They Got Al Capone on Tax Evasion

I’m not much of a TV watcher, but I think I’ll set aside some time to watch this.

Investigations conducted by ZEMBLA show that Bayrock has formed a business construction in the Netherlands, which may have been used to siphon off one and a half million dollars. In this enterprise, Bayrock collaborated with Viktor Khrapunov, a fugitive ex-mayor and governor from Kazakhstan. The Kazakhstan government accuses Khrapunov of systematically looting hundreds of millions of public assets.

It doesn’t sound like riveting TV, until you read a bit further.

The hub of the enterprise is the Dutch letter box company KazBay B.V. In the act of incorporation it states that KazBay is owned by two companies: the Dutch firm Bayrock B.V. and the Swiss company Helvetic Capital S.A. This email explains that Trump’s business partner Bayrock Group L.L.C. is behind Bayrock BV, and that the actual owner of Helvetic Capital S.A. is none other than the wife of Viktor Khrapunov.

This mail clearly refers to the use of a Dutch go-between company. Its contents also reveal that the Dutch construction was formed by the law firm of Rudy Giuliani who, at the time, was a partner in Bracewell & Giuliani LLP, and is also a Trump confidante.

Trump and Giuliani? Tied up in international money laundering?! It could explain his stance on national monuments, according to James Henry.

“This is a land grab,” said Henry. “If you don’t get that Putin and the Russians transferred a hell of a lot of wealth of the Russian government to a handful of 25 oligarchs. Right now there are five states in the U.S. that are roughly 80 percent or more owned by the federal government. Trump has just issued executive orders that will open up a lot of that land, either to outright privatization or to mining deals like we’ve never seen before.”

“There’s nothing ideological,” Henry said. “What connects all of these people in the Trump government is they are all about money. This is going to be a huge payday for these people and their friends. At the end of the day, they take care of themselves.”

This might also explain why Trump was so eager to fire Comey; the FBI was shifting focus from Russian collusion with Trump to organized crime involvement. It would also explain why Democrats questioned Comey about Felix Sater.

There’s a lot of speculation here, alas, and I’d rather see Trump investigated for collusion. But it might also be solid grounds for impeachment and a major scandal for the Republicans.

What if the simplest solution was just to fire Comey and to pressure McConnell to go along? Not that the Senate Majority Leader needed much persuading.

“McConnell received a million-dollar contribution from Russians back in October that we know about,” Henry said. “There was a million-dollar contribution to the Senate leadership PAC in the name of a New York company owned by Len Blavatnik.” Blavatnik is a Russian-born billionaire-oligarch who invested in aluminum companies in Russia and became a U.S. citizen decades ago.

It’s not the ideal path to get Trump out of office, but it could work.

Intersex and Sex Denialism

This was a pleasant surprise.

For generations those who, for biological reasons, don’t fit the usual male/female categories have faced violence and stigma in Kenya. Intersex people – as they are commonly known in Kenya – were traditionally seen as a bad omen bringing a curse upon their family and neighbours. Most were kept in hiding and many were killed at birth. But now a new generation of home-grown activists and medical experts are helping intersex people to come out into the open. They’re rejecting the old idea that intersex people must be assigned a gender in infancy and stick to it and are calling on the government to instead grant them legal recognition.

While some of those people are trans*, that podcast does talk with a number of intersex people as well. It’s great to see more advocacy, I just wish I’d see more of it in North America and less of this.

The facts of the world generally don’t support transphobic arguments, and transphobes don’t really have the option of making robust arguments based on an honest assessment of the current state of our knowledge. They know this – they make use of this same technique of pondering counterfactuals. The difference is that they work backwards to fabricate an entirely new counter-reality, tailored to support their positions and vast enough that it can substitute for reality itself in a person’s mind. It’s called denialism: an entire ideological support system made to preserve a desired belief by rejecting the overwhelming evidence that would threaten this belief.

Denialism is wrongness with an infrastructure – ignorance with an armored shell, a whole fake world weaponized against the real world.

Less of “denialism,” that is, not good analysis or Zinnia Jones. She gets a bit meta behind the link, and the contents are applicable to much more than transphobia. It’s worth a full read.
(That last item comes courtesy of Shiv. Support her work, too!)

The Firing of James Comey

Now that I’ve set a CPU on fire, I can start typing up something about this. I’m a bit late to the table, but that means I have a bit more information. In no particular order:

Whew! Capitol Hill is nearly as hot as my CPU right now.
Bonus track!

“He had grown enraged by the Russia investigation, two advisers said, frustrated by his inability to control the mushrooming narrative around Russia. He repeatedly asked aides why the Russia investigation wouldn’t disappear and demanded they speak out for him. He would sometimes scream at television clips about the probe, one adviser said. […]

But the fallout seemed to take the White House by surprise. Trump made a round of calls around 5 p.m., asking for support from senators. White House officials believed it would be a “win-win” because Republicans and Democrats alike have problems with the FBI director, one person briefed on their deliberations said. Instead, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told him he was making a big mistake — and Trump seemed “taken aback,” according to a person familiar with the call.

By Tuesday evening, the president was watching the coverage of his decision and frustrated no one was on TV defending him, a White House official said. He wanted surrogates out there beating the drum. Instead, advisers were attacking each other for not realizing the gravity of the situation as events blew up.”

Last one, promise.

Politico described the mood last night at [Roger] Stone’s house in Florida as “elated.” Another former Trump adviser under investigation as part of the Russia probe, former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page, also applauded the move.

While Stone was jubilant, Politico reports that “shock dominated much of the FBI and the White House.”

I LIE, though to be fair that’s currently in style. Also, I have to update a line-item above, Comey’s been invited to testify privately next week and despite early reports it looks like his successor will take his place during the public hearings this week. Plus:

Three interesting items, one of which is only tangentially related to the above.

In the weeks before President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, a federal investigation into potential collusion between Trump associates and the Russian government was heating up, as Mr. Comey became increasingly occupied with the probe.

Mr. Comey started receiving daily instead of weekly updates on the investigation, beginning at least three weeks ago, according to people with knowledge of the matter and the progress of the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe. Mr. Comey was concerned by information showing possible evidence of collusion, according to these people.

===

Trump was angry that Comey would not support his baseless claim that President Barack Obama had his campaign offices wiretapped. Trump was frustrated when Comey revealed in Senate testimony the breadth of the counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s effort to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And he fumed that Comey was giving too much attention to the Russia probe and not enough to investigating leaks to journalists.

The known actions that led to Comey’s dismissal raise as many questions as answers. Why was Sessions involved in discussions about the fate of the man leading the FBI’s Russia investigation, after having recused himself from the probe because he had falsely denied under oath his own past communications with the Russian ambassador?

Why had Trump discussed the Russia probe with the FBI director three times, as he claimed in his letter dismissing Comey, which could have been a violation of Justice Department policies that ongoing investigations generally are not to be discussed with White House officials?

And how much was the timing of Trump’s decision shaped by events spiraling out of his control — such as Monday’s testimony about Russian interference by former acting attorney general Sally Yates, or the fact that Comey last week requested more resources from the Justice Department to expand the FBI’s Russia probe?

===

When President Donald Trump hosted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office on Wednesday just hours after firing the FBI director who was overseeing an investigation into whether Trump’s team colluded the Russians, he was breaking with recent precedent at the specific request of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The chummy White House visit—photos of the president yukking it up with Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak were released by the Russian Foreign Ministry since no U.S. press was allowed to cover the visit—had been one of Putin’s asks in his recent phone call with Trump, and indeed the White House acknowledged this to me later Wednesday. “He chose to receive him because Putin asked him to,” a White House spokesman said of Trump’s Lavrov meeting. “Putin did specifically ask on the call when they last talked.”

I didn’t know this.

The most famous leaker in US history — the pseudonymous Deep Throat, who gave sensitive information on the Nixon administration to Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in 1972-3 during the Watergate scandal — was later revealed to be Mark Felt, who was associate FBI director at the time.

Interestingly, Felt’s motivation for leaking about Watergate wasn’t whistleblowing: He wasn’t motivated by some patriotic sense of duty to protect American democracy. Rather, he believed he was acting to protect the FBI’s independence from Nixon’s attempts to rein it in.

If that culture is still in place, the FBI could go to war with Trump. That seems probable, and the first shots may have already been fired.

FBI agents raided the Annapolis offices of a GOP fundraising outfit, Strategic Campaign Group, with links to Trump. The director, Kelley Rogers, has been employed by Penn National Gaming, a company with ties to the Trump Taj Mahal. The Senate Intelligence Committee reportedly has been looking into money laundering penalties levied against the Taj in 2015.

One of Strategic Campaign Group’s senior advisers, Dennis Whitfield, is also a director of the political consulting firm Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. Founders Paul Manafort (a former Trump campaign chairman) and another longtime Trump adviser, Roger Stone, are reportedly under investigation for connections to Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

Remember when Trump said “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation?”

Trump narrated those three occasions to [Lester] Holt. The first came at a dinner between the two men in which Trump said Comey seemed to be trying to keep his job, in the face of Trump’s public criticism.

“I had dinner with him,” Trump said. “He wanted to have dinner because he wanted to stay on … Dinner was arranged. I think he asked for the dinner. And he wanted to stay on as the FBI head, and I said, ‘I’ll consider it. We’ll see what happens.’ But we had a very nice dinner, and at that time he told me you are not under investigation.”

Trump acknowledged that Comey has said the FBI is investigating links between his campaign and Russia, but said he was not personally involved, and that Comey had reiterated that in two separate phone calls. “In one case I called him and one case he called me,” the president said.

Except that directly contradicts what Comey has shared with friends and associates.

As they ate, the president and Mr. Comey made small talk about the election and the crowd sizes at Mr. Trump’s rallies. The president then turned the conversation to whether Mr. Comey would pledge his loyalty to him. Mr. Comey declined to make that pledge. Instead, Mr. Comey has recounted to others, he told Mr. Trump that he would always be honest with him, but that he was not “reliable” in the conventional political sense. […]

By Mr. Comey’s account, his answer to Mr. Trump’s initial question apparently did not satisfy the president, the associates said. Later in the dinner, Mr. Trump again said to Mr. Comey that he needed his loyalty. Mr. Comey again replied that he would give him “honesty” and did not pledge his loyalty, according to the account of the conversation.

But Mr. Trump pressed him on whether it would be “honest loyalty.” “You will have that,” Mr. Comey told his associates he responded.

That New York Times story also drops this interesting tidbit.

Mr. Comey described details of his refusal to pledge his loyalty to Mr. Trump to several people close to him on the condition that they not discuss it publicly while he was F.B.I. director. But now that Mr. Comey has been fired, they felt free to discuss it on the condition of anonymity.

This meshes with what other people have suggested, that Comey is a master at setting up a defensive paper trail. It apparently has Trump spooked and reaching for distractions.

The FBI isn’t exactly elated, either, with some agents scrambling to finish the Russian probe before Trump can kill or starve it.

An intriguing update on Comey’s testimony.

He declined an invitation to speak to a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday and was replaced on a panel testifying before that committee last Thursday by his temporary replacement, Andrew McCabe.

Comey’s associates say that he is not seeking publicity and that they believe an open session before Congress is the most appropriate setting. He would not be commenting on specifics of the investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election and would likely discuss issues about his record.

Here we go. It needs independent confirmation, but still:

Mr. Comey wrote the memo detailing his conversation with the president immediately after the meeting, which took place the day after Mr. Flynn resigned, according to two people who read the memo. The memo was part of a paper trail Mr. Comey created documenting what he perceived as the president’s improper efforts to influence a continuing investigation. An F.B.I. agent’s contemporaneous notes are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations. Mr. Comey shared the existence of the memo with senior F.B.I. officials and close associates. The New York Times has not viewed a copy of the memo, which is unclassified, but one of Mr. Comey’s associates read parts of the memo to a Times reporter.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” […]

Mr. Comey created similar memos — including some that are classified — about every phone call and meeting he had with the president, the two people said. It is unclear whether Mr. Comey told the Justice Department about the conversation or his memos.

Proof of God: The Cosmological Proof (1)

Proof from First Cause, or the Cosmological Proof

Have a quick look around you.

Are you sitting in a chair? Did you ever wonder how that chair got there?

I’m willing to bet you or someone else placed it there. I doubt you created it, though; more likely, a team of people fashioned it out of wood and metal, gave it to another group who transported it to a store or warehouse, where another bunch helped deliver it to you. Where did that first team get their materials, though? The wood was probably harvested from a forest, the metal dug up from a mine. The trees got their nutrients from the soil and the sun. No matter which path you take, both trace back to the Earth or the Sun.

So far, everything we’ve discussed has come from something else. The materials came from elsewhere, and somebody or some process helped shape it. The chair was “caused” by human effort and the proper materials, the tree was “caused” (in a loose sense) by sunshine and nutrients gathering in the right place and the right way. We can do this thought experiment for every object in the universe.

We should be able to do this for the universe itself. It’s a material thing, after all, though perhaps a little larger and more complicated than our chair.

At this point, the chain of causes breaks down. We can’t name anything within the universe as a cause, since by definition that’s a part of the universe itself. Any potential cause must come from outside. But what lies outside the universe, in a place we can never hope to explore?

There’s only one being we know of that could live outside the universe. God, after all, is the only possible being with enough power to create a universe, and in countless religions she does exactly that:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

(Genesis 1:1, Jewish Old Testament, King James translation)

They say it happened long ago when there were no people nor anything, and when earth and the black sky did not exist “Let us make the earth and the black sky,” he said. He began to study and talk about how both the earth and sky might be made.

(“Myths and tales from the San Carlos Apache”, collected by Pliny Earle Goddard)

Nights, days, weeks and seasons; wind, water, fire and the nether regions—in the midst of these, He established the earth as a home for Dharma. [11]

(from the Sikh religious text “Siri Guru Granth Sahib”, translated by Singh Sahib Sant Singh Khalsa)

Then, at last, slowly uprises Tane-mahuta, the god and father of forests, of birds, and of insects, and he struggles. With his parents; in vain he strives to rend them apart with his hands and arms. Lo, he pauses; his head is now firmly planted on his mother the earth, his feet he raises up and rests against his father the skies, he strains his back and limbs with mighty effort. Now are rent apart Rangi and Papa, and with cries and groans of woe they shriek aloud: ‘Wherefore slay you thus your parents? Why commit you so dreadful a crime as to slay us, as to rend your parents apart? But Tane-mahuta pauses not, he regards not their shrieks and cries; far, far beneath him he presses down the earth; far, far above him he thrusts up the sky.

(“Polynesian Mythology & Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealanders,” collected by Sir George Grey)

Therefore, there’s only one possible cause for the universe, and that’s god.

Golden Oldies

The Cosmological proof is, without a doubt, the most popular of its class. Surprisingly, it’s also one of the earliest formal arguments we know of, dating back to Plato’s last work, Laws. In the tenth chapter of this dialogue, the wise “Athenian[12] ” scoffs at those who deny the existence of the gods, who claim they were man-made inventions that bend to human whims. To show their folly, he builds a simple proof by cataloguing the types of motion that exist in the universe. After ticking off nine, the “Athenian” describes a tenth type, that is capable of moving itself and other objects. He then points out this tenth must be the greatest of all, and reaches the core of his argument:

ATHENIAN: I mean this: when one thing changes another, and that another, of such will there be any primary changing element? How can a thing which is moved by another ever be the beginning of change? Impossible. But when the self-moved changes other, and that again other, and thus thousands upon tens of thousands of bodies are set in motion, must not the beginning of all this motion be the change of the self-moving principle?

CLEINIAS: Very true, and I quite agree.

ATHENIAN: Or, to put the question in another way, making answer to ourselves: If, as most of these philosophers have the audacity to affirm, all things were at rest in one mass, which of the above-mentioned principles of motion would first spring up among them?

CLEINIAS: Clearly the self-moving; for there could be no change in them arising out of any external cause; the change must first take place in themselves.

ATHENIAN: Then we must say that self-motion being the origin of all motions, and the first which arises among things at rest as well as among things in motion, is the eldest and mightiest principle of change, and that which is changed by another and yet moves other is second.

(Laws, Book X, translated by Benjamin Jowett)

From there, the “Athenian” needs only a little bit of hand-waving to turn this primary mover into what he calls a “soul,” but modern readers would recognize as a god.

The argument next appeared roughly 1,300 years later, in Avicenna’s studies of ancient Greek thought, only this time it proved the existence of Allah instead of the Greek gods. Later scholars, most notably the influential Al-Ghazali, would condemn all of Plato and Avicenna’s work as a corrupting influence, but retained the handy Cosmological proof.

Thomas Aquinas independently claimed Cosmological for Christianity some 200 years after Avicenna, in his Summa Theologica. Aquinas’ version shows why this proof continues to be so popular. Not content to merely repeat Plato’s chain of movers, he created three more variations of the same proof and claimed each as a newcomer. One is the chain of causation I used in my introduction to Cosmological; another is a chain of creation, which traces back to singular creator; and the last is a chain of perfection, leading to the most perfect being possible.

Plato’s original argument has endured because it is so very plastic. To come up with your own variant, all you need is some way to organize every object in the world into a hierarchy.[13] You then claim that an infinitely deep hierarchy is absurd or impossible, then place atop this tower of induction the god of your choice. In the 2,500 years since it left Plato’s mind, Cosmological has been polished down to an invincible single sentence:[14]

You can’t create something from nothing, unless you’re a god.

Because I Said So

It would help if we had a more formal version of Cosmological to run through point-by-point. The Kalām[15] version of Cosmological, as promoted by William Lane Craig, seems like a good start:

  1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
  2. The universe began to exist.
  3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

We can easily modify this to cover all other versions of Cosmological:

  1. Whatever begins to exist was created has a cause creator.
  2. The universe began to exist. A finite number of movers must exist.
  3. Therefore, the universe has a cause. a being more perfect than all must exist.

Returning to Plato, he rejected the idea of an infinite chain of movers or causes because he didn’t think infinite things existed in the real world. Most thinkers who invoke the Cosmological proof agree, and like Plato stop this infinitely long cascade by placing an infinitely-powerful being in its path. Thus in order to stop an infinite thing from existing in the world… they propose the existence of an infinite thing in the world. Hmm.

And looming over it all is a cherry of a contradiction that Cosmological tries to ignore. If everything has a creator or mover or what-have-you, and god is something, then what created/moved god? After all, this proof rests heavily on the idea that everything can be put into a hierarchy, with no exceptions, but then it turns around and grants one exception. Doesn’t this derail the entire train of thought? If we’re allowed to grant exceptions, what prevents me from saying the universe is an exception too? Philosophers have been fine labeling their god of choice the “First Mover” without any evidence to justify it, so I fail to see why I can’t slap the same label on the universe, given an equal amount of evidence.

[11] “Dharma” probably means “religious path” here, but in other contexts it could be closer to “religious law” or “social structure.”

[12]  Scholars suspect this mysterious Stranger from Athens was supposed to be Socrates. Plato never named the character directly because he bore little resemblance to the Socrates from Plato’s earlier dialogs. The youthful version was perpetually questioning and dripping with excessive humility, while the later one knows the truth and kindly shares his lessons with lesser people.

[13] Why a hierarchy? Let’s take creation as an example: a lump of clay can be used to create many things, like pots or plates, while those pots or plates have only one creator, the clay. The same one-to-many branching applies to causes, movers, or whatever other mapping you use, and when laid out on paper naturally leads to a hierarchy.

[14] Sorry, that’s a lie. The ancient Greek Parmenides nailed it when he said “ex nihilo nihil fit,” and he pre-dated Plato!

[15] “Kalām” refers to an early school of Islam, that valued knowledge and thought theological arguments were best settled by debating it out. I approve, if only because it cuts down on the number of holy wars.

Proof of God: Introduction (1)

Introduction

Here’s a homework assignment for you: Corner any adherent of any religion, and ask for proof that their God or gods exist.

They’ll refuse, with odds better than chance.

They don’t need proof, they say, because they feel his presence within them, or because nothing else can explain how well this world fits together.

I have moments when I realize things like this [Comfort’s argument, reproduced below] myself. Personal moments, when something very physical and small reminds me that the world can’t be an accident. Reminds me that the world fits together too nicely.

Good sex. Hard boiled eggs when you’re in a hurry. What salt water does to my hair. Peanut butter and milk. Giving birth. Aloe. Fingernails.

Now, I don’t get into debates with atheists, and I don’t think one can prove God to anyone else, but I feel it’s worth taking a second to admit to this… since I post a lot of sarcastic bits on this site, and this is a chance to cheese out.

The way a banana fits the hand is exactly the kind of thing that makes me believe… in something. As good an argument as anything, when one isn’t making an argument out of it.

Call it God, or call it lucky agriculture… either way it makes me think the universe has an order I can believe in.

(Laurel Snyder, May 14, 2007, http://www.jewcy.com/religion-and-beliefs/proof_of_god)

I understand that a lot of people do not believe in God because of the simple fact that there seems to be no evidence of Him. I believe the majority of atheists would believe if God showed Himself. So I’m just curious if you have ever asked the Lord into your heart? Because you can’t find God, if you are simply looking for proof. You can only find God when you truly seek after Him. Even just a small amount of faith will due.Even [sic] if you don’t sense His presence immediately. Simply by asking, “God I want to believe in you, so could you show up in my life?” Some people who don’t believe say, “Alright God, if you exist, then show yourself.” As in if they don’t see God show up, then they automatically rationalize that God isn’t real. But the truth is, you have to invite Christ into your life and then He will show up. You WILL feel His presence only when you invite Him into your life. God says draw nearer to me and I’ll draw nearer to you. You can’t see God face to face on earth, but you can feel Him.

(“Violet”, http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110209212839AA9uEI7 )

Only a select few will go farther, but those proofs are somewhat lacking. Ray Comfort, for instance, invokes what he calls the “Atheist’s Worst Nightmare”: the banana.

This fruit fits perfectly in your hand, and has a non-slip texture to help keep it there. You can judge when it’s ripe to eat by the colour of the outer skin. It’s easy to peel open, with the help of a well-placed fingernail. There’s a gentle curve for easy insertion into the mouth. The taste is pleasantly sweet, with no seeds to interrupt your enjoyment. Once finished, the skin is easily discarded and bio-degrades.

A pop can has many of the same attributes, and we know it was designed by humans for humans. Bananas are plants, though, so who could be the designer?

Humans, as it turns out.

Originally, the wild banana had large seeds, and was almost inedible to us. Over 7000 years ago, the residents of what is now Papua New Guinea began cultivating them for food anyway. By keeping only those plants that grew the best-tasting bananas, they gradually improved the taste and reduced the size of the seeds. The new-improved banana picked up fans throughout South-East Asia. Islam then spread the fruit across the Middle East, and may have introduced it to Africa[2] . Portuguese sailors discovered the banana in West Africa around 1500 AD, and began importing it to Europe. It slowly grew in popularity there, eventually requiring large tropical plantations to satisfy demand.

Bananas come in a wide variety of colours, from red to purple, and the majority of them have to be cooked before eating. The yellow “dessert” banana was discovered on a Jamaican plantation in 1836, and its unusually sweet taste and softness made it a hit in the United States of America. Modern agricultural techniques and refrigeration have turned this rare treat into a staple.

The banana is dependent on us for reproduction and protection. The lack of seeds means it can only spread by having a certain portion of the root deliberately cut off and replanted elsewhere. Selective breeding and our desire for a consistent product have robbed the banana plant of genetic diversity, making it easy prey for disease and parasites. In fact, the tastiest variant of dessert banana was killed off by a fungus in the 1960’s. Our current sub-standard replacement is being ravaged by the same disease.

This has been known for some time. If Comfort had only done a little research, he would have been spared the nickname “Banana-man.”

Or take Michael Behe’s argument about the bacterial flagellum. These look like little hairs but act like little propellers, whipping around in circles to drive the bacteria forward. The design of these flagellum is fragile, however; remove any one component, and it’s useless as a propeller. However, evolution works via small, incremental changes, not large leaps; having every piece simultaneously click into place by chance is so unlikely, it would be like tossing some metal into the air and having it land as a bicycle.  If the flagellum was designed, not evolved, Behe proposes that the culprit was an “intelligent designer.” While he’s careful not to use the “g” word, the only potential being that could pull off such a design coup would have to be a god.

One problem: evolution doesn’t force a component to have only one use. Wings began as limbs with a flap of skin, which were useful for gliding, and slowly got better at flying and worse at supporting weight. Limbs are fins that stretched out via 500 million years of evolution, and so on. The flagellum bears a strong resemblance to a “secretion system,” generally a long needle-like structure used to stab other cells and inject them with poison, that has had one or two extra bits added on that allow rotation. Those extras are easy to mutate into place, so the flagellum could evolve after all.

Not only did Behe misunderstand evolution, an embarrassing gaff for a biologist, but he did it in a courtroom, so his mistake has been permanently etched into the public record.

Three Objections

This puts me in a bit of a bind. I could spend an entire book jumping from specific proof to specific proof, only to have my work dismissed as merely “cherry-picking” the worst of the bunch. Even worse, new proofs are easy to manufacture. Behe has move on to more subtle arguments surrounding the rate of evolutionary change, while Comfort can rapidly shift between dozens of well-practiced alternate proofs, deflating any rebuttal longer and deeper than a sound-bite.

And so far I’ve just considered Christian arguments. There are thousands or hundreds of thousands of other religions that have existed on this planet. Even within a single religion, there’s an incredible variety of beliefs. Returning to Christianity, depending on your sect God comes in a trinity or in singular form, God is Jesus, Jesus is the Son of God (and thus only partially god-like), or you yourself could become a God. He may actively alter the universe, passively sit by and provides comfort, or any mix in between. In the Old Testament, God is portrayed as a physical being:

And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden.
(Genesis 3:8, King James translation)

And he said, Hear thou therefore the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left.
(1 Kings 22:19, King James translation)

Modern Christians reject this, and agree more with the New Testament’s view of God as a purely spiritual being, outside the physical world. That fits well with Daoists, who put it more poetically:

The revealing of great virtue all comes from the guidance of the Dao.
The Dao is so fleeting, so alternating.
Alternating and fleeting, there are signs in between; fleeting and alternating, there are forms in between.
It is so deep and so very dark. In between, there lie feelings of life. And feelings of life are real, latent with trust.
From ancient times until today, the name of the Dao stays; it has been guiding us to the origin of the manifestations of all things.
How do I know the very origin of the manifestation of all things? It’s through the Dao.

Things rapidly get worse for me, though. The conflicting views on god imply that some of them must be incorrect. This in turn opens up the possibility that none of them are correct, and the true description of the divine order has yet to be discovered or was contained in an extinct religion.

So not only am I facing a Hydra[3] of proofs, I must also factor in multiple definitions of gods that don’t mesh well or have yet to be thought up! Looming over it all is the biggest problem of them all, the one I began with. Why is any sort of proof necessary in the first place?

This is a slightly daunting task. Obviously I can’t claim to be definitive, but as impossible as this sounds, I think I can make a reasonable go of it.

[2]  There is some recent evidence that Africans may have domesticated the banana themselves, on or around 1000 BCE.

[3]  An old Greek monster that grew two heads for every one you chopped off. It likely went extinct because of ever-increasing brainpower, which in turn led to ever-increasing boredom.

Proof of God: Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

In absolutely no order, I must give thanks to:

  • [names]
  • Brandie and Zane, for helping debug some of my thoughts.
  • Daniel Dennett, who’s book “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” tipped me off to Hume’s near-discovery of evolution.
  • Paul Buller, who accidentally helped me improve my section on the Cosmological proof.

How To Read This Book

Experienced readers may find themselves somewhat bored with this book. I’ve done my best to come up with novel arguments, but this territory is very well trafficked. If you find yourself nodding off or intimidated by the scope of this book, there’s no harm in skipping ahead. You can always come back later if need be.

If instead you find yourself short on time, or with no desire to wade through proofs you’ve heard multiple times before, here’s what I recommend:

  • Read at least the last chapter. It makes more sense if you read the Introduction first, but experienced readers should be able to puzzle out what they missed.
  • Hop around through the rest of the chapters as you fancy. Beyond the beginning and end, this book has a very non-linear structure and sometimes refers to previous or future chapters to support a point. Take advantage of that to graze along as you find the time and desire. I recommend skimming the chapters on Fine Tuning, Design, and Popularity, in particular.

Notes

Any writer that discusses science faces this dilemma: should I use scientific notation, or not?

As an example, I can write the speed of light as 299,792,458 metres per second, or as 3.00 • 108 metres per second. The little exponent piggybacking the 10 tells you how zeros to tack on to the right of the decimal place to get to the true value. If that exponent is negative you head left, unsurprisingly; our eyes are most sensitive to light that has a wave length of 0.000000555, or 555 • 10-9, metres.

Scientific notation is much shorter than the conventional way, which seems like a clear advantage, but it also tends to obscure the true scale of large numbers. The difference between 2.0 • 1010 and 6.0 • 1014  seems bigger than the difference between 7.0 • 1018 and 9.0 • 1018, until you do the maths: the first is a difference of 599,980,000,000,000, while the second is 2,000,000,000,000,000,000. Human beings are lousy with large numbers, and the exponent in scientific notation makes that an order of magnitude worse.

The sheer bulk of conventional numbers creates its own problem, however: all those extra digits make them look more accurate than they really are. For instance, the size of the visible universe is 880,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 metres across. That looks extremely precise, but in reality we’re only confident of the first three digits. All but the first zero is mere padding to get those digits into the right place, and yet there’s no good way to remove the excess fluff.

The same number in scientific notation is 8.80 • 1026. The precision is so easy to convey that it’s intuitive!

On the balance, I prefer to waste a little space to give you a better feel for how large some numbers are, so long as the zeros don’t get too crazy. Just be aware that the first two or three digits are usually the only accurate ones. [1]

My next problem is one of capitalization.

Christianity has decided that their god shall be called God, and can get rather snippy if you don’t fall into line. Yet God is but one of many gods that have existed through the ages, and in this book I’m aiming at a definition of god that encompasses them all. Given the choice of offending Christians by not capitalizing the word god, or offending other religions by implying their Gods are really just the Christian one, I’ve decided to go with the majority. Sorry, Christians, but I don’t mean offence by it, and if I do talk about your god in particular I’ll be sure to make liberal use of the Shift key.

There’s also the problem of pronouns. The Christian God is a “He,” which is both a generic pronoun and a male-specific one. Hindu gods have a definite gender, and some can also be considered a “she.” Deists roll their eyes at the suggestion of a physical shape to their god, let alone a gendered human-like one, so “it” is most appropriate. Satisfying everyone is impossible, so I’ve decided to satisfy no-one and freely interchange all of them.

While apologizing for my apologetics, I should also ask for forgiveness from polytheistic religions. To save my poor typing fingers, I’ll frequently refer to god in the singular. I’m fully aware of the possibility of multiple gods, and all my arguments should succeed or fail equally well in that framework, but it gets annoying to continually write “god or gods.” Again, no slight is intended.

Speaking of other religions, atheists are commonly criticized for focusing on one religion and ignoring all others. I’ve tried hard to avoid that.

[1] But not always. In 1983, the Comité International des Poids et Mesures decided to define the metre as exactly 1 / 299,792,458th of how far light travels through a vacuum in one second.

Proof of God: Table of Contents

 

Proof of God

Context

 (1)

Acknowledgements

How To Read This Book

Notes

  (2)

Introduction

Three Objections

 (3)

Definitions

 (4)

Whither Proofs?

Gotta Catch Them All

 (5)

Proof from First Cause, or the Cosmological Proof

Golden Oldies

Because I Said So

 (6)

Hume’s Trip to the Pole

 (7)

There Are No Stupid Questions

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

 (8)

Absolutely Nothing

So Bad It’s Not Even Wrong

 (9)

Proof from Logical Necessity, or the Ontological Proof

No Really, It’s Quite Popular With Some People

 (10)

Existence is not Great

The Triumph of Irrationality

 (11)

Kant-er Arguments

Gödel’s Proof, and the Problem of Infinity

The Proof that God Does Not Exist

 (12)

Proof from Intelligence

Definitions

 (13)

Divine Gift or Solvable Mystery?

Cogs in the Machine

Language

 (14)

Problem Solving

Mathematics and Logical Thinking

 (15)

Visual Processing

Music

Intrapersonal and Self-Awareness

 (16)

Spatial Reasoning

Tool Use

Play

Culture

 (17)

Creativity

Long-Range Planning

Interpersonal

Altruism

Cross-species Altruism

 (18)

Farming

Lying

So What’s Left?

 (19)

Proof from Logic and Dualism

The Connection to Reality

Confirming The Obvious

 (20)

Elegant, According to Whom?

Dualism

 (21)

Dualism

The Limits of Logic

 (22)

You’ve Got to Have Soul!

 (23)

Proof from Morality

Moral Quandaries

 (24)

Two Big Objections

 (25)

Social Animals

The First Game

 (26)

The Golden Rule

Clockwork

 (27)

Fuzzy Logic

The Monkey Wrench

 (28)

Proof from Design, or the Teleological Proof

Cranes and Skyhooks

 (29)

A Hat Tip to Mandelbrot

 (30, 31, 32)

Evolution and Chaos

Baby Steps to a Light-Sensitive Patch…

Take A Chance

 (33)

I Fought The Law

Death by a Thousand Cuts

 (34)

Proof from Popularity

Bridge Jumping

Judgement Day

The Ascent of Religion

 (35)

Over-active Pattern Matching

Classism

Evolution

Social Attachment

Fear of Death

How Religion Started

(unfinished)

(36)

Proof of God: Context

I used to own this little Palm device. The thing was a decade old when I got it, and the on-screen keyboard was scarred by the continual tap-tap-tap of a stylus. I had to find just the right pressure to register a letter; sometimes, it would register the wrong one and I’d be forced to stop, try to reposition the cursor with the stylus, delete the offending letter without adding more, and finally right that wrong. As the screen required manual calibration, typing the wrong letter was unfortunately common. It made writing tedious.

And yet, during rare moments of downtime, I would solemnly tap away at the thing. Some days I could manage a hundred words, and in the evenings I would pop out the SD card (the docking station was broken, if I recall) and copy those hundred words into their proper place in Proof of God.

If my timestamps are correct, I started writing that book on December 21st, 2009. I’m a bit surprised it was so recent, but maybe the Palm distorted my sense of time. Back then, I thought there was a hole in the atheist literature; while a decent number of books on apologetics existed, they struck me as shallow. No one seemed interested in gathering a comprehensive list of counter-proofs, and everyone assumed that Christianity was the only religion out there.

I think I was also trying to better understand religion. Weird fact: I didn’t believe in belief until well into my adulthood. Don’t get me wrong, I’d briefly see preachers on TV when flipping to cartoons, and I’d been in churches and read a few Bible stories. But the stories were too fantastic to be taken seriously, so I thought they persisted because people wanted to ground themselves in the past. If times were tough, remind yourself that you’ve survived a lot worse before and you’ll feel better. None of my circle expressed religious belief, so I thought society had long since shed those false beliefs and moved on.

It was only when I spent time with a true believer outside my bubble that I realised I’d been in one. Naturally that led to a desire to catch up on what I’d missed, and that led to the study of why people believed in their religion. And once my head had filled with arguments and counter-arguments, it made sense to start typing them out to clarify things.

While the date I started Proof of God is murky, the date I stopped is not: August 4th, 2013. I’d decided to leave the boring parts until last, which sapped my desire to write. The citation-heavy style I prefer created a maintainence headache. But above all, my answer for why people believed was leading me to an unsettling conclusion: people believed in religion to discriminate against others and get ahead in life, albeit unconsciously. The arguments for belief were just a conscious smokescreen for that discrimination, which made a book devoted to them seem useless.

In hindsight, I was also getting cynical about the atheist community. The odd beliefs of the devout seemed far less shocking when I started running into skeptics who doubted climate change and couldn’t wrap their heads around consent. Atheists could pick apart the finer details of the Watchmaker argument, yet struggle to understand feminism. Believing in nonsense seemed to be a fundamental part of being human, and wouldn’t go away if every religious person deconverted. The revelation took more wind out of my sails, and seeded a complex set of feelings about the skepto-atheist community.

If I seem somewhat dour, take heart. Proof of God also led me to some novel atheist apologetics, which I quietly continue to pursue. The introduction and conclusion we’re the first time I expressed those ideas in writing. I’m proud of other chapters too, and several years ago vowed to blog them should I wind up on FtB.

Well, here I am. And here it is, in small bits twice weekly. To make random access easier, my next post in the series will be a table of contents that’s updated as I go.

The Odds of Elvis Being an Identical Twin

This one demanded to be shared ASAP. Here’s what you need to know:

  1. Identical or monozygotic twins occur in roughly four births per 1,000.
  2. Fraternal or dizygotic twins occur in roughly eight births per 1,000.
  3. Elvis Prestley had a twin brother, Jesse Garon Presley, that was stillborn.

For simplicity’s sake, we’ll assume sex is binary and split 50/50, despite the existence of intersex fraternal twins. What are the odds of Elvis being an identical twin? The answer’s below the fold.

[Read more…]