Jp's Lab

In the days and years since the terrible tragedy of 9/11, a wealth of misinformation, disinformation, and clever plots have cropepd up. There is a curious correspondance between this all - it is a clever dance of control. Friends, BYONDers, internet-people, there is a conspiracy afoot!

Those who hold to the 'conventional' view of 9/11 would tell you that it was quite simple! Apparently, the American government just happened to have set up bombs in just the right spots to demolish the Twin Towers when they were exploded - despite no eye-witness reports of these "bombs", and not a single shred of evidence that such a 'controlled demolition' could take place! There are no similarly-structured buildings in the entire world that have been destroyed in one of these 'controlled demolitions' the man would like you to believe occurred.

They would have you believe that four planes just mysteriously 'happened' to vanish, along with all their passengers - as if the American government could have the competence to fake such a thing! They would have you believe that all the wreckage around the Pentagon and the Towers just happened to fall in such a way that it looked like plane parts.

I am not a believer in coincidences. All these 'happenings' are quite convincing - the offical story is a lie. The Twin Towers were not 'demolished' by some sort of 'government conspiracy' - no, you have been misled! A conspiracy at the very highest levels, the ones who control all of your life with an iron hand while still remaining too inept to protect themselves against any idiot blogger with a crazy opinion, the secret New World Order! It was all a conspiracy by Islamic fanatics!

The officials would have you believe that there is no such thing. That Islamic fanatics mean you no harm at all. They cover up all of the abundant evidence demonstrating the ill-will of these people with their disinformation!

I'm not going to tell you what the evidence is - if you're really interested, you can find it out on your own. But the unspecified and vaguely-referenced assertions I make are valid and a strong argument - I have the burden of proof, I'm afraid. You must prove that there couldn't possibly be a Islamic fundamentalist conspiracy before I'll even begin to examine my assumptions or evidence. Also, any 'contradictory' evidence you find is disinformation that actually provides evidence for my claim. Unless it's evidence that supports my claims, in which case it's probably a brave whistleblower.

Just remember, when you stare into that mosque in the last momements of your free life:

I told you so.

Looks like Labour has won the Australian election. They're not exactly who I'd like in government, but they're better than the Liberals by a long way.

This is based on predictions from the groups covering the election, but I think they're solid enough to guess by now where things are going. They're all predicting that Labour has won ~78 seats - they need 76 to form govenment. They're mostly tipping the Liberals to have 55 or so. There's about 15 seats that are currently in doubt, some of which have had nearly no votes counted.

I'm expecting Labour to win, and will be disappointed if they don't.

For those who are confused, the Liberals are, in fact, the right-wing Australian party, and Labour are a left-wing party that arose out of worker's unions.

A group called the "Christian Democratic Party" are getting far too many votes, though. They've gotten something like 4% in some seats!

EDIT: 81 - 58 with 2 held by minor parties/independents and 9 in doubt.

The original post can be found here, and the forum post by Knifo (If it hasn't been deleted yet) is here

Let us begin.

Vex begins with the caveat that anyone who takes their holy book literally is being just a bit unscientific - I'd have to agree with him there. In the interests of defining the limits of debate, I'm not talking about fundies. That would make it too easy. I'm fairly sure we can all agree that someone who thinks God made all life in six days six-thousand or so years ago is a nutcase.

But he then goes on to propose, essentially, NOMA - non-overlapping magisteria. Science answers "how" things happen - i.e., Newton's laws of motion, Einstein's theory of relativity, all the other mechanics behind the universe - and religion answers "why" things happen - What's the purpose to life? Why am I here? and so forth.

I'd put forward that there are several immediate and obvious problems with NOMA:
- Science doesn't answer the 'why' questions because there is no way to answer the 'why' questions. Any answer to them is inherently unfalsifiable - and not the kind of unfalsifiable where it's an argument so incredibly watertight you can't help but agree with it, the kind where it's impossible to test. That takes it beyond the realms of scientific testing. Religions are answering the questions, sure, but there's no way to tell whether they have good answers or not. They are, essentially, guessing. It's clearly irrational to provide an answer when there is absolutely no way you can check your answer, no way you can even argue for your answer (Interestingly enough, if a hypothesis is unfalsifiable, you inherently cannot find evidence for it).

- Some religious claims are scientific questions, and thus fall afoul of scientific testing. God in its most general is unfalsifiable, and therefore outside science - more specific gods make claims about reality that can be tested - it's easy enough to see if there's a gigantic palace on the top of Mount Olympus in our modern world, for example, and the nonexistence of such a structure casts some doubt on the existence of the greek gods. The Christian god is very much testable - even if you remove all the miracles from someone's conception of the Christian god, there are still testable properties - because the Christian god is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, and there are some properties we would expect to see in a universe with a God possessing those three properties. Basically, you can make Problem of Evil arguments about God - as chains of deductive logic, these arguments are testable.

- This explanation may run afoul of god-of-the-gaps, and all the problems associated with that. What is not a scientific question today may well become testable in the future, and religion will then be 'answering questions' that science can test.

- NOMA can only stand if religious figures do not make claims about reality - if they do, they're running into scientifically testable ground. No religion does that. "You can pray, but it won't make a difference, because that would be scientifically testable"?

In short, I consider NOMA untenable.

Vex then goes on to use a horrible, horrible argument - Thomas Aquinas' First Efficient Cause. In short:

- The universe exists.
- The universe had a beginning
- Something does not come from nothing
- The universe could not come from nothing.
- Therefore, God created the universe.

That's simplifying a little - look at Vex's post to see his version of the argument, or look around on Wikipedia for more.

First Efficient Cause is quite possibly one of the first arguments for God ever put forward by man (Although there was a hilarious quote that ended up on FSTDT that was essentially point logic - it wasn't even circular logic. Circular logic has to go somewhere).

The problem is that it uses special pleading - the universe requires some sort of event to kick it off, but God does not. The justification for this is normally to claim that God is special somehow - that he/she/it is, by definition, not contingent on anything. This rather misses the point - you can substitute any noncontingent item as the 'first efficient cause'. Why pick God when there are so many others? Why can't the Big Bang be noncontingent? Why must the universe be contingent? There's no real reason. This is, incidentally, one of those god-of-the-gaps situations - there's no reason why this couldn't be scientifically testable in the future.


Vex then goes on to misunderstand evolution and science slightly. For starters, 'theory' in the scientific world does not mean questionable. 'theory' is the pinnacle. Consider the 'theory' of relativity. Scientists don't talk about the 'fact' of relativity, because 'fact' isn't a descriptive term.

And saying that evolution is becoming 'less theory and more fact' rather misses that it's been the accepted explanation for over a century. Because it's right, at its most basic. The driving force may change over time (Indeed, there has been recent scientific discussion about punctuated equilibrium and neutral genetic drift), but what could be called the 'law' of evolution - species split and diverge into other species over time - remains constant.

A theory is, quite simply, an explanation that ties together multiple phenomena, is well-evidenced, and stands the test of time. See this and this.

The distinction between a law and a theory is simple - laws are simple mathematical relationships. Theories explain laws. For example, the four laws of thermodynamics are simple and mathematical. They are explained by atom theory as the statistical behaviour of large groups of molecules in a gas.

He then goes on to ask how abiogenesis occurred (That is, how life arose from non-life). This particular part of science is, as far as I am aware, not as well developed as evolutionary theory (Which does not concern abiogenesis - evolution is only about the frequencies of alleles in populations over time). However, there are still scientific descriptions of abiogenesis, full of impressive sounding words that you're unlikely to understand unless you have a grounding in molecular biology. Quite frankly, when it comes to God, abiogenesis has no need of that hypothesis.

His free-will stuff is also pretty bad. I am a determinist - I do not think that the laws of physics allow for free will. But the illusion of free will is easy-peasy. Evolution could come up with that. Evolution could come up with a lot of things - it's an incredibly powerful mechanism.

Vex's list of 'valid questions to which God is a reasonable answer', is, in short, not really any such thing.

I would hold that there is nothing to which God is a reasonable answer - saying that xyz is true because of an unfalsifiable being is just bad philosophy - there is no way to rationally justify an unfalsifible concept, because it's unfalsifiable. It is consistent with all universes. The 'answer' adds no knowledge - it does not add to thought one iota. It's a non-answer - a fake answer - a stopgap until we can investigate the question more thoroughly.

There is no rational reason to believe that god, in general, exists. In that sense, belief is irrational. To the extent that modern religions have no evidence behind them (And I would conclude that they do not, Lee Strobel be damned), then belief in them is irrational too.

Keep in mind that I'm only talking about belief in terms of truth of the concept - if it could be demonstrated that benefits accrue to societies and individuals if you believe in some religion X, there is a rational reason to believe in X. There is still not a rational reason to believe it's true, however, assuming that there are reasonable scientific explanations of the benefits.

Religions are irrational in a second way - they are based on faith. All of them. Pretty much by definition, faith is religion.

Faith doesn't have evidence. Faith doesn't respect evidence. Faith is all about believing in something no matter what. If the evidence is against you, and you continue to believe, your faith is that much stronger.

Faith is clearly irrational. Rationality is about considering the evidence and constructing chains of deductive logic. Faith is raw belief. Faith is practically the antithesis of rationality. In that sense, religions are irrational too.

And yes, love is irrational too, because I know that one's going to come up. Just because it's irrational doesn't mean it's bad.

But religion is bad, though.

So there.

I'm not sure if I brought this up recently, but I recently built myself a nice new computer - I was getting tired of running things on my pokey old P3 Celeron. Plus, it'd stopped booting.

So, lovely little computer - Core 2 E6850, 8800GTX, Asus P5K Deluxe, some nice Corsair RAM.

Last night, it shut off in the middle of a game (KOTOR, to be precise). Wouldn't boot up after that.

A bit of poking around has revealed that disconnecting the processor power cable causes some difference in its behaviour - it gets far enough for the motherboard to beep at me about the processor not working. Conclusion: something in the processor is shorted such that the motherboard or power supply shuts down when I try to boot. Bummer.

Fortunately, I haven't overclocked anything, and the processor was certainly within the thermal specifications. It was also bought ~two months ago. So it's still under warranty.

Sigh.

Whenever there's some sort of religious argument on BYOND, I'm regularly accused of being part of some sort of 'atheist mafia', a group of dedicated nonbelievers, spreading heresy and blasphemy where'er we go, and attacking hapless Christians (It's almost always a Christian) en masse when we can.

If I'm going to get this accusation regularly, it may as well be true. Ish.

To that end, I open a social BYOND guild - this isn't for games at all.

This. is. ATHEISMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!

Want to highlight a particularly hilarious pronouncement by some puffed-up fundy? Do it here.

Want to engage in reasoned discussion over some sort of religious (or any, really) topic? Do it here.

Want to be part of some sort of evil atheist conspiracy? Do it here.

Don't think you can't post on the forums if you're not a nontheist of some form - the arguments section would get a little boring if it was just weak atheists versus strong atheists all the time.

So, yeah. Try and make it not a flop. Please?