Moved to Wordpress

I finally buckled in to peer pressure (and practicality) and moved my blog to wordpress so from now on check out:

http://authorofconfusion.wordpress.com/

Cheers
Ian

Public Debate: Is God a Delusion?

I just found out that there is going to be an interesting public debate coming to Palmerston North next month entitled Is God a Delusion? The Regent website describes it as:

"A public debate between Bill Cooke and William Lane Craig. Bill Cooke is the Vice President and National Spokesperson of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. His books, writing and speaking are appreciated in New Zealand and around the world. William Lane Craig holds PhDs in Philosophy and New Testament Studies. He speaks throughout the world on the reasonableness of the christian faith. He has an incredible ability to communicate complex issues in easy to understand ways.Hosted by Central Baptist, Crossroads Church and TSCF. All are welcome. ENTRY IS FREE."

I also found further details and additional events around the debate on the Palmerston North Central Baptist website including the following presentations (taken from their site):

• Sunday 15th June - A Perfectly Reasonable Faith
  9am & 10.45am, Central Baptist Church (190 Church Street, Palmerston North)
• Sunday 15th June - Does Suffering Disprove the Existence of a Good and Powerful God?
  7.00pm - 8.30pm @ Christian Community Church (54 Pascal Street, Palmerston North). Admission Free
• Thursday 19th June - Is God a Delusion?
  7.00pm - 8.30pm Public Debate with Bill Cook (Vice President of the NZ Association of Rationalists and Humanists) @ the Regent on broadway. Admission Free
• Friday 20th June - Creation or Co-incidence: the biggest question?
  12:10pm - 1.30pm Public Lecture at the Russell Room @ Wharerata, Massey University. Admission Free
• Friday 20th June - Who was Jesus of Nazareth?
  7.00pm An evening of conversation with Bill Craig on this critical question @ St. Albans Church (339 Albert St.) Admission Free

It'd be great to see a few more atheists there so I'm not the only one :) Let me know if you're going to any of these so we can catch up there (or before for a few bracing cold ones lol).

Brad Harrub Presentations - Part 1

Hi all

Apologies that it's a bit (i.e a LOT) delayed but here is my summary of Brad Harrub's presentations on young earth creationism given in Palmerston North on the 20th-23rd April 2008. Dwayne Bryant (unsure of spelling), a colleague of Harrub's, also presented over the four nights but his discussion mostly focused on painting atheists in a bad light and such arguments don't merit much response - even if he could demonstrate atheists were the worst people in the world, correlation does not equal causality and the nature of the person who states an opinion has no bearing on it's truth. As it happened he failed completely to demonstrate atheists are any worse (or better) than Christians so the point is irrelevant.

This post covers the first night. The others will follow hopefully fairly quickly.

Night 1: The Evidence for Evolution

Harrub opens with a clear indication of where the rest of this presentation is going by stating:

“If atheists are correct then man is merely a product of evolution. If their religion, if their belief system is true then the only reason that you and I are really here is by chance, by accident, by the right lucky combination of gene mutations. And that leaves us with only two options: Either man was created by god or man is the product of evolution and we imagined god.”

This is precisely the kind of statement that starts things on the wrong foot. Clearly Harrub sees god as being true unless science's view is true and he presents this false dichotomy in several different ways. In fact the entire argument over all four nights rests on the notion that if evolution is false then what he believes is true. This kind of thinking is obviously weak, and it is telling that there was no attempt by Harrub to offer positive evidence for this alternative view. Having said that the audience was mostly sympathetic so perhaps leaving that out was fair enough.

Anyway the bulk of the first night was dedicated to deconstructing the evidence for 28 million years of hominid evolution starting from Aegyptopithecus Zeuxis through to the more recent ancestors like Homo Habilus based on a hominid evolutionary path which he presented and discussed in detail. There were two basic points made through the night:

The first point was that there are not enough fossils to make the conclusions that have been made. Harrub made the point repeatedly that only teeth of some species or only fragments of others had been found. While it is true that we don't have billions of hominid fossils to draw on, one has to remember it only takes one to disprove evolution. As it happens all the fossils found pretty much square up with the predictions of evolution - and even if the details are hazy, they certainly don't show details that disprove it. Also in my opinion he tended to underestimate the ability of science to make inferences from fairly limited data. A lot can be learnt from a single tooth (and the context it was found) and much more from jaw bones and leg bones. It is over simplifying it saying "it was just a leg bone" and dismissing any inferences that followed.

The second point he makes, building on the first, is that in the evolutionary path, the first 3-4 species were clearly apes, the next 3-4 were clearly humans. Seemingly unwittingly he makes one of the strongest cases for evolution in an attempt to discredit it. His point is that the early fossils are all apes, and the latter ones are all humans, so no evolution occurred and there are no transitional fossil. He conveniently forgets to mention two key factors. Firstly evolution predicts that there should be a distinction between human-like and ape-like species over time (which will of course vary depending on how you define "ape-like"). If evolution is true then there shouldn't be any hominids that appear early in the record and that is exactly what we see, and exactly what he said. Secondly each of the species mentioned does show changing traits in a remarkably linear fashion, a transitional fashion one might say.

Harrub also makes an interesting point near the end of his first presentation which turns out to be a recurring theme.

"When you truly evaluate the scientific evidence you realise that the theory of evolution, folks, it can't explain how life came from non-life. It can't explain the origin of the original matter of the universe, it can't explain the design that we find in nature. But there is a theory that can and that would be the creation model."

And that is the crux of the nights discussion - the remarkably fallacious argument that if I can poke holes in the evolutionary theory, that my theory of creationism is true. This might have some credibility if either the dichotomy was real (it isn't) or if he succeeded in falsifying evolution (he didn't) but as it is, it was an argument devoid of a solid foundation of logic.

In the conclusions of the presentation we get offered this gem:

"At what point along that tree that we just looked at, did god finally look down and give man a soul? Because folks, each and every person in this room has one."

So to summarise, he spent the whole night talking about how evolution is not based on real evidence and then makes a categoric statement about something that has infinitely less (i.e. zero) evidence as if it was further proof he was right? I suspect the irony was lost on most of the audience :)

Part 2 coming...

Creationist Nonsense

Just a quick plug for Expelled Exposed website which exposes the nonsense behind this seemingly ridiculous movie:

In other news I'll be attending some presentations by a relatively obscure young earth creationist and bible literalist Brad Harrub next week. It promises to be amusing/painful, especially after listening to this discussion. Aside from a promising start it goes badly downhill to the usual young earth nonsense.

I'll post more about how the presentations go. I am particularly interested to see how kiwis respond to it.

Cheers
Ian

Defining God

A cornerstone of religious belief is the notion that god is real and while it is possible to believe without this (usually based on the notion that being religious is better than not - i.e. belief in belief) most religious people profess some genuine acceptance of the reality of the existence of their god. This raises a fundamental problem for believers however which I would like to raise.

What is god?

I am going to approach this from a Christian perspective but the same sorts of arguments work for any deity.

The bible is remarkably vague on what god actually is, but my impression from what I have read of the bible is that there are two distinctly different aspects of god represented by the bible.

The first is the "old man in the clouds" cliche and while this may not be explicitly stated in the bible (I am unsure if it is although churches make free with this notion in their imagery) it is certainly the impression one gets from reading Genesis, and any other part where people talk directly with god.

The details don't matter too much - what matters is that god is seen in this definition as a tangible, directly observable, can "come down to earth" kind of thing. He is essentially portrayed as a super powerful person. This definition is interesting right up until you ask for evidence that such a being exists and then the second form of god makes its appearance.

The second aspect is represented when Jesus says "I am truth". The notion that god is the driving force of life, that god is the good things, or all things, or truth, or life force, or any of these other intangible things. Such definitions are remarkably vague and do a good job of avoiding the need for evidence. Of course it doesn't answer the question of why one would worship such an intangible thing, or even come to realise it exists in the first place.

There are of course intermediate definitions as well.

However it frequently seems to me that god is defined in the most convenient manner for the purposes of the current discussion - a theist might say "he's a guy in the sky who responds to prayers" when praying and yet 5 minutes later might say "He is truth" in a different context.

I find this whole notion of what god actually is tremendously confusing, and I have yet to see any believers answer this question clearly or definitively. If any readers think I am wrong, please post a comment including their own precise definition :) Keep in mind a definition needs to be precise, and needs to define something in such a way that something else that is not god is not covered by the definition. In other words someone should be able to look at a Tuatara and, via the definition, say that is not god.

If god can't be defined properly surely it is lunacy to have faith in it? If I said "believe in Zeus, he is all things good" would you believe without asking what Zeus is? If I said Zeus can't be defined, wouldn't you be just a little suspicious? Why should god get any different treatment?

Cheers
Ian

Direct Evidence for God

Time for a new post methinks, and why not a big one :)

In the quest for a resolution of the age old theism versus atheism debate (in all its various guises) it is hard to escape the fact that absolutely zero positive evidence for the existence of any kind of god exists. There are numerous gaps in our knowledge within which god could possibly exist but absolutely nothing that positively points to actual existence of a god. This is a problem because it really makes religious discourse a matter of philosophy not of reality.

I'd like to work through the main types of evidence that exist and show what I mean.

1) Evidence of design

Even if it could be demonstrated that design was inherent in the universe, you are still no closer to having evidence that a particular god exists, only that something must have caused the design to take place. What reason do we have to suppose that it was Yahweh (for example) or even a god? We can go further and invoke Arthur C Clarke's third law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

This of course equally applies to the "magic" of a god. Maybe a highly advanced race of beings did the design etc etc.

It is also worth noting that there is no positive evidence that anything was designed by anything anyway - only an inability to precisely explain how it occurred naturally. The real problem is that a highly adapted creature through evolution would be, at a macro level, largely indistinguishable from a designed one. However we would expect some strange vestiges of prior evolutionary forms which should have no part in any designed creature, and that is exactly what we do find. In other words aside from no evidence of design, we also have, in a sense, evidence against it. This also applies to other seemingly scientific arguments such as the fine tuning argument.


2) Personal Revelation

This is curiously often the most powerful argument for the existence of god and often used as a trump card in debates. However there are several problems with this. Firstly personal observation is heavily tainted by expectation. It is telling that people of various religions rarely have experiences that would validate another religion. For example you don't see Hindu's having experiences of Jesus. Also the way the brain interprets sensory signals is to try and fit them into established models in the brain. Therefore if you have grown up in an environment where you are familiar with certain images or experiences, then you will naturally see these first.

Secondly it is very easy to trick the human mind into seeing something that isn't really there. Optical illusions are the easiest to see (although aural and touch illusions are also common). A classic example of an optical illusion is the well known "Jesus illusion". Try it if you haven't before, it is quite cool. Now try it again looking for this image of John Petrucci of Dream Theater (or even my avatar pic - there are probably millions of images that could be made to fit) and you'll see how meaningless an image of Jesus really is. It only means something if you attach meaning independent of what the actual evidence offers.

Thirdly there is a reason anecdotal evidence is mostly rejected by science - it is simply unreliable. We all know the "the fish was this big" syndrome, and that is just about fishing. Who wouldn't want to be the person who experienced god directly?

I am also reminded of the point Christopher Hitchens makes in the Four Horsemen discussion (available on Google video):

You had a marvelous quotation from Francis Collins, the genome pioneer, who said, while mountaineering one day, he was so overcome by the landscape, and then went down on his knees and accepted Jesus Christ. A complete non sequitur.

Given all of this, personal experience cannot be considered positive evidence for the existence of god - it is only evidence that someone experienced something that they interpreted in such a way to suggest something.

3) The bible is historically accurate

If we assume that the non-supernatural stuff in the bible is historically correct (i.e. those kings existed, those places existed, those people existed, those wars happened, etc) we shouldn't be too surprised. The bible was written at a time when those things were recent history and they should be close to correct, god or no god. It certainly doesn't tell us anything about whether a god penned it or not because accuracy would be expected either way. Of course any inaccuracies (and there are likely to be several given inconsistencies throughout the bible) are a bigger problem for advocates of the god point but again expected if men penned it.

It is certainly not positive evidence for the existence of god.

4) Biblical prophecy

Firstly if we were to assume that every prophecy in the bible was specific, dated, and directly fulfilled, we still do not have positive evidence of the existence of god. We only have evidence that someone was able to correctly predict the future somehow and wrote it down in the bible.

Unfortunately none of the prophecies were specific, dated or directly fulfilled so this point is moot. Given enough time and ingenuity it seems inevitable that most of the prophecies will be fulfilled in some manner, but they are all either vague or highly likely to come true. An example of the latter is one I took from http://100prophecies.org/page2.htm:

Ezekiel 36:11
I will increase the number of men and animals upon you, and they will be fruitful and become numerous. I will settle people on you as in the past and will make you prosper more than before. Then you will know that I am the Lord.

Given how settlements and civilisations changed over the history of the middle east, this not happening in some way would be more of a surprise.

5) Miracles

Again even if we assume that miraculous things genuinely occur, miracles don't come with calling cards. Just like personal revelation, they are interpreted by each person to match their expectations. If a person is "miraculously" cured of cancer, we have no evidence of anything except that something unexpected and positive occurred. We cannot look at a miracle and assume a particular causal agent (god or otherwise) was involved so yet again we don't have positive evidence for the existence of anything.


6) Superiority of believers

It is often argued that Christians (or substitute any other favourite belief system) are somehow better people than non Christians. It is often claimed they are more moral, or harder working, or more altruistic. While fairly limited evidence exists for this (and it is arguable the opposite is in fact true, although in my view religion is largely irrelevant to morality) the problem is that this is not a reflection of the existence or otherwise of the god. Rather it is a reflection for whether or not the organised structures associated with the belief in that god are beneficial or not. Worshipers of a real god may well be rampantly immoral while worshipers of a non-existent god may be moral by any standard you might choose.

In other words this is not evidence for the existence of a particular god, it is just reflective of the people involved.

Conclusion

I don't think I have missed any of the major arguments for gods existence and this leaves us with a pretty obvious conclusion - there is no positive evidence for the existence of any god. Of course we haven't even looked at the major issue of defining a god in such a way that evidence could even have meaning. Without a meaningful definition, the whole issue of whether god exists or not is pretty much a non-issue. An undefined entity does not exist by definition :)

Does anyone who believes in god actually directly believe in the literal existence of a god? I suspect not, even if they may have convinced themselves that they do via the indirect evidences I discussed above and through continual positive reinforcement through their churches and so forth.

Finally, I would like to point out the faith card is simply inadmissible in this argument. Saying belief without direct evidence is a sufficient state for belief is really a warrant to believe in anything, and takes one no closer to a rebuttal of the notion "there is no direct evidence of the existence of god."

Cheers
Ian

Reading Level of my blog (LOL)

Curiosity kills the cat lol. I saw this just posted on Allan's blog here where his blog's reading level was rated "College, Undergrad" so out of curiosity I checked mine:

I didn't think I was that bad lol - hopefully it isn't chasing people away :)

Having said that, I will get to another substantive post soon; I have several half written posts I must finish!

Cheers
Ian