I Know There Is No God

The title of this piece is sure to draw some ire from nearly everyone. There are believers who flat out disagree with me and then there are agnostics and atheists who say that there is no way to know. Well, I know there is no god. And I hate to have it sound so condescending, but that’s what the following wall of text is for. I’m going to explain why it is OK to honestly say that you KNOW that there is no god. I’ve purposefully stirred up the hornet nest on Reddit and have received over 250 criticisms, conjectures and attacks regarding this and I have this to say in response: relax! I’m going to try to address every major concern here.

I know there is no god, just as you know there are no fairies and no pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The only thing substantiating the god idea is the fact that more people believe it than the fairy story. If I were to say that I know there are no fairies, there would be no argument. Most would agree. Nobody would whip out their overinflated love for epistemology to strike the notion down. So what about the idea of god makes people so righteous about the semantics of knowledge? You’d think these atheists were just agnostics the way they defend god’s right to be considered despite claiming to not believe in it.

I see most atheists as timid creatures, bound by a code of honor that restrains them. Some call it the scientific method, some call it logic, but they apply it far more liberally than they should. I love the scientific method more than most but I have to agree with the quacks on this one; it can’t be used to explain everything. The most frequent response to my claim is that you cannot disprove something that doesn’t exist. So true. But if it doesn’t exist for me to disprove it, can I not say that I know it does not exist?

Of course not. This is where the philosophy jocks step in. Supposedly, if I claim that I know something that cannot be proven, I am no better than a fundamentalist. Ahh, this is where I apply a little misdirection. If I can prove, instead, that the idea of god is a man-made notion, would that not relieve me of the burden of disproving a negative? I sure think so. And before you tell me that a god may exist that has not yet been dreamed of by man, might I remind you about the fairies?

The key to knowing that god does not exist is to acknowledge that he was invented by man to explain the mystery of life and existence. He is no longer necessary, though, as we have learned enough to understand our place in the world with our own knowledge. (Our place, if you’re wondering, is without purpose or meaning. Yay, nihilism!) Though there is much that we do not know, the idea that what we do know is never enough to make a certain claim is such patent bullshit. I have no interest in jerking off to a philosophy text.

The knowledge that there is no god is a priori. Epistemological philosophy is such that if you apply it haphazardly like a jackass, you end up in a loop where you can never truly know anything. The moment that you appeal to this mindfuck of a philosophy, you’re lost. The very statement “you can’t prove it/anything decisively” sets off a shock wave of logical consequences. If the certainty with which I know gods non-existence to be true is useless, what good is anything else you or I consider to be knowledge? You cannot function in life if you honestly think this is a valid way to look at the world. Imagine opening your eyes after a night’s sleep and not being certain about anything. You wouldn’t be able to move if you required “absolute” knowledge to act. Thus, by epistemological definition, getting out of bed in the morning is an act of faith. What mental masturbation!

For every posturing pseudo-philosopher, there seems to be a large space between certainty and absolute knowledge that I simply don't respect. I think that certainty covers the gap quite well and classical philosophers tend to agree with me. Philosophy hacks have put guard rails along the edge though, creating conjectures that make it "theoretically" impossible to know things. They're mad.

Why is what I’m saying any different than a fundamentalist claiming that they “know” god exists? This is the question that the Knights of the Holy Scientific Method like to pose. As if by making a statement that supposedly cannot be falsified, we fall to corruption. Like the paragraphs above demonstrate, life is full of unfalsifiable knowledge, stuff that you just KNOW, and the fact that it cannot be proven either way doesn’t make it less true or useful. Again, we make super-special considerations when it comes to this damned “god” idea. We apply levels of logic that we otherwise wouldn’t have. It reminds me of the fact that South Park once depicted the prophet Mohammad in an episode without controversy, but now that the world is hypersensitive to it, they censored the most recent appearance of the prophet. Same situation, different rules.

Carl Sagan once said, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Indeed, this is a true statement and it has been used to refute my claim, but I am not using only god's lack of evidence as evidence to support my statement.

Next comes the most amusing argument: you cannot use knowledge of the physical world to disprove something that exists beyond it. Well, what would be the purpose of declaring the existence of a metaphysical god if it could not affect the laws of physics? A god who is 100% ineffective is just as good as a god who is 100% nonexistent. The only way to ever have evidence of god (a useful one at least) is to have physical effects that can be attributed to it. In the past, we’ve been fooled into believing what we see is the hand of god at work, but we’ve grown out of that.

We humans have a history of speaking before we have all the facts. Why, at a few points in the last 200 years it was declared that we had learned everything there is to know about the world, only to find how wrong we were. You might think this would prevent me from making further definite claims, but I’m not going there. Every scientific discovery of knowledge has further marginalized the necessity of god. That is the trend and it will continue. We can now trace nearly every question we had 2000 years ago to areas of science that we have even a small amount of knowledge in. Any new gods or metaphysical philosophies that we invent are merely there to ask the new questions that further developments will surely shed light on.

Douglas Adams once said:

I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me “Well, you haven’t been there, have you? You haven’t seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid” - then I can’t even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don’t think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don’t think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.

This quote sums up a large portion of my argument. Why give the idea of god as fair a shake as the idea of fairies?

The Earth Can Save Itself

From a nihilist perspective, saving the planet is a fairly confusing idea. Honestly, I don’t even know where the danger is coming from. Don’t get me wrong, I think it would be great if we used less resources and destroyed less nature if only for the effect on quality of life. But, objectively speaking, I don’t think the planet is in any peril that we can either accelerate or prevent. Let us not forget that 4 billion years ago, the planet was a violent and muggy place, inhospitable to all multi-cellular species that live today, yet here it is, still revolving around the Sun. What I’m trying to say is that the plea to “save the planet” is quite disingenuous and a bit of an exaggeration. Sort of like calling a pageant winner “Miss Universe” instead of “Miss Vain Humanity.”

I’m writing this as a gunman is pacing the lobby of the Discovery Channel building in Maryland. His mission is to get the Discovery Channel to broadcast various shows to help “save the planet.” I think what he really wants is relief for his guilt. He feels guilty for everything society has done to change the landscape of Earth’s surface. He fears for his species’ survival. He’s also a nutcase. Here is a summary of his demands of the channel:

1. Promote restrictions on reproduction.
2. Stop pretending that saving lives is heroic.
3. Stop focusing on war because the root of war is overpopulation.
4. Denounce immigration.
5. Promote environmental harmony.
6. Get the message across that humans are disgusting and should not be allowed to breed.
7. Find solutions for unemployment.

This guy has got it all wrong. If I wanted humanity to go away then war, destitution and overpopulation would be the first things I would promote. Joking aside, it is clear that this man suffers from societal guilt. He also has his perspectives all messed up.

On Sunday (see my previous entry), I heard a comment that I had to immediately refute. The comment was this: humans are the only species that are out of balance with their ecosystem. It is a classical example of the guilt that environmental activists try to instill in society. Frankly, it is bullshit. I was much more polite when I offered my rebuttal though: The history of species on Earth is filled with examples of populations wrecking havoc on entire ecosystems. Introduce an energetic predator into a community with low predation and watch the devastation. While we may frown at the thought, we have to understand this is the way of the world. Nature has no justice.

There is no standard unit of evolution. There is no single factor that determines if a species is evolutionarily fit. Most of all, no single species or ecosystem is inherently more valuable than any other. Just because humanity has invented morality doesn't mean the universe follows its lead. Do I think we should save the forests and stop killing animals? Yes, of course, it really sets off my compassion sensors when shit like that happens. It's a selfish desire, but I'm honest about it. I think the world will be a lot less interesting if we kill everything in it. But beyond that, there really is no actual impetus to act in any particular way.

Responsibility is a subjective term that means nothing out of context. Humanity is hardly a blip on the cosmic radar and yet it has such a huge sense of importance. If Yellowstone were to blow its top, would we blame ourselves if we survived? What’s so great about this intelligence we’ve got when we can’t even organize for our own rational sakes? The planet will survive long after we’re gone. I think we should look at environmentalism for what it is: selfish, but comforting. If we’re going to “save the planet” we should understand that we’re only saving what is familiar to us. Until the meteors come.

NYC Open Discussion Group 1

This past Sunday, I followed one of my dreams and I am pleased to announce that it was a success. For the longest time, I have been wanting to bring together a group of people who wanted to discuss various topics like politics, philosophy and science. I’m aware that these groups already exist, in fact I am aware of a couple with over 100 members that gather in NYC, but I wanted one of my own for a very personal reason. One day, I’d like to open a venue where people can expect to walk in and find themselves in such a conversation, and I needed to prove to myself that not only could the concept work, but I needed to know that I could manage it. Well, so far, so good.

The First Meeting

We gathered in Central Park beneath a statue of William Shakespeare on a hot Sunday afternoon. In all, there were eight of us, our ages ranging from 25 to 40’s. Our backgrounds were quite diverse, from Chile and Colombia, from black and white. To my surprise, we all had relatively disparaging views on religion and I believe we were all either atheist or agnostic. That was not a bother, as we found plenty of other things to explore and a few things to disagree about.

One topic that I brought up was the necessity for a Spanish-speaking rationalist role model. Earlier in the weekend, my girlfriend who is a magazine writer had mentioned to me about the lack of available information in the Spanish language which leads to many unfortunate situations amongst the immigrant population of Latinos and Hispanics. They are afraid of doctors and they don’t trust technology or science. They are attached to cultural remedies and many are blindly religious. This sounded to me like a void of information that was just waiting to be filled and I was interested in getting alternative viewpoints from the many attendees who each had experience in their Spanish-speaking communities.

Everyone’s different perspective really gave the discussion many dimensions. Some felt that the issue would resolve itself, as the new generation of children are already abandoning their parents’ religion and embracing education. Meanwhile, I felt that we still needed a catalyst to empower the individuals to actively seek out education in situations where they are not fortunate enough to have it handed to them. Then came the argument that religion is and always has been a tool of oppression; the idea that leaders would allow their population to be empowered was not likely. In all, it was a very stimulating conversation for me. It took many twists and turns, but I used my abilities as a moderator to keep it on track. When the time came for us to move on to something new, it felt like everyone’s gears were turning in their brains.

There were more interesting discussions after that one. We kicked around the divisive mechanisms of society and wondered what, after religion, political systems, and nationalism, would be our world’s next allegiance divisor. Some would say that technology would split the world into various sects, while one great point was made about the pursuit of pleasure being the trend. Economic markets also appeared to be a looming influence, as one member offered that he could be inspired to speak out about the type of economic system his society was to use.

Another discussion centered around the Idiocracy effect of intelligent couples waiting as along as possible to have children while poor people breed with abandon. It was interesting to discuss the real possibilities of this trend, including its implications for the spread of secularism and intelligence. We also learned a little bit about the realities of the Iraq war from one of our members who is a veteran. At the end, there was plenty to reminisce about and a lot of questions to mull over.

The whole thing lasted about 3 hours, which was longer than I had expected, but the energy never really died down. Even after I declared a stop, the discussion continued for a while. People patiently waited their turn to speak and addressed everyone else with respect. While I suspect things could have gotten a bit heated if we had a religious or spiritual person around to spark arguments, the group had an easy starter run. Everyone expressed their pleasure with it and now it falls on me to find a venue for the next meeting. I’m definitely looking forward to it.

If you are in the NYC area and would like to join us, send me an email and I will add you to the list: andrew@andrewgonsalves.com

A Matter of Perspective

We all look at the world through our own little lenses. The elements that are closer to us are thus largest and most important, while the elements that we rarely encounter are mostly background noise. Speaking for the majority, we enjoy our granular space within the universe and rarely venture out of it. To do so would mean two things: first, we would have to admit that we are not as important as we think we are and, second, we would struggle to imagine just how deep the rabbit hole goes. It is in our nature to be insular because our understanding of the world starts to break down the further we remove ourselves from our own perspectives.

Let’s try a visual thought experiment. Can you imagine what a billion years is like? Even if you acknowledge that evolution is true, even if you are a damned geologist, a billion years is a mind-blowing concept. Even a million years is equally fuzzy. If you were to stretch your arms out as far as you could from your body, with your wingspan representing a billion years, your lifetime wouldn’t even equal the amount of fingernail shaved off by a single swipe of a nail file. Now consider that your lifespan, being that it is most familiar, is your primary gauge for long spans of time.

Over the last 200 years, scientists have struggled to reconcile empirical observations with imagination because reality is stranger than fiction every time. Before the tools that allow us to accurately determine fundamental properties of our world were invented, early estimates of the Earth’s age wildly swung between thousands of years to tens of thousands. There was a time when the suggestion of a million years was preposterous. Science often tells us about things we cannot perceive from our personal perspectives, so it is no wonder that there are so many people who distrust it.

Here’s another visual comparison. Imagine all of the biological mass on the planet, every living organism, clumped up into a single ball. That means all the elephants and the orangutans and the eucalyptus trees and the sea anemones and the amoebas... all clumped together in a giant orb. Can you believe that 80% of that ball would be comprised of micro-organisms? That’s right, tiny life forms that we can’t even see, and didn’t even know existed until 400 years ago, make up 80% of all living matter on Earth. And you probably can’t even imagine what it would look like to have them all mushed together.

When I began thinking about the problem of self-induced ignorance, the main factor that I saw in most examples of it was perspective. People are simply afraid, on some level, of seeing the world in a light that doesn’t highlight what they’re most familiar with. We see examples of people supporting systems that fuck them over (American labor practices, politics, etc.) and we wonder why they don’t realize it. I don’t think that they are blind to their situation, but I certainly think that the prospect of abandoning their perspective in favor of a foreign one is far more frightening than holding on to the familiar and making the most of it.

I believe perspective training is the angle to take when educating people about reason and reality. When we hear about deconversion stories, where people abandon their faith or their superstition, it is usually after a steady stream of information that the person has received. Even if they reject the information at first, they begin to understand the perspective of the people who hold opposing viewpoints. It is important to understand that reason versus superstition is not always a battle of intelligence. The second perspective is always the hardest to adapt.

Inception For Real

In the movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio ventures into the dreams of another person in order to plant an idea so deep into their psyche that they will think they thought it up on their own. As it turns out, you don’t need to go to such lengths for the same effect in real life. An idea can be planted into someone’s mind and they will value it as if they had thought it up themselves without the use of sedatives, accomplices and fancy dream-sharing machines. All you need is a little creativity and a cursory understanding of behavioral economics.

To begin, let’s look at the concept of a possession and what affects how much we value it. I’m sure that if I were to hand you a brand new mug in your favorite color, you would appreciate it a little. However, this mug would probably not replace the one you made at a pottery class, the off-color one with numerous imperfections, a re-glued handle and webbed cracks in the lacquer, as your preferred. Indeed, if someone were to visit you and you two were to share a pot of coffee, you’d give the new mug to your guest and you wouldn’t bat an eye if they accidentally dropped it. The journey of creation (and maintenance) that you shared with your shoddy mug will ensure it a special place in your heart forever.

I’ve stated in previous entries that we treat our own ideas as if they were possessions. Your personal philosophy and that crappy mug of yours have a lot in common. They were both created (or at least adapted) by you and they probably have a ton of flaws, but that won’t prevent you from valuing them over other things that are sleeker, stronger and just plain better.

Now imagine yourself at a job that pays you a decent amount of money to create reports that upper management never read. Your financial needs are covered, but the work is neither stimulating nor fulfilling. You spend 8 hours every weekday doing a task that, at the end of the day, made no difference in the world or even your office. Though within traditional economics, a dollar is a dollar, I am willing to bet that most people would take a pay cut to be doing something that they actually enjoy, that challenges them, that makes an impact. It is important to us to be motivated, to enjoy our work. We want to feel that the money we take home is well earned.

Even animals would rather work for their “pay.” A rat would rather press a button to receive a piece of food than to eat it out of an open dish. Same with parrots, fish, gerbils, and monkeys. We’re no different. It makes sense that the possessions and ideas that we worked for mean much more to us than the things that were just placed in our lap. Therein lies the key to planting an idea in someone’s head that they will appreciate as if it were their own: work.

Whether you consider it a separate phenomenon or not, while we favor ideas that we came up with, we also have negative feelings about ideas that are not ours. If you’re American, you can surely appreciate the utter disgust with which alternatives to Democracy are viewed by the general public. As an employee of a company, you may have a few examples of times when superior technologies or methodologies were not adopted simply because a competitor also used them. More personally, you’ve probably dismissed someone’s perfectly good suggestion before simply because you wanted to do something your way. What I mean to say by all of this is that we have defenses at every level of our psyche to prevent foreign ideas from affecting us. Luckily, these defenses are easily fooled.

To illustrate this, I want to describe a study featured in Dan Ariely’s new book, The Upside of Irrationality. Participants of this study were asked to read various questions such as, “How can communities reduce the amount of water they use without imposing tough restrictions?” The answers to these questions were either suggested or the participants were asked to make up their own. Then, the participants were asked to rate the effectiveness of the proposed solutions. As you might expect, people rated their own suggestions much higher than the suggestions that were provided. The findings of this first study were merely the beginning, though. The follow-up study revealed even more...

This time, while all participants were given the questions in the same manner, the solutions were delivered differently. Just like the first study, some people were asked to rate pre-proposed solutions, some were asked to propose their own solution, but now another group was asked to create a solution by forming a sentence from a pool of about 50 given words. The catch was that those 50 words were just synonyms of the words used in the given solutions condition. That is to say that no matter how the person rearranged the words, they would come to essentially the same conclusion as the pre-proposed solution. The results showed that the participants who constructed their solutions from the pool of 50 words rated their ideas just as high as those composing them from their free thought. This shows that the value we assign to thoughts has less to do with their quality and more to do with their origin.

We’re not done, though. A third study pushed the concept further. If you’ve been paying attention up to now, we’ve established that people will accept an idea and favor it as their own as long as they have a little creative sway in putting it together, but we’ll soon see that people don’t even need that much. In the new condition created by the third study, users only had to rearrange the scrambled words of the pre-proposed solution. In the end, the simple act of unscrambling the words of a sentence elevated its rating to that of an idea borne completely from one’s imagination.

So what does it take for someone to accept an idea as if it were their own? Just a little work. The trick is merely to motivate people to do that small amount of work, whatever it is. Hitting someone in the face with an idea is satisfying, but ineffective. If you’re looking for a real inception, let someone find the answer for themselves. The trick is to make sure that the answer you want them to get is within their reach when they grasp for it. It’s not exactly good for the plot of a blockbuster film, but it gets results.

S. E. Cupp is Not An Atheist

S. E. Cupp is not an atheist. This is my best call, given the evidence. For those of you who do not know who S. E. Cupp is, she has just popped onto the media scene lately promoting her book which claims that the liberal media attacks religion. Her selling point is that she is from the "other side" and thus her argument is more genuine. Yes, that is right, she is posing as an atheist defending religion. This is a noble cause, but entirely misguided. I almost feel dirty for mentioning her on my blog because the want for comment is too strong. It is impossible to avoid falling into logical fallacies, but fuck it! I'm making no claims to irrefutability. Read what I have to say and make up your own mind on the matter.

Her premise, once more, is to provide an argument from the opposition to defend the sensibilities of religion. Were there an actual liberal media manhunt on religion, we might feel guilty, but there isn't one, so her claim makes too much noise in a quiet room. Just like we liberals cringe when the Israelis beat up the Palestinians, we would not be too comfortable with a media blitz against any religion. But S. E. Cupp's claim holds no water at all. As LiberalViewer on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZkFqj5cX5U) points out, she's pulling her points out of thin air. This smacks of a hidden agenda. I also want to point out her perky demeanor on Bill Maher's show, which is reminiscent of Sarah Palin. Perky, but vapid.

S. E. Cupp makes no question about her "conservative" values, which is always a possibility for an atheist, but she is not sticking to the secular conservative arguments (small goverment, less taxes, more freedom of SPEECH). Instead, she sounds more like the neo-cons that are almost exclusively religious. In order to ingratiate herself with the natives, she has stated that she "aspires" to be a person of faith one day. This goes beyond "no true Scotsman." That ain't no atheist. When asked about what lead her to atheism, her answer was simply that she didn't feel like becoming a Christian. That doesn't preclude the belief in god, though, so we look deeper. She would later claim that she would one day like to be a believer. If S. E. Cupp is really an atheist, she is for the wrong reasons.

I've heard too many believers tell me that they were once an atheist like me, but they changed. I'm fairly certain that they were in no way like me. The story of many ex-atheists usually begins with them "rebelling" against the belief in God, like they resented having to believe. Eventually, they "wisened" up and fell back into line. This is not atheism, it is angst. Though the pedants will point out that atheism is only the lack of belief in a god and nothing more, there is an unwritten conversational definition of atheism that we all mean when we use the word. This definition encompasses a conscious certainty of the myth that is a supreme being. If you are really an atheist, there is no line to fall into. That is why an atheist claiming to aspire to belief is pure bullshit. That is why S. E. Cupp is a fraud.

Joke Explanation: Pi in Binary

I read an interestingly philosophical and nerdy joke the other day. It warned the reader not to render the value of pi into binary. The consequences of doing this would potentially expose the doer to accusations of copyright infringement and intelligence theft. How could this be the case? Consider that all computers calculate, memorize and communicate in binary. This means that every piece of information exists (or could exist) in binary form. Pi, being an infinitely long number with non-repeating digits thus theoretically contains every conceivable combination of digits in any conceivable length. When converted to binary, a universal format for interpretation, the value of pi would then conceivably contain every piece of information known (and unknown) to man. Once rendered, it is simply a matter of knowing how many places one would have to calculate before they run into the binary code necessary to compile Windows 7 or the password to President Obama’s email account. As a concept, the joke is quite brilliant, as it goes far beyond the “infinite monkeys” theory and turns the focus from probability to certainty.

More importantly, the joke gives us a new way to look at the concept of infinity. From randomness: perspective. From infinity: certainty.