Tag Archives: Science

What Is Truth?

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I’m sceptical (or skeptical if you’re in the US). It’s a legacy of my years of believing the promises of Christianity. Preachers, pastors, Bible study leaders told me for 25 years that the promises of the bible, of Jesus himself, were all true. And like a fool I believed them. Jesus had made a new creature out of me; he loved me; he was guiding my life; he was returning soon; I’d be resurrected; I’d live in heaven forever… and on and on.

What a preposterous set of propositions! It took my Great Realisation, my own personal revelation that there was no God, to make me see how ridiculous they were.

It is this that left me with a legacy of scepticism. If I’d been misled all this time by people I respected and admired, what else was I accepting as true that very well might not be? I wasn’t going to be fooled again and so began to question practically everything I was told by authorities, experts and the media. If it seemed ‘off’, as we say these days, not quite right or too good (or bad) to be true I asked, ‘Who says so?’, ‘How do they know this?’, ‘What is the evidence?’, ‘Do they jump to conclusions or is their reasoning sound?’, ‘Why should I believe what they say?’ It’s exhausting, I assure you, having to search out the evidence – the primary sources of information – and to sift through it, recognising any bias that has been imposed on it. It’s either this or I must accept without question that everything I’m told is true. I can’t do that any more.

Here are a few examples of claims that I’ve been sceptical of on the recent past:

We are being guided by the science, said politicians during Covid to ensure compliance with whatever lockdown measures were being imposed. Did this really just mean was ‘we are being guided by our interpretation of some rather suspect data’? It became clear after we emerged from the hysteria surrounding the pandemic that this was the case.

Tens of thousands will die of Covid unless you comply: this based on computer predictions which turned out to be very far from accurate: the suspect data that ‘guided’ politicians.

A woman can have a penis. A man can have cervix. Yes, our politicians told us this during our recent fixation with transgenderism. Whatever you think of people changing sex, these two statements, designed to change hearts and minds, if not penises and cervixes, are patently false. Whatever was guiding those who said such things, it certainly wasn’t ‘the science’.

No more irresponsible, undeliverable promises. So said the Prime Minister exactly a year ago. I’m not going to be sceptical or cynical about this. I feel sure it’ll turn out to be true. Is he implying though that promises made earlier than this were indeed ‘irresponsible and undeliverable’. Surely not.

We will not raise taxes on working people (and energy prices will fall by £300 in the long term), Labour politicians, now the government, said only last year in an attempt to gain our votes. I was sceptical about this, as with much they said, and for the first time in many years Labour did not get my vote. Taxes have increased considerably for working people and everyone else in the last year and are set to rise again this week. The price of energy has risen too, by 18%, and will do so again in January. A £300 reduction by 2030, if it happens at all, is not really going to offset this by much. This was all very predictable; since when do politicians tell us the truth in order to get us to vote for them?

Anything Donald Trump says. Insert your selection here.

The NHS is the envy of the world. Pundits and politicians are very fond of this one. They like to add too that the NHS is underfunded. But the NHS is expensive, management heavy and wasteful. Is it really the envy of the world, and if it is, so what, when it’s constantly in crisis at home?

The BBC is the envy of the world. It is impartial and balanced. Is it? A number of independent reviews have determined that it has its own agendas and biases. During lockdowns it fuelled hysteria and now contributes to climate change panic. Rather than reporting facts, it tells us too often what we’re meant to think about issues. It has also been rocked over the past dozen years by sleaze and scandals.

Islam is a religion of peace. So many questions about this one. Many Western politicians have claimed something like it. President George W. Bush did, shortly after 9/11. Perhaps ordinary Muslims are committed to peace but there are many Islamists (the term now used for Muslim extremists) are evidently not: as well as 9/11 there have been acts of Islamist terrorism in London (7th July 2005), at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, in Manchester, the slaughter in the street of an off duty soldier, the massacre of Israeli young people in October 2023, the killing of Christians and others in Nigeria.. Is ‘Allahu Akbar’ really a cry of peace?

We can halt or reverse the climate changes we ourselves have caused. Can we? Who says? (Greta Thunberg, yes, but no actual scientists that I can find.) We can perhaps mitigate and slow down the change, and we should. But the climate will continue to change. Are these changes solely the fault of us humans – we’re contributing to the pace of change, certainly – when the climate has been in constant change from time immemorial?

I was accused of trying to be a maverick in a recent comment on an old post. Honestly, I’m not. It’s more a case of ‘once bitten, twice shy’; I’m not going to be told ever again what to think, especially not by those who don’t present good reasons why I should (I’ve Jesus to thank for this). Everything needs to be questioned, otherwise our minds are not our own. Be sceptical.

Two Ways of Knowing

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A Christian friend told me recently that there are two ways of knowing: science and faith. I don’t agree with him of course and, while I expressed my scepticism, I didn’t argue. It seemed unlikely he would change his mind.

Faith and science have different, incompatible concepts of reality. The first – and faith was first historically – is that there is an invisible realm beyond this one, populated by powerful beings who influence and manipulate the humans who live here below. This reality, though invisible and largely undetectable, is actually more real than the one we see around us. Glimpses have been had of it, however, by those finely attuned to it, in dreams, visions and messages delivered during heightened emotional states. These visionaries – prophets – then pass on to others what the beings of the hidden realm expect of them. Life is then to be lived according to the instructions so conveyed, which usually consist of attempts to appease these gods by doing their bidding. In return for this obsequience, you’re allowed to believe you will live on after death

The other epistemology – actually the only true epistemology in this instance – is empirical, knowledge-based science. A later arrival, historically speaking, than the gods of the invisible realm. The scientific method is the best tool we have for sifting knowledge from superstition and emotion. These, particularly the latter, often impede us in our pursuit of knowledge, which is why science strives to eliminate them from its investigations, taking an objective approach to evidence. Unfortunately, the findings of science are occasionally contradictory (can a man become a woman or not?) and very often misinterpreted by non-scientists. Politicians and the media frequently over-simplify science’s findings and interpret them in ways that suit their own agendas.

Then there are those who masquerade as scientists but are not. During the pandemic, the UK was locked down for almost two years on the basis of computer predictions of what might happen if certain conditions prevailed. These predictions were taken as a scientific conclusion when in fact they were hypotheses, which by their very nature, could not be tested. Needless to say, they turned out to be drastically wrong. Computer projections are not, in themselves, science.

Science, through its practical offspring, medicine and technology, has undoubtedly been a boon to humankind, in a way religion never has. It has also sometimes been a curse too, inflicting us with, amongst other things, an arsenal of ever deadlier weapons, the means of destroying the environment and Covid itself. Science is a tool and like any tool can be wielded both constructively and destructively.

So, perhaps the gods will save us from our own folly after all. If only they and their invisible realm existed. Alas (or thankfully) they don’t; there is zero evidence for them, and visions, dreams and wishful thinking as reliable means of knowing about them. We’re on our own. Science is the best hope we’ve got, our only sure-fire way of knowing. If only politicians and the media understood it more than they seem to.

Who Has Seen The Wind, Or Cause and Effect

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The first time I encountered this poem was when Yoko Ono intoned it, as only she could, on the B-side of John Lennon’s Instant Karma!, back in 1970.

I noticed at the time (because I always read such things, while playing the B-sides of singles) that the poem’s composer was someone called ‘Rossetti’. Back then I knew nothing about him or her. Years later, I came across Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite artist but it turned he didn’t write the poem either. His sister Christina did.

Christina Rossetti was profoundly religious. She set about helping fallen women: ‘fallen’ according to the sexual mores of the day. A number of these young girls may well have been ‘led into sin’ in the first place by her hell-raiser brother, Dante. Her poem Who Has Seen The Wind, written in 1847, is an allegory of the work of the Holy Ghost: as the wind itself can never be seen, only detected by its effects, so too the Holy Ghost can be sensed only by its invisible workings in the real world. It’s an old argument, hinted at in Psalm 19:1, which says the heavens declare the handiwork of the Lord. Modern versions of the argument exist, based on the philosophical assertion that every effect must have a cause, including one that equates God with a murderer, 

It’s a terrible idea in all its forms. First, we know the wind, and murderers too, exist. The wind can be measured and the processes involved in creating winds of various strengths are well understood. Likewise murderers (as tempting as it is to equate God with a callous killer.) The inference that the cause of any given effect must be supernatural – a Ghost, a god, an angel – is mere primitive instinct. Even more unjustifiable is the leap that says this supernatural cause is The First Cause, which itself has no cause. A further leap into the absurd is the assumption that this uncaused First Cause is a God who was first imagined by middle-eastern tribesmen and later reshaped by early Christians and the church.

Which brings us to God: The Science, the Evidence, a new book by a Christian scientist, Olivier Bonnassies and industrialist Michel-Yves Bolloré, proposing that because we don’t fully understand how the universe came into being, it must have been God. Bonnasaries explains how they arrived at this conclusion:

It’s the fact that this (piece of paper) exists. And that because it exists, it needs a cause, and that (cause) needs another cause, and at the end, you need what we call a primary cause in order that everything exists. Because nothing can exist by itself.

Except, apparently, that cause designated, without evidence, the First Cause: God.

It is this, Bonnasaries and Bolloré claim as a scientific hypothesis. Bonnasaries must surely know as scientist that it is far from scientific. ‘God did it’ is a conclusion, arrived at without evidence; there is nothing observable, testable or measurable about it. It is philosophical conjecture at best, theology at worst. Christina Rossetti put it so much better, all those years ago (but still she got it wrong).

 

Pest Control

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I used to pride myself on how patient I could be. I’m finding recently however that I’m becoming far less so. Not with everyone, I hasten to add, but with religionists, Evangelical Christians in particular.

As I mentioned last time, they have infested my Facebook feed with their inane Jesus-Loves-You Amen BS and now I find they’ve practically taken over a science page I occasionally read called From Quarks and Quasars, a sometimes sensationalist site that collects together science posts from other legitimate sources. It recently published an item called ‘Earth Was Once Entirely A Water World, New Research Shows’, prompting 5.2k comments. Many of these were from cranks trying to show how the finding verifies the biblical flood story, despite the fact the article makes it clear it is talking about something that occurred 3-4 billion years ago. Certified genius Dennis Mears offers this comment (all grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors in the original):

Of coarse it was !! but we don’t need “ new research “ to know what every culture on earth has talked about in their history for thousands of years . We can simply read genesis and learn about it in detail

while Scotty Johnson wades in (pun intended) with:

It’s called the flood, it’s recorded in Genesis in the Bible, Noah and the Ark, kids have been learning about it in Sunday School for years. Scientists should study the Bible first, maybe they wouldn’t be surprised when they discover something.

It’s down to astute reader Gene Steiner, catching the original article’s reference to 3-4 billion years, to correct it:

(In) Genesis 7:24 the great flood covered the whole earth, even the highest mountains; and the waters remained on the earth for 150 days…. Not billions of years ago, but 4500 or so years ago during the NOAHIC GLOBAL FLOOD! We knew that all the time!

This is the line subsequent commenters take up until we get to Tobie Schalkwyk, who offers the insight that the water-covered Earth is the same as mentioned in Genesis 1:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And on it goes for thousands more comments. The photo at the top of this post was also shoved on somewhere along the line.

It is the purveyors of this sort of crap that I no longer have any patience for. I want to call them out for their tomfoolery. It’s the same with commenters (Arnold and Don on this blog, Marley1312/Aussiestockman on Gary’s, Revival Fires on Bruce’s) who think atheist sites exist only to provide a forum for their brainless theobabble and Bible-bashing. They can’t be argued with, such is the depth of their ignorance and need to inject Jesus into everything. They bring out the worst in me: snark, bad language and name calling (as you can tell from this very post). I don’t want to stoop to this level, nor is it good for my blood pressure, and so feel compelled to leave them to it. I avoid reading comments and sometimes actually abandon sites I like to read because of the infestations of religious gobbledegook.

I know it infuriates some of you too, but what to do? Let the epidemic spread or resist it? What do you advise?

Back by unpopular demand – it’s the New Year Pop Quiz!

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All set? Here we go!

1. Which one of these fantasy figures actually exists?

2. For which one of these ideas is there refutable/verifiable, corroborative scientific evidence?

3. Which one of these events is demonstrably historical?

4. Which one of these phenomena is verified and corroborated by psychology?

5. Applying logic and reasoning, which of the following scenarios is most likely to be true:

6. Which of these statements is verifiably true?

Answers:

Question 1. The answer is none of them, though C, Donald Trump, comes closest. 10 points if you put C, none if you plumped for any of the others: despite the volumes written about them there isn’t an iota of  evidence that they exist.

Question 2. Award yourself 10 points for B, though if you’re a True Believer this is the only one you think isn’t true. There is an abundance of refutable/verifiable, corroborative scientific evidence that it is. You can only wish there were for the other three.

Question 3. A is correct – 10 points. There is a considerable amount of evidence that the moon landing occurred on 20th July 1969. There is absolutely none at all that the other three are historical. For the sake of argument, let’s say they’re mythical. Nul points if you think otherwise.

Question 4. The answer is all of them. Oh no, wait… that’s my cognitive dissonance speaking. D is the only one of those listed recognised by psychologists. My bad and 10 points to you.

Question 5. The answer is of course E. Award yourself another 10 points if you thought outside the box on this one. (You can also have 10 points if you said they’re all equally likely, as in ‘not at all’.)

Question 6. 10 points for D. 

Scores: 

If you scored 50 or more, congratulations! If you scored nothing at all, you are confirmation that question 6’s answer – D. Human beings are capable of believing just about anything – is true. Well done.

A happy new year to you all.

 

 

The Inflationary Vacuum

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Not a simulation, not created by a God: so how did the universe come to be? Can something arise naturally from nothing, after all? Many scientists think so, but not because a god overturned the idea that something cannot come from nothing. They also answer the related question of why there is something rather than nothing.

I’m not going to reiterate their explanation here, as you can read a summary for yourself (I’ve linked to a simple one for the sceptical among us and of course the diagram above makes it all clear.) Suffice to say, the theory demonstrates that ‘something’ came about when quantum particles popped into existence from nothing. We know they are capable of doing this, making them the Uncaused Cause. These particles led to ‘a chunk of inflationary vacuum’, from which, everything else arose..  

And no, Don, unless he’s ‘a chunk of inflationary vacuum’, this is not your God. Nor did he conjure up the chunk .Before it appeared at the quantum level there was, according to this scientific theory, nothing: no God, nothing.

Slippin’ and Slidin’

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Recycled picture, new post

I’ve written before about how impossible it is to argue with Christians. It’s either that they have superior knowledge because an invisible ghost possesses them and is guiding them towards truths that non-believers can’t possibly perceive. Or it’s that the supernatural just cannot be understood in an evidential, naturalistic way. Science and empiricism – what we can detect with our own eyes, with specialist equipment that serves as an extension of those eyes or that can be mathematically demonstrated – just cannot detect, perceive or understand the supernatural. Gary Matson is currently experiencing this on Escaping Christian Fundamentalism, where a Catholic Christian (an oxymoron to many other religionists) is arguing that the things he believes in – hell specifically and his God generally – are just too sophisticated for the ignorant layman to understand. We’ve met this before too, from pseudo-intellectual Christians who think their faith, which its supposed founder said was best understood by becoming like a child, requires a degree or three in theology or philosophy.

It’s all a sleight of hand, and rather like wrestling with a jelly-fish. The assertion that the believer in the supernatural makes, that his or her particular brand of woo lies outside the purview of science, is mere flannel. ‘You can’t prove this because you haven’t the tools to’, applies to any form of magical belief – in heaven and hell, in an afterlife, in ghosts, and angels, gods who speak to mortals, mystical saints, flying horses, reptilian overlords, UFO abductions… you name it – does not stand up to scrutiny. If supernatural entities and states are outside the natural universe (and they are, by definition) then they will never be detected by science, observation and empirical measurement; but not because our means of detection is inadequate, but because they don’t exist. It isn’t that they are out there somewhere, detectable only with the right frame of mind or with the help of a spirit that itself has no physical presence; they are nowhere; they are not real. It is not the inadequacy of our means of detection that is at fault; it is that the invisible, non-physical and intangible have no substance outside the human imagination. As I’ve said before, remove human imagination from the equation and the supernatural goes with it. If humans were to become extinct tomorrow, so too would all the magical beings and places that humans have ever conjured up. They have no  existence independent of the human imagination.

Arguing that this isn’t so is to assume your conclusion in your premise: ‘Of course supernatural things exist, you just can’t see them. But I can prove them with my argument/philosophy/faith’. This, however, is a demonstration of irrationality, not of the supernatural. In any case, the fact the supernatural has to be argued for at all is evidence that it doesn’t exist. Nothing real has to be argued for, it can be detected, shown, demonstrated and measured by the senses, by instruments, by mathematical proofs. That gods and ghosts can’t be, but have to be argued for, tells us they are not real – not that they are beyond the scope of our capabilities.

Covid+Science

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Science created Covid-19. Or at least scientists did. The evidence is conclusive, being laid out in Failures Of State published in April 2021 by investigative journalists Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott. In short, the virus was first detected about ten years ago in caves in south China after it had killed several miners. Scientists from Wuhan collected samples of the virus from bat guano in the caves. They returned to their lab where, after an initial investigation, they froze the virus until 2019 when they revived it and began experimenting on it, ostensibly to develop a vaccine effective against SARS-CoV2 viruses. They undoubtedly altered the virus at this point, adding the element that has been recognised as being engineered. They also allowed it to escape. This was probably not intentional; pathogens regularly escape from laboratories all around the world. We now know this is the most likely scenario for the origin of Covid-19.

Science propelled us into lockdowns and restrictions. Strictly speaking, the worst case predictions of scientific modellers propelled the world’s politicians into panic mode and, in consequence, populations into lockdowns. Whether data analysis, number crunching and computer projections can be properly defined as science is a moot point, but those involved in this work regard it as such, as do the politicians who act on modellers’ advice. They have been wrong more than they have been right.

Science is helping us out of the pandemic. The vaccine has reduced the number of cases of Covid and its variants. It is not as effective as was originally predicted, three inoculations providing only about five months’ protection. We can only hope that this is sufficient to get us though the next few weeks by which time it may be that the virus will have run its course. We know from previous pandemics that they last about two to three years, after which they become endemic (though naturally scientists are arguing about the meaning of this term). In other words, we will to have to learn to live with a (hopefully) weakened virus.

We must also be more cautious about science and scientists. Science is a tool that humans use to understand the world. It is a good tool, but it is only as reliable as those who use it; scientists who, like all other humans, make mistakes (lab leaks), have biases (towards worst case scenarios) and agendas (predictions of doom, profit, panaceas.) Science sits uneasily on a pedestal.

 

God: Probably Not

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As God-botherers everywhere are fond of telling us, we can’t prove that God doesn’t exist. Of course, no negative can ever be proven. My own conviction that there isn’t a God does not rely on ‘proof’, but on the probability that he doesn’t. Perhaps this is the same as Christians’ own dismissal of Zeus and Krishna as real beings; if they think about such things, that is. So what is the probability that God does not exist? My next couple of posts will look at my reasons for concluding that the likelihood of the Christian God existing is ridiculously low. Some of these reasons have developed from my reading of the last thirty odd years, others from my own thinking about the subject. Both are now so intertwined I don’t know exactly which is which. You’ll have encountered some of what I’ve got to say in other posts on this blog but it seems worthwhile put all my arguments in one place.

So, reason one: God explains nothing. He isn’t required to explain the Big Bang, evolution, human psychology, germ theory, viral pandemics or anything else that science explains with far greater proficiency and conviction. At best, the god concept has atrophied into a god-of-the-gaps desperation. Science doesn’t know how life began, goes the ‘reasoning’, therefore it can only have been God. This explains nothing, merely adding an unnecessary element into the equation; Occam’s Razor demands we remove any such elements from our arguments and attributing life to an unknown supernatural agent is just such a redundancy. I’m confident that science will one day answer the question of how life started, but even if it that were never to happen, the answer would not be, as if by magical default, God.

Two: the more characteristics we attribute to God, the less likely it is that he exists. Let’s say, by way of analogy, that I’ve put myself on a dating app to look for a new partner. To start with I specify that all this partner needs is a good sense of humour. Then I wonder if this is enough. Wouldn’t they also have to be within my preferred age group? Of course. I’ve already narrowed my chances of finding my ideal person. So I think I may as well go for it: I want someone who’s good looking too, with a place of their own, within travelling distance of where I live and with interests similar to my own, including a passion for the ukulele. The likelihood of my finding this person is pretty remote. The probability they actually exist, with all the attributes I want, is equally unlikely.

So it is with God. If he were only the creator of the universe he would be unlikely enough (because of reason 1 above) but that’s not all that is required of him. He has to be also a God that is interested in his creation, and not only interested but intimately involved with certain aspects of it, humans particularly. He is now beginning to recede from the possible into the margins of the improbable. But then it’s claimed that in addition to being the creator of everything and a micromanager to boot, he’s also ephemeral and unknowable. He’s simultaneously loving and a severe judge. He’s both omniscient and omnipotent (this last doesn’t follow from his being the creator; it’s a separate attribute). He’s a god of reason and yet only satisfied by blood sacrifice. And on and on, well beyond the bounds of probability and into the realms of the impossible, like my hypothetical ideal mate. God as envisaged by Christians (and others) is an impossibility.

To be continued.

Theoidiocy

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Blog401a

Theodicy – how to square suffering with an all powerful, loving God. A meme doing the rounds neatly summarises the four possibilities as applied to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Here it is and here they are:

Blog401

Assuming God exists and given his apparent indifference/inaction during the current crisis (not to mention numerous previous ones) these are really the only four options. However, if

  • he is unaware Covid-19 is happening then he’s not omniscient
  • he is aware of it but is unwilling to stop it then he’s not all loving
  • he is aware of it but is unable to stop it then he’s not all powerful
  • he deliberately caused (or allowed it) it then he’s nothing but a complete and utter bastard

Oh wait – turns out there’s a fifth option! (Pause while we phone a friend.)

So that’s it – God doesn’t exist, which is why we see him doing f**k all in this and every other calamity we’ve ever faced.

As for me, I’ll put my trust in science. Already those damn scientists with their ‘man’s ideas’ (©Ken Ham) have started solving the problem. No need then to rely on an imaginary, non-existent friend. Thank God for that.