All that glitters is probably poisonous

Stupid emails by stupid people

2009-03-04T08:50:00.000-08:00

This is a forwarded email that gets sent around to like-minded people so they can feel superior about being ignorant. Well, maybe that's a bit harsh, but whoever wrote it is a dishonest person and I can picture all the recipients nodding their heads, thinking "that is so true and obvious".

I hate that.

email forwarded by [anonymous]

GOD vs. Science

A science professor begins his school year with a lecture to the students, "Let me explain the problem science has with religion." The atheist professor of philosophy pauses before his class and then asks one of his new students to stand. "You're a Christian, aren't you, son?" "Yes sir," the student says.
"So you believe in God?"
"Absolutely."
"Is God good?"
"Sure! God's good."
"Is God all-powerful? Can God do anything?"
"Yes."
"Are you good or evil?"
"The Bible says I'm evil."
The professor grins knowingly. "Aha! The Bible!" He considers for a moment. "Here's one for you. Let's say there's a sick person over here and you can cure him. You can do it. Would you help him? Would you try?"
"Yes sir, I would."
"So you're good...!"
"I wouldn't say that."
"But why not say that? You'd help a sick and maimed person if you could. Most of us would if we could. But God doesn't."
The student does not answer, so the professor continues. "He doesn't, does he? My brother was a Christian who died of cancer, even though he prayed to Jesus to heal him. How is this Jesus good? Hmmm? Can you answer that one?"
The student remains silent.
"No, you can't, can you?" the professor says. He takes a sip of water from a glass on his desk to give the student time to relax. "Let's start again, young fella. Is God good?"
"Er...yes," the student says.
"Is Satan good?"
The student doesn't hesitate on this one. "No."
"Then where does Satan come from?"
The student falters. "From God"
"That's right.. God made Satan, didn't he? Tell me, son. Is there evil in this world?"
"Yes, sir."
"Evil's everywhere, isn't it? And God did make everything, correct?"
"Yes."
"So who created evil?" The professor continued, "If God created everything, then God created evil, since evil exists, and according to the principle that our works define who we are, then God is evil." Again, the student has no answer. "Is there sickness? Immorality? Hatred? Ugliness? All these terrible things, do they exist in this world?" The student squirms on his feet.
"Yes."
"So who created them?" The student does not answer again, so the professor repeats his question. "Who created them?" There is still no answer. Suddenly the lecturer breaks away to pace in front of the classroom. The class is mesmerized. "Tell me," he continues onto another student. "Do you believe in Jesus Christ, son?" The student's voice betrays him and cracks.
"Yes, professor, I do."
The old man stops pacing. "Science says you have five senses you use to identify and observe the world around you. Have you ever seen Jesus?"
"No sir. I've never seen Him."
"Then tell us if you've ever heard your Jesus?"
"No, sir, I have not."
"Have you ever felt your Jesus, tasted your Jesus or smelt your Jesus? Have you ever had any sensory perception of Jesus Christ, or God for that matter?"
"No, sir, I'm afraid I haven't."
"Yet you still believe in him?"
"Yes."
"According to the rules of empirical, testable, demonstrable protocol, science says your God doesn't exist. What do you say to that, son?"
"Nothing," the student replies. "I only have my faith."
"Yes, faith," the professor repeats. "And that is the problem science has with God. There is no evidence, only faith."

At the back of the room another student stands quietly for a moment before asking a question of His own. "Professor, is there such thing as heat?"
"Yes," the professor replies. "There's heat."
"And is there such a thing as cold?"
"Yes, son, there's cold too."
"No sir, there isn't."
The professor turns to face the student, obviously interested. The room suddenly becomes very quiet. The student begins to explain. "You can have lots of heat, even more heat, super-heat, mega-heat, unlimited heat, white heat, a little heat or no heat, but we don't have anything called 'cold'. We can hit up to 458 degrees below zero, which is no heat, but we can't go any further after that. There is no such thing as cold; otherwise we would be able to go colder than the lowest -458 degrees. Every body or object is susceptible to study when it has or transmits energy, and heat is what makes a body or matter have or transmit energy. Absolute zero (-458 F) is the total absence of heat. You see, sir, cold is only a word we use to describe the absence of heat. We cannot measure cold. Heat we can measure in thermal units because heat is energy. Cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it."
Silence across the room. A pen drops somewhere in the classroom, sounding like a hammer. "What about darkness, professor. Is there such a thing as darkness?"
"Yes," the professor replies without hesitation. "What is night if it isn't darkness?"
"You're wrong again, sir. Darkness is not something; it is the absence of something. You can have low light, normal light, bright light, flashing light, but if you have no light constantly you have nothing and it's called darkness, isn't it? That's the meaning we use to define the word. In reality, darkness isn't. If it were, you would be able to make darkness darker, wouldn't you?"
The professor begins to smile at the student in front of him. This will be a good semester. "So what point are you making, young man?"
"Yes, professor. My point is, your philosophical premise is flawed to start with, and so your conclusion must also be flawed."
The professor's face cannot hide his surprise this time. "Flawed? Can you explain how?"
"You are working on the premise of duality," the student explains. "You argue that there is life and then there's death; a good God and a bad God. You are viewing the concept of God as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, science can't even explain a thought. It uses electricity and magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully understood either one. To view death as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing. Death is not the opposite of life, just the absence of it. Now tell me, professor. Do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?"
"If you are referring to the natural evolutionary process, young man, yes, of course I do."
"Have you ever observed evolution with your own eyes, sir?" The professor begins to shake his head, still smiling, as he realizes where the argument is going. A very good semester, indeed. "Since no one has ever observed the process of evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor, are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you now not a scientist, but a preacher?"
The class is in uproar. The student remains silent until the commotion has subsided. "To continue the point you were making earlier to the other student, let me give you an example of what I mean." The student looks around the room. "Is there anyone in the class who has ever seen the professor's brain?" The class breaks out into laughter. "Is there anyone here who has ever heard the professor's brain, felt the professor's brain, touched or smelt the professor's brain? No one appears to have done so. So, according to the established rules of empirical, stable, demonstrable protocol, science says that you have no brain, with all due respect, sir. So if science says you have no brain, how can we trust your lectures, sir?"
Now the room is silent. The professor just stares at the student, his face unreadable. Finally, after what seems an eternity, the old man answers. "I guess you'll have to take them on faith." "Now, you accept that there is faith, and, in fact, faith exists with life," the student continues. "Now, sir, is there such a thing as evil?"
Now uncertain, the professor responds, "Of course, there is. We see it everyday. It is in the daily example of man's inhumanity to man. It is in the multitude of crime and violence everywhere in the world. These manifestations are nothing else but evil."
To this the student replied, "Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart. It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light."
The professor sat down.

Now that that's over, here's what I say to this crap.

The entire thing is a strawman argument (creating an opponent out of straw just to knock him down). The strawman 'professor' does not resemble or act like a real professor and the statements he makes are conveniently flawed so that the student can pick them apart.

1. Evolution does not teach that humans are descended from monkeys.

2. If evil is merely the absence of God, then either God is not omnipresent, which implies he is not omnipotent, or there is no such thing as evil.

3. We can see evolution happen in every reasonable way possible; what these kind of creationist strawman arguments ask for is a 3 million year old human who has watched life evolve first hand. It's an absurd expectation and utterly dismisses the vast amount of reasonable observations that are in fact, facts. We see evolution every day in bacterial and viral infections. HIV can be directly observed evolving and obeying all the principals of the Theory of Evolution. So can bacteria. More complex animals are more difficult to observe because they have longer life cycles, but that's what paleontology is for.

4. The section about 'science' saying the professor has no brain is insultingly lazy. An fMRI would easily verify to the student that the professor indeed has a brain in his head. Solipsist bullshit.

5. Christianity makes far too many specific claims about the nature of God for a wrong-headed analogy 'proving' the logic for the existence of a 'god' to mean it's the Christian God.
As I say, if God does exist, it is absolutely nothing like the God described in the Bible.

I love pharyngula!

2009-03-04T08:18:00.000-08:00

PZ Myers makes me happy. He posted a walk-through response to a creationist handout distributed outside a Richard Dawkins lecture. More on it here- Fleas Flock to Dawkins Lecture, but I had to share his responses because these are questions I used to ask people. I really wish back then I would have bumped into PZ, because he would probably have set me straight and saved me a lot of time and heartache serving a god that doesn't exist;

Is there an objective truth (and where did it come from)?

Yes, there is an objective truth that we discern by studying the natural world, and by constantly subjecting hypotheses about its nature to testing. That nature is not separate from its existence.

Does evolution obey the second law of thermodynamics?

Yes, and you've already descended into ignorant idiocy with your second question. There is nothing in evolution that violates the laws of physics or chemistry.

What are the statistical probabilities of life evolving from non-life, and the accidental evolution of a single strand of DNA

1.0. Life exists. What you're really trying to claim, in your clumsy and unschooled way, is that you think evolution argues that the extant complexity of the biosphere emerged in one abrupt accident. It did not, and if it did, it would be an exceedingly unlikely event. It would be creationism.

Why does the existence of God make Dawkins so angry, and how can a scientist say with absolute confidence that there is no god?

Dawkins is not angry at the existence of god, nor am I. We are a bit peeved at intrusive nitwits like yourself who try to impose your quaint superstitions on others.
By the way, you apparently have not read Dawkins' book (which is ironic in light of the next question), since he does not claim with absolute confidence that there is no god. I will go further, however, and claim with absolute confidence that you have no good evidence for any god.

[Assorted Jesus babble and bible quotes] Have you ever read the Bible?

Yes. It's an incoherent collection of delusional muck, cobbled together by generations of priests trying to promote the status of their tribe and their role within it. It contains brief sparks of literary brilliance, but mostly, it's garbage. And the whole Jesus story is illogical nonsense that no rational person should accept.

Made my day. . . .

(TGBC 6) Victims to the illusion of external agency

2008-10-24T13:08:00.000-07:00

No evidence of 'spiritual forces' exists outside of the personal human experience, and they are better explained as the evolutionary side-effect of primate 'mirror neurons' that create a sense of both empathy with other creatures and an illusion of outside agency (gods, fairies, demons and ghosts). Our ability to project our imaginations beyond our physical senses creates an experiential 'optical' illusion that, in the past and present, has been ascribed to the spiritual. Really, what we think of as our human mind and soul is an accident of survival. A very pleasant accident, I might add, but there is no deeper meaning reavealed by its existence. Should any fairy, demon, ghost or god care to say otherwise, I'm waiting. I'd love to see it. Been waiting my whole life. I bet a lot of people have.

(TGBC 5) Hm. Forgot about this for a minute.

2008-10-10T09:49:00.000-07:00

For good reason. I proposed to Carey Wednesday.

She said yes.

(TGBC 4) Fun with boxes

2008-10-06T14:37:00.000-07:00

Lessee here . . . how many blogs behind am I?

I'm going to leave off the religion commentary for a second to talk about a wonderful new addition to my little family.

A 42" plasma TV.

Which I will be setting up tonight- I'm so excited.

Carey and I were out in Franklin visiting Matt and Ashley and their newborn daughter Sophia. On the way back we stopped at the mall and then poked our heads into HH Gregg to do some window shopping. I strolled over to the model I've had my eye on and Carey, ever so sweetly, says "Hey, that big sign on the front door said no interest or payments till 2010. Wanna see if I qualify?"

Then there was $100 off that level TV, which was already reduced.

Lo and behold, guess who got approved? (hint: not me).

:)

Just doin' our parts to help pull the economy out this slump.

Many thanks to Dan who met us with his truck to drive it home.

(TGBC 3) Faithless cartoons

2008-10-03T16:32:00.000-07:00

I came across a website of cartoons that poke fun at religion and the Bush administration. Some of it's pretty funny. http://edkrebs.com

Reading through them I've been creating a mental list of things that I have significantly changed my position on as a direct result of giving up on literal bible Christianity.

Gay rights

Abortion (this is a revised position)

Separation of church and state

Foriegn policy (I used to be one of those Support Israel at all costs kinda church folk)

the ACLU (I've softened a little. not much)

C.S. Lewis quotes. That's a tough one.

Stem cell research

Cloning

mucking with genetics

Probably a bunch of other things, but these are what have come up.

(TGBC 2) The impossibility of the Christian God

2008-10-03T09:36:00.000-07:00

I didn't post yesterday because it was poker night at Wilhagan's. I guess I'll have to do penance and post twice somewhere in here. This will be brief because I have a nasty cough and I want to go take a nap. Shouldn't have gone to Wilhagan's yesterday . . .

Evangelical Christians, and Christians in general I assume, believe that God is compassionate, all intelligent, all powerful and primarily interested in having a personal relationship with every single one of us humans.

When people ask me if I believe in God, I say I'm an apathetic agnostic, which is I think technically weak atheism, and I'll explain that I keep waiting for God to talk to me and until such a time, I have no reason to think I should bother trying to please him or act as if he matters at all.

It pisses me off when I get the response of "maybe you just can't hear him".

If he's all that interested in being in a 'relationship' with me, and he's got all this intelligence and all these limitless resources, and all this compassion, don't ya think he'd be a little better at talking in a way I would hear? If I went to a friend and I was in distress and really wanted some help, or a listening ear, or some advice, and after my speil, all my friend replied with was a string of gibberish, and when I asked for clarification all I got was more gibberish, and then after that he says nothing no matter how much I ask for him to say something, and this was all I ever got out of him, he would no longer be my friend.

What kind of pathetic god can't figure out how to communicate clearly with his creation, and at what point am I supposed to believe he wants a personal relationship with me when he has yet to put together one coherent sentence on his own without someone else putting it in his mouth?

. . . looks like the great blog challenge is turning into a religious rant for me. This will be fun . . .

(TGBC 1) God and the goofiness of the human brain

2008-10-01T22:02:00.000-07:00

I've got god on the brain, and I'm not the only one. I went to my brother's last weekend to do some golfing and visit with my nieces and nephews. Around his house are several issues of creationist/intelligent design type magazines for children. A quiz page in one of them had questions like "You may be told that dinosaurs disappeared millions of years ago, but they really went extinct ______ years ago. (Answer: 4,000. see Genesis xx:xx)"

He and I traded a lot of information when I was in college regarding the evolution-creation debate. We were on the creation side, being good evangelical thinkers. During the years after college, he went on to become a real scientist. He's currently an associate professor at IUPUI. He's a professional immunologist. I went on to be a busboy, waiter, barista and starving artist for a while before becoming a scientific and grant writer for medical research. Different sides of the same fence.

Coming into science from such a strangled route meant that I had to spend a lot of time figuring out how the hell to do well enough in my job to keep my job. I've spent a lot of time reading a lot of science reports (what's called primary sources; i.e. the articles that are referenced by news reports such as on NPR today saying 'scientists have found a new blood sample that indicates HIV was circulating in the human population almost 100 years before it's identification in the 80s.'). I've also spent a lot of time talking about science with the researchers and scientists around me for whom I have to write. I recognize that my brother has had formal training, and I have had ad hoc training, but in working in the same environment and with the same material for the last six years, I am forced to consider how differently I see the world now than when I was trading creationist apologetics with him in the 90s.

The human brain does a lot of weird and interesting things that through the centuries have served the race pretty well from a survival standpoint. One of the most significant is its ability to create a continuous story from fragmented information. A study demonstrating this ability was done in people with a certain kind of brain operation that severs the left and right lobe of the brain. In these people, the two sides cannot communicate information, including images. The subject is put in front of a computer set up to show two different images to each of the eyes. One side of the brain, the one that processes narratives, might be shown a picture of a shovel, the other side a command like 'stand up'. In the experiment, the person promptly stands up. When the researcher asks why, the response is 'because I was thirsty and was going to get some water.' The side that has to create an explanation has no access to the visual command 'stand up', but does its job and comes up with a story anyway. The person completely believes that he stood up because he was thirsty, though that is not the truth.

I no longer believe the creationist story that I used to share with my brother. I'm a bit embarrassed that I ever did. The scientific method, in all its iterations, is based on the concept of 'show me'. As the method has developed over the millennia since the first skeptic asked for proof of something, civilization has uncovered just how inaccurate the brain can be in interpreting external, and even internal, information. Statistics is a great example, and is how casinos make their money. We perceive that we're on a hot streak in craps, but really all those winning rolls in a row are a normal sequence in a random series of possible outcomes. If you could find a purely random sequence of numbers, and you had lots and lots of them, millions of random numbers, somewhere in the list we should not be surprised to find 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 all in a row at some point. Random does not mean 'no perceivable pattern'. It means 'impossible to predict exactly what comes next'. Once the numbers have come out, they are there and brain starts looking for patterns. That has helped us survive as a race, but it has little relation to what's really going on.

Science is a way for us to double check what we would assume about given information. For a long time, humans assumed that if a rock and a pebble were dropped from the same height at the same time, the rock would land first because it is heavier. Then Galileo actually did it and discovered that we were wrong. They land at the same time.

In my learning of statistics first, and then a little corner of biology related to viruses, I have discovered that many of my assumptions about given information has no supporting basis other than a sort of armchair intuition. I have also become convinced that when it comes to interpreting cause and effect in the natural world, the truth is almost always more complicated than the assumption. Thus science has hypotheses that can be tested. That is the cornerstone of good science.

A hypothesis in science is not the same as a hypothesis after a few beers with a friend. After a few Guinness, what I'm doing is pulling together a narrative with my fallible brain designed to fill in gaps based on really incomplete information. Such as 'I am going to catch runner runner runner runner to my ace of hearts, because I haven't won a hand in 20 minutes and it's my turn. I'm all in.' A hypothesis in science is an assertive statement based on limited observations, like 'I hypothesize that pouring bleach into my flower pot will be followed by my petunias dying.' In science, a hypothesis always has at least one twin- the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis (null meaning roughly the empty or opposite) is what scientists always have in mind while performing an experiment. The hypothesis and null hypothesis are like balancing scales, and the results of an experiment will be placed in one or the other. The outcome of an experiment will either support the hypothesis (yes, my petunias died) or it is placed in the null hypothesis (they didn't die) or it is placed in a variation of a null hypothesis (they crawled out of the pot and ran screaming to the neighbor's yard). A lot of our medical advances have come from the third category, where what we expected didn't happen, and what we thought would be the opposite outcome didn't happen either. That means we don't know (yet) what is going on. In that case, statisticians say 'we fail to reject the null hypothesis', which means we might still be right but at the moment we don't know. If the petunias die, then they say 'we reject the null hypothesis', meaning in this case, we were right, but that may not always be the case. That's where science gets either really fun or really boring because the scientist must do the same thing again, and again, and again, and then in a little different way, then again, and again, and again, then in a differ. . . .

Which brings me back to where this started with my brother's creationist magazines. Like the word 'hypothesis' has a different meaning in a laboratory than in a coffee shop, the word 'theory' has a different meaning in science than in a bar. A scientific theory is a collection of hypotheses that have been supported over and over and over by the either exciting or boring repetition of asking 'show me' with experiments. The more the results get placed in the 'reject the null hypothesis' side of the scales, the more reliable the theory becomes. Very important to a strong theory is that many different experiments asked in different ways all point to the same conclusion. This, I now understand, is the state of the theory of evolution. Geology supports it, biology supports it, genetics support it, medical research itself supports it. All these different disciplines all point to the same conclusion; random mutations forced through very not random pressure to survive (i.e. mutating to breath air is really bad if you live on the ocean floor) gives rise to creatures that are significantly different than their ancestors.

Creationism and Intelligent Design do not have any hypotheses. They do not make any predictions (like 'my petunias will die') that can then be tested. They are based on armchair assumptions and those that teach them, like the writers of my brother's magazines, are satisfied to never consider the null hypothesis then ask "show me".

What distresses me is that my brother, a scientist and ignorant of my change of position, does not consider the full breadth of science when teaching his kids about the origin of humans or how all this life around us got here. I am distressed because he is teaching them to be the opposite of scientists; that they do not have to ask "show me" but should be content that Genesis xx:xx says that dinosaurs died in Noah's flood, and that was 4,000 years ago. I am really distressed because he is not the only one discouraging scientific thinking. Lots of people do, and they are probably going to vote for the McCain ticket since Sarah Palin wants Intelligent Design to be taught as an alternative 'theory' to evolution in science classes. If that were to happen, we can kiss science and all its potential advances (like medicine) goodbye. We will have a decrease in people that believe asking "show me" is the right question to ask.

I did not give up my faith in God because I started to believe the theory of evolution. I gave up my faith in God (as it was) because I started to understand how science has teased out what the story telling brain cannot about the physical world. After a while, too many results ended up in the null hypothesis to God for the scales to stay balanced. I gave up my faith in God because I started saying "show me", and he hasn't. That's between me and him, if he's out there somewhere. I can't say that God does not exist, but I am confident saying he doesn't exist in the way I thought he did. I am fairly certain that if he exists, his existence has no discernible impact on life. My current hypothesis is that God is the product of the story telling human brain. He fills the gaps of knowledge quite nicely and probably has no existence outside the human brain.

But the really big question is how am I going to come clean with my brother?