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"The earth is flat, and anyone who disputes this claim is an atheist who deserves to be punished." - Muslim religious edict, 1993, by Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, supreme religious authority, Saudi Arabia
Below are essays I've written on rationalism and politics, about the conflict between science and religion on social issues.
My main essays, on the central themes I talk about, the interrelation of politics, economics and automation, are on my economics page. Essays on how to reform liberalism so liberals win elections again, along with some miscellaneous political essays, are on my politics page. Essays on the technological Singularity (the hypothesized upcoming tremendous speed-up in the rate of technological progress) and its relation to leftist economics are on my Singularity page. My futurology pagealso has plenty of political overtones.
Technology, Science and Morality, in which I show that, ironically, cold, amoral science and technology foster morality, when religion, which is supposed to be all about morality, never does.
Why the So-Called "Pro-Lifers" are Anti-Life.
Technology and Sexuality, a novel way of looking at sexual and reproductive issues that I've never heard elsewhere.
The Great Unknown, debunking the common misconception that atheists deny anything beyond currently-known science.
Stupid Design, my suggestion for the best way to combat "Intelligent Design", creationists' latest attempt to get their fairy tales taught in schools as science.
How To Wipe All Religion Off the Face of the Earth in 10 Days Or Less. Just kidding. (I think.)
(written in 2005)
Rationalism is the belief in the scientific method, and the lack of belief in anything mystical, which by definition lacks any evidence. (If there were evidence, it would be scientific, not mystical.)
Science and technology can offer anything that people get out of religion and mysticism. As Carl Sagan pointed out throughout his writings, science can provide a sense of awe and of the numinous, far greater when contemplating our wondrous universe, billions of years old and billions of light-years across, than fundamentalists can get with their pathetic earth-centered universe just thousands of years old. Once, a religious friend said it's a shame that I, as an atheist, cannot appreciate the wonder of God's creation. I replied that it's a shame that he, as a religious person, cannot appreciate the wonder of the universe that science has unveiled. The leaf of a fern, the spiral of a galaxy, the formation of an embryo, the tree of life on earth -- the fact that it all came about by itself, with no all-powerful conscious being creating it -- that is what's TRULY wondrous. (The banana tree I sit under as I write this is an actual relative of mine, a VERY distant cousin, if you go back 1.5 billion years in our family tree to our common ancestor, and we share 50% of the same genes. Now that's what I call wondrous.) With religion, it's just a given that God can do anything - ho hum. Anything in the universe, God could have done infinitely better, in fact.
Science and technology can also offer purpose and meaning in life: the endless quest for knowledge, and the endless improvement of the human condition that technology can bring. Hopefully, science and technology will even eventually provide what is probably the most important thing that religion pretends to provide: immortality (hopefully in the not-too-distant future -- especially while I am still alive!). See my essay on the Singularity for the reasoning on why we might achieve immortality far sooner than most people would ever believe. The irony is that most people would scoff at the idea that medical science will ever reach that point, and yet believe without doubt that there's an infinitely intelligent being up in the sky, and that people will fly around in the clouds in some paradise after they die, with harps and wings and halos. Their skepticism finally kicks in at just the wrong time! Now, which one of those 2 is the most likely? Even more ironic, and tragic, is that because so many people are lulled into a false sense of hope by religion, research into stopping the aging process gets little support. If there were no religion, I'd be willing to bet that we'd be spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on research into life prolongation, because there would be great numbers of people terrified at the idea of dying who would support such research.
The evidence shows that science and technology even foster morality, and that religion has never done so. Since the Bible and other religious texts were written in a brutal era thousands of years ago, and approve of such things as slavery and raping and pillaging, following those texts only encourages a return to that era's brutal values. Religion has given the world as much mayhem as tranquility, and has only provided a rationalization to both tyrants and people of good will to act the ways they would have done anyway.
Ironically, it is cold, amoral science and technology that has fostered morality, since only people with full stomachs have the luxury of acting morally, and desperate people do not have that luxury. Irrationalism only decreases support for science and technology, therefore slows the improvements they bring and keeps the world from becoming a better place. Like any placebo, it works, but discourages a search for the real cure. Ironically, though religion talks a lot about morality, it surely must slow the progress in morality that has come from technology. While religions have existed for thousands of years, there was no moral progress until the last century or two, when slavery, raping and pillaging, genocide and racism were considered to be wrong by almost all people for the first time in history. (Even I can remember when people thought nothing of westerns that glorified the genocide of Native Americans, and overt racism was considered acceptable in the southern US as late as the 1960s, and South Africa the 1990s.) Christianity, for instance, has been around for 2000 years, and Christians claim that their religion is a force for moral improvement in the world. If so, then what was it busy doing its first 1800 or 1900 years?? For instance, most Christians today want to forget the fact that while small groups of Christians were anti-slavery before the Civil War, the vast majority were pro-slavery. And the most pious tended to be the most pro-slavery. That continues today, for the Bible Belt contains the most reactionary people with thinly-veiled bigotry, who favor an economic system little different than slavery. Considering that the advances in the last century or two occurred just when science and technology became a major force in the world, the evidence plainly shows that this moral improvement came about as a result of science and technology, and not religion. If that weren't enough evidence, consider that the areas of the world that are most religious, especially the Middle East, are just where the most mayhem occurs. The same is true within the US, where the Bible Belt has the lowest social indicators in the country: crime, divorce, poverty. Consider the history of religious wars and inspeakably brutal inquisitions that occurred whenever religion was given a free reign. Before the last century or two, such things as genocide and slavery were just considered a fact of life, and anyone who wished to rid the world of them, before it was economically feasible, would have been laughed at as impractical dreamers.
Many people with little knowledge of what life was like in previous centuries think that the 20th Century was the worst one in history, when in fact it was the best. Ironically, the Holocaust and other horrors of the 20th Century first stand out because they were the exceptions to the rule for the first time in history. Previous centuries were practically wall-to-wall holocausts.
Today, progress in morality continues. It is only recently that human rights have expanded to everyone, and now growing numbers of people are even going on to advocate animal rights. In the past, people viewed war as glorious and exciting (probably because their daily lives were so awful and boring, in a time before widespread travel and entertainment, that war was the most interesting experience people ever had in their lives), but now, for the first time in history, people generally think of war as a bad thing.
I should add, however, that when it comes to the growing world threat of fundamentalist religion, I am anything but a pacifist. As comedian Bill Maher so perfectly put it, "People should be tolerant, but not so tolerant that they are even tolerant of intolerance." Instead, we had the specter of stupid leftists even coming out against the US war against the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9-11, when the Taliban, which put every woman in the country under house arrest, literally ripped their fingernails out if they were caught wearing nail polish, and executed people for the crime of listening to music, was far beyond their worst nightmares. While people have become less warlike, technology increasingly allows small numbers of people to kill vast numbers of people. Due to the increasing efficiency of killing, we simply cannot have religious crazies out of the 8th Century running around in our modern world. Just as the 20th Century eliminated fascism and communism, so in the 21st Century, the next ism we will simply have to eliminate is religious fundamentalism. If we don't, we'll never make it to the 22nd Century.
Notice, by the way, that I have repeatedly talked about morality here, and yet I've only talked about genocide, slavery, war, raping and pillaging, etc., that you almost never hear religious fundamentalists talk about, even though they claim to be the moral ones. They are too busy obsessing about laughable trivial matters of who is voluntarily putting which body part where into who else, that has nothing to do with morality, to care about REAL moral issues. In fact, I suspect it is no coincidence that they divert people's attention from real moral issues to their phony ones. They do so because they are the immoral ones, and religious fundamentalism is a great way to act immorally, in the ways of our barbaric past, while hiding under the cover of their phony "morality". Notice how many prominent religious fundamentalists, such as televangelists, turn out to be sleazy money-grubbing creeps who were secretly involved with all sorts of sexual escapades, drugs, etc., and how conservative politicians and businessmen are pathologically greedy, in direct violation of the religion they claim to believe in.
Religious people claim that morality is a subject outside the realm of science, that only religion has something to say about, but that's not so. Where do our moral feelings come from? Religious people claim they come from God, and therefore, we need religion in order for people to be moral. (I suppose they think that when we atheists are moral anyway, it's because God is still instructing us to be that way, even if we don't know it.) In fact, our moral feelings come from within ourselves -- from our genes, which constructed our brains to have such feelings because they increased the probability that our genes would spread. That's why, to religious people's surprise, atheists tend to act as moral as any other people. Those instincts came from our evolutionary past. The real reason for them is that they passed on our genes the most during the 99% of human history that we were primitive people living in tribes, battling against other tribes, so those genes are the ones that came to predominate. Even seemingly selfless behaviors such as reciprocity increased gene survival when we lived in small tribes, and everyone knew each others' reputations and could retaliate if they took more than they gave. Though we no longer live in small tribes where we know each other personally, we haven't lived in the modern world long enough for it to have affected our genetic makeup yet. Besides, in the anonymous modern world we have constructed information networks that tell people's reputations, such as credit histories, and sellers' reputations on eBay.
We humans go by our gut instincts of what seems the right thing to do, just as animals do. We have greater cognitive abilities, so can look at the bigger picture than animals can, weigh more complicated sets of options and their effects against each other in making our moral decisions, and see cases where "if everyone did it, out of their own immediate self-interest, it would lead to everyone's collective doom". But why, for instance, do we feel that collective doom is bad? Underneath that new-fangled cognitive level are those old gut instincts, telling us what's good and bad, just as with animals. We have no idea why they're good and bad, they just are. The real reason they are is because our genes built us to feel that way.
What is really ironic is that while religious fundamentalists are against evolution and claim that humans are fundamentally different from animals, it is their attitudes on sexual and reproductive and other issues that favor having humans act no differently than animals. Animals unknowingly act in ways that create as many copies of their genes as possible. And that is precisely what conservatives want people to do: Only engaging in forms of sex that lead to pregnancy, and being against contraception and abortion, so women will have as many babies as possible. Having women only produce babies, and do nothing else with their lives, to maximize the production of babies. Monogamy, because the men in control want to be sure their women pass on their genes, not any other man's. Passing money down through the generations in inheritances to maximize the future success of their own genes, as opposed to improving society in general. Continually warring with other "tribes" (now called countries) for supremacy, just as people did throughout the 99% of our history when we lived in tribes that were genetically related, and warred with other tribes in order to increase our turf at other tribes' expense and (though no one was doing so for conscious reasons) thereby spread our genes. It's no accident that right-wingers use terms of genetic kinship to talk people into going to war, such as the motherland or the fatherland, and patriotism, from the Latin word for father. and nationalism, from the Latin word for giving birth. (It's no accident, either, when left-wingers counter with phrases such as "universal brotherhood" and "the human family", pushing people's evolutionary emotional buttons in the same way, but for opposite purposes, by expanding their metaphorical "family" from a single country, as right-wingers do, to all humans.)
Conservative "moral" thought is nothing more than a reversion to those less-moral barbaric primitive times when people were too desperate to be moral, rarely looked at the big picture, and followed their immediate gut instincts. In primitive tribes, people loved others within the tribe because they were genetically related and had copies of the same genes, hated other tribes and continually fought them, bred as much as possible to make as many copies of those genes as possible, and out-breed other tribes in order to spread outward. And there you have conservative ideology in a nutshell. Unthinkingly spread your genes as much as possible, just like stupid animals do -- that is the essence of conservative philosophy. But as Richard Dawkins said at the end of his famous book "The Selfish Gene", we are not our genes. Our genes created us, but we, as conscious beings, have become separate entities, no longer necessarily with the same interests. It is in our genes' interest to create as many copies as possible, in order to continue to exist, but it is not in our best interest. Continually warring with each other is not in our best interest. Allowing a small bunch of billionaires to hoard all the wealth being created by our increasing technology, rather than all of humanity benefiting from technological advance, is not in our best interest. Having loads of children that we must struggle individually to support is not in our best interest. Overpopulation is not in our collective best interest, even though our genes "want" to make as many copies as possible. Our best interest, as conscious beings, is to enjoy our existence.
(written in 2005)
Why is it that the so-called "Pro-Lifers" believe that humans have souls? It must be because of the inexplicable mystery that, unlike rocks and trees, although we humans are mere physical objects, we possess awareness of our own existence and the world around us, or consciousness, and are capable of suffering and pleasure. Although I am an atheist, I'm perfectly willing to call those centers of consciousness "souls". The best explanation science has for them is that though they are not mystical, they are immaterial just as religious people think they are. They consist of information, which is immaterial, even though information consists of patterns in matter and energy. The patterns can remain even if they transfer over into other clumps of matter and energy, so that even though they are dependent on SOME clump of matter and energy or other to support them, they are separate from it. Materialists claim that when something that stores and processes information reaches some threshold of complexity, it becomes conscious. While that seems like a partial explanation, it doesn't satisfy me that it is the whole explanation. It may explain why we are conscious of what we are, but not why we are conscious at all. It doesn't explain WHY something is conscious when it reaches that threshold. There is what philosophers call the Zombie problem, that there seems to be no reason why there couldn't be a zombie, or robot, that did everything we do, that walked and talked and reacted to stimuli, and yet did so mechanically, just as our brains surely do, but without any awareness of any of it. When you think about it, for that reason, consciousness seems completely superfluous, since our nerve cells would be controling our bodies just as well even if we had no awareness of any of it. Philosopher Daniel Dennett even wrote a fascinating book called "Consciousness Explained", but I'm not the first one to charge that about the only thing the book didn't explain was consciousness. It's entirely possible that science will never be able to answer all ultimate questions (such as: Why does ANYTHING exist?), and consciousness may be one of them. If religious people want to call that mystical, that's fine with me.
But now notice something really weird. The idea of souls started out because we humans are conscious. And yet when you listen to the so-called "Pro-Lifers", it seems like souls have little if anything to do with consciousness. After all, they insist that fertilized human egg cells have souls the moment they are fertilized, yet fertilized egg cells are no more conscious than an amoeba. (That idea that egg cells get souls at the moment of conception can easily be disproved, by the way, since if that original cell happens to separate into 2 cells when it splits, it results in identical twins, which have 2 souls. The seemingly-inexplicable vehemence of theirs against cloning is surely in part because it would bring the absurdity of their philosophy even more into the open, since every cell in our bodies could potentially suddenly have souls. The act of cloning would obviously be creating new souls -- now don't religious people think that only God can do that?) At the same time, animals such as chimpanzees and cats are clearly conscious, and capable of pleasure and suffering, even if their consciousnesses are limited compared to ours, and perhaps comparable to a human with a stroke who loses the ability for language. Yet though animals are conscious, "Pro-Lifers" usually claim that they have no souls. So what's going on here? What's going on is that "Pro-Lifers" have seriously lost their way philosophically, somewhere along the line. Somehow they've wound up with a philosophy almost exactly the opposite of the common-sense philosophy they started out with, that makes no sense at all!
It seems that where they lost their way was in their insistance that souls are an all-or-nothing phenomenon. This is also clearly against common sense. Souls are centers of consciousness, and yet consciousness comes in all degrees. Animals could be ranked in order of how conscious they are, all the way from bacteria to humans, and their consciousnesses come in a steadily-increasing spectrum of degrees. Babies, as they develop, both before birth and after, become increasingly conscious. People with brain damage come in a decreasingly conscious range. Since "Pro-Lifers" think in black and white and allow no shades of gray, they must go to comic lengths to maintain their laughable philosophy despite common sense. They must extend their idea of souls from the "moment" of conception to the "moment" of death (even though another problem with their philosophy is that neither of those "moments" is a actually a moment, lasting zero time, but are fuzzy processes taking hours). And if souls are all-or-nothing, what to do about whether or not our ancestors had souls, going back all the way back to our ape-like ancestors, and to the origin of life on earth? Since all of life on earth is a gradually-changing continuum, yet they claim there are no shades of gray, there is no place to draw the line between black and white -- so must we then claim, as we work our way backward down the evolutionary tree, that even bacteria and plants have souls? Most religious people draw another phony line, and claim that evolution never happened, despite mountains of evidence that it did, that grow by the day. Yet even that doesn't help them any. You can think of the mathematical space of all possible genomes -- all possible combinations of our 3 billion nucleotides, each of which comes in 4 possibilities: A, C, G or T. There is no single human genome. All humans (except identical twins) have slightly different genomes, so they form a cloud of points in that mathematical space. Then off to the side, about 20 times as far away as the human cloud is wide, is the chimp cloud. Imagine a series of fetuses stretching in a line all the way from the edge of the human cloud to the edge of the chimp cloud, and then beyond, all the way to amoebas, each one differing from the last by only a single nucleotide. At what point does it suddenly go from "human" to "non-human", and can be aborted? Shades of gray again. So here's already one way that so-called "Pro-Lifers" are actually anti-life. They are anti any life that isn't human, even when it is conscious, and capable of suffering. All this to shore up a philosophy that goes against what is so obvious, that consciousness isn't all-or-nothing.
So we "Pro-Choice" people aren't the immoral ones. We are more moral than the "Pro-Lifers", because we base our philosophy on what really matters: CONSCIOUS life, not just life. Most "Pro-Choicers" agree that as a baby approaches the point of being ready to be born, it (gradually!) becomes close enough to a newborn baby that killing it would amount to infanticide, even before it is born. (In cases where the mother's life is in danger, however, the doctor should have the only say in whether the baby should be killed to save the mother. Since the mother is more conscious than the baby, she gets preference. Passing a law that abortion is only legal in case of the life of the mother is for all practical purposes making it illegal even then, since few doctors are going to save women's lives if they know that their decisions might later be judged in court, and they might be thrown in jail for murder if judges, who don't even have the qualifications to decide, decide the opposite way that they did.)
"Pro-Choicers" are also the moral ones because they tend to be pro-animal rights, at least for "higher" animals that are clearly conscious, while religious fundamentalists tend to be against amimal rights. While we should not expect to find a definite place to draw the line, still, any pet owners would surely put cats and dogs over the line, and I've read that pigs are supposed to be equally intelligent (which is why I finally, reluctantly gave up eating pork, despite loving it). On the other hand, horses and cows and chickens, in my limited personal experience, seem to be monumentally stupid, and clearly below the line, although I know that horse-lovers would disagree. While I'm sure that they are capable of suffering when injured, their consciousnesses seem so dim that the idea of killing them swiftly and painlessly, as is supposed to happen in the industry that raises them for food, does not trouble me. Horses and cows seem to spend their lives in a state of "bored indifference", as Daniel Dennett so aptly described it.
Few Americans even realize just how lunatic and extreme the so-called "Pro-Lifers" are, because they don't usually reveal their complete philosophy to the general public, in an attempt to sound reasonable. There is some government group called the President's Council on Bioethics, and Bush appointed as chairman someone named Leon Kass, who is as extreme and loony as they come. He has gone on record as saying that medical science should not have as its goal to lengthen lives, or potentially even cure the aging process and make human lifespans indefinitely long, because that would only delay people from "meeting their maker", and getting their reward for good behavior in heaven, or their punishment for bad behavior in hell. That attitude is actually horrifyingly widespread, despite people's supposed survival instinct. I have met numerous people who say that curing the aging process would be "against God's plan", and artificial. (That is an example of the Naturalistic Fallacy that the vast majority of people seem to believe in nowadays, that natural automatically = good and artificial = bad. This despite the fact that "natural" is dying in infancy and getting polio and tapeworms and being covered head to toe with mosquito bites, and other such wonderful things.) In a way this is nothing new, but few Americans know about how religious fundamentalists fought earlier battles in previous centuries against such now-noncontroversial things as giving women anesthetics during childbirth (because the Bible says that God made childbirth painful as punishment for eating the apple in the Garden of Eden, so eliminating that pain would be against God's plan. Strangely enough, though the rich, the Republican base, are now exempt from God's other punishment doled out then, of people having to work in order to eat, I never hear conservatives complain that that is against God's will. They'll only complain if, thanks to artificial intelligence, the rest of us don't have to work in a few decades.)
So the final irony is that, while few Americans are aware of it, the so-called "Pro-Lifers" are actually very anti-life, even conscious human life. And that is why I've kept calling them "so-called".
One wonders why religious people claim to be fervently pro-life, meaning our physical bodies, when their whole philosophy is supposed to be that our souls are what's important, and our physical bodies are superfluous, just something we will shed when we die, because they think the soul lives on without them. They are against the pleasures our physical bodies when it comes to sex. Why are they even against murder, if they believe that our souls continue on anyway? Wouldn't murdering people rush them to their just eternal reward or punishment that much sooner? But then, religion is a gigantic mess of preposterous contradictions, so why should this instance be surprising? We atheists are the ones who are pro-life, both when it comes to our physical bodies and our souls, which cannot exist without bodies of some sort. We are the ones who know just how precious this life is, because it's the only existence we've got.
(written in 2002)
As far as sexuality, as with all other aspects of human life, technology is the only thing that has a major effect on people, and on history. Behind conservatives' arguments about sexual and reproductive issues is a fundamental ignorance of the history of sexuality, of the implications of that history, and of the effect technology has had upon that history. Conservatives talk about restoring "traditional values", apparently unaware that some of the values they advocate are entirely new, that some truly traditional values would shock them more than hippies advocating free love, and that others, while truly traditional, are just bits and pieces of a whole way of life that formed a coherent system, and that could not work if restored piecemeal. The whole system would have to be restored, and that is impossible without our society going back to the technology of the 18th century or earlier. All the sermons in the world promoting abstinence are wasted breath.
Most people are probably familiar with the observation that a combination of contraceptives and cures of the sexually transmitted diseases commonly around at the time unleashed the Sexual Revolution in the '60's. Also, that the divorce rate keeps rising because people are living longer due to improved medical care, so that marriages that might have lasted a lifetime before no longer do. My understanding about the effects of technology on sexuality goes far beyond these two observations. Basically, the Industrial Revolution enabled us to provide for our every need, except for sex, which just the opposite, used to be the one need people had no problem fulfilling, but now is the only one that is problematic. In providing for all our other needs, we changed society to be out of harmony with our sexual needs. That is one bad effect of technology that even modern-day Luddites don't seem to have noticed.
Before the Industrial Revolution, children matured both sexually and economically at almost the same time. There wasn't even the concept of adolescence, the period when people have matured biologically yet are still dependent on their parents, until the 1800's, for until then, no such period existed. Before the Agricultural Revolution, children could learn all they needed to know to survive on their own, hunting and gathering, by the time they reached puberty around age 13. During the Agricultural Age, there began to be more things to know as society became a bit more complicated, and the age of economic independence edged up to around 16, but that was still a manageable gap. During the Industrial Age, that age went up to 18, then 21. Now, the age of economic independence is rising through the 20's, lower for the poor, who take less complicated jobs, higher for the rich. Additionally, with improved nutrition, the average age of onset of puberty has fallen a few years. It is true, as many people say, that children today know so much more than their parents did at that age (typically, 3-year-olds are better at using computers than their parents, who are afraid to even touch them), but the amount they will need to know is rising even more quickly. By the time they need to know, there will be new technologies that leave them in the dust even more than computers have done to their parents. Before the Industrial Revolution, people were married and had children soon after they reached puberty, and in most societies, their marriages were arranged marriages. But now, adolescents can't very well get married and have children when they can't even take care of themselves (unless we start a new custom of having grandparents raise their grandchildren). Conservatives say people should be abstinent until they get married, but the longer the gap between puberty and marriage becomes, the more impractical that policy becomes. Conservatives don't even seem to realize that abstinence is not a traditional value, for until a century or two ago, there was no need for abstinence, and it wasn't even an issue. On the other hand, conservatives are aghast at the idea of "children" (meaning those not much beyond puberty) having sex, when that WAS a traditional value!
In addition to the fact that adolescents shouldn't be having children at all, even adults must limit the number of children they have. Before the medical care of this century, people's life spans were short, often less than an average of 30 years, and infant mortality was so high that people basically had to have sex all the time just to maintain the population, hence the emphasis in the Bible on people being fruitful and multiplying, and not engaging in any forms of sexual activity that cannot lead to pregnancy. But now, if people did that, without contraception, people would average a dozen children per couple, and the population would grow about 200-fold each century, assuming 3 generations per century, 40,000-fold every 2 centuries, etc. At some point the Earth couldn't support any more people, and the closer we got to that point, the more the population increase would undo any increases in living standards that technology could provide. People who argue against "sodomy" because those sexual acts cannot lead to pregnancy don't even seem to realize that, with the population explosion, that is now an argument FOR it, not against it. An additional problem is that the ability people now have to travel causes sexually transmitted diseases to spread like wildfire. Therefore, there is no way around either abstaining or greatly limiting sexual activity, which people never had to do before, or using contraceptives. Since contraceptives are inadequate today, and there is a new round of sexually transmitted diseases, research should be increased in developing more effective, easier-to-use contraceptives, and in finding cures for those diseases.
A society should be judged by how well it serves its people's needs, so how can we restore the natural balance so that our society serves our sexual needs again? The only way is to allow adolescents to have sex, but to teach them to use contraceptives responsibly so that they do not have children or catch any diseases. The age at which they can start having sex should not be when they get married, but when they can be trusted to use contraceptives responsibly. As contraceptives are improved and diseases are cured, that age will go down, and my hope is that eventually, adolescents will be able to have sex as soon as they want to, as they once could. Of course, with the current epidemic of incurable diseases, and the lack of adequate contraceptives, I agree with conservatives that adolescents should be encouraged to abstain if possible. The difference is that for me, the current situation is a temporary, regrettable one, to be remedied with more research, whereas for conservatives, the current situation is something they are positively gleeful about.
(written in 2005)
After debating occasionally with religious people, I've noticed that their arguments fall into a few predictable categories. I'm always amused when they present arguments I've either heard or thought about myself many times before, as if they actually think they are the first people to think of them. They act like they are actually going to stump me because I've never heard their arguments before and have no answers for them.
Most of fheir arguments are so hackneyed that they're barely worth mentioning here. Most common is the class of arguments that say that the universe had to have a beginning, and something can't come out of nothing, so there had to be a God that created the universe. The answer, of course, is to ask what created God. If they say that God existed eternally, the answer, of course, is to ask why the universe couldn't also have existed eternally in some form. Positing a God really solves nothing, with that argument and all others, just pushes the philosophical dilemma back a step.
In fact, since "universe" means everything that exists, if God exists, then God would be part of the universe, not external to it. By "universe", those people really mean "observable universe". So God creating the observable universe would just mean that the universe (previously consisting of nothing but God) changed its form a bit, so it came to consist of God plus the observable universe.
The only difference with positing a God is that God is supposed to be a conscious intelligent being with purposeful actions, and the observable universe isn't. However, every time throughout history that people have made assumptions based on the idea that there is a purpose and intelligent design to the universe, those assumptions have turned out to be laughably wrong, so that idea has a very poor track record. (Of course, some people define God as "nature" or "whatever mysteries we don't currently know the answers to". Their idea of God is apparently not conscious, intelligent or purposeful, and is so watered-down as to be meaningless.)
That idea of pushing off the dilemma of an eternal universe onto God is like the question people asked when they thought the earth was flat, that got into similar seemingly impossible infinite regresses: What holds the earth up? Pillars? Then what holds up the pillars? The backs of turtles? Then what holds up the turtles?
One of my favorite jokes is: An anthropologist is asking a member of a primitive tribe such questions, and the tribe member stops the anthropologist and says, "I know what you're going to say next, but you're wasting your time. It's turtles ALL THE WAY DOWN!!" Perhaps when those religious people meet God, they will ask what created God, and God will say that He/She/It was created by a higher-level God. And when they ask what created the higher-level God, God will say, "It's Gods ALL THE WAY UP!!"
While one answer to the dilemma of what created the universe is that something had to exist forever, another possibility is that our concepts of time and causality are so primitive that the true answer is beyond our current imaginings, both scientific and religious. Notice that the dilemma of what held up the flat earth seemed just as insoluble as our current philosophical dilemmas, and involved the same infinite regresses -- and yet it was solved!! The answer turned out to be that the earth is spherical, and gravity isn't external to the earth, but is generated by the earth and pulls inward to the center of the earth. You might say that each hemisphere holds up the opposite hemisphere, both pushing against each other. The answer turned out to be so simple, it was almost anticlimactic. We were simply thinking about the problem in the wrong way. If such a seemingly insoluble problem was solved, I have hope that our current philosophical dilemmas will be solved as well. The answers will turn out to be that we were thinking about the problems in the wrong way. Now, if I knew what the right way was to think about them, I'd be the smartest person on earth.
Another argument I commonly hear is that atheism is just another religion, and atheists have faith that there is no God. Nothing could be further from the truth. Atheists base our belief on evidence, the opposite of faith. Since there is no evidence for a God, we do not believe in one. That does not mean that such a thing is impossible, but based on the evidence, there's no reason to believe in it, just as there's no reason to believe that there's an invisible purple unicorn in the corner of my room, and an infinite number of other things that there's no evidence for. While the chance of there being a God isn't zero (nothing is impossible, after all, unless it involves logical paradoxes), it's so small it's not worth talking about. (Of course, their idea of an omnipotent and omniscient God involves all sorts of paradoxes, so can't be true. For instance, if God is omnipotent, does he even have the power to not be omnipotent if he feels like it? That can't be, because then he wouldn't be omnipotent. But if he doesn't have that power, then there's something he can't do, so he's not omnipotent. But maybe God is merely really really powerful, as the ancient Hebrews thought, and not infinitely powerful.) At this point people then insist I'm really an agnostic. If that's so, then there don't seem to be any atheists, for I've yet to meet one who has faith there is no God. There is no firm line between atheism and agnosticism; it's a matter of degree. Agnostics think there's a serious chance that there might be a God, a large-enough chance to be worth talking about. Atheists think the chance is too miniscule to take seriously, but I have yet to meet one who thinks the chance is absolutely zero. (Of course, different religious people mean all sorts of different things by "God", even though they all use the same word, and as I just said above, some things they believe in, such as omnipotence, are self-contradictory and impossible. However, there are infinite mathematical realms that involve no contradictions, and perhaps some more sophisticated conception, that some people would be willing to call "God", will turn out to be true.)
But enough of these hackneyed arguments. What I mainly want to talk about in this essay is a more unusual argument that people have given me in various forms several times. I at least found it more interesting for its novelty, and for what the answer to the argument says about the nature of science. I don't remember seeing any other athiest websites addressing this argument, so I'll do it here.
The argument was: If I had lived before the discovery of radio waves, I would have never believed in radio waves, because I only believe in things there is evidence for. Yet I would have been wrong, since radio waves do actually exist. My response was that this is a misleading argument, because everyone would have been wrong, from the most credulous to the most skeptical. Before enough evidence piled up that the first person was able to conceive of the idea of radio waves, they were literally inconceivable, to anyone, both religious and atheistic.
After thinking about it, I realized what the person was really getting at, and since then I have heard the same argument in a more direct form. People say there is so much more to reality than atheists think, and talk about such things the ultimate mystery of existence, and of possible higher dimensions and hidden realms. These people are making the preposterous claim that atheists only believe in what science has found out so far, and don't believe in even the possibility that there will turn out to be more to reality than that. It is as if they think we atheists are continually surprised when science finds out every new fact, because at any given moment, we think that is all that will ever be found because there's no current evidence for more. And it is as if on the biggest mysteries, such as how the universe came into existence, we deny that they are mysteries, because the answers would have to involve something beyond current science, and we supposedly insist that there's nothing beyond what science currently knows.
So what is the problem with that argument? The problem is, these people make no distinction between saying that SOME unspecified explanation or other will turn out to be true, and saying that some PARTICULAR, specified explanation (such as God) will turn out to be true. The problem is when they start insisting that their particular answer is the correct one, in the absence of any evidence to justify it.
We atheists agree that there is more to reality than we currently know. We, however, unlike religious people, do not claim to know that which no one knows! Surely SOMETHING will turn out to be the explanation for the ultimate mysteries. The problem is when people insist they know what the explanation is. Saying that we don't know yet which explanation is correct is not the same as saying that there is no need for an explanation. There are an infinite number of possible explanations for the ultimate mysteries, and only an infinitesimally small chance that the answers religious and other mystical people insist are true, despite the absence of any evidence, will turn out by some wild luck to be the correct ones. A conscious intelligent mystical supreme omniscient omnipotent being is only one of those explanations (and, as I showed above, can't even possibly be true).
In the entire history of science, I don't know of a single example of someone just dreaming up an answer to a mystery, completely out of the blue, without the slightest evidence to guide them, and by some wild luck coming up with the right explanation. Even the most intelligent humans who have ever lived just aren't that good. People have to be led by the nose by the evidence before they finally, often most reluctantly, come upon the true explanations for things. Therefore, I'd be willing to bet, with almost complete confidence, that any explanations people come up with entirely out of the blue will turn out to be wrong. That is what is wrong with the idea of faith. Anything people have to put faith in is almost certainly wrong! It is only when people are led by the evidence that they have a chance of finding the truth.
That is why the argument about radio waves is bogus. It is true that if I had been presented with the idea of radio waves, before there was any evidence for them, I would not have believed in them. But before there was any evidence for them, I would never have been presented with the idea, since no one would have ever conceived of the idea in the first place!
(written in 2005)
"Intelligent Design" is the latest attempt by creationists to get their fairy tales taught in public schools as if it was science, and eventually get evolution kicked out. The idea is that organisms such as humans are too well-designed for them to have been created by a (supposedly) blind random process such as evolution, so they must have been designed by a conscious intelligent creator (which they never call "God", to try to pretend that their doctrine isn't religion, since the First Amendment prohibits public schools from teaching religion).
Various scientific, educational and atheist groups have been doing a good job in fighting this latest attempt to turn the U. S. into the laughing-stock of the developed world. But I want to suggest a better tactic that I haven't seen anyone propose.
Many people fighting "Intelligent Design" have pointed out that the human body, as amazing as it is, isn't all intelligently designed. In some ways, it is so poorly designed that no sane intelligent creator would have ever designed it that way.
Creationists' favorite example of intelligent design is the eye. They claim there is no series of small-enough evolutionary steps that could have led to it. This despite the fact that there are various organisms with simpler eyes than we have, that show the complete series of steps from simple light-sensitive eye spot to human eye.
Ironically, my favorite example of stupid design involves the eye. Our retinas are actually facing backwards, with the light-sensitive cells called rods and cones facing inward to the back of the eye, AWAY from the light! As a result, the rods and cones only get attenuated light, after it has passed through the layer of nerve cells that gathers signals from the rods and cones and passes them along to the optic nerve. Therefore, we can't see as well in dim light as we otherwise could have. And since those cells get less light than if they were facing the light, the lens of the eye must open wider to pass through enough light for us to see with. As any photographer knows, the wider the lens opening, the narrower the range of distances that are in focus. So that stupid design is the reason why we are prone to nearsightedness and farsightedness. Also as a result of those backwards-facing rods and cones, at the place where the optic nerve passes out of the back of the retina, there is no room for rods and cones. Therefore, we have the Blind Spot in each eye, that is not sensitive to light. If the rods and cones covered the other side of the retina than they do, they could have even covered the spot where all the nerves gather together into the optic nerve, sticking through on the opposite side.
Any sane intelligent designer would have corrected both problems by putting the retina on facing the right direction, but evolution is neither sane nor intelligent. It simply works with what it already has. So instead, in some nocturnal animals that especially need to see in little light, they have developed a tapetum lucidum, a mirror-like layer behind the retina that reflects light back at the rods and cones so they have a second chance to absorb the light. (That's why cats' eyes shine in the dark.) As for the Blind Spot, the brain actually guesses what there is to see at that part of the visual field, based on what is surrounding it. That is why under ordinary circumstances we are not aware that we have a Blind Spot in each eye. An amazing, but ridiculous solution to the problem, when there is a simple solution would have been so much easier.
There is no possible explanation for why an intelligent designer would have designed the eye that way, unless religious people are willing to accept the idea that their hypothetical creator isn't omnipotent, but is occasionally either amazingly inept and stupid, or downright insane. Are they? No, I didn't think so. (This even though in the story of Noah's arc, God tells Noah afterward that wiping out all life on earth may have been a mistake, and that God won't do it again. So despite most religious people's claim that God is perfect, according to the Bible, even God makes mistakes.)
On the other hand, there is a perfectly good reason why evolution created the eye that way. In the first multicellular organisms with eye spots that merely sensed light, but couldn't focus it into an image, those organisms were so small that light passed right through them. However, there was more light coming from the side of the organism that the eye spot was on than from the opposite side, since from that direction it still had to pass through the organism. Therefore, serendipitously, those organisms were able to sense which direction the light was coming from, in a crude way. Evolution then hit upon the idea of forming a dark opaque spot just inward of the eye spot, in order to cast a shadow, so that the difference in the amount of light from different directions was greater. A shadow is sort of a negative image, so a bright spot of light, such as the sun, forms a dark spot opposite it. Since the primitive retina was looking at the shadows being cast by the opaque spot, the light-sensitive cells faced inward, toward the opaque spot. Then when organisms grew bigger, they grew too big for light to pass through them. Now, light was only coming from the side the eye spot was on, so there was again a crude way of telling which direction it was coming from. Evolution then hit upon 2 ideas to sharpen the image: recessing the eye spot in an indentation so the light was coming from only 1 direction rather than from the whole side, and after growing a clear covering to protect the eye, bulging the covering outward to form a lens. But by that point, evolution was already stuck with the light-sensitive cells facing away from the light. Creationists often falsely claim that there is no way from going from one design to another in small-enough steps. Well, here was a case where that was true, and therefore, evolution did NOT occur. The light-sensitive cells would have had to swivel around in unison, or something, but couldn't do that with the layer of nerve cells in the way. Plus, in the mean time, swiveling around part-way wouldn't have improved vision, so there was no reason for them to even start swiveling.
There are many other examples of stupid design in the human body that an intelligent designer would never have created, while there are obvious evolutionary explanations. For instance, in humans, the appendix serves no purpose, and is prone to life-threatening infections. It is obviously a vestige from herbivor ancestors who did in fact use it for digestion. In males, the vas deferens takes a long round-about way from the testes to the penis, despite that they are right beside each other. Like a garden hose snagged around a tree, it became snagged around the urethra when the testes descended and became external in warm-blooded mammals. We get goose bumps when we are cold or scared because in our ancestors with fur, little muscles raised each hair on end, either to trap more air to keep us warmer, or to make us look bigger and more formidable to attacking animals. Though we no longer have fur, we still have those little muscles in the skin that cause little bumps when they tense up, trying to raise that now-nonexistent fur.
So my suggestion is that the best way for our side to attack "Intelligent Design" is to invent our own doctrine, called "Stupid Design". Every time creationists try to get "Intelligent Design" taught in a school district, by saying that schools should be open-minded about teaching all viewpoints, we should say, Yes, indeed! And if the schools teach "Intelligent Design", they should even more so teach "Stupid Design", the theory that we were created by a supernatural creator, but that the creator is sometimes either inept and stupid or insane. As I showed above, the evidence for "Stupid Design" over "Intelligent Design" is overwhelming. If our side would only start following after creationists, promoting the teaching of "Stupid Design" in every school district the creationists target, the creationists would be sorry they ever started this fight.
Often, the best way to defeat irrationalism is not the direct approach of disputing it in favor of rationalism. The best way is to exploit the fact that since irrationalism does not rely on evidence, there are any number of possible irrational beliefs (while science always converges on single explanations for things when there is enough evidence). The best way is often to make a laughing stock of irrational beliefs by offering alternative parody irrational beliefs.
For instance, the best way to ridicule astrology is not the rational approach, since that will never work with irrational people. The best way is the following: Wait till an astrology nut talks about the 12 signs of the zodiac, and spouts their prejudices about people based on their birthdates. (Isn't it ironic that liberal New Agers tend to believe in astrology, so just the people who abhor prejudice based on race believe in prejudice based on birthdate.) Then insist that there aren't 12 signs of the zodiac, but 17, and that your sign is Malooga (October 8 through 25). Like all Maloogans, you enjoy eating pretzels, are fair-minded about which laundry detergent is best, and have trouble opening umbrellas. What can they say? Let them try to insist that there are 12 signs, not 17, and you can insist right back that there are 17, not 12. There are no constellations in the night sky, only stars, and there is just as much reason to believe in 17 constellations in the zodiac as 12, or any other number! (Astronomers pretend that there are constellations just for navigational purposes. And in fact, there is indeed a 13th major zodiacal constellation, Ophiuchus, in between Libra and Scorpius, plus several other constellations that stick into the zodiac just a bit. But I digress, just as Maloogans always do....)
(written in 2007)
The other day, I saw a documentary about the Salem witch trials. One of the atheist groups I'm in presented it, in order to show an example of the evil of religion when it gets out of control. The documentary told something that surprised me: that anyone accused of being a witch could have instantly exonerated themselves and gotten off with no punishment merely by confessing to it, and naming other people as accomplices. That policy was considered the Christian thing to do. The only reason any people were killed was because they were pious enough that they refused to lie that they were witches, or to falsely accuse others of being witches.
That got me to thinking that while those people who refused to confess, even on punishment of death, seemed admirable, they were in fact as stupid as could be. If they had just thought it through, they could have realized that no one had to die, so the witch trials were really nothing bad at all. If everyone accused had simply confessed, there would have been no deaths. True, they would have falsely accused others, but if those others had simply confessed, nothing bad would have happened to them either, so no harm done. All that would have happened was a wave of accusations, which would have quickly built up at an accelerating speed until everyone in the population was accused, quickly followed by a wave of exonerations. If each person had accused 10 people, then the next day, those 10 people would accuse 100 people, and so on, until everyone was accused, and then exonerated. And then everyone could have said, "Okay, we all confessed. (**yawn**) Nice weather we're having, isn't it?"
That got me further to thinking, and I had a sudden epiphany: that the witch trials were not only not bad, but the greatest thing ever. I only wish we had them again! After all, we atheists would prefer that religion, especially in its more fundamentalist, dangerous form, were wiped off the face of the earth. And here was a perfect way to quickly filter out everyone in the population who is pious and stupid enough to not see that everyone should just confess and be exonerated -- just the people who are fundamentalist and dangerous.
The idea I came up with in my epiphany is that the best way to promote atheism is to have atheism declared a crime punishable by death. Hmmm ... that seems rather paradoxical, doesn't it? Yet probably most people by now can see where I'm going with this. As long as anyone confessed to their atheism and accused at least 10 other people of being atheists within 24 hours, they would be exonerated. The only people who would be too loathe to do this to save their own skin would be dangerous fundamentalists, so we'd quickly be rid of them. There are close to 7 billion people on earth, so in a mere 10 days or less, the wave of accusations, growing exponentially at 10-fold per day, would cover everyone on earth. Granted, some people would refuse to confess, slowing that rate of growth down, but that would be more than made up by some people accusing more than the minimum 10 people required. Heck, I would speed up the process greatly, and when the judge asked me if I had anyone to accuse, I would plunk down a Fort Lauderdale phone book (that's where I live), and tell the judge, "All of these people, your honor." While I was at it, I'd use a forklift, and bring in every phone book on earth, plus say that all people with unlisted numbers and no phones were guilty as well.
Given the current climate in the US, in which atheists are considered somewhat lower than lepers and politicians, I would think that such a law wouldn't be too difficult to get passed. The very people it would actually target would be the last ones to catch on to its real motivation. So I'm calling on all atheists to call their congresspeople and demand that they pass such a law.
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I'm still waiting...
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That's the trouble with atheists -- they're too damn moral.