenever someone uses the word objective in any argument they make. At a bare minimum it is an indication that you need to be looking VERY closely at any assumptions or premises that might be proposed. For if you don't accept the premises they are presenting, their argument is even less valuable than to have not made the argument to begin with.

In addition, if you are planning on using the word objective in your argument, you need to be very careful and get your opponent to stipulate to your assumptions before you make the argument. Otherwise your opponent will simply dismiss your argument on the grounds that you are dishonest or that you are stupid

An anti-theist is NOT an atheist.

2011-03-26T00:02:00.000-04:00

I seem to run into a lot of people that claim they are atheists, but when you listen to what they are saying you find that they are not atheists, they are anti-theists. Now according to them, anti-theism is just a more activist version of atheism. This post to to hightlight why this is not true and try to explain why so many anti-theists want so badly to be classified as atheists.

The best way to describe this is a little story. A theist walks up to an atheist and says "I believe I can fly". The atheist (rightfully so) responds with "Show me some evidence". After much arguing and no demonstration of this ability, the atheist says "I don't believe you can fly". When this story is replayed between a theist and an anti-theist. The only difference is the anti-theist says "I believe you cannot fly". The anti-theist also generally goes on make comments describing how the theist is lying and how they are such a low life for making such claims.

Where the atheists simply says "I don't believe you" the anti-theist actively asserts that they not only don't believe the theists but that the theist is wrong for making the claims they make. Both are rightfully using the lack of evidence as justification of their position. However the anti-theist is taking it one step further and applying some kind of moral judgement on the theists.

This gets at the heart of the difference between atheists and anti-theists. To a hard core atheist, there is no such thing as absolute good or evil. Those concepts are nothing more than expressions of people's likes and dislikes. To attempt to make them into something more than just personal opinions, is to do nothing more than raise one person's feelings of likes and dislikes to a level that is more important than other people's feelings. This of course has the effect of downgrading someone else's feelings to point where they can be disregarded.

For an atheist, NOBODY'S feeling are more important than anybody elses. There is no scale where somebody's feelings can be ranked as more virtuous than another's. In fact, the act of blessing some people's feelings and supressing someone else's feelings is generally the cause of most of the inflicted harm that is perpetrated on people every day.

However, the anti-theist look at this entirely different. They generally feel that theism has caused some kind of problem that they don't like and now feel justified to mock and insult the theists. The most militant of the anti-theists will actually advocate penalizing the theists.

This can only be described as a kind of mental disease. The theists are wrong because they want to force their beliefs on others, but somehow the anti-thists are right because they want to force their beliefs on others. The theists are wrong for pushing their moral agenda, but the anti-theists are right because they are pushing their moral agenda.

An atheists sits back and says, "While it's not possible for both sides to be right about the existance of a god. The other possible answer is that BOTH sides are wrong". Unless you are an idiot and have not kept up with the advance in mathematics during the 20th century, you would know that there are situations where it is simply impossible to make a decision about which is the right answer.

So while there may be some truth to one or the other answer to the question of a god's existance, it is entirely possible that this is just one of those situations where it is not possible to choose. In other words there may be some ultimate truth, but no human can EVER know the answer. Therefore choosing to be on the side of believing a god exists or believing a god doesn't exist, is simply wrong on an fundamentally trivial basis.

If you pay attention, you will find that most anti-theists where at one time theists and "deconverted" as they call it to their anti-theism position. This is actually a very interesting point. The hard core theists attempts to push their moral position on others while the hard core anti-theists do the same thing. They both follow the unethical position that they are right and the rest of the world should be forced to follow their kind of thinking.

Both positions are in sharp contrast to an atheist's position that NOBODY should be forced to believe or disbelieve anything. Every person has the right to make up their own mind, and there is nothing wrong with choosing any possible alternative. The only thing that could possible be a universally disliked thing is when someone else tries to force you to believe something you don't accept. Or worse, when someone advocates penalizing someone for their bad thinking.

If you want a demonstration of the difference between an atheist and an anti-theist, make the following statement: "Atheism is just another religion". An atheist will respond with sure why not, there is nothing wrong with religions. An anti-theists on the other had will take great offense at that statement. The anti-theists are so wrapped up in the ideal of how evil religion is and how wrong the theists are that they think it's an insult to claim such a blasphemy.

The anti-theists just like the theists, seem to be so unsure of their position that even the slightest hint that they may be wrong is unacceptable. An atheist on the other hand makes no moral judgement about a person based on their beliefs. For an atheist a preditor is not evil for killing Bambee, it's just feeding.

When the theists or anti-theists feel attacked they seem to identify with Bambee and consider the preditor is some kind of evil thing. The atheist simply accepts them for what they are and defends themself. No need to go out and hnut down those evil preditors and eradicate them or change them into something else. All you need to do is protect yourself from them and the stupid people who don't, simply choose to be the preditor's next meal.

I suspect that most anti-theists at some level understand how closely they are related to the theists they hate so much. They have a real fear of the same thing being in them that they see in those evil theists. Because of this they want to classify themselves are atheists (without god) to make themselves feel more confortable with what they are esposing.

However, if you think there is something wrong with theists, atheists, or anti-theists you are NOT an atheist. You are just a religious kook that is trying to use your personal view of religion to justify some crappy treatment of somebody you don't like.

Why don't you stop hating them for what they believe and hate them for being douche bags reguardless of what they believe. Don't people get that atheism is without the existance or non-existance of a god. It's simply without a god. If your running around talking about how bad people are because of their belief in a god, you are most definitely WITH a god. Just one you don't like.

Why are atheist arguments so ineffective?

2010-12-12T23:18:00.000-05:00

After watching tons of atheist videos and reading tons of atheist blogs, I am struck with how ineffective their arguments are. While atheism has been around as long as theism, the atheists remain a small minority of the population.

Commonly. a statistic of somewhere near 16% is quoted by most atheists. However, that number is actually the number of non-religious people. If you dig deeper, you will find that about half are theists and half are atheists. So the reality is that atheists only make up about 8% of the population.

Considering the placebo effect, that makes atheism only slightly more effective than homeopathy. Even if we are generous and grant 10% to the group, that means that 90% of the time people do not find the atheist arguments to be convincing.

Maybe it’s just me, but when I am trying to make an argument and find that it is ineffective, I attempt to figure out what the weak points of my argument are and adjust to compensate for those weaknesses.

However, in the so called atheist community, it’s virtually never considered acceptable to actually criticize atheist positions. As an atheist, I have many times been criticized as a closet theist simply because I have brought up weaknesses in some atheist’s argument.

It’s almost as if the atheists are so unsure of their position that even the slightest hint that their arguments are flawed MUST mean that the theists are correct. I guess I should expect this because so many of the atheist arguments are based on the idea that if one minor thing about a theist argument is wrong, that is accepted as proof the entirety of the theist’s position is wrong. Of course, in those cases, the atheist is making a common logical fallacy so it’s really undeniable that their argument is weak.

Another common tactic of atheists is to use some variation of the traditional ad hominem logical fallacy. They attempt to paint their opponent as some uneducated fool so therefore the opposing position is wrong. As any honest person knows, this is not a fair tactic, so once again the atheist looses on grounds of being a douche bag.

A significant number of atheists attempt to use science to refute their opponent. And yes, quite a few theists do use science incorrectly to defend their position. However, the atheists are much worse at this intellectual offense.

To begin with, the phrase “scientific proof” is one of the greatest oxymorons of all time. Nothing in science is ever proven. In fact, if anything in science is ever proven it immediately becomes an unscientific idea. One of the hallmarks of scientific thinking is that all ideas are falsifiable. However once an idea is proven it is no longer falsifiable so therefore it is no longer a scientific idea.

Along with the logical inconsistency of “scientific proof” is the idea that scientific evidence is somehow anything more than just evidence. And as anybody with a lick of sense knows, evidence is also not proof of anything. Put in legal terms, evidence may be accepted or rejected by the trier of fact. Nobody is under any obligation to accept any evidence. So demanding that your opponent accept your evidence is just another sign of a weak argument.

In general, atheists claim there is no evidence that god exists and they are correct in that assertion. However, on the other side there is no evidence that god doesn’t exist. Attempting to use a scientific argument for something that has no evidence supporting or refuting a position is misguided at best.

By the time the atheist is demanding proof or even evidence for a god’s existence, they have already lost the argument and are just acting like a whiny little kid that isn’t getting their way. The best they can do it retreat to a position of describing how they believe, without being able to convince their opponent.

Which leads to the idea of what an atheists believes. Many atheists will claim that they don’t believe a god exists and they don’t believe a god doesn’t exist. While this is a very pure definition of atheism (i.e. being without god) it does beg a real tough question.

If you truly don’t believe a god exists and you don’t believe a god doesn’t exist, how could you possibly justify a position where theists are wrong? At best, you could claim that theists have not proven their point, but then again the atheist has not proven they are correct either.

Taking the approach being used by many atheists, since the theists have not proven their position and the scientists have not proven their position, believing science is somehow better than religion is just another religion in itself. Something based on unproven assertions.

If atheists want to ever be more than a marginalized group of religious kooks, they need to stop making weak arguments and begin to focus on the problems with religion without bring up the existence or lack of existence of god.

beechgrovejoe