A few weeks ago I engaged in a great argument with a friend of mine, who was trying to make the point that “belief in the supernatural was reasonable and soundly backed by evidence”. Now, I know what you’re thinking: you’re thinking that I must have rejoiced in exercising my penchant for identifying logical fallacies and my cursory understanding of science to completely overcome my opponent and win the argument.
Not so.
As a matter of fact, he made some incredibly valid points…statements for which I could not refute and hadn’t seriously considered before.
We concluded our hours long discussion without resolution…he continues to believe in magical, invisible, unsubstantiated evidence for omnipresent creatures of the heavens who created the earth and sky…and I continue to reject the teleological argument for a creator, as well as any faith based belief in anything outside of that for which the laws of nature can or could explain.
When we were done, as an exercise, we took some time compiling a short list of points that we both agreed upon…and I think that list is really important to consider; because if there are some things that the believer and non-believer can agree upon, then maybe it can serve as a foundation for consensus around the world, and a starting place for those two camps to pitch their tents together…without anger, hatred, violence and harm.
We came up with a title for our list…and it’s one that both the religious fanatics and science heretics can both appreciate it. We call it “The Beauty of I Don’t Know”.
I’m going to explain that further and identify the union of the venn diagram which contains the list of items in “The Beauty of I Don’t Know”…a list that you may not agree with, by the way…which is fine. The fact that two homo sapiens with diametrically opposing understanding of the universe, could conceive of such a list gives me hope for the future of our planet.
First, I have to state for you my point of view and perspective on the argument against magical thinking.
Point number one: despite the well edited nature of this pre-recorded syndicated audio blog-net-cast thing that you’re listening to…I am not as smart as I may seem. I am not highly educated or in possession of greater intelligence than the vast majority of those listening to me right now. I want to make that clear: I’ve carefully written out, and precision edited almost everything that I’ve ever published on Phedippidations. When you hear me quote Lucretius “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum”…it’s not because I am multi-lingual or have excelled in my studies of ancient dead languages…it’s because I remembered hearing the phrase years ago and had to look it up, and it took at least five or six tries to get the pronunciation even close to correct.
So, to be clear and with complete honesty: I am almost certain that you, listening to me right now, are significantly smarter than I am. Please keep that in mind as we go forward. It’s not a big deal, but you ought to know that I’m not of superior intelligence. Not even close.
It’s true that I read alot of scientific literature, including peer reviewed studies in the Journal Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Interestingly enough: I even understand some of what is written in those tomes.
I am a very curious primate and I like to read about the latest findings in science.
For every line of evidence I have ever presented in an argument, there are likely hundreds of opposing lines of evidence refuting my position. I agree with what the Astronomer Carl Sagan, professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, called “The Baloney Detection Kit”.
I’m going to have to let Carl explain that himself, from his highly recommended book “The Demon Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark”
“Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
Arguments from authority carry little weight—“ authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.*
Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging. • If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise)—not just most of them.
Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle—an electron, say—in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.”
In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions.”
Armed with this way of thinking, my friend and I sat around my fire-pit on a warm Summer night armed only with an ice cold Sam Adams and our unique understanding of the universe, to battle wits between the armies of magical thinking and science.
The proposition of the affirmative was as follows:
“Belief in the supernatural is reasonable and soundly backed by evidence”
For just over two hours we fought, suffering attacks of special pleading, argument from adverse consequences, ad hominum, begging the question, the enumeration of favorable circumstances, the statistics of small numbers, inconsistency, non sequitur, post hoc, ergo propter, meaningless questions, false dichotomy, straw man, and my favorite: cherry picking,
It was exhausting, enlightening, frustrating, heated, and thorough. We abandoned our intellectual dishonesty and when mutually agreed upon lines of evidence were presented, we kept our minds open to the possibility of being wrong.
“How can you know the unknowable”? he riposted.
“Questions like that are meaningless” I parried.
“Not when the unknowable is God” he returned
“So you admit that God cannot be known?” I countered.
“Just because something cannot be known does not make it impossible to exist” he defended.
“All hail the invisible flying spaghetti monster in space” I posited.
“That’s an ad hominum attack on all who believe” he attacked
“What evidence do you have that your god is NOT a flying spaghetti monster”? I retorted.
And so it went, back and forth, hither and yon. In the end, we remained good friends but each stood our grounds…or at least we appeared unmoved. And to conclude the well fought argument, we constructed a list called “The Beauty of I Don’t Know”, which I’ll recite for you now.
Item one: We agree that the universe is more complex and enormous than our species can fully understand. From the micro to the macro, everything that ever was or will ever be exhibits process, behavior and conditions
Item two: We agree that the laws of nature are finite. This was an important one to agree on, and it was something that I consider an important win for my side…then so does my friend.
For me, it supports the position that so called “super” natural phenomenon is anything but. All matter adheres to the laws of nature, and so anything that has physical structure in the universe cannot operate outside of the limits of nature. This means that the dead can only come back to life under certain clinical conditions. Water can only be turned into wine through very specific chemical operations. The future cannot be predicted except in some cases of understanding cause and effect in the natural world.
What we couldn’t agree upon, of course, is the validity of a super natural universe…something that is above and outside of the rules of nature. My friends compromise is that there is indeed an omnipresent dictator that rules our lives and promises us an eternal servitude of which we will, he assures me, be grateful…but that he, or she or it, created the very laws by which nature operates, and those laws which apply to matter are merely a finite subset of what this invisible inter-dimensional creator of all has made possible.
How does he know this? Because he believes. Why does he not believe in Apollo, Thor, Xenu or any of the hundreds of thousand other mythical characters invented by mankind over the past 10,000 years? Because, he assures me, this is the real deal. We settled our difference on this by agreeing that the laws of nature are finite, and that his Flying Spaghetti Monster Circular reasoning created circular reasoning.
Item three: We agree that the Universe is teeming with beauty. From the serenity of a floral garden to the impeccable majesty of the mountains and seas…from the aesthetically pleasing Allagash River Waterway in Northern Maine, to the white pristine sands of the Cape Cod National Seashore, the magnificent desolation of the moon’s surface, to the colorful elegance of the crab nebula…our universe is filled with incredible beauty.
My friend posits that this is proof of the FSM’s existence, I argue that it’s all about the human beholder…and, it’s worth pointing out; that this beautiful universe is doing it’s best to kill us.
Think about that…the gardens are beautiful, but if you’re allergic to insect stings your enjoying them at your own risk; the mountains and oceans are beautiful, but I wouldn’t want to spend the night on Hillary’s Step at 29,029 feet above sea level, or anywhere below the surface of the waters without oxygen. Space is beautiful , except for the deadly radiation, bitter cold and painful vacuum.
The logical fallacy known as the “appeal to nature” proposes that “a thing is good because it’s natural, or that a thing is bad because it is not”.
I give you ultra violet radiation, shining down from the sun.
I give you rattle snake bites.
I give you grizzly bears and sharks
What other examples of natures dangerous natural beauty would you add to the list?
My point here is that if the beauty of the universe is proof of an extraterrestrial all knowing, omnipresent invisible flying spaghetti monster; then it’s also proof that that creature wants us all to die in painfully horrible ways.
Or maybe, and I’m just spitballing here, but maybe there is no extraterrestrial all knowing omnipresent invisible flying spaghetti monster, and the dichotomy described here can be attributed to the laws…not the whim, of nature.
Continuing on with “The Beauty of I Don’t Know” is item number four: “There are things in this universe that can never be known”. It took us awhile to agree on this one. My friend wanted to modify the statement to specifically address the unknowable to mankind…but I was able to point out some specific examples that would remain unknowable by all sentient creatures.
The bulk of my evidence was an explanation of the so called “observer effect”. The observer effect is what happens when observing a phenomenon changes the phenomenon. For example, you can never really tell what the exact air pressure of an automobile tire is because you almost always let out some air in taking the measurement…thus changing the pressure.
Another example is that it’s not possible to see, with our eyes, any object without light hitting that object…which causes that object to emit light. What does a baseball look like in a pitch black lightless room? We’ll never know. We can guess, we can assume that it looks the same way that it would if we shined a flashlight on it, but we can never really know because the baseball can only be observed by our eyes with light shining on it. All we can ever really report on is what a thing looks like with light shining on it…and that’s never the same thing as observing the thing itself.
How about measuring temperature? In a standard mercury based thermometer, the liquid metal has to absorb or emit energy in order for the temperature to be measured…so it actually changes the temperature of the thing being observed….be it air, or liquid or that spot under your tongue.
Einstein taught us that Motion, Direction, Size, Speed, Time and all measurements are relative.
There are some things that can never be known, and that’s okay. For me, someone who is fascinated with learning new things…I’m interested only in those things that we can know, for better or worse. There is no such thing as magic. Everything that we have or will ever experience has an explanation related to the natural laws of the universe.
This is all there is, and it is enough.
The fifth and final item in our list of “The Beauty of I Don’t Know” was the one that we spent the most time with. I suppose it was a philosophical argument that we went back and forth on; but because the two of us are intellectually honest we had to shake hands and agree on this last point: We agree that one of us could be wrong.
I’ll explain this to you from my perspective: I could be wrong about the existence of an invisible flying spaghetti monster, or Zeus, Apollo, Krishna, Vishnu, Allah, Christ, the Feathered Serpent Queztalcoati, the Rainbow Serpent, Jupiter, Breged…and on and on and on…which one is the true God?
The point is, I could be wrong…and any one of those mythical beings could be real. Why not? Despite the overwhelming lack of evidence for any of them, it is certainly plausible that I am wrong and my friend is right. Okhams Razor aside, I do not claim to be all knowing…and so I’m not going to take the position that my friend is an idiot, or stupid, or clueless, or brainwashed…if I’m going to be intellectually honest about it, then I have to allow for the possibility that I am wrong. Do I believe I am wrong? No. Not at all. I’m not agnostic. I stand by the evidence (or lack thereof) that I feel supports my position.
In the end, this list of The Beauty of I Don’t Know, is an acknowledgment that life and the universe are wonderful because there is so much more to learn.
We agree that the universe is more complex and enormous than our species can fully understand.
We agree that the laws of nature are finite.
We agree that the Universe is teeming with beauty and
We agree that one of us could be wrong.
I want to talk about many things, but I’m afraid that in doing so I’ll not make the world a better place. I find myself shouting obscenities and angry tweets on the interwebs, and then deleting them upon realization that I’m urinating into the global social discourse. I don’t want to be that guy.
I want to tell you how sad I am about the realization that we have a racist, narcissistic, ignorant, incompetent, embarrassing and foolish president, posing as commander in chief of my country.
I want to tell you about how angry I sometimes get at the charlatans and liars who pretend to have magical powers of communicating with the dead or lost for profit at the expense of human misery.
I want to scream at the so call leaders who pant and salivate for war, the military of my country who wallows in the extravagance of killing machines and weapons of pain, death and suffering.
I want to burn the flag, destroy the monuments to war criminals we call generals and heros and piss on the graves of those who through history have acted on their hatred and evil. My country tis of the EFF YOU.
I am a citizen of a diseased and disgusting nation and I am embarrassed and ashamed for all the things I’ve said about fighting for freedom and the American way…because, the truth is that the so called American way is all about greed and hatred and shitting on our neighbors.
I am angry…and I want to talk about these things.
I know that all of this is true, not because I want to believe it (I don’t), not because there is overwhelming evidence to support the facts, (there is), and not because I fear for my country (I do), but because there are those in my country who would disagree with me (and there are).
This is important, I want to tell you honestly: I don’t expect you to agree with me…maybe you probably shouldn’t.
I’m usually cool with people who disagree with me…but this is something else, this is something dark.
This episode was an interesting one, because in it I picked apart an argument I had with a friend…but what I didn’t tell you, is that this friend was someone who…not so long ago, was a self-admitted atheist…and I, not too long ago, was a certified believer in God, Country and all of the supernatural phenomenon associated with that being and my nations place in history.
What happened to us, I do not know…but today my friend is “born again” and I have become an angry skeptic. I often find myself envious of his blind faith in the magically impossible. There was comfort in that.
I’m sometimes asked how I can go from being a devout Catholic to an Atheist Skeptic without feeling a moral gap. For surely without Zeus, Cthulhu or Yaway in my life, I must lack a moral compass.
That’s silly. That is stupidly silly.
For me, this is all there is. This life, and then back to dust.
My life is an unimportant single expression of matter forming into a creature who can experience consciousness: whatever that is. But it’s not magic, and we’re not special: and that’s okay.
My moral compass is sound, far more meaningful than those who fear an jealous, comic dictator in the heavens who threatens us with eternal suffering if we don’t submit to his ridiculous demands.
My morality is based on the predicate that I have this one life in which to make the world a better place for others, however microscopically, and that’s a good thing.
While I’m here, I’ll do my best to do no harm to anyone or anything. I won’t always get it right, but my intent is morally sound, regardless of the existence of a hateful imaginary Flying Spaghetti Monster in the sky.
I’m sometimes asked if my biological son’s estrangement is the source of my depression and the cause for my skeptic view…and it’s taken awhile, along with therapy and medication, but no: I’m well past the stage of acceptance.
All evidence of his presence in my life has experienced extreme entropy. He is, for all practical measure, no longer my son and from my perspective, no longer in existence.
I have some good memories, but they fade in time without evidence.
I specifically have not left any provisions in my last will and testament to h”e who must not be named” and his issue, and specifically disinherit him from my last will and testament intentionally and without regret. Not that it really matters anyway.
I’m not angry, I’m not upset, I don’t love or hate him or his issue. He no longer exists to me, and that’s a very good thing.
My compassion and energy is better spent on those whom I do love, and that’s a really long list of friends, family and acquaintances…not to mention grandchildren who matter.
Which brings me back to my commentary on quote “being cool with people who disagree with me”. If you’re a Trump Supporter, Climate Change Denier, or a devout believer magical beings: I hope we can still be friends…I have plenty of friends who are all these things…and our discussion and logical arguments are entertaining, and fun…without ad hominin attacks.
We can, and should all get along…but I hope we won’t always agree: because, I’m a skeptic: and that means that I do not feel intellectually superior about anything. There may be an Invisible Flying Spaghetti monster, Global Warming may be a Chinese hoax, there may be all sorts of magical extraordinary claims to be made…but as long we we can agree that such claims require extraordinary evidence: and the burden of proof is soundly with you: then yes, we can and will get along…as we should.
We live in a little blue bubble in space, on a tiny speck of dirt supporting rock and this life, this existence is short, but it should be long enough and actually: it’s all that we have…this is all that there is…this, that and each other.
All the years combine
They melt into a dream
A broken angel sings
From a guitar
In the end there's just a song
Comes crying like the wind
Through all the broken dreams
And vanished years
Stella blue
I’m Steve Walker, reminding you that solvitur ambulando.