My new favorite Family Guy

In "Not All Dogs Go To Heaven", Stewie kidnaps the cast of Star Trek: TNG, Meg becomes a born-again Christian, and Brian's atheism leads him to become the town pariah.

You can see it at Hulu.com here.

George Carlin was an atheist (you schmucks!)

While I'm mulling over three posts
- a roundtable forum on the value of appeasement, chaired by Neville Chamberlain
- a discussion of what randomness is and what it isn't, as an exercise in expository writing about math
- a discussion of the top 10 actresses of my generation. This is suffering a bit because (a) my top 8 choices are all non-American, and (b) it's damned hard to get to 10

Anyway, I was inspired by the latest cartoon by August J. Pollak, and so I link to it approvingly.

We've lost two of the greatest atheist voices in the world in the past year: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and George Carlin. It was no coincidence that both were very funny people. Humor is a great tonic.

a snarky religious post

I usually don't wander into alt.atheism types of arguments, because, to be blunt, I haven't heard a novel argument against atheism is over twenty years. I tend to be of the Dawkins school that views the entire God brouhaha as a way of creating mental blocks in human beings that are used as mini-taboos to block certain patheways of thought. I think, furthermore (and I don't know if this agrees with Dawkins because, um, I've yet to bother to read him) that these tendencies in the human mind probably have had some evolutionary fitness, as people have historically been so predisposed to self-destructive ways that only deep taboos against certain types of behavior have enabled sub-populations to survive. And, as any population geneticist will tell you, a trait that gives even the slightest fitness advantage will rapidly spread throughout the population.

So I tend to think people are hardwired for the possibility of doctrinaire religious thought - though this is hardly a rigorous theory.

In any case, I was pointed by PZ Myers to an excellent article about the semantic differences between the terms "atheist" and "agnostic" by Trevor Burrus. Most of the comments were along the usual lines of thought for atheist, but there was a brave soul who was pushing a doctrinaire Christian line. As an exerise, I decided to tackle his claim. It wanders a bit. Here it goes:


JK Jones:

The laws of logic are universal (absolute, consistent over time from one person to another and one place to another).

Presumably this is true. But we really do not know this to be true. Indeed, as far as I understand modern physics, all of the laws of physics are constrained to only be true when various prerequisites are in place. Or, to put it differently, we can only observe the laws of physics as having existed from a certain point on after the Big Bang.

And those are the laws of physics. While I tend to think that (d(Mathematical Truth)/dt) = 0, it’s not really something that we could ever test.

One example is the law of non-contradiction.

Non-contradiction is an abstraction. It’s not completely clear that it holds for the physical universe, though it certainly appears to.

These universal laws require an explanation.

Uh, why? Where did “require” come from?

A Christian can provided an explanation for the universal laws of logic: an unchanging God upholds them in His being and knowledge.

That’s really not much of an explanation, if I may say so. It just beggars the question about explanation by creating a circular loop. Existence needs explanation, so there must be a God upholding existence. All the questions about the mysteries of existence have merely been shunted off into the blind ally of this “God” fellow. The “God” entity is interesting because no truth claims are made about it and no actual physical existence is postulated about it. Indeed, almost nothing testable about “God” is said at all.

This is not very close to “an explanation” in my book. It’s just a rhetorical trick - a way of stopping arguments. Usually the people who use the God argument block up all sorts of emotional drives with this idea, and can only respond with anger and/or indignation if the area is probed.

You must supply an alternative explanation for the universality of the laws of logic before we can even disagree on any subject.

I think you’re getting way ahead of yourself here. For starters, the “laws of logic” is a field of mathematics. Many people do very good work in this field without ever referring to a Christian God. Why do you think this is the case? Indeed, one of the seminal consequences of 20th century logic was the realization that certain truth claims are independent of well-devised systems of mathematical axioms and their consequences (aka ‘theories’). Indeed, one can describe fairly comprehensible mathematical postulates (e.g. the Continuum Hypothesis) whose truth or falsity is independent of the commonly used axioms of mathematics (aka ’set theory’).

Here is my take on this: people who want to assert something as being true need to first create a framework where the statement can be comprehended, and then they can describe the framework upon which the truth or falsity can be judged. This is a completely different point of departure than what you are doing. From a logical standpoint, you have simply arrogated to yourself your personal theory of comprehensibility (aka ‘the God Hypothesis’) and are now demanding that any competing theory meet your criteria, and, if it doesn’t, your theory must hold the day by default.

Well, that certainly would be a sweet position to have in the world of abstract nonsense, but I haven’t seen anything to grant you such a default position in the universe of hypotheses. To the contrary, I think that, if you want people to believe in your God hypothesis, the heavy lifting is up to you. You are the one making a truth claim about the nature of the universe, after all.

Otherwise, I’ll just continue on with the assumption that logic can only be accounted for by the existence of an unchanging God.

Logic just is. It doesn’t need a God hypothesis to validate its existence, unless one comes to the table making this demand, as you do. Your demand that your God hypothesis be granted equal standing with the “laws of logic” strikes me to be as unjustified as my nutty neighbor’s demand that his sun-worship be given equal status with the “laws of logic”. Neither his Apollonian beliefs nor your Christian beliefs have ever demonstrated any tangible relationship between their truth claims and the “laws of logic”. Indeed, the situation is worse than that, as the “laws of logic” usually make a fair mess of your religious truth claims, when they are applied with vigor.

If the laws of logic do not apply…

Oh, we needn’t worry seriously about that…

…we cannot even have a conversation because no ideas can be communicated.”

So now all communication skills are tied into your pet metaphysical theory. That’s a neat trick!

If the laws of logic do not apply, we cannot evaluate ideas and systems of thought for internal consistency. If the laws of logic do not apply, we cannot even make generalizations about what we perceive.

(Aside: you are granting more permanence to the “laws of logic” than I think is justified. Indeed, my perspective on the nature of thought suggests to me that logical reasoning is far more complex than would be understood by your epistemology. After all, we know via Godel that any finite mathematical theory will necessarily be incomplete. I suspect that the actual truth content of the abstract nonsense which undergirds the universe is far more rich and complex than is implied by your brutish invocation of the “laws of logic”.)

Rational – “pertaining to or attributable to reason or the power of reasoning”

Sure.

Truth – “conformity of assertions to fact or reality”

Agreed.

Both definitions are from The New American Webster Handy College Dictionary.

Yes, Webster was a good West Hartford boy. I prefer his work to the OED, but that is because of my Yankee upbringing.

I’m waiting for the point where the elevation of the Christian God to a supreme place in metaphysics is in any way related to the various claims about epistemology that you have made. I fear I would have to wait for quite some time.

Vonnegut

I've been thinking about what I wanted to say about the passing of KV, Jr. There are a lot of things that could be said. For starters, he wasn't considered a "great writer" like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Saul Bellow or James Joyce or one of those guys English department grad students get all excited about. But I've never gotten excited by that kind kind of writer.

I think "accessibility" is a key feature of a writer, and that's a trait that Vonnegut has to a much greater extent than the above-named wrtiers (esp. Joyce). But what really set Vonnegut apart was the sheer quality of his ideas. Ice-9 was, for example, a tremendous concept. A lot of writers seem to write books and books and books without ever saying anything interesting. Then there's the kind of gifted writer who blazes onto the scene with a compelling style, but never learns a damned thing about life worth passing on to the next generation. (I'm looking at you, Mr. Salinger.)

The first Vonnegut story I read was Galapagos. I noticed several interesting things. For starters, the narrator had the habit of putting asterisks next to characters when they were about to die. This way the death wouldn't come as a shock to the reader. It also dealt with evolution to some extent, but the great theme of Vonnegut was just how freakin' stupid the human species is. Somethings this theme collapsed into bleakness, but more often it validated its existence with a vicious streak of humor.

Hi ho!

After reading Galapagos I devoured most of Vonnegut's writing during high school. Of course I read Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle, Mother Night and God Bless You, Mrs. Rosewater; and in addition some of his lesser works: Bluebeard, Welcome to the Monkey House, Player Piano, Slapstick, Deadeye Dick, etc. I basically read everything except The Sirens of Titan. I still haven't read that book, for somewhat complicated reasons. But I'll get to it eventually.

The course of my intellectual development from the age of 14 to 18 is not something I can retrace so clearly. When I was 14, I was a practicing Catholic. I was even confirmed. By the time I was 18, I was an atheist, and even going to Georgetown University did little to rekindle any religious devotion.

I think Vonnegut was one of the key writers during this period. I got into the French existentialists a little bit, mainly Camus and Sartre. Other irreverent writers I liked included Joseph Heller, Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, though for most of them I only read one or two works. (I tried reading other Heller books but didn't find them anywhere near the level of Catch 22.) With Vonnegut I read everything.

For a while I was a Deist - thinking that the workings of the universe were likely directed by a supreme being who stayed out of it. But as I've gotten older, I've come to view that attitude more as human projection. I do believe in the existence of order to the universe, but I think the variation between complexity and simplicity tends to defy our tiny little minds.

For a long time, I was really caught up with the epistemological questions of how people know anything. The certainty of mathematics is its greatest appeal to me: somehow, when one asserts a mathematical truth that has been properly verified, the proposition simply is true. It's not a matter of perspective, or interpretation. It simply is true. And I don't know of any field other than mathematics that has such a firm grip on truth value. Back in the days of ancient Greece, philosophers like Aristotle were considered equally valuable to Euclid and Pythagoras. But these days, Aristotle is considered laughable when he ventures into discussing the natural world, while the proofs of Euclid are just as valid today as they were 2500 years ago.

Vonnegut's writings were packed with this irreverence, which contrasts nicely with the overbearing assertiveness typical of arrogant American culture. Indeed, after leaving the Catholic Church and its reckless attitude towards making truth claims, I found it very hard to believe in anything. Lost myself in mathematics for a decade there, but that was to a great extent simply Avoiding the Question (in addition to a burgeoning contempt for our species that was reinforced at many occassions.) I only had a breakthrough in my early 30s when a friend who is in physics explained to me that absolutely every scientific proposition is always subject to review. Nothing is considered to be "true" in science in the same fashion as it is in mathematics.

I'm starting to get a grip on empiricism and natural philosophy. That means I'm catching up to 18th century science! Yay!

Vonnegut's death

Well, the man has shoken loose his mortal coil and left us. Or, as PZ says,

Kurt is up in heaven now.

(It's really quite funny if you're a freethinker.)

I have a lot to say about Vonnegut but won't get around to it until the weekend. Short version: he's the most important author I've ever read. His prose wasn't as pretty as Shakespeare's, but his understanding of the world far outpaced the Bard's.

And that's what I'm talking about.