When good people do bad things

Amongst Catholics, it had long been thought that “children who die without being baptized are with original sin and thus excluded from heaven, but the church has no formal doctrine on the matter. Theologians have long taught, however, that such children enjoy an eternal state of perfect natural happiness, a state commonly called limbo, but without being in communion with God.”

However, it seems that concerns have been raised about this because of the growing number of children who now die without being baptized. (I am not exactly sure why this is seen as a bigger problem now than before. Is there a finite amount of space and thus overcrowding in limbo?) Anyway a recent news report says that the Catholic Church has appointed a high powered International Theological Commission to study this problem (really) and now thinks that there is “reason to hope that babies who die without baptism can go to heaven.”

All Christians are familiar with the concept of original sin. This asserts that all people are sinful by their very nature because they are born that way and thus must seek forgiveness to achieve salvation. I had rejected the idea of original sin at a very early age, even when I was still religious in other ways. The idea that newborn babies are sinners struck me as just too preposterous to be taken seriously. Furthermore, since I had never accepted the Genesis story as being literally true, the ‘fall from grace’ which is supposed to be the source of original sin and is depicted in the famous story of Eve tempting Adam with fruit from the forbidden tree of knowledge, could not have occurred anyway, making the whole idea very dubious.

For me discussions about the nature of limbo (or even its existence) and the importance of baptism of infants for salvation are utterly pointless, similar to questions concerning how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But such questions have serious consequences in the lives of real people. Richard Dawkins describes the tragic story of Edgardo Mortara in his book The God Delusion (p 311-315), which he takes from another book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara by David I. Kertzer.

Edgardo was a boy born to Jewish parents around 1850 in Bologna, Italy who, as an infant, had a fourteen year old Catholic nanny. When the baby got very sick one day, the nanny panicked and thought that he was going to die. Not wanting him to end up in limbo, she discovered that anyone (not just priests) could baptize anyone else by sprinkling water and muttering the appropriate words, and she did so to Edgardo in order to save his soul. Edgardo recovered, however, and many years later, the news that he had been baptized came to the attention of church authorities and since a baptized child was legally considered to be a Christian, it was considered intolerable for Edgardo to be brought up in a Jewish home. So in 1868 the papal police, acting legally under the orders of the Inquisition, seized the six-year old boy and brought him up in a special home used for the conversion of Jews and Muslims.

His distraught parents naturally tried everything they could to get their child back but it was to no avail. In fact, the church was bewildered that anyone would even make a fuss about this. After all, the child was now a Christian by virtue of having been baptized and the church thought that being brought up in Christian environment was best for the child. A Catholic newspaper in the US even defended the Pope’s action as taken on behalf of the principle of religious liberty, “the liberty of a child of being a Christian and not forced compulsorily to be a Jew. . . The Holy Father’s protection of the child, in the face of all the ferocious fanaticism of infidelity and bigotry, is the grandest moral spectacle which the world has seen for ages.”

Although Edgardo’s story was highly publicized, it was by no means unusual at that time and this is what makes the whole thing so bizarre. It was apparently routine for well-to-do Jews to hire Catholic nannies, and this kind of surreptitious baptism and taking away of children from Jewish parents had happened before.

This immediately raises the obvious question of why Jews, although aware of this potential problem, would take the risk of hiring Catholic nannies instead of Jewish ones. The reason, it turns out, is that since observant Jews are prohibited by their religion from doing a vast number of routine tasks on the Sabbath, having Catholic servants enabled them to get things done without offending their own god. So the risk of losing a child was seemingly outweighed by their sense of obligation to follow their own god’s rules.

But even after the abduction of their child and when all their efforts to get him back through other means had failed, Edgardo’s parents still had one sure-fire remedy, and that was to agree for themselves to be baptized. Even if they did not believe in the Christian god, if they had agreed to have water sprinkled on themselves and the ritual words spoken, they would get their child back since they would now be considered Christian by the church. But they refused to do this, out of loyalty to their own Jewish god. As Dawkins says: “To some of us, the parents’ refusal indicates wanton stubbornness. To others, their principled stand elevates them into the long list of martyrs for all religions down the ages.”

Dawkins uses this story to make a telling point. Every person and institution in this sorry episode was a ‘good’ person, in the traditional sense that they were acting according to the highest ideals of their religion. The nanny was trying to save the child from limbo. The church honestly seemed to believe that it was in the best interests of a Christian child to be brought up by and amongst other Christians. Edgardo’s parents were trying to observe their religion by hiring a Catholic nanny (despite the known risks) so that they could faithfully observe the Sabbath. And in not agreeing to go through even an insincere baptism, they were acting to avoid incurring the wrath of their own Jewish god because he is well known to be a jealous god who gets really angry at any form of allegiance to other gods, even the Christian god. Presumably the parents sincerely felt that their god would not understand and forgive a baptismal charade, even though their motives for agreeing to a phony baptism would have been unimpeachable.

These were all ‘good’ people, not setting out deliberately to do evil. They were all acting very devoutly according to their own religious lights. But the net result of their actions was evil – a family torn apart and a child deprived of the love and companionship of his parents.

This sad story illustrates better than any other the truth of Steven Weinberg’s statement: “Without [religion], you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.”

POST SCRIPT: Richard Dawkins and Bill O’Reilly

You can see the clip of the exchange here. O’Reilly basically said that because he believes in the Christian god, what he believes must be true. He also said that the tides going in and out, the sun rising and setting, all could not happen without god. In short, he trots out all the simple and fallacious arguments that should be familiar to readers of this blog.

False symmetry

In recent posts, I have been pointing out that while it is impossible to disprove god’s existence, that did not mean that it was rational to believe in god. The reason for those posts was to address a false symmetry that is sometimes posed between atheism and religious belief. That symmetry takes roughly the following form:

1. It cannot be proved that god does not exist
2. Therefore not believing in god’s existence is as much an act of faith as believing in it.

Some extend this line of reasoning even further, to argue that therefore atheism is also a religion and that thus keeping prayer and religious education out of schools is equivalent to promoting one particular ‘religion’ (atheism), and thus violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

This is a false symmetry. While atheists would accept the first statement, they would reject the second. The crucial difference is the role that evidence plays in shaping beliefs.

I said that because of the impossibility of proving a negative, the current state of absence of evidence for god and the afterlife was all the proof we were ever going to get. If people think that a more convincing proof is required for disbelief in god, then I am curious to learn what form it would take. So far, nothing has been offered, as far as I know.

Atheists take the following position:

1. We believe in those things that have sufficient and convincing evidentiary support.
2. We disbelieve those things for which there is insufficient evidentiary support.
3. The more evidence there is in favor of a belief, the more we are likely to believe and vice versa.

The crucial difference can be seen in response to my question as to what evidence it would take to make them disbelieve in god and the afterlife. The commenters in this blog (who are all people who have obviously given this question considerable thought) agreed that there was no conceivable evidence that would make them give up their beliefs. And yet, they do not believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, which have no evidentiary support either. So religious belief is decoupled from evidence. In fact, belief in god in the absence of evidence is taken as a virtue, a sign of the depth of one’s faith.

On the other hand, atheists take a position that is consistent with a scientific outlook. They believe in those things for which there is persuasive, objective, corroborative, and cumulative evidence, even if it cannot be proved beyond any doubt. They can also always conceive of some evidence that would persuade them to give up their most cherished theories. For example, if human fossils that are two billion years old were ever found, that would seriously undermine the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Similarly, atheists can conceive of all manner of things that would require them to accept the existence of god. As another example, suppose god were to suddenly appear on all TV stations, announcing his/her existence, the way that V appeared in the excellent film V for Vendetta. Of course, that by itself would not be convincing since people nowadays are skeptical of the power of technology. Some people are convinced that the Moon landings and the 9/11 attacks were hoaxes.

So to be really convincing, god would have to announce in that broadcast that he/she would stop the Earth’s rotation for 24 hours, starting at some specified time. Such an act would violate the laws of conservation of energy and angular momentum, which are foundations of physics. If that happened, I don’t see how anyone could doubt god’s existence.

Of course, god would have to take some precautions. Simply stopping the Earth’s rotation would, according to the laws of physics, at the very least unleash huge tsunamis and earthquakes that would wreak destruction on a massive scale. But since an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient god can keep track of and do everything at once, I am sure that these negative consequences of stopping the Earth can be avoided. And this is not asking for too much evidence since the Bible says that god has done this in the past (Joshua 10:12-13). To be accurate, the Bible says that god stopped the Sun, not the Earth’s rotation, but we can grant some license for pre-Copernican thinking.

I am not saying that this is the only proof of god’s existence that would be acceptable to atheists. One can suggest a vast number of similar evidences. But it does suggest the nature of the evidence that would be required to be convincing.

So that is where things stand. Atheists, like scientists, can always articulate what evidence (or lack of it) makes them believe some things and disbelieve others. They can also specify what kind of evidence would make them call into question what they currently believe and convert them to belief about things they are currently skeptical of.

But religious believers have no choice but to say that there are some beliefs that they will never give up on, whatever the evidence. It is important to realize that there is nothing inherently wrong with taking this position. Kathy in her comments to previous posts quite rightly points out that faith is irrational and that logic and evidence have nothing to do with it. I agree with her.

What I am saying is that the atheist’s lack of belief in god and the afterlife are, like a scientist’s, based on logic and the absence of evidence while religious beliefs have to part company with evidence at some point. And this is where the symmetry breaks down.

POST SCRIPT: The secret doubts of believers

In a previous post, I suggested that it was strange that religious believers in their daily lives did not act in ways that were consistent with an all-knowing, all-powerful god and suggested that perhaps people were more atheistic than they were willing to let on. Of course, there is hardly any new idea under the sun. It turns out that long ago philosopher David Hume suspected the same thing, as he wrote in his The Natural History of Religion chapter XII (1757):

We may observe, that, notwithstanding the dogmatical, imperious style of all superstition, the conviction of the religionists, in all ages, is more affected than real, and scarcely ever approaches, in any degree, to that solid belief and persuasion, which governs us in the common affairs of life. Men dare not avow, even to their own hearts, the doubts which they entertain on such subjects: They make a merit of implicit faith; and disguise to themselves their real infidelity, by the strongest asseverations and most positive bigotry. But nature is too hard for all their endeavours, and suffers not the obscure, glimmering light, afforded in those shadowy regions, to equal the strong impressions, made by common sense and by experience. The usual course of men’s conduct belies their words, and shows, that their assent in these matters is some unaccountable operation of the mind between disbelief and conviction, but approaching much nearer to the former than to the latter.

Proofs of god’s existence

I have been doing many posts recently as to why belief in god and the afterlife is irrational. It seems only fair that I now provide arguments for the other side but it seems that someone has already done all the work for me. I came across this website that gives over five hundred of proofs of god’s existence, many of which will be familiar to anyone who has discussed these things with believers.
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Religious beliefs as a house of cards

I have argued before that to sustain a belief in god requires one to construct an elaborate system of auxiliary beliefs to explain away the fact that no convincing evidence has ever been provided for god’s existence, even though there is no discernible reason why god is prevented from doing so. The very qualities that most religious people ascribe to god (omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence) are the ones that give the most trouble in explaining why the evidence is not revealed.
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Religious by day, atheists by night?

Here’s a puzzle. Most people in this country are religious. The god they believe in is an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful god. If that is the case, why is it that people still do wrong things, things that they believe god will disapprove of? We know that even very religious people still lie and steal and cheat and do all manner of things that their religion tells them is wrong. But if they are sure that god knows all the things they do and is capable of punishing them, why do they still do it?

An obvious response is that human beings are not perfect, they are prone to temptation and that they are going to stray from the path of good behavior. A religious person might couch this in terms of human beings being weak and sinful and that they need to depend on god’s forgiveness to save them form their sinful natures. (An atheist would have to depend on his or her conscience and moral sense to help overcome the temptation to harm others for their own gain.)

That’s fair enough, but it seems to me that that only explains behavior in which people do something wrong on impulse or on the spur of the moment or by mistake because they did not have time to think things through or figure out what was the right or wrong thing to do. This can arise in tricky ethical situations where one has to make a decision on the spot and one can momentarily forget that god is watching your every move.

But that does not explain why religious people deliberately do things over a long period even when they know that what they are doing is wrong. Disgraced evangelist Ted Haggard, who railed against gays while having a relationship with a male prostitute, is only one highly publicized example of many cases of both clergy and laity indulging regularly and in a systematic manner in a whole host of activities that they strongly assert to be unquestioningly wrong, not just in sexual matters. If they really thought that god was watching their every move and knew their every motive and that their immortal souls were being imperiled, surely they would desist?

This leads me to wonder as to whether people really believe that god is all the he/she is cracked up to be. Perhaps what we have are closet atheists who pay lip service to the existence of a god but really don’t believe it, or at least have serious doubts. Thus they are gambling that they can get away with things they believe are wrong because they think there is a good chance that god does not exist.

It is true that people can be aware of being observed and yet forget that they are under surveillance and act as if they are unobserved. For example, most stores now have cameras that record everything that goes on but we usually ignore them. But our nonchalant behavior usually extends only to those actions that are not serious transgressions. So we might clown around, pick our noses, yawn without covering our mouths, scratch ourselves, and do similar things and not care that we were being watched and recorded. But a serious criminal acting with premeditation would be aware of the cameras and take steps to avoid being detected or identified while stealing. The greater the levels of security, the more likely people would avoid doing something wrong in that store.

Similarly, if you knew that your boss in your workplace had a surveillance system that was monitoring your every move and that people were watching you, surely that would affect your behavior and you would not do what you felt your boss did not want you to?

But we need not limit ourselves to petty criminality. The examples can be multiplied in the worlds of politics, big business, and in interpersonal relations. People consciously do wrong things (cheat on their taxes, defraud their companies, tell lies about others, etc.) all the time, gambling that they can escape the adverse consequences because the earthly authorities are not likely to find out because they do not have the resources to find out everything.

There is no reason to think that such people are any less religious than the average person. Since surely god is the most perfect security system of all, how is it that these people can so easily ignore the fact that the god they believe in knows exactly what they are up to and considers it wrong? Could it be that, deep down, people do not really believe in this kind of god at all, but are simply spouting the pieties that they have been brought up to say from the time they were children?

Are we really a world of closet atheists, too nervous to say out loud what they really believe? That would explain this cavalier attitude to god’s watchfulness but I suspect that religious people would not accept it.

I would be curious to hear alternative explanations for this.

POST SCRIPT: Photo touch ups

I recently saw a magazine cover photo of actress Sally Field. She is 60 years old but in that photo she looked a lot younger and I was impressed at how well she had taken care of herself. But was that photo touched up to ‘improve’ her looks? I don’t know but it is clear that the technology is there that gifted people can use to improve your image immensely.

Take for example, this photo. By moving the cursor over and off the image you can compare the images before and after the photo was touched up.

In another image, the bare shoulders from the image of a different woman was grafted onto the image of a woman who was wearing a dress. It is so well done as to be seamless and unnoticeable.

You can see more examples here. Just click on any thumbnail to get the full image.

These touch ups are done by the company Nasonart.com which is run by the editor of MachinesLikeUs, who is also a professional graphic designer, which explains why his website is so attractive!

In some ways, this is disturbing. Can you believe any image anymore? No wonder some women in this country suffer so much, trying to reach the unattainable standards of beauty they see in magazines. Granted, these women are attractive to begin with (he would have a tough time improving a photo of me!) but the retouching takes them to a level of flawlessness that is unattainable in real life.

But it seems that most young people now assume that the people they see in magazines have had their photos touched up, which is reassuring. I think high school yearbooks now do this kind of thing routinely, making people aware of the fact that things are not always what they seem.

Why it is so hard to give up belief in the afterlife

It is interesting how one’s views can be changed by a comment. Such was the case with Cindy’s comment on my post regarding the absence of proof of an afterlife. Cindy said:

I tend to think that lack of belief in the afterlife is more fundamental to atheism than lack of belief in a God. I think I would have become an atheist a lot sooner if it weren’t for my emotional aversion to non-existence (which has really gone away after a years of thinking about it). Also, while a lot of people think it’s fun to talk about arguments for an against the existence of gods regardless of their beliefs, I’ve seen reasonable people reduced to tears with just a few good points raised about the lack of an afterlife. It seems like theism of any kind is based on two strong emotional ideas: 1) I’ll never really lose anything or anyone 2) The world is inevitably fair. And if they can’t have 2, they’ll still cling to 1.

I think Cindy is really on to something. Clearly people want to believe in the existence of a god and the after life, despite the lack of evidence for either. Although the two beliefs are linked, I used to think that wanting to believe in god was the primary impulse and that belief in an afterlife was something that came along with a belief in god, a fringe benefit if you like.

But Cindy’s suggestion is that the reverse is true, that what people really want to believe in is the afterlife, and that belief in god is merely a mechanism that enables that belief.

That makes a lot of sense. After all, god is an abstraction. Hardly anyone, except Pat Robertson, would claim that they have any kind of real relationship with god. Imagine meeting god. You really would not have much to say and it could be quite awkward, like encountering a stranger at a party. After a little small talk (“Hi, god, nice place you got here. So, . . . read any good books recently?”), you start wishing you could get away to the buffet table.

But that is not the case with people whom we like who have died. It would be like meeting a close friend after many years. We can’t wait to find out what they have been up to and getting them up to speed on out own lives. We can imagine ourselves talking to them for hours and days.

All of us have had people and pets whom we have loved and who have died. We have fond memories of them and the desire to continue that relationship is very strong. A recent study reported by Elizabeth Cooney in the Boston Globe of February 21, 2007 says that:

Contrary to traditional notions of grief after the death of a loved one, a new study finds that yearning is felt more powerfully than depression. . . . “Yearning is reacting to the loss of someone or something, and once that is gone, you miss it, you pine for it, you hunger for it, you crave it. That was the primary emotional experience after bereavement, rather than depression,” Holly G. Prigerson, one of the authors, said in an interview. . . . “People never get over a loss, they just get used to it,” Prigerson said. “Even years after someone dies, they get pangs of grief, they need to think about the person, and they miss them with heartache,” she said.

What people find most difficult to deal with in the death of a close loved one is missing the companionship that person provided. It is natural to want to believe in something, such as the afterlife, that promises that that link may someday be renewed.

In my own case, now that I think about it following Cindy’s comment, giving up believing in god was not that hard. But my father died nearly thirty years ago, before my own children were born. My greatest regret is that he would not see them growing up because I know how much he would have enjoyed knowing them and playing with them and how much they in turn would have enjoyed his company. The idea of meeting him again was much more appealing to me than the thought of seeing god. Believing that he was somewhere ‘up there’ looking down on my children was comforting. Even as I write these words, memories of him and the sadness associated with missing him comes flooding back. Giving up that belief was much harder than giving up belief in a god about whom I really knew nothing and with whom I had had no prior relationship or shared memories.

So it makes sense that belief in an afterlife is more important to people than belief in god and that maybe people desperately want to believe in god because it enables them to believe in an afterlife.

POST SCRIPT: Beautiful sand art

While the people who make sand art are obviously very skilled and patient people, what really amazes me is their willingness to spend so much time and effort something that gets destroyed soon after. You can see more exquisite sand art.

sandArt13.jpg

God in the supermarket

Long time readers of this blog will recall the famous banana argument for the existence of god put forward by an evangelist named Ray Comfort, accompanied actor by Kirk Cameron. The design of the banana is so exquisite, he said, that it could not have evolved according to Darwinian natural selection. He asserted that the existence of the banana was the ‘atheist’s nightmare.’ (This clip has to be seen to be believed. Move the cursor to the 3:25 minute mark to get to the good stuff.)

Well, another ‘atheist’s nightmare’ has surfaced, this time to show why life could not have originated naturally by the action of energy on inorganic matter. The evidence? To appreciate it, you have to move from the fresh fruit section a few aisles over to where the peanut butter is.

(Thanks to MachinesLikeUs.)

Oddly enough, the argument used in this video is the very same ‘absence of evidence is evidence of absence’ argument that I wrote about before, but used incorrectly. There is so much wrong in how this reasoning is used here that one scarcely knows where to begin.

But what I would like to warn the person in the video who is making the case based on peanut is that this kind of argument can be fatal, not for atheists (unless they get a heart attack and die from laughing), but for religious beliefs, because it falls into the trap of ad hoc thinking which can be so easily demolished.

From back when religious believers realized that they could not assume that the idea of god was obviously true and needed some supporting evidence, they have cast around for things that they thought ‘proved’ some religious idea. Initially they have sought to provide evidence of things that could not have occurred except for the action of god.

First it was “Look, the human being! It is so perfect that it has to have been created in the image of god.” Then later it was “Look, the eye! It’s so perfect it cannot have evolved!” And when that fell apart, it was intelligent design creationism with its more sophisticated “Look, the bacterial flagellum!” Now it is degenerating to “Look, the banana!” and even “Look, its Skippy extra smooth peanut butter!”

The flaw is that the proposers of these ideas never seem to explore the implications of their ideas and this is where they differ fundamentally from the scientific approach. All scientists realize that any idea to explain anything has consequences that extend well beyond the thing being immediately explained, and that these consequences must be investigated.

Charles Darwin’s idea of evolution by natural selection is quite simple and the main argument can be stated in a few hundred words. But his groundbreaking book On the Origin of Species consists of nearly 500 pages where he carefully explores a huge number of the possible consequences of that idea, looking both for corroborating evidence and for weaknesses in his theory. He examines animals, birds, insects, fish, and plants from all over the world, looking for patterns. It is an exhaustive and encyclopedic effort, of which I will write more later.

The person making the peanut butter argument has obviously not thought things through. If he thinks that finding an organism in a peanut butter jar or in any other processed food item is evidence of how life originated without god, then he has lost the case because I think almost everyone has at some time bought some item of food that seemed to be ‘spoilt’, i.e., contaminated by some bacteria. We put this down to a fault in the manufacturing process. It is not unknown for foreign matter to creep into food products, and court cases resulting from such events are legion. But for this person, such an event would be a sign of life being created by the action of energy on matter, without the need for god.

I wish it were that easy to show how life originally came into being. Then all scientists would have to do is fan out into the world’s supermarkets and systematically examine each jar of processed food to see if any living organism is found. But instead scientists continue to do it the hard way, in the laboratories, under controlled conditions.

POST SCRIPT: Evolution in cartoons

Here’s a quick summary of Darwin’s ideas from The Simpsons.

And while we’re at it, here’s a compilation of religion related clips from The Family Guy.

And here’s another clip from The Simpsons.

Scientific proof of god’s non-existence

There were a couple of interesting (anonymous) comments in response to my post on what constitute rational and irrational beliefs. The writer said that I was overstepping the line that divided science from philosophy when I argued that religious beliefs were irrational. The arguments took a familiar form and went something like this:

1. We cannot prove that god does not exist.
2. Hence it is rational to believe that god exists.
3. Scientists should stick to the world of data and not venture to question god’s existence since that enters the realm of philosophy, not science. The author states that if a scientist is asked: ‘In your scientific opinion, does God exist?’ the proper answer should always be, ‘I don’t know. I don’t have any data on the subject.’

I will readily concede the first point, and in fact have done so previously (See here, here, and here.)

But the other two statements do not follow from the first. Just because we cannot prove, using data, the negation of some entity does not mean that it is reasonable to believe in that entity. Scientists constantly make judgments in the absence of data and act on those judgments. In fact, it is essential that they do so, as science could not proceed otherwise.

The only time that you can prove a negative is if you have the ability to do an exhaustive examination of every possible situation. As an example, I can prove to everyone’s satisfaction that no unicorns exist in my office because I can search every nook and cranny and show that none are there. But I cannot similarly prove that no unicorns exist anywhere on the Earth or elsewhere in the universe.

I also cannot prove the non-existence of magic unicorns in my office, that only materialize when I am not present and are capable of hiding all evidence of their visits before they disappear again. It seems to me that arguments for the existence of god are of this nature.

But there is another point about the word ‘proof’ that needs to be emphasized. When scientists use the word ‘proof’ they use it in a slightly differently way from the way mathematicians use it. In mathematics, a proof is a construct based on an agreed set of axioms and rules of logic. If someone challenges the validity of any of the axioms or one of the rules, then the proof is also called into question. But since the axioms are usually few in number and do not necessarily have to be based on data, mathematicians can agree on the validity of more things as working hypotheses than scientists can.

Scientific ‘proofs’ do not have the same level of rigor as a mathematical proofs because the axioms themselves are not simply assumptions but are also expected to justified based on evidence. Also there are far more explicit assumptions that go into scientific conclusions than go into mathematical proofs, thus opening them up to far more challenges. This greater degree of challenge that scientific assumptions receive makes scientific ‘proofs’ different from mathematical proofs. So although I and other scientists use the word proof frequently, we do understand that it is being used in a slightly different sense than a mathematical proof. The word proof is used to signify a reasoned judgment based on the merits of the evidence.

But just because scientific proofs do not have the same status as mathematical proofs does not mean that scientific conclusions cannot be extremely robust. Let me give an example. Most people readily accept that there are just two kinds of electric charge, positive and negative. This is about as well-established a ‘fact’ as one is likely to find in science. This is one of the most firmly held beliefs in all of science and the entire modern world is constructed on the basis of this two-charge model. No one even thinks of questioning this fact. (Note that ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ are just labels and the charges could just as well have been called things like ‘green’ and ‘blue’.)

The interesting question is how it is that we are so certain that there are just two kinds of charges that we base our entire society on it. Do we have certain proof that there are only two kinds of charges? Do we have direct data that no more charges exist? Have we looked everywhere and convinced ourselves of this? The answer to all three questions is no. So how is it that we are so sure that only two kinds of charges exist? It is because of the absence of certain kinds of data.

Here’s how that argument works. Suppose you have three charged objects A, B, and C. What scientists find is that if the charges are such that A and B attract each other and A and C attract each other, then it is always found that B and C repel each other. This set of three observations can be explained by (1) postulating that there exist just two kinds of charges, and (2) adopting a rule that says that like charges repel and unlike charges attract. No data has ever been seen that contradicts the consequences of these two assumptions.

Because of the absence of any data that contradicts any predictions based on those two statements , scientists will say that they are extremely confident that there are only two kinds of charges and this is all the ‘proof’ they need. But note that haven’t actually proved it in a mathematical sense. It is just a powerful inference based on the absence of certain kinds of data, but it is sufficient proof to convince scientists.

Notice though that even this ‘proof’ can be challenged. After all, we have done such experiments with just a few sets of charges. We have not exhaustively repeated them with every single charge that exists in the universe because it would be impossible to do so. As a result, someone can come along and say that scientists are wrong, that there does exist a third kind of charge but that either it has not been found yet or that it does not interfere with the experiments that scientists do. There is no way that scientists can prove this person wrong. How could they? But what they will do is ignore this argument as not worth responding to because that kind of argument has the same standing as magical unicorns in my office or a god who is determined to avoid leaving evidence of his/her existence.

A belief that has no observable consequences is of no use to scientists and they will work on the assumption that this third charge does not exist and that would be perfectly rational behavior. A person who clings to the belief in a mysterious third charge that has no observable consequences will be treated as somewhat eccentric.

Historians and philosophers of science have long pointed out that there is no proposition in science, however idiotic, that cannot be made immune from refutation by the addition of a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses to shield its weaknesses. But if you want to convince scientists that something like a third kind of charge exists, you will have to provide positive evidence, some actual data that cannot be explained by a two-charge theory. For scientists, the absence of such evidence or data is taken as evidence of absence.

It seems to me that the arguments put forward by believers for the existence of god are of the same kind as those that might be put forward for a third charge: It exists but its effects cannot be observed. But just as scientists are perfectly justified in rejecting as irrational that kind of hypothesis when applied to a third charge and confidently proceeding on the basis that it is false, so it is that we can confidently reject the arguments currently given for the existence of god.

So although you may not be able to prove exhaustively that god does not exist, you cannot obtain a stronger scientific proof than what we currently have.

So if someone should ask me ‘In your scientific opinion, does God exist?’, I would answer ‘No’ with the same degree of confidence that I would say ‘No’ to the question as to whether a third type of electric charge exists.

POST SCRIPT: More lists of famous atheists

Some more lists of well-known atheists and agnostics, along with quotations from them justifying their inclusion in these lists, can be found here and here.

Although it should be obvious, I should add that the mere fact that someone famous is an atheist is not being offered as an argument in favor of atheism. Lists of this kind are simply to identify the members of an affinity group. One could do the same thing with lists of vegetarians or Bassett hound owners.

Why belief in god is irrational

In yesterday’s post I argued that there are conditions under which it is not irrational to believe in things for which there is no evidence at all. The example was given of extra-terrestrial life or space aliens. Since the universe is very large and very old and we know contains a vast number of galaxies, there exists a plausible argument that life, even intelligent life, could exist elsewhere in the universe that we are unaware of.

But believing in other things, such as that space aliens are buzzing around us mysteriously all the time or that dragons and unicorns and the like are roaming in some secret regions of the Earth, is irrational because to retain such beliefs requires one to create very complicated and implausible scenarios to explain the absence of any evidence in favor of them.

Similarly, the idea that that there exists an afterlife is also irrational because having that belief requires one to construct a whole superstructure of auxiliary beliefs in order to sustain that belief, and these auxiliary beliefs are themselves implausible and not supported by evidence and also depend on some kind of willful attempt at concealment of evidence, so one ends up building a whole house of cards of implausible theories just in order to sustain that one belief.

What about belief in god? Is that rational or irrational? Some have argued that it is no harder to believe in a god than that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, since both have no convincing evidence in support of the belief.

But with god, the kinds of explanations for the absence of evidence that can rescue intelligent extra-terrestrial life and place it in the realm of rationality no longer apply. The problem is caused by the very qualities that religious people ascribe to god. With intelligent extra-terrestrial life, we assume that they, like us, are limited by space and time and the laws of nature. In particular, they cannot travel faster than the speed of light, which puts a real crimp on being able to get around this vast universe. After all, even if their technology was so advanced that they could travel at speeds approaching the speed of light, it would still generally take years for them to reach even the nearest neighboring star, so exploring beyond their our own galaxy becomes an enormously time consuming activity. So believing that there exists intelligent life in some remote part of the universe that is so far inaccessible to us is not an outlandish belief because the auxiliary beliefs that are necessary to sustain it (such as a very large universe and limits to travel) are supported by evidence. So the Raelians actually have a more plausible belief structure than mainstream religions.

If (hypothetically) the universe was quite small and could be traversed in a brief time, and people started invoking ideas like that extraterrestrial life existed but they were deliberately and cleverly hiding from us, then that belief starts becoming irrational.

But in the case of god, he/she is not supposed to be not limited by space and time. He/she can be everywhere all the time and has infinite powers to boot. So there is no reason at all why god should not be able to provide us with the kind of convincing evidence that I outlined earlier that would remove all doubts once and for all.

In order to overcome this problem, religious believers have to construct auxiliary hypotheses, similar to the ones that become necessary to sustain a belief in the afterlife. It is postulated that god does not want to be seen by us and has the ability to stay hidden, choosing to be seen in highly selective situations, although those situations seem to be becoming increasingly trivialized and bizarre, such as appearing in grilled cheese sandwiches, damp spots in highway overpasses, and the like.

In such situations, the absence of convincing evidence casts serious doubts on god’s existence and lifts the belief in god into the realm of irrationality. However, the faithful continue to remain devout. It does not seem that they wonder why god goes to all that trouble to provide just tantalizing glimpses. Those who do wonder about this have to, at this point and as a last resort, invoke the inscrutability argument: We cannot presume to understand why god does these things, we just have to believe that there is a good reason that is being hidden for us.

I think that this could be used as a test as to whether a belief that is sustained in the absence of evidence is rational or irrational:

• For a belief to be irrational, in order to sustain it one must argue for the existence of something that is in principle unknowable and also requires a deliberate scheme to conceal evidence of existence.
• For a belief to be rational it needs to be something that is unknown only in practice due to limitations of time or technology, but may become known in the future, and the absence of evidence is not due to willful deception by the very entity whose existence we seek.

This is not how most people seem to view rationality. People tend to view a belief is rational simply because a large number of people believe in it and if it has been around for a long time. But those two arguments really have no merit since it is quite possible for large numbers of people to believe false things for a long time.

But numbers and time seem to be the only thing that belief in god has going for it.

POST SCRIPT: Famous atheists

The online magazine MachinesLikeUs has compiled a long list of famous atheists that makes for interesting reading. There were some names on the list that were a surprise to me.

It contains scientists (Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin), writers (Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy), popular culture celebrities (Angelina Jolie, Woody Allen), political figures (Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony), and even people who are not famous (me).

Rational and irrational beliefs

Some time ago, I wrote a post wondering if the Pope was an atheist. Of course, I do not know the Pope personally and he has never made a public statement to that effect. It would not really be a good career move on his part.

My point was that the more one thought seriously about god and studied religious texts, the more likely that it was that the whole idea of there being a god and heaven would be seen to be preposterous. All the logical fallacies and lack of evidence would become transparent. Hence I argued that it was amongst clergy and theologians that one was most likely to find atheists because those people are not stupid and they do study religion in depth. The higher one went in the hierarchy, the more intellectual were the clergy and theologians and so, given that logic, I argued that the Pope was a prime candidate for atheism.
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