Count that day lost

I was pondering the subject of intellectual inoculation this morning. Primarily, which is the inoculation: To be able to read factual scientific evidence with piles of data behind it and still ignore it because it goes against your religious/political point of view? Or to be able to reject any mode of thinking that goes against your ideology even if you’ve seen substantive and reproducible evidence to go against it? Or to be able to read rhetorically persuasive writing and see through the BS and reach reasoned and logical conclusions.

I’ve written before about how, in the last few years, I’ve gone from being a fairly religious (and certainly religiously active) young earth creationist to a Skeptic and an atheist. I didn’t have anybody in my life “preaching” science and atheism to me, but as I had doubts about my religion and religious upbringing, I started to read work from both (many?) sides of the science/religion debate, and ultimately found the scientific world view to be compelling and true. During that time I also had religious friends who did some of the same reading, but stuck to their religious world view. I’ve also had some friends who are occupying a middle ground of doubt. It’s easy to dismiss the true believers as not giving the evidence a fair shake, but I think that at least some of them read with as open a mind as they could based on their history. So what is the inoculation?

To me, their “evidence” for God is weak and ridiculous when natural explanations are readily available and more in-line with the evidence. To me, they’re being close-minded. For them, that scientific evidence is ignoring a whole realm of emotional reality which, though untestable, is real to them to such a degree that by my not accepting it I’m the one being close-minded.

We all want our loved ones to share at least a fairly high percentage of our ideals, so while much of my family would like my children to be religious and are interested in promoting that world view in them and how they think, I want them to be Skeptics. I want them to have the tools to analyze evidence and information and make informed decisions. I don’t want them to be cold calculating robots, but in addition to having compassion and human understanding (rooted in philosophically sound thought as well as emotional intelligence) I do want them to be able to use proper logic and reason and know the tricks our minds can play on us when we desperately want to believe in something.

To that end… I’m looking for a Skeptic parent’s bookshelf. Not just the Demon Haunted World books for the adults, but books that can be read at bed time to your toddler, through YA, that promote critical, scientific, free thinking.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

I’ve been reading about Desire Utilitarianism lately on the sites of Alonzo Fyfe (who has a blog as well as his main site) and Luke Muehlhauser. I’ve found the premise to be interesting. The idea behind it, as I understand it, is the development of an ethical theory which doesn’t depend on an intrinsic value. Since desires are something we know to be real (by intuition and neuroscience thanks to MRI), they can be a basis. Luke (aka lukeprog) summed it up as:

Desire Utilitarianism claims that a good desire tends to fulfill more and stronger desires than it thwarts. A right action is one that an agent with good desires would perform.

They’ve both said a lot on the subject, and it’s probably better to point you there for further info on it. Luke did an interview with Alonzo for his podcast and has some nice links on the subject, or you can just hit his FAQ on it.

This is a bit of something I put together in response to a friend’s question regarding what options regarding Jesus’s resurrection were open as explanations for theists, agnostics, and atheists. His position was essentially that atheists can’t allow themselves to consider even the possibility of an “actual resurrection” even if there was significant evidence because of their stance regarding “God”.

It’s rough. It’s certainly using parts of other’s arguments I’ve heard but don’t recall where. I’d love to hear what you think of it.

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I don’t think that an atheist must disallow a possibility of the supernatural resurrection, but in the same way one doesn’t assume David Blaine or David Copperfield are actually performing “magic”, one would go from a basis of natural causes and disallow it as anything even vaguely probable. In the same way you would be incredulous if somebody claimed to have spontaneously regrown a limb (or been abducted by aliens), it would take more than even a few people claiming it as truth for you to believe it happened. You would want evidence. You would have to have great, extraordinary, evidence because it is an extra-ordinary claim.

An extraordinary claim (being raised from the dead counts) for which we have no other instance in history with any level of reasonable evidence (and I use “other” not to imply we have any level of reasonable evidence, but to take that instance out of the timeline so we have a baseline of the REST of history to use), would require extra-ordinary evidence for belief. I would wager that you’re unlikely to believe Joseph Smith received any golden plates with the story of Jesus and his visit to the Americas (or the Isrealites in America, I forget the details), and yet there are 13 million people who have found his story compelling enough to be members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. There were even enough people in his day who believed that extra-ordinary claim to propogate the Mormon system of belief in much the way the desciples propogated the Jesus resurrection myth. We have seen time and time again that there is almost no spectacular story that won’t be believed and repeated by people as “truth”. The bottom line is that a story of Jesus resurrection is much more likely to be because there were believers who believed it (truth or not) and shared it with other people willing to believe without any real proof (this was a time of much belief in many things) than because somebody was actually raised from the dead.

In X million (or less than 10K if you swing that way) years of humanity we have no surviving evidence sufficient to convince everybody that anybody, ever, has been raised from the dead. We do have many groups who are willing to believe THEIR guy was raised from the dead, talked to God, did some other impossible thing. As spectacularly improbable as winning the lottery is, I can still point and say “that guy over there won” and know that however miniscule the chance, I conceivably could win (ignoring the mathematical improbability of it and the non-sound investment of even a dollar due the odds factor). What I can’t do is look over at somebody and say “well THAT guy was raised from the dead so I’ve nothing to fear and I can jump off buildings for fun” because we don’t have ANY evidence for somebody being raised from the dead in modern times, and in fact the only claim any really significant number of modern western civilization people give any credence to is for somebody 2000 years ago. If I find an eye-witness account that says “Jethro fed his sheep in the year 12BCE” I have no reason to believe it didn’t happen because that is entirely consistent with what we expect people from that era to have done. However if I find an eye-witness account that says “I saw a mermaid in the middle of the Indian Ocean in 12BCE and she had a nice rack” we would believe the author to have been mistaken because we have seen no evidence for us to believe that there is anything resembling a “mermaid” out there and it was most likely just a Dugong or some other similar animal. Even with multiple eye-witnesses of the mermaid it wouldn’t be compelling enough for us to think The Little Mermaid was a pseudo-documentary.

In any given scenario the supernatural is the least likely possible cause, or it wouldn’t be supernatural. Two thousand, or even two hundred, years ago the collective knowledge of the way things work was so spectacularly limited that while we knew sex had something to do with it, we didn’t even know how babies were made (I believe it was the 1600s when somebody discovered sperm and for quite some time the theory was then that the head of each sperm contained a tiny little person from which we grew). In such a world, where few of the (very obvious to us now) naturalistic explanations have been discovered or understood in any meaningful way, the supernatural seems to be a reasonable means of explanation. In that context the combination of lack of naturalistic knowledge combined with a fervent desire to believe make the likelihood of a physical resurrection so infinitesimal as to make belief in God as the guide to your life because of Jesus’s resurrection to be akin to (but not even as practical as) belief in the lottery as a retirement plan.

This is not to discount the practical wisdom in the Bible (or many other religious texts), and I think one of the primary reasons many of the major world religions have endured is because they do give practical advice and insight on how enterpersonal life works (or can). If they didn’t offer something practical that helped people get through day to day life, they wouldn’t have endured (they would’ve naturally been selected out as viable belief systems ). I think it’s that practical aspect of religions that are the reasons they “work” at all. They have been the cheat sheet to getting through life, because so many of the questions they answer for people (“How should I treat my family?”, “how should I feel about my country?”) it doesn’t matter where the answer comes from as to how practical the advice is. It’s the Santa Clause… if telling you that misbehaving gets you on the naughty list works to get you to behave, it doesn’t so much “matter” (in the context of results) if your motivation is based on a falsehood until that falsehood is revealed… and most religions that stick around have that reveal safely tucked away in the after-life.