It's so hard to find songs that actually appeal in some significant philosophical way to me.  I'm not above willingly hearing what I want to as far as entertaining music goes in order to make ends meet in a culture that bombards us with trite nonsense.  Just wish what I misheard on the radio had been the actual lyrics.

The chorus to Kevin Rudolf's "Let it Rock" goes:

Instead of what is highlighted, my cognitive biases interpolated, "What they says, for God..."   Meaning, the way people used to conceive of what makes life worth living in a passionate way for God needs to be replaced with a passion for life in a humanistic sense. 

And the song had introduced God earlier in the song:

So it wasn't an implausible interpretation, but it was wrong.  Oh well.  There's a whole bunch of other stuff going on in the song I'm not even going to try to understand, so it's not a significant loss.  But it does remind me how few songs seem to be available in my philosophical genre. 

Ben

Update:  Saint Gasoline has a very interesting post interpreting the entire song as a fully humanistic anthem.

Wow, I laughed so hard.   Then I cried. 

Intro:

Greetings readers.  I'd really like some help on this from the math gurus out there on xanga and/or Planet Atheism.  Below is my latest response to atheist historian, Richard Carrier on his blog post, "Are We Doomed?"  It's a bit of a tangent from the original post, but it relates to issues dealing with William Lane Craig's Kalam argument.  But it's even a tangent from that, too.

I think I'm following along in concept just fine, but at some level Rick is appealing to his math proofs (which can be found in his latest comments in that link above) to show I'm breaking some rules and I'm not entirely sure what's going on there other than what I can infer from the things I'm pretty sure I do understand.  My position is that infinity is infinity is infinity, and Rick's position is that one infinity can be a larger quantity than another and so relative proportions actually add up somehow in the ultimate sense depending on the thought experiment. 

Some help from an outside party would be appreciated.  Granted we've been over this before (link), but it never hurts to triple check.

Thanks for responding.  To recap, you had said:

But to give you an example of a counter-argument, if you are falling toward an infinite platform, and one out of every ten planks on that platform is missing, and the odds of hitting any one plank (missing or not) across that whole infinite expanse is equal, then it doesn't seem plausible to argue there is a 50% chance you will fall through the platform. Surely the odds are 1 in 10.

You said "surely" to appeal to my common sense, but common sense doesn't deal with the actuality, only the appearances.  To make the sensibility "work" I had to assume you meant this:

If someone is falling from a finite height, there's only so much surface area of an infinite plane you are actually dealing with. And the density (and consistency) of the plank ratio matters. [...] You can put all the planks to one side of the infinite plane or do whatever, and it shouldn't effect the probability in any way shape or form. [...] As I see it, it is straight 50/50 and the idea that one infinite can be "more" than another is incoherent.

But, you had something more creative in mind:

Actually, you can just change the laws of physics any way you want to make the stipulated conditions hold, e.g. have it so people don't fall in a fixed direction but any direction at random that is below the parallel. [...] The point is not the incidentals of physics, but what happens to probabilities when you change ratios in an infinite series.

If we allow for this omni-fall, which is fine, my point is reinstated.  There are two infinites on the infinite plane beneath you no matter how they are arranged and you can hit *any* plank space *anywhere* on it.  Your chances on balance, since that's actually what we have to deal with despite appearances, is still 50/50. 

One of the few things that has been proven (deductively, formally proven) for transfinites is that there are infinities that are objectively bigger than others. Cantor demonstrated this, and thus originated the concept of cardinality.

Cardinality may be the proper way to describe the 9/10 *arrangement* but cardinality does not magically make one infinity more or less than another infinity.  Mathematicians suck at communication and "bigger" in this sense is not the bigger you need to mean anything relevant here.

However, producing a one-to-one correspondence is not by definition the same operation as producing a ratio, thus it is a conflation fallacy to convert the one into the other.  

A 1:1 correspondence is a freaking ratio, by definition.  How exactly is the "law of identity" a "fallacy of conflation"? 

If in N for every x(f) there are ten ~x(f)'s, and you extract one item from N and it is a ~x(f), you can pull one x(f) out of N to pair with it. If you repeat the operation indefinitely, you will exhaust all the x(f)'s by the time you've exhausted only a tenth of the ~x(f)'s, but you cannot do the reverse, i.e. even after infinite operations, there will still be ~x(f)'s left over, but no x(f)'s.

So you think you can prove that you can somehow "run out" of an infinite quantity, one by one?  I'm completely baffled. 

It works the same for transfinites, as long as you use proper definitions and rules, which actually forbid tricks using "one-to-one" correspondence as a device to dink the quantities.

Okay, so there's some magical rule in math that says I'm "not allowed" to take 10 Easter eggs from each of an infinite number of Easter egg baskets and spread the eggs out so that there is only one egg in each basket?  I'm not going to have nine eggs left over per basket because I'm going to have completely spread them out...to infinity.  I could set 9 eggs beside every basket if I wanted to, but I don't have to because the arrangement of infinities is meaningless (though we may feel the need to articulate the specific arrangements).  The end quantities are all that matter and none of the rearrangement stuff changes them.  One infinity equals another infinity.  What you call "dinking" (and "cheating") I call "demonstrating you are wrong." 

But who knows.  Maybe I'm the one that is wrong.  Rick has put a lot of effort into his response that is several comments long and unfortunately I absolutely disagree with him as much as he does me.  I've gone back and forth with him on other issues in the past in ways we sharply disagree to no avail and I guess we're both quite stubborn.  So I was hoping that someone out there might be able to shed some light on things and take us in a different direction.  Or at least just show me how I'm wrong in a different way than Rick is attempting to.  

Rick takes forever to respond to comments so there's plenty of time between cycles for me to reevaluate my response here.

Ben

Interestingly there will be no ethical issue if the mind/body dualists are correct.  I do wonder though as Markram's "ten years" prediction nears if the Blue Brain project will be allowed to finish.  Physicalists and cautious fence sitters will likely become more vocal.  Let's just agree not put Francis Collins in charge, shall we? 

Thank you google alerts for bringing this to my attention.  I'm still waiting for the Ted.com version of this. 

Update:  And here it is.

Intro:

Vox Day's reason for being a Christian is, um, interesting (link).  He's responding to Luke Muehlhauser's questions (link) from the "Common Sense Atheism" blog.

First of all, the Bible describes an imperfect world because it couldn't very well get away with describing a non-existent perfect world, now could it?  Vox's God is just a powerful being (link), and not the classic tri-omni God you might find at the end of an ontological argument.  So he, too, has conceded to reality. 

Second, I can only assume that Vox is being hyperbolic, since his description of evil (as something other than an idea putting actions in an emotional context) is something that would actually falsify Christianity from my perspective if I followed his chain of reasoning.

Vox continues:

Intro:

To put it simply, Vox Day advocates a rather heretical definition of God in order to solve the problem of evil.  His God is just bigger, not biggest.  Gooder, not goodest.  Smarter, not smartest.  So the argument from evil is not even directed as his tribal deity he's resurrected from the pages of an eclectic garbage dump of half-baked theological ideas found frozen in the Bible.  The following are selected quotes from his "penultimate chapter" of his book, The Irrational Atheist, which claims to deal with the argument from evil. 

Note, Luke Muehlhauser over at Common Sense Atheism has recently started a friendly dialog with Vox (link), so I thought I would go ahead and finish up my review that I started a few weeks ago.

I don't take Dawkins' argument against the existence of God from contradictory attributes any more seriously than Vox does, so there's no problem there.  I am wondering how a council of Nicaea would address his heresies.  I recall thinking about how difficult it would be to make that case myself years ago when I wanted to make sure I could use my arguments against modern theology when Christians try to wiggle out of the mainstream positions.  The Bible is not a philosophy book so even when it does seem to spell out some absolute characteristics of God one is hard pressed to tell the difference between hyperbole and doctrinal proof text.  Then you have to make sense of (or just flat out disown at the expense of coherency) all the anthropomorphisms once you've gone all the way the other direction which may be an equal stretch for critical theologians.   I'd love to see that Bible on Bible debate though. 

In other words the "penultimate" "solution" to the argument from evil, is that God is a lazy a$$h*le. (Finally, a Christian listened to George Carlin! link)    Continue reading →

Of course, that's just a caricature.  Let's take a look at what apparently passes for a more sober perspective from Republicans (at 2:20):

There's almost a kernel of truth!  Yay!  Ten years from now.  Maybe.  If stuff doesn't work.  And if you are a Republican, you know it won't.  Q. E. D. 

Intro:

Jim S over on Quodlibeta and Agent Intellect attempted to frame skepticism of religious experiences as an atheist conspiracy theory (link).  So I went over to his blog and shouted, "You lie!"  hehe

Let me be the first token naysayer. Hope you don't mind.

The human mind is a virtual reality machine. We have near constant access to its diverse abilities in our sleeping state when we dream. The mind is always preset to objectify incoming experiences and therefore any off kilter day time hallucinatory experience will naturally be a something "out there" that doesn't correspond to our normal environment. Hence you get the world beyond effect and you get it often. If this is your primary commonality, I see no reason not to expect it from a naturalistic point of view. The brain is an imperfect virtual reality machine and we should expect bizarre sophisticated (even value-laden) effects in the population.

While it is normal to want to take for granted the legitimacy of all incoming sense data (and an evolutionary preset of hyperskepticism surely doesn't get the job done), that doesn't mean we should be at liberty to do so uncritically when we see so many examples of what the human mind is capable of that we *can* confirm.

I'm curious as to what you think those commonalities are or if they differ from what I've addressed above. As is, I think the naturalistic explanation better explains the commonalities and the differences and why we can't verify that say even two Muslims heard the exact same sophisticated speech from an angel. The fact that culturally we embrace this mental side show or even seek to participate in it in monastic ways is not surprising. Why wouldn't we?

If I'm not mistaken, inducing an out of body experience, for example, entails starting off in a "reverse room" scenario where everything in the room you were in is flipped. That could be interpreted objectively as  though that's the airlock for some other plain of existence, but in all likelihood, it just means that's what always happens when you do that to your experience. It's like some bug in a video game. It's the same for everyone, but that doesn't mean everyone isn't running the level on their own Xbox.

In my mind, I'm not worried about having to disprove every single religious experience. I'm waiting for even one of them to be vindicated. I'm not going to spend my entire life never having that level of proof to go on. I guess I understand the allure and the epistemic "why not" approach to some extent, but I don't hate myself that much. I'd like to know it's actually true first.

That's one way to look at it. I would argue it's the wrong way. Just because the metaphysical claims of every religion may be false, that doesn't mean at their root, there's not at least some kernel of truth to how they are satisfying the human condition. Most of the time it's just blown out of proportion. That doesn't make it "all wrong." Not all atheists miss that and it's a shame Lewis did.

I sometimes ask myself what people seem to want when they are free to naturally gravitate unrestrained by rational concerns towards what suits their most cherished values. I think that's why Lewis appreciate fairy tales so much. Religions can tell us something about that though often in just another convoluted way. So you take it with a grain of salt like anything else. As a humanist, I take note, because I try to learn from everything, and look for whatever the closest real world version of it is as at least one more guide in life.

And as Sam Harris seems to advocate, I see nothing wrong with seeking to cultivate the positive end of these experiences. It's your brain. You can do whatever you want with it. I do find that fascinating even if I think it's all together separately in our own heads.

Ben  Continue reading →

Intro:

Steve Lowell (link) wants to see C. S. Lewis' original argument from morality through to show that the hot criticism of an atheistic critic of divine justice does validate Christian theistic morality if morality doesn't stand up apart from theism.  Somehow the subjective passions of Christianity's critics proves that morality is embedded in the fabric of reality.  Now, if this were poetry, I'd be pleased, but this apparently passes for epistemology.  :S  In a previous comment archive (link) we went back and forth on what I would consider a sober evaluation of what morality is versus the magical conceptions of it.  Then Steve tried to pull things back to the original argument from atheist hotness (link) and I explained some of my reasons for not taking Lewis' superfluous moral framework seriously.  We were on the verge of simply repeating ourselves (link), but at least there has been some healthy exchange of ideas, and it seems things are wrapping up.

Ben,

Sorry if this seems exasperating. I think there may be another issue of dialectic to point out and that if we agree on that then despite all the foregoing we may be closer to agreement than it has so far appeared.

Firstly, the moral argument to God from evil certainly doesn't prove Christianity. You are quite correct in that. However for reasons I have outlined above I also think it cannot lead to Zoroastrianism ... but it could certainly lead to a god of limited power or to some form of deism. Since it is an moral argument to God from evil, then we certainly need to be able to accommodate the existence of evil in whatever form of religion we end up with ... but Christianity is perfectly capable of that (as are other religious views). If you want to endorse one of those other views, then as far as this thread goes you will find no objection from me. But notice that Christianity is certainly among the options ... The point of the Lewisian rejoinder to the problem of evil with which this thread began was not that evil proves Christianity, that atheism is not one of the available responses to evil; that if the moral argument stands then evil does disprove atheism; that you cannot move to atheism while at the same time "hotly criticizing divine justice". Now it is certainly true that I've done close to nothing here to show either of the following:

(1) Morality requires the existence of God.
(2) The existence of evil is consistent with the existence of a perfectly good, all-powerful and all-knowing God.

But (2) is not controversial, and you were allowing (1) for the sake of argument. With (1) and (2) in play I don't see that you can resist Lewis's argument that the atheist room for specifically moral complaints against God ... since if the complaints were to succeed (which by (2) they could only do so probabilitistically not conclusively), then by (1) the very piece of evidence cited (some real evil) would suffice to disprove his own worldview.

If we agree to here, then we can begin discussing (1) and (2) themselves.

With respect to (2) how do you go about proving the statement below?

-(2') If there were a perfect universal health care system in the U. S. then everyone in the U.S. would have health insurance.

It doesn't seem like truth of logic to me. If fact it seems false to me. And remember, for there to be a logical problem of evil then the equivalent of -(2') needs to be a logical truth, not just a truth, and certainly not just a probable or possible truth.

So, where are we now?

Steve

I think you've laid down your thoughts in a very organized way and I appreciate that. However, I'm not going to belabor the issue when there are too many things I disagree with to make the "for the sake of argument" theme worthwhile. If we accept all of C. S. Lewis' flawed premises and his construction of what he thinks those premises mean, then we are basically just accepting everything for no particular reason. But that's just a parallel moral universe that can't be imposed on the critic as though it should necessarily constrain their judgmental "hotness." Not everyone conceives of morality innately as Lewis does.

True, we can imagine that 48 million people happen to be from the planet Krypton and like Superman, don't need health insurance, but if we put in enough real world premises (or even make  reasonable accommodations of our definitions to exclude meaningless exceptions like supermen), the analogy works and the logical argument from evil is solid.   Who in their right mind would call a health care system universal or perfect if it left 48 million needy people uninsured?  It's basically tautological.  And as for (2), there's really no excuse (other than the Zoroastrianism dualism) that would enable anything to get in the way of an all powerful, all knowing, good god from creating and maintaining morally perfect creations.  And no matter how much give we allow from an absolute conclusion on that mark doesn't really seem to help Christian theism any.  It fails at all sorts of levels, Biblically and generally as I've tediously laid out on my blog in the past.  All of the excuses I've ever come across are excuses we would never accept in any other analogous moral context and I doubt anything new is going to show up and save the day after so many thousands of years (since the book of Job was written, I guess) of trying.  I'll understand if you aren't quite there with me, since I'm sure there are many hidden issues to address and resolve.

What we have is just a really bad hypothesis and I don't see hardly any Christian theists jumping on board alternative versions of theism in order to even show they honestly care about having a worldview that is the best explanation of the facts we know. It's as though they feel orthodox Christian theism is (to use another political analogy) "too big to fail" and they aren't going to move beyond its subjectively established clout no matter how far out on a limb they have to go for it.

I'm not really sure what we can work out from here. I think I understand where you are coming from and we mainly disagree on issues not directly related to the post. Fair enough?     

Ben

Intro:

I noticed on the Media Research Center's "bias alert" RSS feed (link) that it was apparently enough to merely reassert what was already being confronted in regards to the merit of Obama's former green czar, Van Jones. I was expecting to see some kind of pros and cons chart to expose just how little Van Jones did versus the known objections.  However that's nothing like what we got.  And so far it seems, that free association and labels go a long way with critics of Obama.  It seems pretty clear that Van Jones is no longer a commie (link). 

My dear Mr. Jones, it may be vicious, but it's not a smear when they're quoting you directly!

"I am resigning my post at the Council on Environmental Quality, effective today. On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.

Never write anything that you don't understand can and will be used against you. The reason I am always careful to articulate my more controversial opinions is that I know perfectly well that they'll eventually be appearing on Wikipedia or a blog somewhere. Of course, because I know what I'm doing, my critics are usually forced to avoid printing the direct quotes because those never sound anywhere nearly as bad as the inaccurate and exaggerated summaries.

Jones, on the other hand, clearly didn't. The direct quotes were damning, which is why he had no choice but to resign.

Hey VD,

Is there a problem with people like Van Jones working with Obama on narrow issues they happen to have common ground on if they are qualified for that specific job? I don't see why Obama has to necessarily agree with everything everyone in his administration believes. With standards like that I'd have to object to every Christian appointment in his administration. But if folks like Francis Collins, for example, can do the job and keep their other beliefs out of it, that's just what it's like living in a world where people starkly disagree. And I respect Obama for that. What am I missing here do you think?

Ben  Continue reading →