tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34148443458471566662024-02-08T08:31:09.693-06:00Celebration Of ReasonReason, Evidence and the Rule of Logic. A collection of interesting articles and posts.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.comBlogger104125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-63019178270406188362013-02-27T12:33:00.001-06:002013-02-27T12:33:46.268-06:00Why Bogus Therapies Often Seem to Work via Quackwatch.com<h2>
Why Bogus Therapies Often Seem to Work</h2>
<h3>
Barry L. Beyerstein, Ph.D.</h3>
Subtle
forces can lead intelligent people (both patients and therapists) to
think that a treatment has helped someone when it has not. This is true
for new treatments in scientific medicine, as well as for nostrums in
folk medicine, fringe practices in "alternative medicine," and the
ministrations of faith healers.<br />
Many dubious methods remain on the
market primarily because satisfied customers offer testimonials to
their worth. Essentially, these people say: "I tried it, and I got
better, so it must be effective." The electronic and print media
typically portray testimonials as valid evidence. But without proper
testing, it is difficult or impossible to determine whether this is so.<br />
There are at least seven reasons why people may erroneously conclude that an ineffective therapy works:<br />
<a href="http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/altbelief.html">Go To Article</a> Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-57628621176513941782012-08-03T12:43:00.000-05:002012-08-03T12:43:22.827-05:00<br />
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<a href="http://thunder.lyris.net/t/4503188/6741970/7091/8/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="See the hi-resolution version of this image on NASA's website.">Timeline of the Universe</a> — A representation of the evolution of the universe over 13.7 billion years. The far left depicts the earliest moment we can now probe, when a period of “inflation” produced a burst of exponential growth in the universe. (Size is depicted by the vertical extent of the grid in this graphic.) For the next several billion years, the expansion of the universe gradually slowed down as the matter in the universe pulled on itself via gravity. More recently, the expansion has begun to speed up again as the repulsive effects of dark energy have come to dominate the expansion of the universe. The afterglow light seen by WMAP was emitted about 380,000 years after inflation and has traversed the universe largely unimpeded since then. The conditions of earlier times are imprinted on this light; it also forms a backlight for later developments of the universe. (<a href="http://thunder.lyris.net/t/4503188/6741970/7091/9/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Credit: NASA / WMAP Science Team</a>)<br />
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<img alt="Timeline of the Universe (Credit: NASA / WMAP Science
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<h4>
Nothing is Negligible<br /><small>Why There is Something Rather than Nothing</small></h4>
by Michael Shermer<br />
Why is there something rather than nothing? The question is usually posed by Christian apologists as a rhetorical argument meant to pose as the drop-dead killer case for God that no scientist can possibly answer. Those days are over. Even though scientists are not in agreement on a final answer to the now non-rhetorical question, they are edging closer to providing logical and even potentially empirically testable hypotheses to account for the universe. Here are a dozen possible answers to the question<br />
<h5>
The Definitive Dozen</h5>
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<span style="display: block; float: left; font-size: 65px; line-height: 35px; margin: 0px 8px 0px 0px;">1</span><strong>GOD</strong>. The theist’s answer to the question is that God existed before the universe and subsequently brought it into existence out of nothing (<em>ex nihilo</em>) in a single creation moment as described in Genesis. But the very conception of a creator existing <em>before</em> the universe and <em>then</em> creating it implies a time sequence. In both the Judeo-Christian tradition (along with the Babylonian pre-Judeo-Christian cosmogony) and the scientific worldview, time began when the universe came into existence, either through divine creation or the Big Bang. God, therefore, would have to exist outside of space and time, which means that as natural beings delimited by living in a finite universe, we cannot possibly know anything about such a supernatural entity. The theist’s answer is an untestable hypothesis and thus amounts to nothing more than a god-of-the-gaps argument.</div>
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1616144432/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217153&creative=399349&creativeASIN=1616144432" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the
book from Amazon"><img alt="The Fallacy of Fune-Tuning (book cover)" height="284" src="http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/2011/images/11-06-15/Fallacy-of-Fine-Tuning-cover.jpg" title="Order the book from Amazon" width="197" /></a><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1616144432/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217153&creative=399349&creativeASIN=1616144432" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the
book from Amazon">Order the book from Amazon</a></div>
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<span style="display: block; float: left; font-size: 65px; line-height: 35px; margin: 0px 8px 0px 0px;">2</span><strong>WRONG QUESTION</strong>. Asking why there is something rather than nothing presumes “nothing” is the natural state of things out of which “something” needs an explanation. Maybe “something” is the natural state of things and “nothing” would be the mystery to be solved. As the physicist Victor Stenger notes in his book, <a href="http://thunder.lyris.net/t/4503188/6741970/7092/11/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book from Amazon"><em>The Fallacy of Fine Tuning</em></a>: “Current cosmology suggests that no laws of physics were violated in bringing the universe into existence. The laws of physics themselves are shown to correspond to what one would expect if the universe appeared from nothing. There is something rather than nothing because something is more stable.”</div>
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452296544/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0452296544" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book
from Amazon"><img alt="From Eternity to Here (book cover)" height="307" src="http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/2012/images/12-07-11/From-Eternity-to-Here-cover.jpg" title="Order the book from Amazon" width="200" /></a><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452296544/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0452296544" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book
from Amazon">Order the book from Amazon</a></div>
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<span style="display: block; float: left; font-size: 65px; line-height: 35px; margin: 0px 8px 0px 0px;">3</span><strong>GRAND UNIFIED THEORY</strong>. In order to answer the question, we need a comprehensive theory of physics that connects the subatomic world described by quantum mechanics to the cosmic world described by general relativity. As the Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll notes in his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452296544/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0452296544" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book
from Amazon"><em>From Eternity to Here</em></a>: “Possibly general relativity is not the correct theory of gravity, at least in the context of the extremely early universe. Most physicists suspect that a quantum theory of gravity, reconciling the framework of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s ideas about curved spacetime, will ultimately be required to make sense of what happens at the very earliest times. So if someone asks you what really happened at the moment of the purported Big Bang, the only honest answer would be: ‘I don’t know.’” That grand unified theory of everything will itself need an explanation, but it may be explicable by some other theory we have yet to comprehend out of our sheer ignorance at this moment in history.</div>
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<span style="display: block; float: left; font-size: 65px; line-height: 35px; margin: 0px 8px 0px 0px;">4</span><strong>BOOM-AND-BUST CYCLES</strong>. Sean Carroll also suggests that our universe may be just one in a series of boom-and-bust cycles of expansion and contractions of the universe, with our universe just one “episode” of the bubble’s eventual collapse and re-expansion in an eternal cycle, and therefore “there is no such thing as an initial state, because time is eternal. In this case, we are imagining that the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the entire universe, although it’s obviously an important event in the history of our local region.”</div>
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<span style="display: block; float: left; font-size: 65px; line-height: 35px; margin: 0px 8px 0px 0px;">5</span><strong>DARWINIAN MULTIVERSE</strong>. According to the cosmologist Lee Smolin, in his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195126645/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0195126645" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><em>The Life of the Cosmos</em></a>, our universe is just one of many bubble universes with varying sets of laws of nature. Those universes with laws of nature similar to ours will generate matter, which coalesces into stars, some of which collapse into black holes and a singularity, the same entity out of which our universe may have sprung. Thus, universes like ours give birth to baby universes with those same laws of nature, some of which develop intelligent life smart enough to discover this Darwinian process of cosmic evolution.</div>
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201328402/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0201328402" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book
from Amazon"><img alt="The Inflationary Universe (book cover)" height="312" src="http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/2012/images/12-07-11/Inflationary-Universe-cover.jpg" title="Order the book from Amazon" width="200" /></a><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201328402/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0201328402" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book
from Amazon">Order the book from Amazon</a></div>
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<span style="display: block; float: left; font-size: 65px; line-height: 35px; margin: 0px 8px 0px 0px;">6</span><strong>INFLATIONARY COSMOLOGY</strong>. In his 1997 book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201328402/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0201328402" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book
from Amazon"><em>The Inflationary Universe</em></a>, the cosmologist Alan Guth proposes that our universe sprang into existence from a bubble nucleation of spacetime. If this process of universe creation is natural, then there may be multiple bubble nucleations that give rise to many universes that expand but remain separate from one another without any causal contact between them.</div>
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<span style="display: block; float: left; font-size: 65px; line-height: 35px; margin: 0px 8px 0px 0px;">7</span><strong>MANY-WORLDS MULTIVERSE</strong>. According to the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are an infinite number of universes in which every possible outcome of every possible choice that has ever been available, or will be available, has happened in one of those universes. This<em>many-worlds multiverse</em> is grounded in the bizarre findings of the famous “double-slit” experiment, in which light is passed through two slits and forms an interference pattern of waves on a back surface (like throwing two stones in a pond and watching the concentric wave patterns interact, with crests and troughs adding and subtracting from one another). The spooky part comes when you send single photons of light one at a time through the two slits—they still form an interference wave pattern even though they are not interacting with other photons. How can this be? One answer is that the photons are interacting with photons in other universes! In this type of<em>multiverse</em> you could meet your doppelgänger, and depending on which universe you entered, your parallel self would be fairly similar or dissimilar to you, a theme that has become a staple of science fiction (see, for example, Michael Crichton’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679444815/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0679444815" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book
from Amazon"><em>Timeline</em></a>).</div>
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<span style="display: block; float: left; font-size: 65px; line-height: 35px; margin: 0px 8px 0px 0px;">8</span><strong>BRANE UNIVERSES</strong>. A multi-dimensional universe may come about when three-dimensional “branes” (a membrane-like structure on which our universe exists) moves through higher-dimensional space and collides with another brane, the result of which is the energized creation of another universe.</div>
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<span style="display: block; float: left; font-size: 65px; line-height: 35px; margin: 0px 8px 0px 0px;">9</span><strong>STRING UNIVERSES</strong>. A related multiverse is derived through string theory, which by at least one calculation allows for 10<sup>500</sup> possible worlds, all with different self-consistent laws and constants. That’s a 1 followed by 500 zeroes possible universes (12 zeroes is a trillion!). In his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1573920223/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1573920223" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book
from Amazon"><em>The Unconscious Quantum</em></a>, Victor Stenger published the results of a computer model that analyzes what just 100 different universes would be like under constants different from our own, ranging from five orders of magnitude above to five orders of magnitude below their values in our universe. Stenger found that long-lived stars of at least 1 billion years—necessary for the production of life-giving heavy elements—would emerge within a wide range of parameters in at least half of the universes in his model.</div>
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<a href="http://thunder.lyris.net/t/4503188/6741970/7093/12/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book from Amazon"><img alt="The Nature of Space and Time (book cover)" height="334" src="http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/2012/images/12-07-11/Nature-Space-Time-cover.jpg" title="Order the book
from Amazon" width="200" /></a><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691145709/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0691145709" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book
from Amazon">Order the book from Amazon</a></div>
<div style="margin-top: 14px;">
<span style="display: block; float: left; font-size: 65px; line-height: 35px; margin: 0px 8px 0px 0px;">10</span><strong>QUANTUM FOAM MULTIVERSE</strong>. In this model, universes are created out of nothing, but in the scientific version of <em>ex nihilo</em> the nothing of the vacuum of space actually contains the theoretical spacetime mishmash called <em>quantum foam</em>, which may fluctuate to create baby universes. In this configuration, any quantum object in any quantum state may generate a new universe, each one of which represents every possible state of every possible object. This is Stephen Hawking’s explanation for the fine-tuning problem that he himself famously presented in his 1996 book (co-authored with Roger Penrose) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691145709/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0691145709" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book
from Amazon"><em>The Nature of Space and Time</em></a>: “Quantum fluctuations lead to the spontaneous creation of tiny universes, out of nothing. Most of the universes collapse to nothing, but a few that reach a critical size, will expand in an inflationary manner, and will form galaxies and stars, and maybe beings like us.”</div>
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<a href="http://thunder.lyris.net/t/4503188/6741970/7094/17/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book from Amazon"><img alt="The Grand Design (book cover)" height="304" src="http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/2012/images/12-07-11/Grand-Design-cover.jpg" title="Order the book from Amazon" width="200" /></a><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/055338466X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=055338466X" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book
from Amazon">Order the book from Amazon</a></div>
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<span style="display: block; float: left; font-size: 65px; line-height: 35px; margin: 0px 8px 0px 0px;">11</span><strong>M-THEORY GRAND DESIGN</strong>. Stephen Hawking has continued working on this question, and this month, he and the Caltech mathematician Leonard Mlodinow present their answer in a book entitled<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/055338466X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=055338466X" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book
from Amazon"><em>The Grand Design</em></a>. They approach the problem from what they call “model-dependent realism,” based on the assumption that our brains form models of the world from sensory input, that we use the model most successful at explaining events, and that when more than one model makes accurate predictions “we are free to use whichever model is most convenient.” Employing this method, they write, “it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation.” The dual wave/particle models of light are an example of model-dependent realism, where each one agrees with certain observations but neither one is sufficient to explain all observations. To model the entire universe, Hawking and Mlodinow employ “M-Theory,” an extension of string theory that includes 11 dimensions and incorporates all five current string theory models. “M-theory is the most general supersymmetric theory of gravity,” Hawking and Mlodinow explain. “For these reasons M-theory is the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe. If it is finite—and this has yet to be proved—it will be a model of a universe that creates itself.” Although they admit that the theory has yet to be confirmed by observation, if it is, then no creator explanation is necessary because the universe creates itself. I call this <em>auto-ex-nihilo</em>.</div>
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of Skeptic magazine"><img alt="A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something
Rather than Nothing (book cover)" height="301" src="http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/2012/images/12-05-30/universe-from-nothing-cover.jpg" style="margin-bottom: 5px;" width="200" /></a><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/145162445X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=145162445X" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book
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<span style="display: block; float: left; font-size: 65px; line-height: 35px; margin: 0px 8px 0px 0px;">12</span><strong>NOTHING IS UNSTABLE, SOMETHING IS NATURAL</strong> In his 2012 book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/145162445X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=145162445X" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book
from Amazon"><em>A Universe From Nothing</em></a>, the cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss attempts to link quantum physics to Einstein’s gravitational theory of general relativity to explain the origin of something (including a universe) from nothing: “In quantum gravity, universes can, and indeed always will, spontaneously appear from nothing. Such universes need not be empty, but can have matter and [electromagnetic] radiation in them, as long as the total energy, including the negative energy associated with gravity [balancing the positive energy of matter], is zero.” And: “In order for the closed universes that might be created through such mechanisms to last for longer than infinitesimal times, something like inflation is necessary.” Observations have revealed that, in fact, the universe is flat (there is just enough matter to eventually halt its expansion), its energy is zero, and it underwent rapid inflation, or expansion, shortly after the Big Bang as described by inflationary cosmology. Thus, Krauss concludes, “quantum gravity not only appears to allow universes to be created from nothing—meaning…the absence of space and time—it may require them. ‘Nothing’—in this case no space, no time, no anything!—<em>is</em> unstable.”</div>
<h5>
Putting Something to the Test</h5>
Many of these dozen explanations are testable. The theory that new universes can emerge from collapsing black holes may be illuminated through additional knowledge about the properties of black holes. Other bubble universes might be detected in the subtle temperature variations of the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang of our own universe. NASA recently launched a spacecraft constructed to study this radiation. Another way to test these theories might be through the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) that is designed to detect exceptionally faint gravitational waves. If there are other universes, perhaps ripples in gravitational waves will signal their presence. Maybe gravity is such a relatively weak force (compared to electromagnetism and the nuclear forces) because some of it “leaks” out to other universes. Maybe.<br />
After a column I wrote in <em>Scientific American</em> on this topic (“<a href="http://thunder.lyris.net/t/4503188/6741970/6615/18/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Much Ado About Nothing</a>,” May, 2012), I received an email from the Columbia University theoretical physicist Peter Woit cautioning me not to put too much emphasis on any one of these hypotheses/answers to the question of why there is something rather than nothing, noting that even these proposed tests probably themselves lack validity, if they could ever be conducted in reality. He explained that his skepticism came not out of religious conviction: “I’m as much of an atheist as anyone, and I’m really disturbed to see arguments being made that are going to end up discrediting skepticism and atheism.” He then posted <a href="http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">a blog commentary</a> on my <em>Scientific American</em> column, noting that my “authority here is the Hawking/Mlodinow popular book, but he’s also convinced that WMAP and LIGO are somehow going to provide evidence for multiverses, something that even the most far-out theorists in this field aren’t claiming.” Regarding my comment that perhaps gravity “leaks” out to other universes Woit responds: “Nobody seems to have told Shermer that this is not an idea taken seriously by a significant number of theorists, or that LHC data has shot down the hopes of the one or two such theorists.” Woit was prescient in that the prominent Intelligent Design creationist William Dembski did highlight Woit’s skepticism at his blog <em>Uncommon Descent</em> (“Serving the Intelligent Design Community”), quoting Woit and commenting: “Don’t nobody tell Shermer. It’s more fun this way.”<br />
Given the fact that I appreciated Peter Woit’s skeptical book on string theory (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465092764/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0465092764" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book
from Amazon"><em>Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law</em></a>), I queried my sources. Physicist Victor Stenger responded: “The multiverse is not nonsense. It is based on good theory, but only theory. It is, in principle, detectable by measuring an anisotropy in the cosmic background radiation. That’s why I did not rely on it in <em>The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning</em>. I agree with Woit on M-theory, though.” Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow said he doubts that either he or Woit knows what “most physicists” think about the multiverse, and then opined that “most cosmologists certainly believe it,” recalling that Brian Greene “outlined the general thinking (as opposed to, say, Hawking’s particular views) very well in his book on it” (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307278123/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=skepticcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0307278123" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="Order the book
from Amazon"><em>The Hidden Reality</em></a>). Finally, Caltech physicist and cosmologist Sean Carroll noted: “You are completely correct, the multiverse is an idea that pops out of inflation (and string theory), not one that is put in out of desperation. Here is <a href="http://thunder.lyris.net/t/4503188/6741970/7095/19/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">a column of my own making</a> exactly this point. Carroll then cautioned: “Obviously the entire set of ideas is controversial and speculative, and should be presented as such, but it’s taken very seriously by a large number of extremely smart and respectable people.” For example: Leonard Susskind, Alex Vilenkin and Alan Guth (on the pro-multiverse side) and David Gross, Paul Steinhardt, and Edward Farhi (skeptical of the multiverse side).<br />
<h5>
God, Science, and the Great Unknown</h5>
In the meantime, while scientists sort out the science to answer the question <em>Why is there something instead of nothing?</em>, in addition to reviewing these dozen answers it is also okay to say “I don’t know” and keep searching. There is no need to turn to supernatural answers just to fulfill an emotional need for explanation. Like nature, the mind abhors a vacuum, but sometimes it is better to admit ignorance than feign certainty about which one knows not. If there is one lesson that the history of science has taught us it is that it is arrogant to think that we now know enough to know that we cannot know. Science is young. Let us have the courage to admit our ignorance and to keep searching for answers to these deepest questions.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-14521503406076849522012-06-27T06:19:00.001-05:002012-06-27T06:22:13.308-05:00Skepticism 101<h3 style="color: #335555; font-family: 'Droid Sans', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 18px 18px; text-align: center; text-transform: uppercase;">
WELCOME TO SKEPTICISM 101!
<small style="text-transform: none;">The Skeptical Studies Curriculum Resource Center</small></h3>
<div style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 20px;">
<span class="smallcaps" style="text-transform: uppercase;">THE SKEPTICAL STUDIES CURRICULUM RESOURCE CENTER</span> is a comprehensive, free repository of resources for teaching students how to think skeptically. This Center contains an ever-growing selection of books, reading lists, course syllabi, in-class exercises, PowerPoint presentations, student projects, papers, and videos that you may download and use in your own classes. Lessons in these resources include:</div>
<ul style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 20px;">
<li style="list-style-type: square;">what science is, how it differs from pseudoscience, and why it matters</li>
<li style="list-style-type: square;">the scientific method and how to use it to investigate and conduct skeptical analyses of extraordinary claims</li>
<li style="list-style-type: square;">how to construct effective arguments and rhetorical strategies</li>
<li style="list-style-type: square;">how to effectively use presentations and papers to present an argument</li>
<li style="list-style-type: square;">reason, logic, and skeptical analysis</li>
<li style="list-style-type: square;">the psychology of belief</li>
<li style="list-style-type: square;">how ideas are presented within academia</li>
<li style="list-style-type: square;">how peer review works</li>
<li style="list-style-type: square;">and much more…</li>
</ul>
<a href="http://www.skeptic.com/skepticism-101/">Skeptic » Skepticism 101 » Welcome to Skepticism 101! The Skeptical Studies Curriculum Resource Center</a>:Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-20230149576119649362012-05-15T13:37:00.000-05:002012-05-15T13:37:56.282-05:00How Critical Thinkers Lose Their Faith in God via Scientific American<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: georgia, times, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;">Why are some people more religious than others? Answers to this question often focus on the role of culture or upbringing. While these influences are important, new research suggests that whether we believe may also have to do with how much we rely on intuition versus analytical thinking. In 2011 Amitai Shenhav, David Rand and Joshua Greene of Harvard University published a</span><a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2011-21081-001/" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #19437c; font-family: georgia, times, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">paper</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: georgia, times, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;"> showing that people who have a tendency to rely on their intuition are more likely to believe in God. They also showed that encouraging people to think intuitively increased people’s belief in God. Building on these findings, in a recent </span><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6080/493" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #19437c; font-family: georgia, times, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">paper</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: georgia, times, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;"> published in</span><em style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: georgia, times, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Science</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: georgia, times, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;">, Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia found that encouraging people to think analytically reduced their tendency to believe in God. Together these findings suggest that belief may at least partly stem from our thinking styles.<br /><a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-critical-thinkers-lose-faith-god">Go To Article</a></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-14510567106442965642012-03-23T20:59:00.001-05:002012-03-23T21:01:43.788-05:00Tests of the supernatural fail again: new study can’t replicate findings of precognition<span class="entry-source-title-parent" style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">from <a class="entry-source-title" href="http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/http%3A%2F%2Fwhyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com%2Ffeed%2F" style="color: #1155cc; display: inline-block; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Why Evolution Is True</a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> </span><span class="entry-author-parent" style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">by <span class="entry-author-name">whyevolutionistrue</span></span><br />
<br />
<a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/03/18/tests-of-the-supernatural-fail-again-new-study-cant-replicate-findings-of-precognition/">Tests of the supernatural fail again: new study can’t replicate findings of precognition</a>: <br />
Who says that you can’t test the supernatural? Intercessory prayer, near-death experiences, and ESP—all have been tested (and refuted) using science; all are classical “supernatural” phenomena whose mechanisms, if they existed, would seem to defy the laws of physics (I’m not going to get into arguments about the definition of “supernatural” here). And now there’s a new <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0033423">paper in <em>PLoS ONE </em></a>by Ritchie et al. (free download at link, reference below) that refutes a recent paper presenting evidence for precognition: the idea that somehow one could have intimations in the present about stuff that hasn’t yet happened.<br />
The original paper, published in 2011 in the J<em>ournal of Personality and Social Psychology</em> by Daryl Bem of Cornell University (download the paper <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CDYQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdbem.ws%2FFeelingFuture.pdf&ei=385lT8-LOsO2twej18z9DQ&usg=AFQjCNE2WPWaSvfC_zwi8okfq4NkfykK3Q">here</a>, and see my post on it <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/scientific-evidence-for-psychic-powers/">here</a></span>), gave statistically significant evidence for precognition in several experiments. In brief, experimental subjects who were asked to memorize a list of words, and then type as many as they could remember onto a computer, did better at remembering those words to which they were subsequently exposed when presented with random selections of the initial word list and irrelevant “control” words. This implied that seeing the words later increased one’s ability to remember them in the past.<br />
The paper, appealing as it did to many people’s love of psychic stuff, got a lot of attention; it was, I believe, a subject on <a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/my-fractious-interview-with-skeptiko-2/">my radio interview with woo-meister Alex Tsakiris at Skeptiko</a>. (Alex loved it of course.)<br />
<a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/01/07/psychic-paper-provokes-backlash/">Bem’s experiment was criticised by other scientists</a>, and I think there are still some attempts to replicate it in the works; my own judgment was that the results couldn’t be replicated by others. That seems to be the lesson of the paper by Ritchie et al., who took Bem’s most significant experiment and replicated it <em>three times</em> in three different laboratories: The University of London, The University of Edinburgh, and the University of Hertfordshire.<br />
The results are simple: none of the three replications achieved anything near statistical significance. The respective probability values (the values that results as extreme as those seen could be due solely to chance) were 46%, 94%, and 61%; the overall probability was 83%. For “one-tailed” tests like these, results are considered significant only if the probability of attaining them by chance is 5% or less; and the replication results didn’t even come near that threshold. Conclusion: Bem’s results are severely in question.<br />
What happened in Bem’s study if his results really were wrong? Ritchie et al. have several theories:<br />
<ul>
<li>There were statistical and methodological “artifacts” outlined by several critics (see references 2, 3, 5, 6 and 7 in their paper)</li>
<li>Other variables, not recorded by Bem (subjects’ use of self-hypnosis or meditation, anxiety level, etc.) could have been responsible for the results. I don’t really understand this criticism because it seems that the “supernatural” character of precognition would be unaffected by those variables</li>
<li>the effect might be genuine but is hard to replicate. Ritchie et al. note that this is a common claim by psi advocates when results aren’t replicated. It’s like theologians who say, “God cannot be tested.”</li>
</ul>
The authors favor the hypothesis that Bem’s original result was due to “experimental artifacts.” They also note that there is at least one other published report of a failure to replicate Bem’s response: the paper by Robinson (2011) cited below. The <em>PLoS</em> paper ends with a cute conclusion:<br />
<blockquote>
At the end of his paper Bem urges psychologists to be more open towards the concept of psychic ability, noting how, in Alice in Wonderland, the White Queen famously stated, ‘Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast’. We advise them to take a more levelheaded approach to the topic, and not to venture too far down the rabbit hole just yet.</blockquote>
<strong></strong><a href="http://www.plosone.org/annotation/listThread.action?inReplyTo=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fannotation%2F02eae6d6-af7f-41d8-b2b3-b6d32fdce7a6&root=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fannotation%2F02eae6d6-af7f-41d8-b2b3-b6d32fdce7a6">Bem has published a response</a> to Ritchie et al.’s piece: it’s basically a non-response, calling for more work and floating the possibility that the negative attitudes of Ritchie et al. could have had an effect on their results (that, too, would be a paranomal result). As Bem said, “Ritchie, Wiseman, and French are well known as psi skeptics, whereas I and the investigators of the two successful replications are at least neutral with respect to the existence of psi.” That’s a pretty lame defense. Why would you re-test someone’s results if you <em>weren’t</em> a skeptic? On Thursday Ritchie et al. published<a href="http://www.plosone.org/annotation/listThread.action?inReplyTo=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fannotation%2Fcd8a1df4-e003-44aa-9d72-a7e1a6b26012&root=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fannotation%2Fcd8a1df4-e003-44aa-9d72-a7e1a6b26012"> a response to Bem’s critique.</a><br />
An interesting side note: Chris French, one of the authors of the Ritchie et al. paper, wrote a piece in the <em>Guardian</em>, “<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/15/precognition-studies-curse-failed-replications">Precognition study and the curse of the failed replications,</a>” giving his take on Bem’s study and describing their own difficulties in getting their failure of replication published. It was rejected by three journals, including the original journal—the <em>Journal of Personality and Social Psychology—</em>before it was finally accepted in <em>PLoS ONE</em>! The unwillingness of the original journal’s editor to even send Ritchie et al.’s paper out for review is reprehensible, particularly in light of the splash made by Bem’s paper. Extraordinary results deserve extraordinary scrutiny. As French notes:<br />
<blockquote>
This whole saga raises important questions. Although we are always being told that “replication is the cornerstone of science”, the truth is that the “top” journals are simply not interested in straight replications – especially failed replications. They only want to report findings that are new and positive.<br />
Most scientists are aware of this bias and will rarely bother with straight replications. But straight replication attempts are often exactly what is required, especially when dealing with controversial claims. For example, parapsychologists are typically happy to accept the findings of a new study if it replicates a previously reported paranormal effect. However, if it fails to do so, they are likely to blame any deviation from the original procedure, no matter how minor. It was for this reason that we chose to follow Bem’s procedure as closely as possible (apart from a minor methodological improvement).<br />
Given the high cost of paper publications and the high submission rejection rate of “top” journals, it might be argued that rejecting replication studies was defensible in the pre-internet era. But what would prevent such journals from adopting a policy of sending reports of replications, failed or otherwise, for full peer review and, if accepted, publishing the abstract of the paper in the journal and the full version online? Otherwise, publication bias looks set to remain a major problem in psychology and science in general.</blockquote>
Doubt and replication are the <em>sine qua non</em> of science, and journals must always send out failed attempts to replicate for peer review, and find a way to publish them if they’re sound. <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0033423"><br />
</a><br />
h/t: Diane G.<br />
__________<br />
Bem, D. J. 2011. <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CDYQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdbem.ws%2FFeelingFuture.pdf&ei=385lT8-LOsO2twej18z9DQ&usg=AFQjCNE2WPWaSvfC_zwi8okfq4NkfykK3Q">Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect</a>. J. Personality Social Psych. doi: 10.1037/a0021524:DOI: 10.1037/a0021524.<br />
Ritchie, S. J., R. Wiseman, and C. C. French. 2012. <a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/10.1371/journal.pone.0033423">Failing the future: three unsuccessful attempts to replicate Bem’s ‘Retroactive facilitation of recall’ effect. </a>PLOS ONE 7(3): e33423. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0033423<br />
Robinson E. 2011. Not feeling the future: A failed replication of retroactive facilitation of memory recall. J. Soc. Psychical Research 75:142-147.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img height="360" src="http://zerobs.net/media/two-hands-working1.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From zerobs.net</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-1863514866041177622012-03-22T22:02:00.000-05:002012-03-22T22:02:34.893-05:00You Don't Have Free Will<br /><br />March 18, 2012<br /><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Jerry-A-Coyne/131165/">You Don't Have Free Will</a><br /><br /><br />By Jerry A. Coyne<br /><br />The term "free will" has so many diverse connotations that I'm obliged to define it before I explain why we don't have it. I construe free will the way I think most people do: At the moment when you have to decide among alternatives, you have free will if you could have chosen otherwise. To put it more technically, if you could rerun the tape of your life up to the moment you make a choice, with every aspect of the universe configured identically, free will means that your choice could have been different.<br /><br />Although we can't really rerun that tape, this sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics. Your brain and body, the vehicles that make "choices," are composed of molecules, and the arrangement of those molecules is entirely determined by your genes and your environment. Your decisions result from molecular-based electrical impulses and chemical substances transmitted from one brain cell to another. These molecules must obey the laws of physics, so the outputs of our brain—our "choices"—are dictated by those laws. (It's possible, though improbable, that the indeterminacy of quantum physics may tweak behavior a bit, but such random effects can't be part of free will.) And deliberating about your choices in advance doesn't help matters, for that deliberation also reflects brain activity that must obey physical laws.<div>
<a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Jerry-A-Coyne/131165/">Go To Article</a></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-44231761531281908212012-02-08T10:53:00.000-06:002012-02-08T10:53:16.828-06:00Tricks of the Psychic Trade How psychics talk (and manipulate)<br /><br /><a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/speaking-in-tongues/201201/tricks-the-psychic-trade">By Karen Stollznow.</a><br /><br />Psychic mediums perform one-on-one sessions for sitters. Stage mediums typically offer personal readings, but they also perform short psychic readings to an audience. Unless the stage medium performs a hot reading, otherwise known as cheating, the main tool is cold reading. This involves observation, psychology and elicitation to provide the appearance of psychic powers. Let's look at the typical formula used by stage mediums, and explore some commonly used linguistic and psychological techniques. <br /><a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/speaking-in-tongues/201201/tricks-the-psychic-trade">Go To Article</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-52270078477251856622012-01-31T23:55:00.001-06:002012-01-31T23:56:37.680-06:00Why Atheists Are NOT Wasting Their Time<br />
<a href="http://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/2008/08/10/why-atheists-are-not-wasting-their-time/">By Thomas Keane</a> from
<a href="http://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/">doubtingthomas</a><br />
<br />
<br />
***NOTE: This article was originally published by the people at <a href="http://www.pathofreason.com/">www.PathofReason.com</a> and is reprinted here with their permission.<br />
<br />
One of the most common criticisms Atheists are confronted with is the question of why we waste so much time discussing religion, god worship, the bible, etc.? Why do we focus so much time on something we don’t believe in? Don’t we have anything better to do with our time? The reason why these questions are always so frustrating has less to do with how often we are confronted with them and more to do with how obvious the answers should be. When your child tells you they believe there is a monster in their closet or under their bed, do you ignore them or tell them the truth? If she told you that the reason she believed there was a monster under her bed was because she had read a story that told her about these monsters, wouldn’t you be curious to read this story in order to better understand how your child came to her erroneous conclusion? Now what if your daughter is 21 and has a 3 year old daughter of her own. Her boyfriend, the father of her child, is involved with a group that believes their founder (Avalon) is the second coming of Christ and is in direct communication with God. If you discovered that your daughter had also become a follower of Avalon and was teaching/raising your 3yo granddaughter to believe in the same things, would you be wasting your time if you decided to speak up and express your belief that Avalon was a fraud and even offer proof to support your opinion?<br />
<br />
What if your daughter refused to listen and instead ran away with her boyfriend, your granddaughter and Avalon to an isolated compound somewhere and you didn’t see them again for another fifteen years? What do you think the likelihood is, that once you are finally allowed to see your, now 18yo, granddaughter, that anything you say will convince her that what she has been raised to believe isn’t true? The odds are that your words would fall on deaf ears; however, that doesn’t make your efforts meaningless. Nor does it mean you should give up. The more you learn about this cult that swallowed up your daughter and granddaughter the greater your ability will be to address the issues you have with it. After all, even the strongest barrier of misinformation can’t withstand a constant barrage of truth.<br />
<br />
There is a reason why the majority of god worshipers are devoted to the same god that the people who raised them worshiped. It isn’t because their god is any more legitimate than any of the other 2,000+ gods mankind has invented over the years. It is simply because once myth has been established as fact in a child’s innocent, naïve mind, it is very difficult, even as an adult, for that person to shake that belief. Faith is not a synonym for fact, it is a synonym for hope and it is the definition of foolishness to devote one’s every life decision around thehope that a thing is true.<br />
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Once upon a time, people believed that the earth was the center of the universe and everything (including the sun) revolved around it. Once upon a time people believed that tossing a virgin into a volcano or carving out their still beating hearts was the only way to appease their god(s). Once upon a time people believed Zeus’ wrath resulted in thunder and lightning and Poseidon’s resulted in tidal waves. Once upon a time people believed that you could take ‘it’ with you and as a result they built elaborate tombs and filled them with treasures and even servants so that in the afterlife they would continue to enjoy the lifestyle to which they were accustomed. Once upon a time people believed in a great many things that we now know to be erroneous.<br />
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If we discovered that there were people in the world who still believed in established myth, would we be wasting our time to confront them with evidence that reveals the fallacy of their beliefs? And when a Christian or Mormon missionary travels deep into the Amazonian jungles to tell the native people there that the gods they worship are false and that they should instead believe in this or that god, aren’t they doing the same thing that an Atheist does when they contradict Christian beliefs? The only difference here seems to be that an Atheist supports his beliefs with evidence while a believer relies only on hope, AKA – faith.<br />
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What could possibly be more admirable than knowing the truth of something and, when encountering someone who only knows the lie, taking the time to share with them what you have learned. How could this ever be considered a waste of time? How many people ‘wasted their time’ trying to talk reason with a follower of Jim Jones (900 dead, 300 of whom were children). How many people ‘wasted their time’ pleading with family and/or friends who were members of the Heaven’s Gate cult? How many of the 80+ followers of David Koresh, 21 of whom were children, who died in the Waco, Texas catastrophe might have been spared if more people had ‘wasted their time’? If an Atheist had encountered a member of any of these groups you can bet that they would have spoken up. Are we to believe that a Christian would have tucked their bible away and bit their tongue?<br />
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It is in all of our best interests that we resist the tendency to dismiss the opinion of another simply because it differs from our own. If someone is willing to take the time to challenge something you believe in, the least you can do is take the time to listen and consider. Christians like to act all mystified as to why Atheists spend so much time discussing something they don’t believe in but the fact that they never protest when an Atheist wastes his or her time playing Guitar Hero or watching an American Idol marathon reveals that what they are really expressing is anxiety, not confusion. No one likes to be confronted with the prospect that what they accept as truth could possibly be a lie. But such a revelation can only benefit us, individually and as a society.<br />
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If anything it is the religious who are wasting their time. Just consider how much further along we would be as a society, not to mention as a species, if it weren’t for religion. The endless struggle for religious supremacy has led to innumerable wars and countless lost lives. Consider the incomprehensible amount of literature that was hunted down, confiscated and/or destroyed by the church. How much knowledge have we lost because of the fears of the religious? How many of our greatest minds were persecuted and imprisoned because they dared to disagree with someone’s concept of one god or another? How many dreams, ideas and inventions were snuffed out by worshipers of gods? How many more men like Aristotle, Galileo, Voltaire and Socrates would we have if not for religion? Consider all the trials, the imprisonments, the banishments, the riots, the persecutions, the genocides, the repression, the bigotry, the sexism, the mutilation and the division, so much division. Has anything in history ever divided one man from another more than religion? But it’s the Atheist who is wasting his time? Could anything be more laughable? Just imagine where we would be now as a people if we had focused on peace, coexisting, civilization, progress and philosophy instead of saving souls and deciding whose god was better than another’s. No one has wasted more of their own time, and worse, humanity’s time than the religious.<br />
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If the human race has any hope for a bright future it certainly doesn’t rest with the religious or whatever god they may worship. Their god will not create peace on earth. Your god will not protect our children from the evils of the world. His god will not reward us with eternal life. Her god will not assure our armies of success in battle. We can only rely on ourselves and on each other. There simply is no one else. And it’s not a waste of time to say so.<br />
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Thomas Keane (DoubtingThomas)<br />
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Please visit my main page (<a href="http://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/">http://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/</a>) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-37151683375872911782012-01-31T22:46:00.001-06:002012-01-31T22:46:20.514-06:00My Top 25 Substantive Posts in 2011<br />
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<br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /><a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2012/01/my-top-25-substantive-posts-in-2011.html"><span class="post-author" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.3em;">By <b>John W. Loftus</b> </span><span class="post-timestamp" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.3em;">at 1/23/2012</span></a></h3>
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Here they are:<a href="" name="more"></a><br /><br />25) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/10/i-stand-in-gap.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">I Stand in the Gap</a><br /><br />24) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/02/top-ten-misconceptions-about-atheists.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">The Top Ten Misconceptions About Atheists</a><br /><br />23) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/03/ten-marks-of-deluded-person.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">The Ten Marks of a Deluded Person</a><br /><br />22) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/07/once-again-atheism-is-not-belief-nor.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">Once Again, Atheism is Not a Belief Nor a Religion</a><br /><br />21) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/10/in-defense-of-debates.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">In Defense of Debates</a><br /><br />20) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/11/ten-ways-how-to-resist-preaching-to.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">Ten Ways How To Resist Preaching to the Choir</a><br /><br />19) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/01/science-based-explanations-vs-faith.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">Science Based Explanations vs. Faith Based Explanations</a><br /><br />18) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/02/christians-demand-that-i-must-show.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">Christians demand that I must show their faith is impossible before they will see that it is improbable</a><br /><br />17) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/03/danger-of-belief-is-thinking-you.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">The Danger of Belief is Thinking You Believe What God Does</a><br /><br />16) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/02/problem-of-miracles.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">The Problem of Miracles</a><br /><br />15) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/02/answering-once-and-for-all-christian_05.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">Answering Once and For All The Christian Complaint That Skeptics Would Refuse to Believe No Matter What God Did</a><br /><br />14) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/07/who-answers-prayers.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">Who Answers Prayers?</a><br /><br />13) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/09/omniscient-god-solves-all-problems-and.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">An Omniscient God Solves All Problems and Makes Faith Unfalsifiable</a><br /><br />12) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-christian-apologists-work.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">How Christian Apologists Work</a><br /><br />11) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/10/when-christians-critizcize-each-other-i.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">When Christians Criticize Each Other I Think They're All Right</a><br /><br />10) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-and-better-pascals-wager-if-god.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">A New and Better Pascal's Wager: If God Asked You to Wager Before Being Born What Would You Choose?</a><br /><br />9) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/09/deuteronomist-and-king-josiah.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">The Deuteronomist and King Josiah</a><br /><br />8) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/06/ouitsider-test-for-faith-otf-is-not.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">The Outsider Test is Not Hard to Understand</a><br /><br />7) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/06/responding-to-thomas-talbiott-on-why-i.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">Responding to Thomas Talbott: On Why I Think There is a Material World</a><br /><br />6) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/10/assessing-minimal-facts-approach-of.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">Assessing The Minimal Facts Approach of Habermas, Licona, and Craig</a><br /><br />5) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/10/does-religious-context-increase-odds-of.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">Does a Religious Context Increase the Odds of a Miracle?</a><br /><br />4) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/07/michael-liconas-book-is-delusional-on.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">Michael Licona's Book is Delusional on a Grand Scale</a><br /><br />3) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/10/william-lane-craig-on-whether-witness.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">William Lane Craig On Whether the Witness of the Spirit is Question-Begging</a><br /><br />2) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/10/in-defense-of-william-lane-craig.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">In Defense of William Lane Craig </a><br /><br />1) <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/10/lets-recap-why-william-lane-craig.html" style="color: #003366;" target="_blank">Let's Recap Why William Lane Craig Refuses to Debate Me</a></div>
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-43527443995281829872012-01-30T19:33:00.001-06:002012-01-30T19:33:55.854-06:00What makes scientists tick?<br />
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<span style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><i style="background-color: white;"><u><a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328496.200-what-makes-scientists-tick.html"> from the NewScientist.com</a></u></i></span></span></h1>
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<i style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Psychologist <b style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Greg Feist</b> is trying to find out what drives scientific curiosity, from ways of thinking to personality types</i></h1>
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<b style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">You are championing a new discipline: the psychology of science. What exactly is this?</b><br />
It's the study of the thought and behaviour of scientists, but it also includes the implicit science done by non-scientists - so, for instance, children and infants who are thinking scientifically, trying to figure out the world and developing cognitive conceptual models of how the world works.</div>
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<b style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">What areas interest you and what discoveries have you made in this field?</b><br />
My area is personality. I look at the personality characteristics and qualities that distinguish scientists from non-scientists.</div>
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The personality characteristic that really stands out for predicting scientific interest is openness to experience: how willing and interested someone is to try new things, to explore, to break out of their habits. Open people get bored with routine. Another thing I've found is that social scientists tend to be higher in extroversion whereas physical scientists tend to be a bit more introverted.</div>
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<b style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">I understand that certain people - Jewish people, for example - are more likely than average to become scientists. Why?</b><br />
I was brought up Catholic and I married a Jewish woman. I spoke to my wife's rabbi and asked him this question. He said that in Judaism there is no hierarchy. No one person who has more access to the "truth" than anyone else. And there is a healthy tradition of debate. That way of critical thinking and debate is more congruent with the scientific attitude than Catholicism, say, which is based on dogma and hierarchy.</div>
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In the US, only 2 per cent of the population is Jewish, yet about 30 per cent of the members of the National Academy of Science and 30 per cent of the Nobel prize recipients are from a Jewish background. That's no coincidence.</div>
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<b style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">What other areas of the psychology of science are ripe for research?</b><br />
A couple of graduate students and I have started investigating if there is evidence that any kind of <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18462-star-students-beware-bipolar-disorder.html" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #34a3d1; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">mental disorder</a> is associated with scientific thought and behaviour. The general answer is no. In fact, most disorders seem to be screened out to a greater extent in the sciences than in the arts.</div>
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<b style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Have psychologists looked into the issue of how objective the scientific process really is?</b><br />
Scientists are human. They're not perfectly objective and rational, but the scientific method tries to limit that as much as possible by having repeatable, observable, empirical methods to minimise the subjective element. The more we understand about the psychology of scientists the more we can mitigate the effect of cognitive bias.</div>
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<b style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">How will this new discipline benefit science?</b><br />
One of the things it will do is shed light on how and when people become interested in science. And why do some kids, who started out with an interest in science, then leave it? <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228361.500-science-in-america-decline-and-fall.html" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #34a3d1; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">In the US it's a pretty big deal to discover what is lacking</a> in our training and development of young scientists.</div>
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Profile</h3>
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<a href="http://www.sjsu.edu/people/greg.feist/" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #34a3d1; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="nsarticle"><b style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Greg Feist</b></a> is at San Jose State University, California. He is president of the <a href="http://www.ispstonline.org/" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #34a3d1; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="nsarticle">International Society for the Psychology of Science and Technology</a>, and author of <i style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">The Psychology of Science and the Origins of the Scientific Mind</i> (Yale University Press, 2006)</div>
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</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-43864080949166639712012-01-27T09:13:00.002-06:002012-01-27T09:13:49.454-06:00<br />
<h1 id="watch-headline-title" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: #ebebeb; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 1.8333em; height: 1.1363em; line-height: 1.1363em; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; max-height: 1.1363em; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;">
<span class="" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-size: 22px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="inFact: Conspiracy Theories"><a href="http://infactvideo.com/">inFact: Conspiracy Theories</a></span></h1>
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<span style="background-color: #ebebeb; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Are conspiracy theorists really as crazy as they sound?</span>
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<span style="background-color: #ebebeb; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><a href="http://infactvideo.com/">Go To Video</a></span></div>
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<span class="" dir="ltr" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-size: 22px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="inFact: Conspiracy Theories"><br /></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-64081114699829561932012-01-27T09:03:00.000-06:002012-01-27T09:03:44.906-06:00Answering 13 Questions About 2012 by Kyle Hill<br />
<div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 23px; margin-bottom: 23px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Via <em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Psychology Today</em>, arm yourself against the pseudoscience of 2012 apocalypse with <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/reality-check/201112/what-you-should-know-about-2012-answers-13-questions" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #31952e; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">answers to 13 questions</a> about the supposed end of the world.</div>
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<em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">[spoiler alert: the whole theory is bogus]</em></div>
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<a href="http://sciencebasedlife.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/answering-13-questions-about-2012/">The Mayan Apocalypse is Nonsense</a></h3>
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Here are the questions you will find answers to, with a short summary of the answers (read the full article linked to above for the complete explanations):<br /><a href="http://sciencebasedlife.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/answering-13-questions-about-2012/">Go To Article</a></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-46966819526989235022012-01-25T09:01:00.000-06:002012-01-25T09:01:30.160-06:00Will The Real Jesus Please Stand Up?<br />
<h2 class="title" style="background-color: white; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; color: #1a1b1b; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0.5em; padding-left: 2px; padding-right: 2px; padding-top: 0.5em; text-align: left; text-shadow: rgb(221, 221, 221) 3px 3px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/wwjtd/2012/01/19/will-the-real-jesus-please-stand-up/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook">Will The Real Jesus Please Stand Up?</a></h2>
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<img src="http://freethoughtblogs.com/wwjtd/wp-content/themes/BlueFTB/images/date.png" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: medium; border-color: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: medium; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: medium; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: medium; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin-bottom: 2px; margin-left: 2px; margin-right: 2px; margin-top: 2px; max-width: 680px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" /> January 19, 2012 at 12:00 pm <img src="http://freethoughtblogs.com/wwjtd/wp-content/themes/BlueFTB/images/user.png" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: medium; border-color: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: medium; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: medium; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: medium; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin-bottom: 2px; margin-left: 2px; margin-right: 2px; margin-top: 2px; max-width: 680px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" /> JT Eberhard</div>
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<strong style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/wwjtd/files/2012/01/David-Fitz.jpg" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; color: #3366cc; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4186" height="198" src="http://freethoughtblogs.com/wwjtd/files/2012/01/David-Fitz-300x198.jpg" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: medium; border-color: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: medium; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: medium; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: medium; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 5px; max-width: 680px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="David Fitz" width="300" /></a>Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?</strong></div>
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<strong style="font-weight: bold;">Is the “Jesus of History” any more real than the “Jesus of Faith”?</strong></div>
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<strong style="font-weight: bold;">(From the upcoming book,<em style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Jesus: Mything in Action,</em> by David Fitzgerald)</strong></div>
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<strong style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/wwjtd/2012/01/19/will-the-real-jesus-please-stand-up/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook">Go To Article</a></strong></div>
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-12960243311590385112012-01-25T08:44:00.000-06:002012-01-25T08:45:18.355-06:00Psych 101: Controlling This Tendency Will Make You Happier and More Productive<br />
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<a href="http://feefighters.com/blog/fundamental-attribution-error/">Psych 101: Controlling This Tendency Will Make You Happier and More Productive</a></h1>
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<img alt="Screen Shot 2012-01-18 at 8.40.26 AM" class="attachment-big-thumbnail wp-post-image" height="97" src="http://feefighters.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Screen-Shot-2012-01-18-at-8.40.26-AM.png" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Screen Shot 2012-01-18 at 8.40.26 AM" width="264" /></div>
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By <a href="http://feefighters.com/blog/author/stella/" rel="author" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(51, 102, 153); background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #aaaaaa; font-weight: 700; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Posts by Stella">STELLA</a></div>
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Your coworker is late. You’re angry. “He’s always late!” you say to yourself. Instead of thinking of the myriad of external sources that could potentially explain his tardiness, you default to the fact that he is always late. Does this sound familiar?<br />
<a href="http://feefighters.com/blog/fundamental-attribution-error/">Go To Article</a></div>
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</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-87782740341998001562012-01-19T14:26:00.004-06:002012-01-19T14:26:50.693-06:00Climate Change, Disbelief, and the Collision between Human and Geologic Time by Peter H. Gleick<br />
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<a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2012/01/16/climate-change-disbelief-and-the-collision-between-human-and-geologic-time/">Climate Change, Disbelief, and the Collision between Human and Geologic Time</a></h1>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px; text-align: left;">Geologic time scales are long – too long for the human mind to really comprehend. Over millions, and tens of millions, and hundreds of millions of years, the Earth has changed from something unrecognizable to the planet we see on maps, plastic globes, and photos from space. The Atlantic Ocean didn’t exist eons ago and it will literally disappear in the future as the continental plates continue to move inch by inch. A visitor from outer space millions of years ago would have looked down upon land masses and land forms unrecognizable today. As John McPhee notes in his book, </span><em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">Assembling California</em><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px; text-align: left;">, “For an extremely large percentage of the history of the world, there was no California.” Or North America, China, Australia, Hawai’i, Mt. Everest, Grand Canyon, or any of the other landforms and natural symbols we think of as immutable.</span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2012/01/16/climate-change-disbelief-and-the-collision-between-human-and-geologic-time/">Go To Article</a></span></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-2214059632750298832012-01-12T14:21:00.002-06:002012-01-12T14:21:47.252-06:00John Edward: Hustling the Bereaved<br />
<br /><a href="http://www.csicop.org/si/archive/category/investigative_files">Investigative Files</a><br /><a href="http://www.csicop.org/author/joenickell">Joe Nickell</a><br /><a href="http://www.csicop.org/si/archive/category/volume_25.6">Volume 25.6, November / December 2001</a><br /><br /><br /><br />Superstar “psychic medium” John Edward is a stand-up guy. Unlike the spiritualists of yore, who typically plied their trade in dark-room séances, Edward and his ilk often perform before live audiences and even under the glare of TV lights. Indeed, Edward (a pseudonym: he was born John MaGee Jr.) has his own popular show on the SciFi channel called Crossing Over, which has gone into national syndication (Barrett 2001; Mui 2001). I was asked by television newsmagazine Dateline NBC to study Edward’s act: was he really talking to the dead?<br />
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<a href="http://www.csicop.org/si/show/john_edward_hustling_the_bereaved/">Go To Article</a></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-60167502143313603172012-01-08T05:50:00.001-06:002012-01-08T05:50:49.570-06:00The Richard Feynman Trilogy: The Physicist Captured in Three Films - - - Open Culture<p><a href="http://richarddawkins.net/videos/644496-the-richard-feynman-trilogy-the-physicist-captured-in-three-films">The Richard Feynman Trilogy: The Physicist Captured in Three Films - - - Open Culture</a></p> <br/> <div style='clear: both; text-align: center; font-size: xx-small;'>Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.2</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-34453172017749764272012-01-01T19:12:00.000-06:002012-01-01T19:12:04.753-06:00How To Debunk Christianity by John W. Loftus<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_V452Ll6JHAE/S2XrtcSMjdI/AAAAAAAAAf4/7i5DrLHQFBY/s1600-h/Church-Of-Christ-web.jpg" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; color: #3366cc; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img border="0" height="206" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_V452Ll6JHAE/S2XrtcSMjdI/AAAAAAAAAf4/7i5DrLHQFBY/s320/Church-Of-Christ-web.jpg" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: medium; border-color: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: medium; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: medium; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: medium; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 680px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="320" /></a></div>
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As you can see from this chart of denominations the Church of Christ is represented as the true church. I have not tried to verify the facts, but it’s roughly accurate I suppose in representing when they started and such. Notice that every denomination is part of “Babylon the Great Whore” depicted in the book of Revelation except those in the “Restoration Movement” “non-denominational” conservative middle branch of the Christian Church/Churches of Christ, of which I was once a part. In the lower right hand corner there is a strict warning that people in these other denominations will probably be doomed. A lot of other Christians in various denominations think the same way about the Church of Christ and condemn them as heretical.<br /><a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/loftus/2011/12/27/how-to-debunk-christianity-2/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook">Go To Article</a></div>
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-36617435067533500592011-12-28T08:14:00.001-06:002011-12-28T08:17:06.426-06:00Is God Good?, Part I by Peter Hurford<a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/is-god-good-part-i">Is God Good?, Part I</a>: <br />
<b>Follow up to: <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/the-meaning-of-morality">The Meaning of Morality</a>; <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/the-christian-god-sure-takes-his-sweet-time">The Christian God Sure Takes His Sweet Time</a>; <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/the-biblical-god-is-a-malevolent-bully-part-ii">The Biblical God is a Malevolent Bully, Part II</a>; <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/the-great-problem-of-evil-part-iii">The Great Problem of Evil, Part III</a>; and <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/god-babies-hell-and-justice">God, Babies, Hell, and Justice</a></b><br />
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Most religious people suggest that the God they worship is not only a pretty good guy, but ultimately benevolent, all-loving, and morally perfect — a being capable of doing no wrong to anyone. Some of these people suggest that this God is so benevolent and perfect that he actually is the very moral standard by which benevolence and moral perfection is measured — that our idea of moral goodness <b>comes</b> from this god.<br />
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I don’t think either of these claims work — based on what we know about God’s character from observing the world, we know he cannot be good, and because of this and several other reasons, we definitely don’t get our morality from God. In this essay, I explain what all the previous essays on God’s malevolence have been pointing to, and once and for all make the case that God is decidedly malevolent, and thus not worth worship, with the inevitable conclusion that many religions are false.<br />
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<h2>What Does It Mean to Be Good?</h2><br />
So when we’re saying God is “good”, what is it that we’re actually saying? As I wrote in <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/the-meaning-of-morality">“The Meaning of Morality”</a>, there are a variety of possible claims — we could be saying that God is good because he follows God’s commands, that God is good because our culture approves of him, that God is good because he always acts to maximize the well-being of conscious creatures, that God is good because he follows his rational duty, that God is good because he does what people would agree to if signing a hypothetical social contract, that God is good because he is of virtuous character, etc. The possibilities are endless.<br />
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However, I prefer to use a specific definition of “good” that works for our purposes: <b>God will never allow any needless suffering.</b> Why use this definition instead of another one? As I point out in <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/the-folly-of-debating-definitions">“The Folly of Debating Definitions”</a>, it ultimately doesn’t matter, as long as this definition <i>works</i>. And it is the one that matters, if God is making people suffer pointlessly, he is worthy of condemnation — he is cruel and malevolent, and fundamentally opposed to love and compassion.<br />
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Some people might ask why we should care about whether God is compassionate, as long as he is <i>right</i> by some other definition. But I think this is <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/dont-smuggle-your-connotations">a connotation that is being smuggled</a>, that we should care about this other definition if it results in needless suffering. Needless suffering is just that — something that we are just better off without.<br />
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<h2>Can We Judge God?</h2><br />
This actually gives us a basis to judge God — we can see if God causes any needless suffering, and if he does, then we judge him to not be good. Some people will find this objectionable in itself, though — why are we allowed to judge God?<br />
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Judging is matching something to an external standard, and seeing if it meets that standard. This type of judging is the same kind of thing as judging Hulk Hogan to be strong or judging Michael Jordan to be tall. And taking any kind of stance to these questions — is Hulk Hogan strong? is God good? — must involve judging, since we are describing God according to a definition, which is a standard that is either met or not met.<br />
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Thus <b>it is impossible not to judge God</b>, since saying God has any characteristic means we’re judging him. If we say God is good, we are judging that God meets the minimal defining characteristics of goodness. If we say God is worth worshipping, we are saying he meets our standards for what we want to worship.<br />
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If we say God is all-powerful, we say that God meets the standard of being capable of doing anything that is logically possible. And the final clincher: even if we say that God cannot be judged, we are judging God to be the kind of thing that meets the characteristics of something that cannot be judged!<br />
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Saying that God meets a certain definition is hardly heresy, it is something completely unavoidable. Thus not only can we judge God, we <b>must</b> judge God, and we have a basis to do so. God either allows needless suffering to happen or he does not, and the answer to this question has implications. So how is this question answered?<br />
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<h2>Why We’re Forced to Appeal to Mystery</h2><br />
Here is where things get a bit awkward, though — when we actually look at the state of the world and the beliefs of Christianity, things don’t look so good. There seems to be an awful lot of needless suffering, which I’ve argued for in other essays:<br />
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<ul><li>In <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/the-great-problem-of-evil-part-i">“The Great Problem of Evil”</a>, I point to birth defects that lead to the suffering and death of babies, deaths from preventable diseases like smallpox and malaria, and deaths from institutionalized cruelty like the Holocaust.</li>
<li>Another instance of needless suffering I didn’t mention, but want to include now, is that of animal suffering prior to the arise of humans — see John Loftus’s <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2010/01/darwinian-problem-of-evil.html">“The Darwinian Problem of Evil”</a> for the really short version and Paul Draper’s <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/paul_draper/evil.html">“Natural Selection and the Problem of Evil”</a> for the really long version.</li>
<li>In <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/the-christian-god-sure-takes-his-sweet-time">“The Christian God Sure Takes His Sweet Time”</a>, I point to the Devil, and the fact that God allows the Devil to continue to cause suffering, and the fact that God has still not brought his perfect kingdom to Earth.</li>
<li>In <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/the-biblical-god-is-a-malevolent-bully-part-i">“The Biblical God is a Malevolent Bully”</a> I point to the massive amount of suffering God commands in the Bible, including outright genocide and infanticide, and the rape and murder of women, all culminating in the punishing of Job for what God himself admits to be without reason.</li>
<li>Lastly, in <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/god-babies-hell-and-justice">“God, Babies, Hell, and Justice”</a>, I point to the unnecessarily harsh punishment of Hell, which constitutes infinite punishment for finite sins.</li>
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Generally when faced with someone who causes suffering, like shooting a woman in the chest, we look for some justification that would explain why this person did such a thing. For instance, we recognize that people are allowed to shoot woman who attempt to shoot them first, or put them in grave danger. God, who is accused of causing suffering, can get the same excuses — simply name a reason that God allowed the suffering that we would recognize as “worth it”.<br />
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However, we do not have those reasons. All of these essays meticulously rebut any possible excuse that justifies the kind of suffering that God permits or directly causes, so at the end of the day we’re left with only one kind of appeal — that while we have no idea why God is allowing needless suffering, it doesn’t make him uncompassionate. We’re ultimately forced to appeal to mystery to defend God’s goodness because we have no other out since all actual justifications fail.<br />
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However, these appeals to mystery fail as well, so we’re left with the Problem of Evil, and the inevitable conclusion that God is not good, and thus many religions are false.<br />
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<h2>The Unknowable Purpose is Unreasonable</h2><br />
One common explanation for why God is good despite all the apparent suffering in the world is that this suffering isn’t needless, but rather God has a grand purpose for this suffering, and that this purpose would completely justify anything God has done and makes him out to be the perfectly compassionate guy he is said to be, if only we knew what the purpose was. And that’s just it… we don’t know what the purpose is. That’s why they call it <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_nonbelief">the Unknown Purpose Defense</a>.<br />
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This sounds suspicious, of course. Isn’t it convenient that God has an unknown purpose that we just don’t know about? And isn’t not having a justification in itself a problem? Why would an all-powerful God not be able to give us a justification, and why would an all-good God not want to? So then we have to find a justification for why God is keeping his purpose hidden from us (or why <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/where-is-god">he doesn’t reveal himself at all</a>). And then we would need a justification for why the justification for why God is keeping his purpose hidden is itself being hidden. And so on, infinitely.<br />
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Imagine if the same justification was extended to beings other than God, such as any criminal. Imagine that same guy accused of shooting the woman in the chest — he doesn’t offer any excuse of self-defense or any other justifying circumstances, but instead says “Oh, I have a purpose for my shooting that justifies it, you just don’t know what it is.” Sure, it’s possible, but we would hardly take it on face value. If we wouldn’t accept the unknown purpose from the shooter on trial, we shouldn’t accept it in defense of God.<br />
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Lastly, there’s another reason we can’t accept an unknown purpose defense though, and that’s because we could use it to defend <i>anything</i> as true. Can zebras fly? It seems like they cannot — we have never observed a zebra who is capable of flight and we know of no method that could allow a zebra to fly. But a ha! What if there is an unknown reason why zebras can fly, and it is simply unknown to us. Until you can disprove the existence of this unknown reason, I’m justified in thinking that zebras can fly!<br />
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Just like in the case of the shooter and in the case of the zebra flying hypothesis, the mere possibility of an unknown reason should not be enough to say that God is good. And we should be immensely surprised that a God who can do anything is so limited that not only is he forced to make people suffer horribly, he cannot tell us why he does so. So the unknown purpose defense is unreasonable for multiple reasons.<br />
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<img alt="" height="300" src="http://www.greatplay.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/God-works-in-mysterious-ways-300x300.jpg" title="God-works-in-mysterious-ways" width="300" /><br />
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<h2>The Circular Nature of God</h2><br />
Another common justification for God is that we know he is obviously good based on his perfect nature, so we needn’t let all the suffering and problems bother us. Instead, we can just be reassured by God’s all-good nature that all the suffering is for the best, all part of his perfect plan.<br />
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This sounds tempting because it puts us at ease and we want to believe it. We want to think that everything will be ok, so we don’t have to worry. However, just because we want to believe it doesn’t make it true. And here, there is a clear problem: this defense of God is circular. We can’t use God’s all-good nature to defend against accusations that he might not have an all-good nature, that’s claiming that we can know God is good because God is good.<br />
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The goodness of God is exactly what is in question by the Problem of Evil, so it makes no sense to dismiss the Problem of Evil by asserting the goodness of God. Additionally, it makes no sense to appeal to what the Bible says about God’s nature as a defense against the Problem of Evil, because that’s the same circularity one-step removed. How do we know to trust the Bible’s description of God’s nature, unless God is good? And why doesn’t the Bible explain what God’s purpose is behind all of the suffering he allows or is directly responsible for?<br />
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But there’s another reason why we shouldn’t use the Bible’s claim that God is good to excuse his behavior: would we use testimony about Hitler’s compassionate character in Mein Kampf to excuse the Holocaust? Hardly, the evil of the Holocaust makes it so we should demand more than just a mere “yeah, I’m a good guy” as an explanation, and we definitely wouldn’t trust the man responsible for the Holocaust to testify himself about his character. Likewise, we shouldn’t use the Bible to justify God’s character.<br />
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We cannot use any claim that God is good, even on the authority of the Bible or God himself, to resolve the Problem of Evil — doing so is circular. Instead, we need an actual reason for why God allowed the suffering.<br />
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<img alt="" height="300" src="http://www.greatplay.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/url-218x300.png" title="god answers a prayer" width="218" /><br />
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<h2>Intermission</h2><br />
There is a large amount of suffering that God either allows (The Holocaust, Epidermolysis Bullosa, Smallpox, Animal predation prior to humans) or is directly responsible (Hell, Satan, Biblical genocide and rape, the treatment of Job), and it seems highly likely that this suffering is pointless, unjustified by any excuse.<br />
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Thus we need to find some sort of reason why God is good despite not having this excuse. But God cannot be justified with an unknowable purpose, nor can he be justified with an appeal to his allegedly good character. So what can God be justified by? This essay is now long enough that I really need to split into multiple parts, so I’m doing so now.<br />
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In the next essay, I’ll explain why God can’t be justified by an appeal to his infallibility, why we can’t just appeal to “God works in mysterious ways”, and then explain why we can’t just ignore the problem because of God’s authority, or an alleged right of God to do whatever he wants with his creation. Then I will go on to discuss why God is indeed surely malevolent, then why God cannot be the source of morality, and then explain that despite my constant references to suffering specifically unique to the Christian God, why the Problem of Evil applies to lots of other religions too.<br />
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<img alt="" height="300" src="http://www.greatplay.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/smite.jpeg" title="smite" width="300" />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-66734951758474526742011-12-28T08:06:00.000-06:002011-12-28T08:11:13.365-06:00Gigantopithecus and crackpot cryptozoologists by Donald Prothero<a href="http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/12/28/gigantopithecus-and-crackpot-cryptozoologists/">Gigantopithecus and crackpot cryptozoologists</a>: <br />
<div style="width: 410px;">
<a href="http://www.skepticblog.org/wp-content/uploads/gigantopithecus-400-588-64.jpg"><img alt="" height="588" src="http://www.skepticblog.org/wp-content/uploads/gigantopithecus-400-588-64.jpg" title="gigantopithecus-400-588-64" width="400" /></a><br />
A possible reconstruction of Gigantopithecus.</div>
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As Daniel Loxton and I finished our upcoming book on cryptozoology, I needed an image of the famous huge ape fossils from Asia known as <em>Gigantopithecus</em> for the chapter on the Yeti. I emailed my colleague Russ Ciochon at the University of Iowa, who has found many new specimens, and got a rather surprising reply on why he would not share his images with anyone: “<em>Gigantopithecus</em> is not part of cryptozoology. Yet that is the only way anyone hears about <em>Gigantopithecus</em>.” I was rather surprised at his brusque attitude toward a scientific colleague who is on his side, but I can see where he must be fed up with non-stop requests from cryptozoologists who are only interested in his work to support their completely unscientific notions.<br />
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The original <em>Gigantopithecus blacki</em> specimens were found in some Chinese cave deposits, first discovered in the 1920s. They include teeth and a complete lower jaw. Unfortunately, there are no other skeletal parts known from this mysterious gigantic ape, despite decades of searching by the large number of Chinese paleontologists who now work on the deposits. More recently, Ciochon has revisited this region, and found more specimens of <em>Gigantopithecus</em>. He did so by shifting his focus to cave deposits in North Vietnam, which are unspoiled by the fossil poachers who robbed the Chinese caves to supply “dragon bones” for apothecaries to grind up into Chinese “medicine”. Still, even after more than 75 years since the first tooth was found, we still have only three lower jaws and about 1300 isolated teeth of this mysterious primate. There is also a second species, <em>Gigantopithecus giganteus</em>, from India, which (despite its name) is about half the size of <em>Gigantopithecus blacki</em>. A third species, <em>Gigantopithecus bilaspurensis</em>, comes from much older beds (6 to 9 million years old) in India, suggesting that the <em>Gigantopithecus</em> line goes back to at least 9 million years ago and the evolutionary radiation of early apes such as the dryopithecines (Ciochon, 1991).<br />
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Because we have only the lower jaws to go on, it’s hard to reliably estimate the size of the entire creature. Ciochon et al. (1990a) estimated that it was about 10 feet (3 m) tall and weighed about 1200 pounds. Simons and Ettel (1970) suggest it was proportioned like more like a gorilla, standing about 9 feet tall and weighing about 900 pounds. Either way, it was the largest primate that ever lived, immensely larger than a gorilla (the largest living primate), or even the biggest human giants.<br />
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<div style="width: 235px;">
<a href="http://www.skepticblog.org/wp-content/uploads/Gig-blacki-mandibles-L-lateral-female-above-old-male.jpg"><img alt="" height="339" src="http://www.skepticblog.org/wp-content/uploads/Gig-blacki-mandibles-L-lateral-female-above-old-male-225x339.jpg" title="Gig blacki mandibles L lateral, female above old male" width="225" /></a><br />
Comparison of an old male jaw (bottom) and a female jaw, showing the extreme robustness and the large thick-enameled molars</div>
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What we do have of <em>Gigantopithecus</em> are the heavily built jaws with huge teeth, especially the molars, which have very thick enamel. Both the molars and the cheek teeth in front of them (the premolars) are very broad and low-crowned, often with their entire occlusal surface ground down flat, suggesting that these creatures ate a very tough, gritty diet. Ciochon et al. (1990b) used microscopic analysis of wear facets on the tooth enamel, and the presence of phytolith fossils from plants, showed that the Chinese apes ate mostly bamboo, as does the living giant panda.<br />
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<em>Gigantopithecus</em> had lived in Asia since at least the middle Miocene, about 9 million years ago, and were found mostly in eastern Asia during the Ice Ages. Careful dating of cave deposits in Vietnam which yield both <em>Gigantopithecus</em> and <em>Homo erectus</em> showed that early humans invaded China about 800,000 years ago, and that <em>Gigantopithecus</em> died out about half a million years later, around 300,000 years ago (Ciochon et al., 1996). Although this certainly disproves the idea that <em>Homo erectus</em> immediately killed off its distant cousin, there are also other possible factors, including competition with giant pandas which competed for bamboo, and also the fact that bamboo suffers from huge die-offs every 20-60 years, which may have stressed the ape population and made them more vulnerable to competition from pandas or people.<br />
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Or <em>did</em> they die out? As Brian Regal points out (Regal, 2011), back in the 1950s and 1960s some anthropologists like Carleton Coon made the inference that the Yeti was a relict population of <em>Gigantopithecus. </em>At that time, many anthropologists embraced the “multi-regional hypothesis,” which argued that <em>Homo sapiens</em> had evolved separately over a million years ago from different stocks of primates in different regions. Asians were descendants of Peking Man, Neanderthals descendants of some early European <em>Homo</em> fossils, Africans were descendants of African <em>Homo erectus</em>, and so on. Although there are still a few holdouts who still support a version of the multiregional model (like Milford Wolpoff at University of Michigan), genetic evidence that amassed since the 1980s has overwhelmingly demonstrated that it is false. Instead, the human genome shows that modern <em>Homo sapiens</em> are all descended from African ancestors that spread across the Old World about 60,000 years ago, displacing any older populations of <em>Homo</em> (such as “Peking man” or “Java man”) that might still have been living there. And the fossils plus the dating showed that this “out of Africa” model occurred more than once, since <em>Homo erectus</em> appears to have originated in Africa and then spread around the Old World (China, Java, and many other places) about 1.85 million years ago. However, even more recent work in genetics (Wells, 2002) shows that some populations (like Neanderthals) interbred with <em>Homo sapiens</em>, so when the invaders from Africa arrived, they did interbreed with the locals and incorporated the regional genome into theirs. Nonetheless, the archaic idea of multi-regionalism and independent, isolated parallel evolution of humans from local <em>Homo erectus</em> populations as advocated by Coon in the 1950s (with its racist overtones) has long been discredited by anthropologists. So <em>Gigantopithecus</em> is no longer viewed as connected to the Yeti, or in any way relevant to this debate.<br />
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Not surprisingly, cryptozoologists like Heuvelmans in 1952 and later many others also made suggestions that the Yeti (and later, Bigfoot) were surviving descendants of <em>Gigantopithecus</em>. If you read the cryptozoological literature, it is full of bizarre <a href="http://www.bfro.net/ref/theories/mjm/whatrtha.asp">unsupported speculations</a> about how these immense apes spread all over Asia and North America from different primate stocks, and Bigfoot and Yeti are their relicts. None of this amateur speculation bears any relation to what anthropologists know about the real history of hominid fossils and human evolution. This demonstrates once again that amateurs are out of their depth and use outdated concepts of human evolution when they propose their wild ideas. Nevertheless, there are many strong lines of argument against the idea that either the Yeti or Bigfoot is a surviving <em>Gigantopithecus</em>:<br />
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For one thing, <em>Gigantopithecus</em> was a giant relative of the orangutan, <em>not</em> a close relative of humans. Although we don’t have much evidence of its skeleton, it is reasonable to assume that its feet would be arranged like that of an orangutan or other great ape, <em>not</em> like that of a human with its reduced big toe and inability to grasp with its foot. Thus, its footprints should resemble ape footprints, not the human-like footprints allegedly produced by the Yeti or Bigfoot. And it should show the same stooped knuckle-walking gait of the orangutan, gorilla, and all other great apes, <em>not</em> the human-like bipedal walking posture allegedly shown by the Yeti and Bigfoot. (Indeed, one of the biggest problems with the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film is that the walking posture is almost completely human, not ape-like in the least). Any time you read about cryptozoologists trying to connect <em>Gigantopithecus</em>to Yeti or Bigfoot, it shows they know almost nothing about fossil and living primates.<br />
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Second, although <em>Gigantopithecus</em> fossils are rare, something that large would still be expected to be fossilized at least a few times if they had survived anywhere in the world after 300,000 years ago. For example, <a href="http://www.bfro.net/ref/theories/mjm/whatrtha.asp">one Bigfoot website claims</a> that ”No research group has ever made an attempt to look for Giganto bones in North America, so no one should be surprised that Giganto remains have never been identified in North America. Ironically, the most vocal skeptics and scientists who rhetorically ask why no bones have been located and identified on this continent are the last people who would ever make an effort to look for them.” This claim is patently false, and shows how completely ignorant this writer is about paleontology and the fossil record. Paleontologists do not go out specifically to look for a particular fossil, but they collect any and all deposits that yield decent fossils. For deposits of the last 300,000 years (middle and late Pleistocene), we have an extraordinarily good fossil record in both China (where hundreds of Chinese paleontologists have been working for many decades) and especially North America, where we have excellent fossil records (especially of larger mammals, and especially from cave deposits) in every state in the United States and most Canadian provinces (Kurten and Anderson, 1980). Hundreds of paleontologists have collected these fossils for over a century and documented them in excruciating detail. Many extremely rare species are known, including an American cheetah and a camel that is built like a mountain goat, among others. Yet <em>not once</em> has anything resembling <em>Gigantopithecus ever</em> been found—not even the smallest tooth fragment (which could be easily recognized by its thick enamel and distinct low-crowned cusps). Contrary to the conspiratorial thinking of cryptozoologists, paleontologists would be overjoyed to find such a fossil and announce it with great fanfare if they had one, because such a discovery could make your reputation. They have no reason to hide such a fossil in hopes that it won’t give comfort to cryptozoologists. In fact, most paleontologists don’t even know or care about cryptozoology at all, so they are not worried about whether cryptozoologists might be affected. Instead, this statement shows that cryptozoologists such as this writer have no clue about fossils, and are using their ignorance to support their fantasies about fossils.<br />
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Finally, the best reason of all to dismiss the idea that <em>Gigantopithecus</em> survives today: all the evidence (and lack of evidence) that shows that neither the Yeti or Bigfoot is likely to exist, but the product of bad observations and bad science and lots of wishful thinking. Our upcoming book will discuss this evidence in detail.<br />
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<div>
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<h4>
References</h4>
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<ul><br />
<li>Ciochon, R. 1991. The ape that was. <em>Natural History</em> November: 54-62.</li>
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<li>Ciochon, Russel L., John Olsen, and Jamie James, 1990a. <em>Other Origins: The Search for the Giant Ape in Human Prehistory. </em>New York: Bantam Books.</li>
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<li>Ciochon, Russell L., Dolores R. Piperno, and Robert G. Thompson, 1990b. Opal phytoliths found on the teeth of the extinct ape <em>Gigantopithecus blacki</em>: Implications for paleodietary studies. <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 87: </em>8120-8124.</li>
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<li>Ciochon, R.; <em>et al.</em> 1996.”Dated Co-Occurrence of <em>Homo erectus</em> and <em>Gigantopithecus </em>from Tham Khuyen Cave, Vietnam” . <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America</em> <em>93</em> (7): 3016–3020.</li>
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<li>Kurtén, B., and E. Anderson, 1980. <em>Pleistocene Mammals of North America</em>. Columbia University Press, New York.</li>
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<li>Regal, B. 2011. <em>Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology</em>. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.</li>
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<li>Simons, Elwyn L., and Peter C. Ettel 1970. <em>Gigantopithecus. Scientific American, </em>January, 1970: 77-85.</li>
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<li>Wells, S. 2002. <em>The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey</em>. Princeton University Press, Princeton.</li>
</ul>
<br /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-17473765827873655482011-12-24T18:33:00.001-06:002011-12-24T18:35:44.172-06:00The Christian God Sure Takes His Sweet Time by Peter Hurford<a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/the-christian-god-sure-takes-his-sweet-time">The Christian God Sure Takes His Sweet Time</a>: <br />
Welcome to yet another essay where I pile on even more reasons to find Christianity false. For those keeping score at home, I’ve previously exposed Christianity for <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/does-christianity-contradict-evidence">contradicting the evidence</a> by getting the order of creation hopelessly wrong in Genesis. I’ve also busted Christianity for <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/the-contradictory-failure-of-prayer-part-i">prayer being false and contradictory</a>, having <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/god-babies-hell-and-justice">a doctrine of Hell that is clearly unjust</a>, and for the actions of God in the Bible <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/the-biblical-god-is-a-malevolent-bully-part-i">being clearly malevolent</a>.<br />
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And don’t forget that God both <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/the-great-problem-of-evil-part-i">endorses a great deal of suffering in our world</a> and <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/where-is-god">is a total uninvolved no show</a>. At this point I am genuinely surprised there are those who intellectually justify the literal truth of Christianity, but I have even more to say.<br />
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Specifically, I’d like to talk about this guy Satan. In the comments section of <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/proving-god-through-cosmology">“Proving God Through Cosmology”</a>, I got into a small conversation about Satan, or the Devil. This lead to the obvious question: <b>Why Doesn’t God just kill Satan right now?</b><br />
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It seems like a complete no-brainer: the Bible talks about Satan being the source of tons of evil, and being a major reason why people are tempted into sin. While there is <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/there-are-no-religious-facts">a lot of disagreement</a> over <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_teaching_about_the_Devil">the nature of Satan</a>, it does seem that people acknowledge that the Devil is not someone we want to keep around, if possible.<br />
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And God is without excuse, as the standard Problem of Evil applies: God is benevolent and thus wants to eliminate anything evil, God is omnipotent and thus quite capable of eliminating Satan on the tiniest whim, and God certainly knows about Satan. It seems inescapably obvious that God and Satan should not be able to coexist.<br />
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And to make matters more interesting, the Bible specifically says that God will remove Satan at some point:<br />
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<blockquote>When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth—Gog and Magog—and to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore. They marched across the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of God’s people, the city he loves. But fire came down from heaven and devoured them. And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever. — <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation%2020:7-10&version=NIV">Revelation 20: 7-10</a></blockquote><br />
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<img alt="" height="225" src="http://www.greatplay.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/satan-on-south-park-300x225.jpg" title="satan-on-south-park" width="300" /><br />
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<h2>What is Going On?</h2><br />
So to re-cap: here we have the Devil, the very personification of evil. According to Christianity, he exists and goes around deceiving us and tempting us into doing terrible things. God clearly wants to kill him someday, and the Bible declares that he will do so. Yet he hasn’t done so, yet. This certainly does seem puzzling. What is stopping an <i>omnipotent</i> God?<br />
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Remember here that God is <b>omniscient</b> and can see the future. God knew ahead of time what Satan would do the moment he created Satan — the moment he created a being so crazy, malevolent, and irrational that he thought it would be a good idea to rise up and rebel against the most powerful and most good thing in the universe. (Does Satan know something we don’t? If God is perfect, why would people rebel against him?) Thus God intentionally set up all this evil.<br />
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As always, the standard excuses don’t apply:<br />
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<b>“Satan cannot be killed.”</b> Oddly enough, this argument actually has been advanced, and appeals to the fact that Satan has a soul, and souls are eternal. However, there still seems to be no reason why God can’t end a soul, or at least imprison it somewhere (Hell) where the soul can do no more harm, so the excuse at best just changes the question to “Why doesn’t God just send Satan to Hell right now?”. Additionally, God, knowing everything that would happen, could have just not created God in the first place. Or he could have created a type of Satan that could be killed.<br />
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<b>“Satan is necessary to test us via temptation.”</b> This doesn’t square with God’s omniscience, since God can automatically and infallibly predict what it is that we would do in response to any scenario without needing the scenario played out in real life (given that God “knows people’s hearts”, and thus can gauge all of their intentions). Also, it’s not as if an omnipotent being is so short on time that he requires a middleman (the Devil) to accomplish his objectives.<br />
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<b>“God must respect Satan’s free will.”</b> This does sound initially plausible, but respecting free will doesn’t explain why you can’t intervene. Would it be the violation of a murderer’s free will to kill them before they manage to kill other people? Hardly, and Satan is no different. God can give people the choice to commit evil acts and still stop them from actually harming people — including Satan.<br />
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<b>“God needs Satan to show us what evil looks like.”</b> So God is so terrible that we can only recognize his goodness when comparing him to the most malevolent entity ever? Makes sense to me, but I’m not sure that’s what you would want to endorse. We recognize what evil looks like in our every day lives from observing murders and hurricanes. I certainly don’t know what the Devil adds to that, given that we never get to meet the guy or see him in person. (Funny that everything the Devil does is so indirect as to be untestable…)<br />
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<b>“God needs to have an adversary.”</b> A perfect being doesn’t <i>need</i> anything, and creating your own villan just so you can fight it is so hopelessly contrived and arbitrary, especially when other people are forced to suffer just so you can play out the hero role. If this excuse is truly the reason why God made and allows Satan, he is a tragic character worthy of pity, not worship.<br />
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<b>“It’s the fault of sinners that Satan can do evil anyway.”</b> Right, if only we could resist his temptations! I’m not sure what it is that Satan does to tempt us, whether it is mind manipulation or more subtle deception, but he still would be guilty of aiding and abetting under any court system. The fact that people can be deceived does not excuse deception. For the same reason that people leaving their stuff unsecured does not excuse thievery and people dressing in revealing clothing does not excuse rape, people being open to deception does not excuse the Devil.<br />
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<b>“Satan was necessary for The Fall.”</b> This excuse is so bad I will need an entire paragraph to eviscerate it and demolish more of Christianity along the way. See below.<br />
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<a href="http://www.greatplay.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/god-v-satan-e1323977038993.png"><img alt="" height="241" src="http://www.greatplay.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/god-v-satan-e1323977038993.png" title="god-v-satan" width="450" /></a><br />
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<h2>Was Satan Needed for The Fall?</h2><br />
First off, the Fall as a story is incredibly silly. We have two people, Adam and Eve… now of course, they didn’t literally exist, so why we would also need a literal Devil to allow for a metaphorical fall is beyond me. But roll with it.<br />
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Two people, Adam and Eve. And they have no knowledge of good or evil, yet God tells them that they must obey him and not eat from a certain tree… that it would be evil of them not to. And then God places the tree right within their reach, and best of all allows the serpent (who could or could not be the Devil, depending on who you ask) into the garden and let’s him deceive Eve into eating the apple.<br />
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And of course, God knew all of this would happen ahead of time, being omniscient. Thus the Garden of Eden Fall story is as ridiculous as how God wouldn’t allow people to build a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel">Tower of Babel</a> of a specific height because they might reach heaven, yet allows us nowadays to have a space program. Maybe God relocated Heaven to a safer distance?<br />
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<h4>Why Would God Want a Fall?</h4><br />
This question makes it clear that the Fall was all part of God’s plan, and that he specifically created Satan so that the Fall could occur. Now while this does seem an inescapable conclusion based on God’s ability to see the Fall ahead of time and ability to prevent the Fall should he have wanted to do so, it also exposes a really weird flaw in Christianity — God set us Eve up for an inescapable failure, and then blames Eve for it, and then blames Adam for Eve’s mistake, and then blames us today for something that our thousand-of-years-ago not-actually-existing-in-history ancestors did. Wonderful. It’s like God is playing “stop hitting yourself” with us just for kicks.<br />
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One might sugget that the Fall was necessary for the whole Jesus thing where God stepped in to save us from our own sins, as if sacrificing an innocent man can make guilty people not guilty. (Try going to court and asking if Jesus can go to jail in your place.) But this would make God into a contrived and arbitrary sham — he decided to sacrifice himself to himself in order to save us from himself. It’s not like our sinful nature was unexpected.<br />
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<h4>Now that the Fall is Over, Why Do We Still Need Satan?</h4><br />
Even all that aside, though, the Fall is still not an excuse: because now that the Fall is over and the atonement occurred, what more use do we have for the embodiment of evil to still be walking around? Even if the Fall could be considered a reason to create Satan in the first place (albeit a really silly one), why does God not kill Satan?<br />
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I’m sure you have an excuse, but you’ll notice that it now (very probably) has nothing to do with the Fall. So we’re off somewhere else.<br />
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<img alt="" height="388" src="http://www.greatplay.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/6a00d8341c54d153ef00e54f75b5168833-800wi.gif" title="6a00d8341c54d153ef00e54f75b5168833-800wi" width="300" /><br />
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<h2>A Retreat to The Great Unknown</h2><br />
Now we get into some even crazier excuses. They would go something like this:<br />
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<b>The Argument from Authority:</b> “God is absolutely sovereign over all of his creation. God’s ways are not our ways, and calling into question God’s plan is to call into question God himself. It is not wise to question his right to do exactly as he pleases. Psalm 18:30 says God is perfect, and you dare criticize perfection? God created us, so he can do whatever he wants with us. If God wants us all tortured severely, he would be in his rights to do so. Our responsibility is to submit to God and do whatever he says, whether we like it or not.”<br />
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<b>The Argument from Infallibility:</b> “God is perfect, so whatever God does must be perfect. Whatever plan god has will be the best one possible, resulting in justice being satisfied and righteousness being glorified. Calling into question God’s plan is calling into question perfection, and you cannot challenge perfection — we simply have no basis by which to challenge God. God can simply not be measured by our feeble standards — God cannot do anything wrong, and we must acknowledge this.”<br />
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<b>The Argument from Mystery:</b> “God works in mysterious ways, and we shouldn’t expect our fallible and sinful minds to be able to understand divine perfection. God simply must have a reason to allow Satan to continue to exist, even if we do not or cannot know what this reason is.”<br />
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These excuses come up so often for so many questions of theology that I’m not going to deal with them here, but rather in my next essay.<br />
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<img alt="" height="275" src="http://www.greatplay.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/353rn5-e1323977109201.jpeg" title="353rn5" width="400" /><br />
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<h2>God Will Do it All, Eventually</h2><br />
And it’s not just Satan that we’re wondering about. Christianity promises us a second coming of Jesus, when all will be restored in some sort of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_coming">kingdom of Heaven on Earth</a>, where everyone exists in the best possible world. Such a second coming would be the end of all the problems <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/the-great-problem-of-evil-part-i">of needless suffering</a>, of <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/where-is-god">God being hidden</a>, and of <a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/there-are-no-religious-facts">religion being confused</a>, since we would now finally have indisputable proof of the one true religion, and be able to talk to God directly and settle all disagreements on his nature or wishes.<br />
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It’s odd enough to notice that God isn’t solving these problems, thus providing large amounts of evidence for his unfortunate nonexistence. The excuses then get made for why God wants to stay uninvolved, citing “free will” or “it’s all a test” or something. But these excuses immediately stop when we notice that God will be coming back <b>someday</b> — whether it be a violation of our free will or an end to the tests.<br />
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So if God can come back without there being any problems, why does he not do so now? Why are we always waiting for <i>someday</i> in the future, going generation by generation of people who swore <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture#Predictions">Jesus would come back</a> in <i>their</i> generation.<br />
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God seems to be taking his sweet time not just with the Devil, but with everything. The only reason this could be true is to be some sort of ad hoc excuse for why a perfect God would create an imperfect world. It will all just get fixed sometime, we just won’t know when.<br />
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And if God is both omnipotent and omniscient, then there is no reason why this would be occurring, since God automatically knows what everyone will do and if they will accept or reject Jesus prior to them doing so. If God is a perfect being, he has nothing to wait for, and can do whatever he wants now. And it’s not like he has to worry about sin, since he can just get rid of it. Thus we have a tension between what we know of God’s character and the fact that we clearly don’t see this being displayed.<br />
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This contradiction means that the Biblical God cannot exist, and Christianity is false.<br />
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<img alt="" height="214" src="http://www.greatplay.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/jesus_flying_saucer_-300x214.jpg" title="jesus_flying_saucer_" width="300" />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-31260985623542379572011-12-09T19:35:00.001-06:002011-12-09T19:42:37.241-06:00There Are No Religious Facts by Greatplay.net<br />
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"It seems that religious people can never agree on anything.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.6em; margin-top: 1.25em; text-align: left;">
Well perhaps they all agree on the notion that some sort of God exists, but the moment this God is given a single characteristic, disagreement ensues. For instance, how many gods are there? Many Hindus would say there are a wide variety of gods, many Wiccans would say there are two Gods, and many Christians would say there are only one."<br />
<a href="http://www.greatplay.net/essays/there-are-no-religious-facts">Go To Article</a></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-29454962314380354672011-11-23T10:40:00.001-06:002011-11-23T10:43:48.891-06:00The Armor of God, or, The Top One Reason Religion Is Harmful | Greta Christina's Blog"So what is it about religion — exactly — that’s so harmful?<br />
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I’ve argued many times that religion is not only mistaken, but does more harm than good. But why do I think that is?<br />
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Sure, I can make a list of specific harms religion has done, from here to Texas. I’ve done exactly that. But that’s not enough to make my case. I could make long lists of harms done by plenty of human institutions: medicine, education, democracy. That doesn’t make them inherently malevolent."<br />
<a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2009/11/25/armor-of-god/">Go To Article</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3414844345847156666.post-43964973085692681272011-11-08T21:47:00.002-06:002011-11-08T21:47:50.236-06:00Communicating Science: The Difference Between Science and Common Sense"<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 23px;">One of the strongest features of science is that it can correct our seriously flawed cognition and give us an unfiltered view of reality. Most people put a lot of faith into relying on common sense and intuition, but as any psychologist will tell you, this faith is misplaced."</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 23px;"><a href="http://sciencebasedlife.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/communicating-science-the-difference-between-science-and-common-sense/">Go To Article</a></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07163302778654874895noreply@blogger.com0