Reactions to Dennett, Dennett's reaction

A summary of blogosphere reactions to Dennett's Breaking the Spell

Among them Brian Leiter's:

At Leiter Reports, University of Texas philosophy professor Brian Leiter challenges Wieseltier's "sneering" dismissal of the idea that science can shed some light on all aspects of human life. "'The view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical' is not a 'superstition' but a reasonable methodological posture to adopt based on the actual evidence, that is, based on the actual expanding success of the sciences . . . during the last hundred years," writes Leiter.

You may want to read Dennett's response to Wieseltier's critique.

Dennett and Breaking the Spell

Daniel Dennett is interviewed by Point of Inquiry. He discusses his latest book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

The whole one yard

Mathematician John Allen Paulos offers us the following food for thought:

What's wrong with the following not quite impeccable logic? We know that 36 inches = 1 yard. Therefore, 9 inches = 1/4 of a yard. Since the square root of 9 is 3 and the square root of 1/4 = 1/2, we conclude that 3 inches = 1/2 yard!

Think about that before scrolling down. (By the way Paulos does not answer his own question, leaving it to the reader to figure this one out.)
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The problem of course lies in the formulation of the conversion equation itself. We can perform various operations on both sides of a mathematical equation and still preserve the equality (e.g. multiply/divide both sides by the same value, or take the square root of both sides), but we must have a legitimate equation in the first place.

"36 inches = 1 yard" is a true statement, for indeed 36 inches make a yard. But it is not a mathematical equation. In that statement "inches" and "yard" are not variables; they are units of length. In order to write a valid conversion equation for this particular problem we have to spell out the variables and what these variables stand for, and know which variable is to be multiplied by the constant--36.

If we let
i = number of inches
y = number of yards

then the correct conversion equation is

i = 36y

As you can see this is--at least visually/graphically--the "opposite" of the statement "36 inches = 1 yard."

Let's now see what happens when we perform the mathematical operations that Paulos suggested.

We divide both sides of the equation by 4:

i/4 = 36y/4

i/4 = 9y

Then we raise both sides of the equation to the power of 1/2, i.e., we take their square roots :

(i/4)^0.5 = (9y)^0.5

Now that looks like rocket science so let's simplify it and see what new species we end up with:

i^0.5/2 = 3y^0.5

i^0.5 = 6y^0.5

Finally, let's pull out those dang exponents by squaring both sides:

i = 36y

Hey, we're back to square one! As it should be.

Now plug in 36 for every instance of i and 1 for every occurrence of y into all of the equations above and you should see that both sides of every equation will have the same value, meaning of course the equations are correct.

One lesson from this is, unless we can translate the problem into its algebraic form correctly, we can perform as much valid math operations as we want to but we will, sooner or later, end up with trash.


---

John Allen Paulos. 1988. Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. New York: Vintage. p. 95.

What do coins and basketballs have in common?

Ever had a winning streak? Did your adrenaline start pumping when you first realized that you were on a roll? Were you excited and at the same time antsy that your luck might be changing any minute then?

Well depending on what we were playing or engaged in at that time, the beliefs and reasoning which we brought to bear upon in anticipation of what was to happen next given our winning (or losing) streak may not have been valid. To illustrate let's take the simple case of coin flips. As we know the probability of getting heads and tails is equally 50%. But suppose after some thirty tosses, we realize that the coin has landed tails five times in a row. Given that history what is the probability that we'll get tails on the next flip? Should we expect the streak to continue or for our luck to change?

Coin tosses are independent of one another, i.e., the result of the last toss has no bearing on whether the next one results in heads or tails. The outcome of the previous toss is totally unrelated (not correlated) to and does not affect the results of future tosses. Mathematically stated,

p(A | B) = p(A)

That's read as "the probability of getting A given B is equal to the probability of A." In the case of coin flips we can say that p(C_n+1 | C_n) = p(C_n+1), where C_n is the result of the nth coin toss and C_n+1 = result of the n+1th toss. Therefore, p(H | T) = p(H), meaning the probability of getting heads given that we got tails in the last toss is simply the probability of getting heads. And just as well p(T | H) = p(T), p(H | H) = p(H), p(T | T) = p (T). The conditional probability for independent events or variables boils down to the simple probability of the event we're interested in.

But what about p(H | TTTTT)? What is the probability of our luck changing given that we've had tails in the last five tosses? Well, it's still p(H), which of course is 50%. No matter how large a streak we may have thus far observed, the chances of getting heads or tails in the next toss is still and will always be 50%.

Again, this is because each flip is independent of any other flip. Coins don't have a memory. Coins don't try and even things out. Only humans want to dissuade their coins from having too long a streak--lest they become nonrandom--and only humans delude themselves into believing that their "luck" will continue or run out.

Given independent events A and B, believing p(A | B) to be something other than p(A) is known as the gambler's fallacy. Lest we non-gamblers heave a sigh of relief, it must be said that we aren't immune to this mistake nor should we believe that we're sinless. Those who are into basketball (no, I certainly am not!) may believe that players sometimes get the "hot hand"--that players have winning streaks, that once a player has scored it's more likely his next shot will make it too. But as with coin tosses getting the ball in the basket is independent of previous shots. And for those who will not take my word for it--and as critical thinkers you shouldn't--Gilovich et al. have studied this belief using data from the performance records of the Philadelphia 76ers. And what they found is that the streaks of hits and misses were no more likely to occur than in coin tosses. Players were no more likely to score given that they had scored previously than if they had missed their previous shot(s). And yet the players interviewed believed their chances of making a successful shot was more probable if their previous shot had been successful. The bottom line is, as with coin flips, p(S_n+1 | S_n) = p(S_n+1), where S = outcome of a shot.

Caveat: It doesn't mean that a player's chances for a successful shot is 50/50. Skill and other factors determine that. What the study shows is that the outcome of a shot is dependent only on skill and those other factors while being independent of the results of previous shots.


---

Thomas Gilovich. 1991. How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: Free Press.p. 11-15.

Complete audio of Parts 1 & 2 of Dawkins' Root of All Evil?

The audio of Richard Dawkins' two-part film Root of All Evil? which aired in the UK last month is available on the Net for download. These files are BitTorrented so you'll need to install a BitTorrent software.To start you off, visit Brian's BitTorrent FAQ and Guide. It not only introduces BitTorrenting, but also provides links to various BitTorrent software available out there. They're freeware. Just download one of your choice. I'm using Azureus. If you ever pick it you must separately download and install the Java JRE program which is on the same site.

Before you can actually get the Dawkins audio you first have to download the torrent files for them. The torrents are very small files. You then open them in your BitTorrent software which then starts downloading the two Root of All Evil? avi files. These are the actual audio files you'll be listening to using, most probably, Windows Media Player (if you're using a PC and Windows).

Here are the torrent files available at ChomskyTorrents.org:

Root of All Evil?: The God Delusion
Root of All Evil?: The Virus of Faith

Download the above files to your hard disk. Open them in your BitTorrent program to start the download process. The actual audio files are 349Mb and 348Mb respectively. Pretty huge. And if you're using a dial-up connection downloading will be pretty slow (understatement of the season). Depending on the number of BitTorrent seeds and peers available online download will take anywhere from 30 hours to forever. It took me some 40-50 hours for each file. Yeah, it's that bad. But hell it's worth it. Listening to Darwin's Rottweiler feistily critique supernaturalism is worth pretty much anything.


Excerpts from Part 1, The God Delusion

I believe there is a profound contradiction between science and religious belief. There is no well-demonstrated reason to believe in God. And I think the idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.

The 21st century should be an age of reason, yet irrational, militant faith is back on the march.

...

Science we are told should not tread on the toes of theology. But why should scientists tiptoe respectfully away? The time has come for people of reason to say enough is enough. Religious faith discourages independent thought. It's divisive, and it's dangerous.

...

At Lourdes in southern France the assault on the senses appeals to us not to think, not to doubt, not to probe. And if we can retain our faith against the evidence, in the teeth of reality, the more virtuous we are.

... If you have a delusion that you're Napoleon it must be a fairly lonely feeling because nobody else agrees with you. Your faith that you're Napoleon needs a lot of shoring up. But these people here [in Lourdes], thousands of people, all have exactly the same delusion. That must give wonderful reinforcement to their faith.

I used to think reason had won the war against superstition, but it's quite shaking to witness the faithful droves trooping through Lourdes. This is a benign herd but it supports a backward belief system that I believe reason must challenge.

...

[According to the resource person Dawkins interviews there has been a total of 66 declared miracles in Lourdes, that there are around 80,000 sick pilgrims who visit every year, and that pilgrims have been coming to Lourdes for over a century. Assume for a moment that there are 66 miracles per year. The miracle rate would then be: 66 / 80,000 = 0.0000825 or 0.00825% or less than one in a thousand. Certainly very depressing particularly when you look at it from the other side--that 1211 out of 1212 sick pilgrims will go home still sick and afflicted. But of course that's a total of 66 miracles over the last 150 years. The frequency of miracles at Lourdes is simply infinitesimal. Generosity it seems is not among the strong points of the god of the Catholics. And as Dawkins points out He isn't very giving at all when it comes to severed limbs. Perhaps He's given up sculpting with dirt.]

So the hard fact is that over the years with their millions of pilgrims there have been 66 supposed miracles. Statistically, it adds up to no evidence at all.

I can't help remarking that nobody has ever had a miraculous regrowing of a severed leg. The cures are always things that might have got better anyway.

People lean on their faith as a crutch, but I fear the comfort it provides is a shallow pretense.

...

People like to say that faith and science can live together side by side. But I don't think they can. They're deeply opposed. Science is a discipline of investigation and constructive doubt, questing with logic, evidence and reason to draw conclusions. Faith by stark contrast demands a positive suspension of critical faculties.

Science proceeds by setting up hypotheses, ideas or models, and then attempts to disprove them. So a scientist is constantly asking questions, being skeptical. Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

[Dawkins then illustrates this definition of his using the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary--the Catholic belief that Mary never died physically but got beamed up to heaven by Capt. Yahweh]

The belief that her body was lifted into heaven emerged about six centuries after Jesus' time, made up like any tale and spread by word of mouth. But it became established tradition. It was handed down over centuries. And the odd thing about tradition is that the longer it's been going the more people seem to take it seriously. It's as though sheer passage of time makes something that was to begin with just made up turns it into what people believe as a fact.

By 1950 the tradition was so strongly established that it became official truth. It became authority. The Vatican decreed that Roman Catholics must now believe in the doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin. Now, if you had asked Pope Pius XII how he knew it was truth he would've said you had to take his word for it because it had been revealed to him by God.

He [the pope] shut himself away and thought about it. He just thought private thoughts inside his own head and convinced himself, no doubt on tortuous theological grounds, that it just had to be so.

...

How do scientists know the things that they know about the world and the universe?... The answer is, Evidence! Tons and tons of mutually supporting evidence. Science is about testing, comparing, and corroborating this massive evidence and using it to update old theories of how things work.

I do remember one formative influence in my undergraduate life. There was an elderly professor in my department who had been passionately keen on a particular theory for, oh, a number of years. And one day an American visiting researcher came and he completely and utterly disproved [the professor's] hypothesis. The old man strode to the front, shook his hand and said, "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years." And we all clapped our hands raw. That was the scientific ideal of somebody who had a lot invested, a lifetime almost, invested in the theory. And he was rejoicing that he had been shown wrong and that scientific truth had been advanced.

...

Evolution driven by Darwin's motor of natural selection gets us to the top of Mount Improbable [getting from bacteria at the ground level to Homo sapiens at the summit]. From primeval simplicity to ultimate complexity. The design hypothesis couldn't even begin to do that because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: Who made the designer?

The abundance and variety of life on earth may seem improbable but it's self-evidently futile to invent an improbable god to explain that very improbability.

I thought that in my lifetime evolution would be accepted and taught around the world as a scientific fact supported by overwhelming evidence. But unfortunately the whole point about faith is that even massive and constantly accumulating physical evidence cuts no ice. Evolution today is under threat.

...

[The segment with evangelical pastor Ted Haggard is a must-hear. A very good reason to tarry not in flushing that odious crap called faith]

...

Evolution by natural selection is supported by mountains of evidence, while [biblical] creation contradicts the evidence and is only backed by some ancient scribblings.

...

Science can't disprove the existence of God. But that does not mean that God exists. There are a million things we can't disprove.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell had an analogy. Imagine there's a china teapot in orbit around the sun. You cannot disprove the existence of the teapot because it's too small to be spotted by our telescopes. Nobody but a lunatic would say, Well I'm prepared to believe in the teapot because I can't disprove it. Maybe we have to be technically and strictly agnostic but in practice we are all teapot atheists.

But now suppose that everybody in the society--the teachers, the tribal elders--all have faith in the teapot. Stories of the teapot have been handed down for generations; it's part of the tradition of the society; there are holy books about the teapot. Then, somebody who said they did not believe in the teapot might be regarded as eccentric or even mad.

There's an infinite number of things like celestial teapots that we can't disprove. There are fairies, there are unicorns, hobgoblins. We can't disprove any of those. But we don't believe in them, anymore than nowadays we believe in Thor, Amun Ra, or Aphrodite. We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Excerpts from Part 2, The Virus of Faith

Science weighs up evidence and advances; religion is hidebound belief for belief's sake. It's bad for our children and it's bad for you.

...

Let me explain why when it comes to children I think of religion as a dangerous virus. It's a virus which is transmitted partly through teachers and clergy but also down the generations from parent to child to grandchild. Children are especially vulnerable to infection by the virus of religion.

A child is genetically preprogrammed to accumulate knowledge from figures of authority. The child brain, for very good Darwinian reasons, has to be set up in such a way that it believes what it's told by its elders because there just isn't time for the child to experiment with warnings like "Don't go too near the cliff edge" or "Don't swim in the river; there are crocodiles." Any child who applied a scientific, skeptical questioning attitude to that would be dead.

No wonder the Jesuits said, "Give me a child for his first seven years and I'll give you the man."

The child brain will automatically believe what it's told even if what it's told is nonsense. And then when the child grows up it will tend to pass on that same nonsense to its children. And so religion goes on from generation to generation.

For many people part of growing up is killing off the virus of faith with a good strong dose of rational thinking. But if an individual doesn't succeed in shaking it off his mind is stuck in a permanent state of infancy, and there is a real danger that he will infect the next generation.

...

[Vis-a-vis the belief that the crucifixion of Jesus was a blood sacrifice, the price for the forgiveness of humanity's sins both past and future, Dawkins says:] If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them? Who's God trying to impress? Presumably himself since he's judge and jury, as well as execution victim.

To cap it all, according to scientific views of prehistory Adam, the supposed perpetrator of the original sin, never existed in the first place. An awkward fact which undermines the premiss of Paul's whole tortuously nasty theory.

Oh but of course the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic, wasn't it? Symbolic?! So Jesus had himself tortured and executed for a symbolic sin by a nonexistent individual? Nobody not brought up in the faith could reach any verdict other than barking mad."

...

I suspect that religion is simply a parasite on a much older moral sense.... Morality stems not from some fictional deity and its texts but from altruistic genes that have been naturally selected in our evolutionary past.

...

By disclaiming the idea of a next life we can take more excitement in this one. The here and now is not something to be endured before eternal bliss or damnation. The here and now is all we have--an inspiration to make the most of it. So atheism is life-affirming in a way religion can never be.

...Religion can provide only facile, ultimately unsatisfying answers. Science, in constantly seeking real explanations, reveals the true majesty of our world in all its complexity.

Stat has always been my Achilles heel

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 9/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

(via Pharyngula)

Battle stations! Battle stations!

Whoa! Guess it's no longer just Nigerian prelates. Some in the Vatican have had it too:

"Enough now with this turning the other cheek! It's our duty to protect ourselves," Monsignor Velasio De Paolis, secretary of the Vatican's supreme court, thundered in the daily La Stampa.

And keep in mind Iran is denying the Holocaust and encouraging its lampooning and that of Jews. Anyone care to bet that ethics/morality comes from the deity of these three "great" monotheisms?

(I remember someone saying something like, I come not to bring peace but a sword. Drats! Can't recall who said it. Surely must've been a god-cursing evil atheist. )


(news via God is for Suckers!)

As with techology imagination cuts both ways

If we knew for certain that there is an afterlife, we wouldn’t have great debates about it, and philosophers wouldn’t have spilled all that ink over the millennia wrangling over it. Since we don’t know, it makes more sense to assume there is no God and no afterlife, and act accordingly. That is, act as if what we do matters now. That way, we’ll think about the consequences of what we are doing.

--Michael Shermer
(filling in for Randi on this week's Swift as The Amazing Bearded One continues to recuperate)

Hate to do this, but the existence of an afterlife and existence of The Invisible Incompetent Designer can be mutually exclusive. If in fact there is no afterlife then we are not warranted in concluding that there are no deities. And if in fact there are supernat heroes and supernat villains then we can't declare that one day we'll open our eyes(ockets) and find our bones and fossils touching base with them in some vanilla sky. Neither is contingent on the other.

In fairness to Shermer, Christian theology makes the two inseparable--it is the will of their schizophrenic deity that people clamber out their graves and get sorted into those who will take to the skies and those bound to toil in the underground mines. If there is no afterlife then the Christian deity does not exist (unless theologians and other suck-ups are willing to declare they were wrong about that premiss of theirs).

Needless to say, the delusional will always believe in things fantastical, irrational and for which there is no evidence. Those among them who believe the hereafter is going to land them six dozen virgins or get them cheek to cheek with their Almighty or get them hooked up with their dearly departed should tarry no longer and book a flight asap by jumping off the nearest cliff.

Fulfillment

Professor of New Testament Gerd Luedemann writes of the "intolerant gospel":

While "peace" is a central theme in Holy Scripture, the aggressive side of Christian faith is all but certainly responsible for the many bloody wars started in and from Christian Europe. A key issue, of course, is how that peace is to be achieved. Here, the New Testament message is as crystal-clear as it is-at least by modern standards-indefensible: Jesus Christ himself will return to carry out God's will and by force, empowered by the authority of his resurrection, will establish his father's kingdom of peace on earth. On the basis of this promise, believers in Jesus Christ have at all times claimed access to that power and used it with a good conscience against those they perceive to be enemies of the Gospel.

The prophecy is even now being fulfilled. The Son is here and is carrying out His Father's will and by force in Iraq.

Brew it

From the Consumer Health Digest.

The Washington Department of Health has ordered Barbara Brewitt and her company Biomed Comm, Inc. to stop manufacturing drug products without a license. The Temporary Order to Cease and Desist also directs her to stop representing herself as a medical doctor. The order states that (a) Biomed manufactures and markets homeopathic products for conditions including Alzheimer’s disease, autism, cancer, menopausal symptoms, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and HIV/AIDS; (b) Brewitt allegedly represented herself as a medical doctor to a Seattle-based pharmacy in order to obtain a drug used in the manufacturing process; and (c) Brewitt holds a Ph.D. in biological structure but possesses no medical degree. The health department plans to notify firms that bought products for retail sale that the products are unapproved....

Some of Biomed's claims violate the FDA Compliance Policy Guideline that restricts the labeling of nonprescription homeopathic drugs to self-limiting conditions readily diagnosable by consumers. The Department of Health's investigation was triggered by a complaint from a former employee who stated that many of the products were mixed by Brewitt herself in her own kitchen as she chanted over a crystal bowl.

Expecto presto cura!

For those untrained in the arts of Hogwarts sorcery, that mind you is the spell for the placebo effect.

Chekov: Phaser banks energized, Kiptain

Christians are about to run out of cheeks to turn:

Nigeria's main Christian body has said it may no longer be able to contain Christians from retaliating after Muslim rioters killed dozens of Christians and torched churches.... "May we at this stage remind our Muslim brothers that they do not have the monopoly of violence in this nation," Anglican Archbishop Peter Akinola said in a statement.... Sectarian fighting is often stoked by politicians seeking to bolster their own power bases, while violence in one part of the country often sparks reprisal killings elsewhere.

McCoy: [on the bridge of the Enterprise, standing in front of the viewscreen] This is barbaric! Jim, how can you just sit there and watch this? Order an away team to stop the carnage!

Kirk: Bones, you know I can't do that. My career's on the line here. I can't meddle in the evolution of another pathetic jurassic species yet again. I'm with you on this. Damn the Prime Directive! But they're going to fry my ass if I do another John Wayne (or was that Dirty Harry?). [Swivels his chair] Lieutenant Uhura, could you check that ancient idiom?

Uhura: Right away, Captain.

Spock: [peering down his scope at his station] Gentlemen, if I may. Bioscans and tricorder readings indicate that the genetic predisposition of this lifeform is, at its cranial core, fundamentally reptilian in nature. Intriguingly, coupled with its cortex its aggression has over its evolutionary been facilitated by its tool-making capacity. Higher functions and abilities notwithstanding, these have in fact been co-opted by the brain stem to serve its reflexive response to environmental stimuli. Given the data my calculations indicate that there is a mere 0.01437 probability that natural selection forces, anytime within the next 500,000 years, will result in an attenuation of its encoded propensity toward violence and mutual annihilation. [Straightens up and faces Kirk] Captain, all data we have on this species point to only one conclusion: this lifeform will, ironically in its bid to survive, eventually destroy itself. For yet unknown reasons the blind forces of nature seem to have created a most efficient killing machine that culminates in self-extinction. (Fascinating.) Captain, intervening in this one instance will have no effect on the aggressive tendencies of this species or its, as you would say, destiny. May I suggest moving on to the next world?

Kirk: [sneers] Thank you, Mr. Spock, for that most dispassionate and irrefutable analysis. (Sometimes I wish your human side wouldn't be so repressed.) Bones, take a seat. Mr. Sulu, all ahead Warp Factor 1.

Sulu: Aye, aye, Captain. Ahead Warp Factor One.

McCoy: [walks up to the Science Officer] You're disgusting, Spock. You haven't got an ethical bone cell in your Vulcan anatomy.

Spock: [sotto voce] On the contrary, Doctor. It will please you that I've surreptitiously readied the transporter room to beam a party of one down to the planet, complete with medical supplies and photon torpedoes.... We'll pick your fossil up on our way back.

Christianity embraces Islam

And the hubbub.

Finally, something straight from the shoulder

The threat of terrorism has a way of making you think twice:

Among those who decline to show the caricatures, only one, the Boston Phoenix, has been forthright enough to admit that its editors made the decision "out of fear of retaliation from the international brotherhood of radical and bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do. This is, frankly, our primary reason for not publishing any of the images in question. Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and as deeply as we believe in the principles of free speech and a free press, we could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy."

Please pray for your enemies

In two large studies it was discovered that

There was a significant association between being prayed for and being re-admitted as a result of things going badly. People who were prayed for were one and a half times more likely to be re-admitted to CCU [coronary care unit] as those who weren't.

Had He been guillotined or hanged or burned at the stake or quartered or ...

But the Italians, I mean Romans, had their own ingenious way of snuffing you out. So why not flaunt it and adorn your schools with the contraption, with a test subject hanging on it to boot?

Crosses will continue to litter Italy.

Italy's highest administrative court ruled on Wednesday that crucifixes should remain in the country's classrooms as a symbol of key Italian values .

In what could turn into a landmark decision, the 'Council of State' threw out a case brought by a Finnish woman who had asked for the removal of crucifixes in the Padua school attended by her children .

The rationale for keeping them up there:

The judges issued a 19-page statement explaining that, as well as being a religious symbol, it was also a symbol of "the values which underlie and inspire our constitution, our way of living together peacefully". They said principles such as tolerance, respect and the rights of individuals, which were now pillars of Italy's secular state, had their origins in Christianity. "In this sense the crucifix can have a highly educational symbolic function, regardless of the religion of the pupils," they added .

What bullshit!

I just love this

The NCSE 700 Club.

Hits the spot after a rather vexing evening.

A major study that might have little value

Results of a long-term study involving around 49,000 post-menopausal women shows "no statistically significant difference ... in the rates of breast cancer, colorectal cancer or cardiovascular disease between women on a reduced fat diet – eating five portions of fruit and vegetables and six portions of grains each day – compared with those who made no dietary changes." Massimo Pigliucci gives us important food for thought about this study. So does Steven Novella.

On afterlife and heaven

An amateur evangelist preaching to the gallery confidently pontificated that whether we believe it or not after our tour of duty on this planet is up we will end up in only two places--in some blissful never-never land with His Royal Heinies (and an endless queue of virgins perhaps?) or some nasty dungeon which He never visits (thank goodness!).

Unfortunately, believing or not believing in the claim that death does not result in death and that heaven and and hell (whatever they are) exist has no bearing on their facticity. One must first substantiate the premiss and provide evidence that they are indeed factually true, with the onus of proof squarely on the party making the (fantastical) claim. Only after substantiation has been presented can others make a rational decision as to how much one ought to believe in this premiss. On the other hand, in the absence of good justification arguments, inferences, conclusions that derive from the premiss remain speculative at best. Therefore, an inquiry into the robustness of the premiss is necessary and would demand answers to such questions as:

What evidence (not mere unsupported claims) is there--from various disciplines--that an afterlife exists? Here of course we are speaking of an afterlife that preserves the idiosyncracies of the individual, i.e., the specific and particular subjectivity remains unaltered (unless of course we are talking of certain Eastern concepts of afterlife wherein the self melds and merges with the collective Self--as raindrops fuse with the sea). Is there a convergence of evidence from these various fields which strengthens the plausibility and probability of the afterlife hypothesis? Or is it that we find a dearth of support and/or even confuting evidence?

What does afterlife consist of? Specifically, what is the process by which a corpse, or some portion thereof, becomes resuscitated or eludes nonbeing? Are there examples of human "souls" which we can scrutinize and which will then confirm the reality of life after death? What investigative, including perhaps medical, methods do we use in analyzing such disembodied "living dead"? What does afterlife mean in the context of current physiological understanding of life? Consciousness/sentience as neurologists tell us is an epiphenomenon of the nervous system, of a brain of a certain degree complexity and integrity, such that genetic and congenital abnormalities, trauma, organic disease, protracted hypoxia, etc. will cause consciousness, including self-awareness, perception, intellect, and the higher functions to become highly degraded if not completely terminated. How then can sentience/consciouness or an intelligent life of some sort exist without the agency of a brain and associated physiological organs, operations, and processes? Unless one can provide plausible and testable means by which one can explain their survival, there is no reason to suspect that disembodied consciousness can exist. On the other hand, should afterlife be defined as a literal resuscitation of (long dead) corpses, then one must show the means by which chemical decomposition (and even petrification/fossilization) can be reversed, a reversal that concludes in the restoration of the various idiosyncracies of the organism before its demise, including the restoration of its memory. Are there known physical and chemical processes by which decomposed, scavenged, disintegrated, or fossilized corpses can become faithfully reconstituted? Positing an ad hoc explanation via an appeal to theogenic magic will not do. One still must be able to explain how the magic works, else one has not in fact offered an explanation.

And moving on, specifically, what is heaven? What empirical evidence--again from various fields--is there to support the hypothesis? Is the evidence strongly suggestive of its existence, or is it the fact that there is as yet a conspicuous paucity of substantation? Is the claim for heaven based on intersubjectively verifiable observations and tests and known processes, or is it merely based on a collective hankering and belief for utopia? Is it a claim that logically and rationally proceeds from our fund of dependable knowledge of the empirical world and existing evidence at hand, or is it an a priori concept that continually begs for empirical support? Is it merely a non-illogical possibility, or is there is a plethora of evidence that compels us to assign it a probability rating much greater than infinitesimal?


Needless to say, all evidence points to one thing--when we finally check out, that's it, we're gone. Thus, to claim the opposite--that life ends not--is wishful thinking. Dewy-eyed Christians just have to face death and accept The End.

Curse of Ham

Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis asks a very revealing question:

"Boys and girls," Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, "you put your hand up and you say, 'Excuse me, were you there?' Can you remember that?"

"Sometimes people will answer, 'No, but you weren't there either,' " Ham told them. "Then you say, 'No, I wasn't, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.' " He waved his Bible in the air.

"Who's the only one who's always been there?" Ham asked.

"God!" the boys and girls shouted.

Children, children! Don't stop now. Keep going. So, were the biblical writers there to witness whatever it is the Holy Honcho did? Did you see His Invisibleness dictate it all to his scriptwriters? Did you see Him write this all down in that book Ken is drooling over? Keep asking, boys and girls.

When pastors dismiss the creation account as a fable, he says, they give their flock license to disregard the Bible's moral teachings as well. He shows his audiences a graphic that places the theory of evolution at the root of all social ills: abortion, divorce, racism, gay marriage, store clerks who say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."

What's all the fuss, Ken? Your deity beat Darwin and all of us damned evil nonbelievers to murder, infanticide, anthropocide, war, slavery, ...

By the way, Ken, a belated Happy Darwin Day!

Detestable as his persona may be the Merovingian gets the laurel

In his talk "Naturalism: The Next Step for Humanists?" (Part 2) before the Freethought Association of Western Michigan, Center for Naturalism director Tom Clark mentions the character known as the Merovingian in the movie The Matrix: Reloaded and how he debates with the "good guys" about choice and causality.

Having been a Matrix fan (of the original flick, not at all the sequels!) I was really curious as to what the Merovingian (until now I had no idea how that was spelt) had to say about causality. Here's the pertinent portion (I initially cut out the juicier section but then figured it's an essential example and so pasted it back in).

Merovingian: You are here because you were sent here, you were told to come here and you obeyed. [Laughs] It is, of course, the way of all things. You see, there is only one constant, one universal, it is the only real truth: causality. Action. Reaction. Cause and effect.

Morpheus: Everything begins with choice.

Merovingian: No. Wrong. Choice is an illusion, created between those with power, and those without. Look there, at that woman. My God, just look at her. Affecting everyone around her, so obvious, so bourgeois, so boring. But wait... Watch - you see, I have sent her dessert, a very special dessert. I wrote it myself. It starts so simply, each line of the program creating a new effect, just like poetry. First, a rush... heat... her heart flutters. You can see it, Neo, yes? She does not understand why - is it the wine? No. What is it then, what is the reason? And soon it does not matter, soon the why and the reason are gone, and all that matters is the feeling itself. This is the nature of the universe. We struggle against it, we fight to deny it, but it is of course pretense, it is a lie. Beneath our poised appearance, the truth is we are completely out of control. Causality. There is no escape from it, we are forever slaves to it. Our only hope, our only peace is to understand it, to understand the `why.'

It's funny (actually not so funny) that I don't remember at all the emphasis of the dialogue on causuality. This selective attention, or more to the point, inattention is for me quite telling. At the time I saw Reloaded this matter of choice (free will) vis-a-vis cause and effect was anything but central in my jumble of interest and so I was totally refractory to what in fact was rather important to the story. But reading the script now makes me nod (albeit cautiously) in agreement with the Merovingian. While "[causuality] is the only truth" is too audacious or exaggerated a claim I believe, underscoring causality as the engine of basically all phenomena in the universe shouldn't be a brow-raising claim. It should in fact be a truism. Even Christian philosophers I think would agree (with their First Cause argument and all).

Moreover, I think the Merovingian makes an excellent point when he says that our only hope is to understand it. Confusing what it is that actually brought about something leads to all sorts of bad consequences: Superstition and post hoc errors, locking up the wrong person, attribution of various forces in nature to anthropomorphized invisible beings, etc. Hence we need a way of finding out the "true causes" of things. In that regard what is science if not in fact largely an endeavor to reliably understand causes of various natural phenomena. What is skeptical inquiry but a search for (mundane) natural causes for what some claim to be apparently supernatural or paranormal phenomena. What is engineering (applied sciences including medicine) if not the use of knowledge of causal factors in molding the world around us, in controlling and making use of our understanding of the world to cause various things to happen including the maintenance of our health and prolongation of our lives.

Our society relies on the assumption that what we understand as reliable/correct causal explanations indeed hold true today, tomorrow, a century from now, whether in Asia or in the Western hemisphere or on the sandy shores far far away where Spirit and Opportunity are dune buggying about. We wouldn't want to wake up one day and discover that nuclear fusion doesn't result in the radiation of an awful amount of heat (unless perhaps unless we've already anthropogenically caused a thermal runaway no thanks to the greenhouse effect). Then again we might every now and then cherish the fantasy that causality would cease operating in some areas: "Breaking News: Germs no longer cause infections!" Of course such a welcome report may not be a pipe dream were medical science to come up with a way of causing our bodies to become immune and resistant to any and all pathogens. Science and pretty much everyday common sense is premissed on determinism (let's not get into quantum mechanics for now, not least because I'm physics-challenged). We tacitly engage the world with the assumption that there is order in the world, that causality is real, that things don't happen without cause, even if that cause is thought to be otherworldly (or never-neverworldly) in origin and nature.

As the Merovingian only knows too well to understand causal factors is to have power, for with such knowledge one can (at least in principle) control the universe. For better or for worse that is the opportunity that science provides us, now, today. On the other hand, supernaturalism, whose causal hypotheses cannot be tested and whose claimed supernatural laws and forces are by definition beyond our ken and reach, is simply devoid of much of anything. As with the Merovingian's test subject supernaturalists don't care about the why, only the feeling, the psychological benefits that now ensue from having such a fantastical worldview. It would be well for all of us for science to discover in the soonest possible time the causes of such delusory escapades and the apparent need of some to lose themselves in the highs such irrationality affords.

(Yep, I couldn't resist capping this entry with a stab at our nemesis)