Have you ever wondered How to Confuse an Atheist? Apparently, theists do, and they even think they have a surefire recipe for doing it. I started reading this expecting a Big Daddy style gotcha that wouldn’t leave any atheists even slightly disturbed (except that eye rolling that hard can make you dizzy), and I was not disappointed.
Let’s take a look at the six steps to confuse an atheist. I’m going to stop at three because that’s enough to see that it’s going nowhere, but I’ll leave the last half as an amusing exercise for the reader.
1. Remember that everyone is entitled to ones own opinions and beliefs, but not to ones own set of facts. Use these steps appropriately, perhaps for debating. Don’t believe you have a right to change anyone’s beliefs.
What did I tell you about eye-rolling? The irony is strong with this one. But OK, I actually agree with this point — if only evangelicals and creationists also thought likewise.
2. Confirm with the atheist what is a thought and / or a feeling, and of what consciousness and thought consist. For example, according to M.I.T. a thought is an electro-chemical reaction in the mind. Feelings are based on clusters/networks of such electro-chemical reactions as well. “The human brain is composed of about 100 billion nerve cells (neurons) interconnected by trillions of connections called synapses. On average, a live-connection transmits about one signal per second. Some specialized connections send up to 1,000 signals per second. ‘Somehow that’s producing thought’,”… as “billions of simultaneous transmissions coalesce inside your brain to form [one] thought” says Charles Jennings, Director of Neurotechnology at the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research.[
This is, in principle, another one I agree with. You should make your premises clear from the beginning, and I do think the brain is the product of natural processes and uses natural mechanisms to generate mind.
However, there are some hints here that we’re seeing a non-scientist at work. They always go for the list of great big numbers, which are essentially meaningless. How many grains of sand on a beach, how many stars in the sky? I am unimpressed. It’s easy to generate lots of cells and connections — the interesting part is the specificity and functionality of the connections. A zebrafish embryo has a repeating pattern of about 20 neurons per segment that generates a coordinated rhythmic set of muscle contractions. That’s interesting. Going gosh-wow over the number of cells is not.
Nice of him to bring Charles Jennings into the argument, but he’s not going to be referenced again, and the quote is simply a very general statement that most scientists would agree with. Dragging in a quote from an authority is a very theist sort of thing to do, but it’s irrelevant and adds nothing — except to someone who thinks citing list of numbers and name-dropping scientists makes their argument sound more sciencey.
Hint: it doesn’t.
But now, the meat of their argument, the point that’s supposed to make us stagger because we’ve never heard it before. Except for those of us who like to laugh at Alvin Plantinga.
3. Ask how anything is known-true, including facts, abstract thoughts and feelings. If abstract thoughts and feelings consist of electro-chemical reactions in the brain, what chemical reaction tells an atheist that s/he is right about disbelieving in spirit or God? What electro-chemical reaction tells the atheist ones own emotion, feeling or hunch is more or less right or true than that of another person’s reaction? If the mind can play tricks on you, why trust it in forming conclusions of what exists in the material or spiritual sense? Why trust what other atheists say, like Harris, Dawkins or Hitchens? After all, there’s no way of confirming their thoughts. The atheist would be operating under a mental framework, illusion, opinion and electro-chemical-agreement; so, to believe in anything to be true or exist would take a tremendous amount of faith.
One immediate objection is that this reveals that the theist is not making a good faith argument — they’re trying to set a rhetorical trap. I said I agreed with the general thrust of point #2; the idea was that we were setting up the consensus to debate a further point. Yet what we discover is that our theist is disagreeing with the whole idea of naturalism. So why were they citing Charles Jennings, Director of Neurotechnology at the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research? Do they agree with #2 or not? Are they rejecting the authority of Charles Jennings, Director of Neurotechnology at the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research? We should go back a step and argue about that, if they want to be honest about this discussion.
But let’s play along. Is there anything in this paragraph that should confuse an atheist? No, but there’s plenty that ought to leave the theist embarrassed.
There’s the over-simplification and reification of chemical reactions
. They ask, what chemical reaction tells an atheist that s/he is right about disbelieving in spirit or God?
Did they or did they not just babble about one hundred billion nerve cells? Didn’t they just cite Jennings saying that billions of signals have to converge to generate a single thought? You might as well ask what transient voltage in the circuit board of your computer makes the pretty moving pictures in your favorite video game. It makes no sense. The question says a lot about the questioner, not so much about the science.
The fundamental problem with this point is the supposedly difficult question it asks: how can you know anything for sure if you’re just a bunch of chemicals sloshing around in a skull? And even at that, how can you possibly decide to trust the perceptions of other skull-bound chemical reactions — they’re no better off than you are!
The answer is simple: we can’t know anything for sure. We don’t trust our brains — they’re easily tricked. We don’t just trust other brains, either. We need confirmation that they’re working reliably. This is what science is, a collection of tools that allow us to cautiously cross-check ideas and test the interpretations of our imperfect brains. We demand measurement, independent confirmation, and critical testing before we accept a conclusion provisionally.
We all do this routinely. For example, there is a coffee table in my living room. How do I actually know it’s there?
I see it. I can touch it. I can crack my shin against it. I can put things on it and they don’t fall to the floor. So I can make multiple kinds of observations that each confirm its existence.
I can ask my wife, “Is there a coffee table in our living room?” and after giving me a funny look, she will independently confirm that it’s really there. I could photograph it and post it to the internet, and ask people if that is a coffee table. (There will always be some joker who tries to say no, it’s a hedgehog — we have to balance our inputs to get a consensus.)
I can make repeated observations. I could check its existence every day for a week; I could pull out a tape measure and record its dimensions every morning, and also confirm that it seems to be a fixed object.
I can study its history. I suspect my wife has a receipt for its purchase hidden away somewhere; I can look up the manufacturer; I can go to the furniture store where we bought it and see if they have a record of it, and maybe they even have another one.
So even though everything about that coffee table is filtered through physical-chemical signals into the hundred billion neurons in my head, which then make a virtual model of the coffee table for me to think about, I can be pretty sure the thing exists. There are so many independent ways to test and confirm the existence of this object that it would be perverse for me to insist that it really was just a figment of my imagination — our brains are imperfect, so there’s no way I could assemble so many entirely imaginary lines of evidence!
Our theist gives themselves away with these other points.
Why trust what other atheists say, like Harris, Dawkins or Hitchens?
I don’t.
This seems to be a difficult point for theists to grasp. I don’t grant unquestioning authority to anyone. There are things I disagree with strongly from each of those three, and things I agree with. I test claims. I read widely to look for better ideas. You can’t just cite Dawkins at me, or St Augustine, or Mike Huckabee, and expect me to roll over and surrender — “They said it, I believe it” isn’t a useful phrase in my toolbox.
After all, there’s no way of confirming their thoughts.
Why, they could all be mindless robots pretending to have thoughts!
Nope, sorry again: We do have ways of confirming the validity of their thoughts. If Dawkins tells me there’s this process called “natural selection”…I can read the works of a thousand authors that confirm it, I can see experiments that test it, I can see the math that makes predictions about it.
So far, I find this theist’s arguments wrong and unconvincing, as well as dishonestly presented. I don’t seem to be confused at all, but that could just be my brain chemicals talking.
Unfortunately, #3 is actually the high-water mark of their argument. The rest falls apart even harder. This next one is just plain incoherent.
4. Make the question science. All sorts of people appreciate what science has achieved. Just because someone is theist, it doesn’t automatically make him or her a disbeliever in science. What one must do is make the atheist question the existence of observable science. Why? Because, some believe that to an atheist science is the “I Ching” as if to do divination of all knowledge. Ask how can science prove that science is the only way to know anything? It can’t. Science presupposes that it is the way of knowing. That also takes a tremendous amount of faith.
Science does no such thing, just as the wrench in my toolbox does not presuppose it is the only possible tool.
5. Analyze your certainty of any moral truism, if you can’t know anything for sure? Usually by now an atheist will say, “You can’t know anything for sure.” That’s assumed to be a true statement about fact or knowledge. Are you sure you can’t know anything for sure? Here’s the problem, atheists can be subjective moralists. They will usually say that “to each his own” but then condemn those people who do “bad things”. Well, if you can’t know anything for sure, how do you know that the things other people do are bad/good? Don’t let them use the scape goat, “Oh, because I see the results.” Well, in order to know something is bad, you have to know that there is “bad”, or that “good” exists. Remind them, “I thought you couldn’t know anything for sure?”
That I can’t know anything with 100% certainty does not mean I can’t know anything with some degree of confidence. Acknowledging that I could be wrong about something does not immediately mean that I am wrong.
6. Think of choosing/causing an action. There is a question of causality. Cause and effect are crucial to material, physical substance? Of course it is said that, “For every action there is a reaction.” Ultimately, why or how could a thing/event have no cause. How can nothing come from something (it can’t according to conservation of matter) ~~ or something from nothing (it can’t. unless there is spontaneity of matter?). Is there a universal “mind”. Do inanimate objects have a mechanical, analog “mind” that parallels that in life, and so do subatomic particles have a facet of a universal mind. Is there something universal that supersedes, preexists and was the source of known matter? How do you know?
Go home, theist. You’re drunk.
I’ll let the rest of you expand on 4, 5, and 6. Or maybe you have a better response to 3. Whatever. All I know is that I’m not only unconfused, I have reasonable evidence that the theist doesn’t know what they are talking about.
Frankly, I am confused. About how someone can make such a sleazy, dishonest argument.
I am confused.
Where’s the argument?
I could spit all that bulldada back at the Christian to prove HE doesn’t know for sure that Zeus and Odin don’t exist.
Also, all that BS about electrochemical impulses sounds like the theist is trying to imply that atheists’ minds are powered by electrochemical impulses, while theists’ minds have souls and are therefore superior.
I am confused… but only at how they think this is a winning strategy.
“Ask how can science prove that science is the only way to know anything?”
Science isn’t “the only way to know anything”.
But science is the only one that tells you, at each step, how it arrived at this conclusion, and how it’s going to use it to get to the next step.
It lays it all under your eyes for you to check that each partial conclusion is correct.
At no point does it throw a “and then a miracle occurs” at you, or state that “this is true because this old book says so at page X”.
It sounds like they are trying to weaponize skepticism against atheism. Popkin, in his delightful “history of skepticism from savanarola to bayle” argues that pyrrhonian skepticism was used by both sides of the protestant/catholic schism, resulting in epistemological scorched-earth warfare (and the intellectual discrediting of philosophy) on both sides. It’s a fun argument and a really readable book. Recommended.
The process is complete when the faithful throw their own epistemology on the bonfire in order to yell “GOTCHA atheists!!!” It’s a strategy of fail like fighting a land war in asia or getting passive/aggressive with a cat.
I would disagree with that, already. The electro-chemical reaction is an implementation detail.
This is the same mistake as saying that a number is an electric charge. A computer may store numbers as electric charges. But what makes something a number is not the electric charge — it is how we use it.
Gee, typical of the fallacious hyperbole and absolutist thinking of the theist. Science hasn’t made that claim. But, compared to the other methods of knowing, science is the most reliable and verifiable way of knowing.
Question in return: Can you show those other methods of knowing, and how reliable, and how self-correcting they are?
I absolutely love when they use the “you have more faith than i do” horseshit accusation. It’s right up there with the “atheism is also a religion” one…
If we both agree that religions are silly and baseless and that faith is a bad thing to have and the more you have, the worse off you are, i….well, i fucking win, thanks for conceding so fast.
#5 is the old fallacious absolute knowledge/knowing presupposition. I’m not confused, but the person pretending absolute knowledge exists is.
Confuse-an-Atheist: One of the unsuccessful ventures, eventually being dropped to allow expansion of the more profitable ones, such as Stun-a-Stoat, Puzzle-a-Puma, Bewilderbeest and, of course, Confuse-a-Cat.
There is at least one thing you know with absolute certainty: you know that you exist. You cannot be mistaken about that, because if you do not exist, then there is no one making that specific mistake. Someone else can be mistaken about whether or not you exist, but you yourself cannot be.
Deacon Duncan @13:
Unless I am a computer simulation with modulated input in order to make it appear to my computer programme (which I am programmed to accept as ‘self’) that I actually exist. Of course if I cannot find any way to determine whether or not I am a programme than it really doesn’t matter.
In fact it’s exactly like a lot apologetics I’ve heard theists spout before. If we are “just” the product of random mutations, if thoughts are “just” the result of mechanical processes, if ethics are “just” a matter of social behavior, then why love you children, why not kill yourself, why… Extremely tiresome. They think all is worthless if not grounded in their Great Guy In The Sky.
How to confuse an atheist: Gish Gallop with sloppy, mangled, regurgitated philosophy!
Science is the only way to know anything worth knowing.
Ogvorbis, #14, you essentially posted my reply. Thanks.
If I only know some to 99.9999% (pick any number of nines after the decimal you want), it isn’t absolute knowledge. It’s good enough knowledge, which is what science deals in.
They’d be better off sending the Confuse a Cat service at us. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvhdWBBuBpA
Actually, it sounds like a primer for ISIS recruitment.
It’s not confusions I’m feeling, it’s another feeling. Ah…boredom, yep, I’m feeling that in spades.
The theists think they have an argument. I think they have a hedgehog.
Yeah, there’s only one thing I claim I know for certain. Everything else is probability based reasoning. What a “gotcha”.
Except, theism still fails given that standard. So back to square one.
Deacon Duncan #13
I think it more accurate to say that there is certainty that something exists, for reasons implied by Ogvorbis. Regardless of what delusions “I” may suffer, what matrix “I” may be in, regardless how flawed “my” reasoning or thinking may be, regardless of whether or not “I” am a program or the dream of some glowing cloud in dimension 18… regardless of any of that something must exist for whatever “I” am to be able to be “aware”, no matter how wrong “my” awareness may be about anything or everything.
You may be saying pretty much the same thing, or the same thing exactly, but the words “you” or “I” carry too much baggage I think, and can be argued too easily as a result.
So, this whole chain of questioning can be shit down by saying “I’m not sure your god doesn’t exist; I’m just not convincedconvinced that it does,” and the author thinks they have some weapons grade questions on their hands? Who did they test these out on Cleverbot?
Science isn’t a way of knowing, it’s a way of questioning. It’s a protocol defining the steps necessary to get from Why (or “that’s odd”) to How. Those steps need to form an unbroken chain that can be evaluated and repeated by others so that they, too, can arrive at the same How. Skip a step, wave your arms, and the whole thing is blown apart. Magic and sky fairies do not apply here.
A better why to confuse an atheist: start explaining how boiling a vast majority of all people who have ever lived for all eternity in a burning lake of gods’ love shows that gods love all of us. That one still confuses me.
Typical for theists. Because atheism confuses them, they think atheists must be confused as well.
This reminds me of discussing philosophy with Dark Star bomb 20, which does not end well.
I’m willing to have faith that some things are true, just as a matter of pragmatism. Even in a mathematical proof (the closest thing to certainty that I can think of), one relies on a set of initial axioms; if these are changed then, yes, you could prove a completely different result. But I am not worried about what is absolutely true or false; rather I am more concerned with what is consistent or inconsistent with my sum experience of the world.
Hah. It seems these days that a good way to confuse an atheist/skeptic is to say “women should be fully equal to men, and the race war waged by police against black people should be condemned”. Most atheists worth their salt will be able to counter each of the OP’s convulations, but these? It astounds a whole bunch of them, clearly.
I must know (for sure, whatever that’s doing here) that I exist, so really we should all be saying we can’t know everything for sure. Much more than that can be known with certainty, if “for sure” isn’t pumped up to such an absurd standard, but at least it’s something.
That is, unless all this talk about knowing things and being sure is supposed to be just a lot of noise and confusion-mongering — in which case, there’s no need for anyone to respond to any of it. Throwing shit every which way isn’t an argument.
Theists can be too. Adding a god just adds another mistake to the pile.
But I can know some things for sure (which was established, well…. centuries ago and again in my comment). How do you know what’s right or wrong? Are you a god? If so, why would that make a difference? If not….. why would that make a difference?
Is that a question? They are? I was under the impression that matter moves around in spacetime, and those are actually the critical pieces of how we understand physics.
Balancing an equation like that isn’t the same thing as causality. But maybe I’m being too sophistimicated here….
It could be something has always existed, along with a lot of other possibilities which you’re neglecting. Theists are the only ones who need to speculate about something coming from nothing. But they call that nothing “god,” give it their personality, and try to convince the rest of us that their bullshit asshattery was our idea all along.
No and no. Not the answer you wanted? Or did you want to confuse somebody with this somehow?
Don’t know and don’t care.
Ogvorbis, #14:
Nope, you’d still be an existing computer simulation, with blah, blah, blah. Having the thought that you exist (or that you don’t exist) means you’re having a thought (or whatever it is that seems like a thought), and nonexistent things simply don’t do that because they don’t do anything. You can rest easy now.
This line of argumentation rests on the idea if science can be doubted, or if science fails to answer a given thing, then that proves that science is flawed and therefore God. This logic assumes a binary division between the claims of science and the claims of God. Yet many of these same people bristle at the statement that religious claims and science are at odds.
I’m confused as to how someone could toss that stupid of a word salad and expect me to start joining their tree-fort club.
None of that confused me in the least. It certainly didn’t cause me to abandon atheism, because the entire argument doesn’t even propose an alternative. Leading questions that are designed to make one question their “beliefs” about atheism still leaves the theist with all of his/her work to do.
There’s nothing in there that provides an evidence — or even argument — in favor of the kind of all-knowing, “naught or nice list” deity that this person apparently has invested some time and money in. Might as well talk about the sunk-cost fallacy.
category error. I learned (at MIT) that the mind is what we call the process of chemical reactions that occur in the brain. The mind is not a metaphysical object that interacts with the brain. So he attempts to confuse atheists by jumbling around terms without any proper usage. Gotcha.
In other words: since chemical imbalance cause insanity, How can you know you’re not insane? without following it to “i might also be insane, how do you know I’m not? Why even try to answer these questions from someone who might also be insane?”
I too, as an atheist, question atheists who claim they KNOW god doesn’t exist. I disagree with being labeled “agnostic” for doubting God existence by phrasing it as “no evidence God exists, if I missed it, I’ll reconsider.” I prefer to focus on the anti-religion aspect of atheism, rather than always arguing about whether or not God exists. Back to the specificity of the question: “what chemical reaction…”: poorly phrased question. It is unclear that any specific conclusion is the result of a single chemical reaction in the brain. It’s the result of a long process of many reactions, to try to identify the single one that resulted in the “aha” response is interesting but not very productive itself. The attempt can produce a lot of information along the way, which may exemplify what the brain process is doing. Etc. ugh, stuck in a loop of dividing investigation into levels that end up being able to be modeled in the higher level. Like chemistry is just high level physics, chemistry is the physics model for a complex set of physics.
[before i run of the rails… moving on…]
that single sentence, extracted from his context, when isolated, makes sense, but still begs the question of the definition of “bad”/”good”. To think his way (kinda), they are just words we use to identify things that hurt or are beneficial to our existence. These labels are applied, in agreement with many others. Don’t confuse correlation with causation, the labels aren’t applied cuz everyone else voted to apply it. Everyone simply agrees that such a ‘thing’ qualifies to hold such a label. I.E. description not causation. Regardless, not all atheists says “they Know” something is good or bad, they just express their agreement with the application of the label.
~~~~
before I get even more longwinded, the thought occurred to me that this “How to Confuse an Atheist”, is just a camouflage for “How to Get Atheist to Self Reflect”. (sorta) Meaning, with that diatribe I just wrote above, I found useful to articulate more fully ideas that previously I would just “sense” in the back of my mind. I found this exercise useful, personally. I hope I was able to share something productive with my attempt here.
There is in all of us, excepting pure psychopaths, a deep moral sense which tells us what is right and what is wrong. It can be called conscience, but seems to be more than that.
Theists tend to assign that sense absolute authority and call it God. Atheists have the same sense, but are aware that in many times and many places it has allowed people to do terrible things.
The human moral sense is flawed. Pretty much the whole body of moral philosophy has been an attempt to produce a rational framework for testing the function of the moral sense.
I suspect the answer is simply that as we evolved as social creatures our brains developed a system for evaluating fairness. We have deep structures in our brains which cause feelings of guilt, or unfairness when we do or see certain things. Those systems, like every part of us, are flawed and imprecise consequences of our evolutionary history.
This is gibberish and bafflegab.
It’s far too long and unnecessarily so.
If you can’t make your point in a few simple sentences, you don’t have a point. Or a good one anyway.
Why trust what some random, mentally fogged up, ignorant religious kook says either. They don’t agree on anything. Including which religion is true inasmuch as xians only make up 28% of the world’s population.
This is a Reverse Appeal to Authority.
We trust reason and data, not authorities.
UnknownEric the Apostate,
I’m confused as to what the strategy is in the first place. I guess they are trying to lead atheists to what they perceive to be the logical conclusion of atheism, which apparently seems to be some kind of full-fledged nihilism (knowledge is not possible, morality does not exist, life has no meaning, etc). They really do believe that this is the kind of place atheism will lead someone to and the only reason most atheists aren’t there already is because we haven’t thought it through. So they’re trying to help us along and… they hope that somewhere along the road we will turn back and prefer God over incapacitating despair? Maybe that’s it? It’s not an argument for theism being true, it’s an argument for believing a lie because reality is just too much to bear?
Reading through those supposed show stoppers, they remind me of the sorts of sloppy, beginner’s rhetorical arguments that I might have used pre-high school. It’s always rather pathetic to see that quality of argument being used by adults.
And the prime mover fallacy, really. Why isn’t the central problem with that fallacy easy to see for those who use it? If everything needs a cause, a thing or force or something to create it, then a posited God needs it too; if the posited God doesn’t need it, then the proposition that everything needs a cause, a thing or force or something to create it is not true, and you have no need of that hypothesis.
The strategy is to lead one through a convoluted set of rhetorical statements where definitions shift between statements. The long windedness is a feature which does two things: try to make you forget or not notice the definitions have suddenly changed, and make you invest time which hopefully makes you more malleable (same thing telemarketers do).
It appears to me that the theist proposing this considers the only real source of information to be Authority. I consider any source of information to be open to question, but some sources of information (observation and measurement, for example), to be generally reliable. Authority is valuable to the extent that the authority figure in question has more relevant knowledge than I do, has no reason to be dishonest, and is willing to share information. Unless all three are true, the authority figure is of no value.
The “how can we know” stuff is the Argument From Reason, already thoroughly debunked by Richard Carrier here.
This is backwards. We simply find out what reliable ways of knowing there are, and then we name those methods “science”. So show me your method is reliable and I shall include it in science. There is nothing faith based or presuppositional about this.
Atheists can’t help but be subjective moralists. People can’t help but be subjective moralists. Even people who claim they get their morality exclusively from the Bible cherry-pick the bits they like and ignore the bits they don’t. If you gave equal weight to every sentence in the Bible and used that as your moral guide, you’d go crazy. You’d also probably be in prison or dead very quickly.
It’s the old “how can you be sure you aren’t a brain in a vat hooked up to the Matrix” canard. If I can’t be sure about that, neither can you. But it’s even worse for theists: not only can they rule not out that their brain or reality is being messed with by unknown entities, like the rest of us, they actually claim that there are known entities that can mess with your brain and reality.
No such thing.
I’m confused as to why someone who is taking the time to write up a model argument doesn’t proofread it before releasing it to the world.
I often wonder how these presuppositionalist theists don’t see the futility of their game here. This is like complaining when someone says “I’ll buy you dinner, I have money on bank card” that they can’t know for sure that their bank account hasn’t been robbed. Do bank accounts sometimes get robbed? Yes. Would that make the statement “I have money on my bank card” uncertain? Yes. But we have good statistical reasons for accepting the claim as probably true. So we don’t pull this “but how do you know” silliness. And it’s the same with anything else, including morality.
If you think about any truth claim in life you find the same thing. No 100% certainty. Which makes this mythical 100% certainty, that presuppositionalists are looking for, completely irrelevant. So I have no idea why they think we should care. Clearly in every day life no one does care. And they clearly don’t need to.
Yup, and neither do you. Just like the bank account.
Remember when a good argument in favor of something was clear and concise? It was intended to win people over, not play stupid word games?
I think there is a segment of society whose negative experiences with teachers, lawyers, doctors, or other people who are supposed to be “smart” have led them to believe that “smart” people demonstrate they are “smart” by being confusing and difficult to follow. The least confused person in the room wins.
So, if you can “confuse” an atheist, you are “smart”-er than them, and your beliefs are validated.
This isn’t a horrible start for discussion, because it raises good solid philosophical questions rather than extraneous nonsense. They’re obviously trying to squeeze a couple theological arguments into the discussion (the argument from reason that Brian Pansky noted in #3, the cosmological argument in #6), but you could build a half-decent philosophy survey course around the discussion.
#1) Is there an objective reality? Are there objective truths about moral or aesthetic claims? [realism v. idealism]
#2) What is the relationship between the conscious mind and the physical brain? [philosophy of mind]
#3) What is knowledge? How can we know things? [epistemology]
#4) What is science? What do we learn from doing science? [philosophy of science]
#5) Can we make true moral statements? [ethics]
#6) What is causation? [etiology]
Hopefully, that’s what you meant to say.
rereading Item#6: It reads to me like his method of To-Confuse-an-Atheist is simply: confuse him with a plethora of questions that haven’t been answered (yet). And the usual “If you can’t impress with brilliance, baffle with bullshit”. As in: juxtaposing unrelated concepts into a single question, with enough bafflegab to connect them.
So, like others have previously admitted, I too was left confused, not by the questions themselves, but by trying to parse them into actual questions rather than word salads. It is an interesting challenge, though. To rephrase this listicle into a set of actual questions that everyone is asking, whether some answer “godidit” or others answer “hmmm, I*D*K, let’s explore that”
I gotta throw in (as I usually do), that ALL answers you get from scientists (even with authoritee) still will include “…it looks so far…” and will eagerly await being rationally dis-proven, with actual reasons and not just “godditit”.
to expand the OP’s comment about wrenches: yes I think this Confusabot needs to be reminded that Science is not atheists version of a being that answers questions we ask (in particularly formatted style). Science is a Method, a tool to use to understand how things work. We use results from the science techniques to build models, using another tool: mathematics, to help us understand how things work. Not to answer your uber-question of WHY, but the more pragmatic question of How.
siderail: math does not control how everything works. it is just a description of our observation of watching stuff happen, that can then be used to predict. it does not Define what will happen, just describes how things have worked previously if you just change some aspects of the previous occurence. /siderail
Yeah, how do you know?
@50, consciousness razor
Ya, I was just thinking about this.
It’s just reassurance seeking. I imagine a congregation going to church and begging the preacher, “Please, give us a list of ways to stump atheists, and please make it sound like atheists are obviously deluded, because we’re not sure ourselves and need you to tell us that our faith is grounded… via a list of six things we’ll just accept as slam dunk atheist-converting arguments”.
@Gen #29 – In my experience, statements like that do not cause confusion so much as they tear a hole in reality and create a place where Skeptical Atheist males can live in an alternate universe where such questions don’t disrupt them.
@34 slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem))
I happen to be one of those “there is no doubt that there is no god” atheists. If Dawkins is a 6.999….recurring, I’m a 7.2.
Not only is there no evidence for a god, there is no possibility that there can be evidence in favor of a god. The entire concept is incoherent. To start, no one in the history of the universe has ever even begun to define what a god “is”. God has an insurmountable ontology problem. I refuse to even begin a debate with a theist until they have satisfied me that they know what their god “is” … not what it “does”, or some fuzzy attribute like being “pure love”…what it “is”.
They run screaming from the room (metaphorically speaking) every time.
@ 46 Crip Dyke
I hear “conservation of matter” all the time from theists, especially of the creationist type. Even when you say E=mc^2, they don’t get it. Of course, in a relativistic universe, energy isn’t conserved, either (see Sean Carroll for an explanation)…but that’s a whole different discussion.
Are you sure you don’t meant to say “according to the third-rate dictionary which confuses the organ called brain with the abstract concept called mind”? You need not read any further to know this is pseudo-intellectual babble.
Even though I think it’s silly to talk about “having faith” in science or atheism, I laugh when theists say, “You have to have more faith to believe in science / not believe in God than I have to have faith in God!” because they say this as if it’s a bad thing, and yet they are the ones who believe faith is a ‘virtue’ (and that the more faith you have, the better).
Sorry, now I am thinking of Kate Bush http://genius.com/Kate-bush-why-should-i-love-you-lyrics
“Have you ever seen a picture of Jesus laughing?”
It’s interesting that Buddha is often portrayed as laughing, but we do not see Jesus with Kate Bush’s “smile that healed.” It’s all about earnestness and suffering and a picture like PZ’s might be considered disrespectful. Why?
@30, consciousness razor
How do we know nonexistent things don’t do anything? After all, I can think of plenty of things that exist that don’t do anything (I’m commenting on a blog when I should be grading… pretty lazy…). Anyway: this might be the opinion of a dilettante, but I don’t think that the “I think, therefor I am” circle can be squared. We humans can do science, and observe stars and people and rocks, and think about things, but that’s not to say that we “exist” relative to something else that “doesn’t exist”. But I digress…
As far as I can see, nobody has addressed that first step in the supposedly confusing process. I don’t even like that first sentence:
While that is a popular piece of rhetoric, it begs the question: what are the nature of “facts.” It assumes (contrary to observation) that there exists a set of facts which we can all can agree on, a perfect set of Lego pieces from which we can build our perfect theories. Such foundationalist nonsense not only gets it backwards, it can be a serious ethical lapse, leading to a false sense of certainty and a truly dogmatic scientism.
Science is a social process by which we judge new “facts” by seeing how well they fit with our existing set of facts in the context of our existing theories. As the philosophers of science put it, facts are “theory laden.” We can’t even tell a fact from an observation error without a theory. Facts are not obvious, are meaningful only in the light of a theory, and are never certain.
This should all be part of public school general science. That it is not, is why the public thinks of science as a collection of indisputable facts, and we have such foolishness as the philosophy of Alvin Plantinga and a Congress that will sit by blithely while the oceans probably continue to warm (unless our thermometers are all broken), the polar ice sheets probably slide into the sea (unless our GPS and satellite observations mean nothing) and Florida probably disappears under a rising sea (unless it floats).
Handy tip for Creationists: If your position requires you not only to call into question the sum total of all scientific knowledge that has been attained throughout history, but knowledge itself as a basic concept, chances are it’s not the correct one.
The only people who claim to have absolute knowledge are politicians and theists. Most people accept that any claim justified today may need to be revised or withdrawn in light of new evidence or new interpretations. However this idea is axiomatic since it contains the contradiction “This much is certain: nothing is certain.”
I don’t think that list was created for the purpose of challenging atheists. I think it’s just supposed to make theists feel good about their position. “Look, we have a [seemingly] well-reasoned argument too! You won’t actually use it in a real argument with an atheist, but you could!”
A theist who tried to reproduce this argument in a conversation with an atheist would have to be reading from a script, and even one unexpected response from the atheist would throw off the entire flow.
Science is a way of knowing that is independent of the observer. Science develops tools to determine outcomes, like a pumpkin soup recipe. You take a set of initial conditions, ie the pumpkin and other ingredients, apply the recipe and end up with something that is recognizably pumpkin soup. Every soup will be slightly different depending on the details of input conditions and the exactness of following the process. You don’t need to be God to make soup, (but it may help)
Now religion is the process of seeing a pumpkin, bursting into tears that it isn’t yet yummy soup, closing your eyes and praying to a higher power to turn it into perfect pumpkin soup indistinguishable from previous pumpkin soups. Then open your eyes and say, thanks mom!
gakxz1 #59
This is so semantically strained that my brain trembled. :P I don’t know how your trying to redefine the words existent and nonexistent, but it must be altogether different that what the words actually mean. We know nonexistent things don’t do anything because… they don’t exist.
I’d be interested in an example.
Not that it is germane to the “something exists” claim, but out of curiosity.
Me @ 65
than* what
I don’t think the original article was really meant to do what it claims to do. It’s really, I think, meant to give believers more confidence in their beliefs by convincing them to imagine that they now have arguments that will “confuse athiests”. Of course I suppose there may be a few atheists out there who are confused by such arguments, but surely anyone who has thought things through will find nothing in that “argument” the least bit confusing. But I don’t really think that was the purpose of the article anyway.
Deacon Duncan@13
Yes, except the “gogito ergo sum” argument says nothing whatsoever about the nature of the whatever it is that is doing the perceiving. You may assign the word “I” to whatever that is, but what justification do you have for doing so? If you don’t know that nature of whatever is perceiving then the words you may asign to it are empty of real content. Even Descartes had to resort to “proving” the existence of God to make the next step.
@62 Al Dente:
Only Sith deal in absolutes.
To the author,
you should make a distinction between theist arguments and just plain poor arguments. What you have presented nobody could reasonably defend, it is just idiotic. I wholeheartedly agree with you. That being said, that is not a legitimate argument. It is just a straw man argument, which is not the same as a theist argument.
snowden23, the argument being held up to ridicule here was apparently written by a theist (unless you have actual grounds for suggesting it was really written by an atheist trying to make theists look foolish? That’s a bit of a stretch. Especially as they often do such a good job of it themselves, without any help).
I’m confused as to why you would think the apparently theist author of the piece PZ links to in the OP is choosing to post a strawman theist argument???
“Ask how can science prove that science is the only way to know anything?”
I love it when an apologist asks me a question like this.
“My dear, I just told you we can’t know anything for sure. So science doesn’t have to do that. Science is about increasing probability.”
And then it’s the apologist who is confused.
“Acknowledging that I could be wrong about something does not immediately mean that I am wrong.”
And this is the cause of the apologist’s confusion. They are binary thinkers. Something must be the 100% vertain absolute, eternal, never changing truth or it’s false.
“Cause and effect are crucial to material, physical substance.”
Yeah. You’re only 80 years behind. Because Quantum Mechanics.
I don’t know if it was the purpose of the article to enabling apologists to confuse atheists. I do know from my own experience that apologists have tried most points on me – and invariably got pissed off that I didn’t react as expected.
I thought there would be more bananas.
mnb0 @72:
Not sure what you mean. You think QM negates cause and effect? More like 90 years anyway.
If I had to guess, the idea is that people with certain interpretations propose some things (who knows what) are “popping in and out of existence” acausally. Or somehow somebody has supposedly established that nothing causes radioactive decays, for instance. Not sure how seriously any of that should be taken.
Or you could maybe talk about entanglements being different from an ordinary “causal” relationship, in which something happens then some kind effect propagates through the space from A to B. Instead, it makes no difference what’s going on in between or in the mean time or whatever — the relevant equations (and observations) simply have nothing to do with that. Maybe it depends on what you mean by “causal” here — it stays inside light cones? Is that all there is to it?
But really, you could talk about how even Newton’s laws of motion (QM’s no different) are symmetric (or invariant? whatever term they use) with respect to the direction of time…. So what is there in that which is supposed to define “cause” and “effect” for us? You could stare at the equations all day and slap those labels on arbitrary things if you really want to, but why? And how exactly are you coming up with that?
Whatever you think of any of that, since physics at the “fundamental” level is laws of motion, I don’t see a problem with saying you don’t need causation. You need things moving around or being somewhere in it, that’s all. You get that right, and you win physics. Any other physical concepts can be derived from that, or if they can’t be so derived then they don’t look like they belong in a serious conversation about physics (maybe psychology, sociology, history, etc.). But if that’s the right sort of view to have, then that’s also been the case since well before QM.
I wouldn’t let them get past #3
I don’t disbelieve in spirit or God; I simply have no idea what those things are, and until a theist can explain what they are and what they do and how what they are makes them capable of what they do*, there’s no further discussion to be had.
*And it always comes down to unobservable beings that are everything and nothing, nowhere and everywhere, capable of doing magic because they are magical, and for some unknown reason they want us to worship or submit to them, and give material wealth and sexual favours to their self-appointed human representatives on Earth.
I (provisionally) trust my mind’s conclusions about the material world because my mind is part of that world. My body looks up at the sky, sunlight enters my eyeballs and a chain of physical processes leads to my brain forming the conclusion that it’s daytime. If it was nighttime, there would be no incoming sunlight and my brain would not form that conclusion. Of course, the chain of causation is not always guaranteed to make my brain form accurate conclusions, but it’s only because the whole business is material that I can even begin to test it for accuracy. OTOH, if I’m an immaterial soul experiencing whatever thoughts and feelings God deigns to provide me with, what reason is there to think that my beliefs correspond to an external world at all?
And I don’t trust my mind to form conclusions about the spiritual world, which is why I’m an atheist. Not much point believing in something unknowable…
Ohnoes! I hate operating under a mental framework. Having opinions just makes it worse, especially when the electro-chemicals agree with me.
If all sorts of people believe in science, including theists, then why are you trying to stump atheists with this line of argument? Apparently everybody’s already cool with the whole “I am the only way of knowing, bow down unto me” thing.
Zing! Only superstitious foreign savages would consider a little book like the I Ching to be an infallible and inexhaustible source of knowledge.* Reasonable people believe in Biblical inerrancy and sola scriptura instead.
*Not that I Ching devotees actually do make this claim, AFAIK. But let’s pretend.
What on earth does this mean? Science is unobservable? Thermometers and research labs are collective hallucinations?
No. But I’m not sure I can know anything for sure either…so I can’t know anything for sure. That’s what “sure” means.
Even if “conservation of matter” was an actual law and “spontaneity of matter” wasn’t a collection of three words randomly chosen by a lemur with a dictionary, all this would prove is that the universe must have come from…an equal amount of matter? It seems that God is a “material, physical substance” and the universe is made out of him…wait, the Norse were right all along!
Probably not. Most inanimate objects don’t behave much like humans, so there’s no reason to believe that they think like humans either. See how useful materialism is? You can infer mental properties from physical ones!
Also, “analog?” Curb your lemur.
The whole “IF I exist, THEN God exists” argument seems specious, at best. It is definitely not a sound basis for debating specifics of science and philosophy.
It seems the author is under the delusion that an atheist will collapse in despair at such a concept and decide to believe in magic books filled with magic beings.
Yeah, I’m not sure how it’s supposed to work, either.
consciousness razor @75:
They haven’t established anything of the sort. They’ve just defined ‘random’ as ‘uncaused’.
Pretty much. People freak out because there are correlations in QM which don’t exist in classical physics. But nothing we’ve ever observed violates causality.
Entropy, i.e. the (logarithm of the) number of available states, i.e. initial conditions and what can follow from them. Broken eggs don’t reassemble*. Asteroids don’t spontaneously form on the surface of a planet, and shoot upwards, perfectly filling a pre-existing crater*.
Physics at the “fundamental” level is never the be all and end all. Calculating shit usually requires initial conditions. See the ‘initial’ there? Decay rate requires initial particle plus interactions. Scattering amplitude requires specifying initial state and final state. Making coffee requires…eh, I don’t drink coffee anymore, but it’s complicated, with final state hotter, messier and the part of it in the cup more delicious, than initial state.
*Well, they could. Calculate the probability.
Okay, but the idea that non-scientist people often spread around is more or less that somehow experiments have demonstrated a lack of causation in such circumstances. (Not sure what anyone could have possibly looked for to determine something like that, but there you have it.) I’m not saying that, but many others do.
Fair enough, if that’s all you mean by causality. Indeed, it’s an important distinction to make, as insignificant as it might seem.
Some people have more larded-up notions of causality, as well as similar ones like laws “governing” what happens, and that’s their problem. I wouldn’t say entanglement or quantum nonlocality violates/contradicts relativity on an experimental or observational level, because it clearly doesn’t, but something is being violated on more on a conceptual level if you thought everything works in the “classical” way that you’re talking about. The concepts you use in the different theories just don’t play together very nicely. Something needs to budge a little somewhere, so it doesn’t suffice to say that nothing is the matter and nothing is violated so look the other way.
Well, sure, but the point is that that’s not derivable simply from the equations of motion. And if you merely add to them the idea that earlier things were in a lower entropy, that will help you with the arrow of time problems, but I don’t know how that really gets us back to the full sense of causality that some people think they need. You’re just adding some initial conditions, after all. How’s that supposed to be “causation” in this really trumped up sense that we’re talking about?
Fine, but those can be expressed in terms of positions as well. Of course, we’re obviously concerned with the configuration of matter initially (“initial” ones merely being whichever boundaries or pseudo-boundaries are interesting/relevant to a particular question), not just where it is or how it ends up in later configurations. I just don’t see how that could be in conflict with the idea that physics is about matter in motion.
cr @80:
Right, it does require (at least?) one additional postulate;
Well, that could only consistently work once in all of history, right? So, it’s helpful to also postulate that this was an early time with a low entropy. (Instead of, say, right now, or every time — since we don’t think we’re Boltzmann Brains or some crazy thing like that.) After that, any other states follow from the exact evolution given by the equations of motion, which takes things toward equilibrium (with extremely high probability, as matter of empirical fact, not out of logical necessity or by definition — which is why you don’t get that for “free” just by having the equations of motion alone). There might be other ways to do it besides this triumvirate of laws of motion + initial conditions + a probability distribution on those conditions, but from what little I’ve seen, that’s the most popular and well-developed approach. But the point about it being empirical is basically that it’s kind of stupid to assume that I must be flipping a fair coin therefore the odds must be equally 50/50, as a matter of pure logic, before you even check what the probability distribution actually is in the real world.
What does any of those six parts have to do with atheism?
tkreacher @65
I think my point with that comment was something along the lines of: I don’t think existence is a predicate (objects don’t have the property of existing). So you can’t say non-existent things “don’t do anything”. Or, you can say that my chair isn’t doing much, but of course it’s doing lots compared to the vacuum of empty space, which, however, still at least has fields and so does “something”. But you can’t say my non-existent chair does nothing, because you can’t really say that things have a non-existent property, and then on top of that say that that thing does nothing… (but I concede the argument until I actually read the philosophy on all this… have a few years to wait while I do so?)
opposablethumbs @ 71
Because a theist says it, doesn’t make it a theist argument. I ask you, what is inherently theist about his argument? The author of the argument tries to be intellectually clever and thought trap someone. In reality they are just trying to undermine knowledge in an effort to protect their own claims. That is why I say it isn’t a theist argument. He may use it to protect God but he also may use it to protect fairies.
It is a straw man argument because no serious theist believes this. It is non-sense. Because it is non-sense, it can be torn down easily. If you want actually intellectual dialogue, debate, and truth, we must then use real arguments and not the stupid stuff people say… But if you want to just rip someone to shreds keep doing this, it doesn’t solve anything or satisfy anyone.
snowden23,
I have read your comments twice, and even reread the OP and I have no idea what you are talking about. No one says these arguments are dumb because they are ‘theist arguments’. They are dumb arguments made by a theist.
Of course there are theists who make -and believe- these arguments. The proof is in the link. In any large group of people you would probably find at least some people believing stupid arguments.
snowden23:
Have you been paying attention to any theistic arguments in the past … I don’t know … two or three thousand years?
In what sense is this different from any other theist argument? If that applies just as well to theist arguments generally (maybe not all — generally), then how is that supposed to disqualify this one?
Then what does this theist seriously believe and how do you what that is? Have you spoken with them or can you read minds?
Which is why is should be torn down….? We should only respond to theistic arguments that are difficult or impossible to refute? Are there any of those?
People say stupid stuff in the course of making “real” arguments. There are much more interesting and productive arguments to be had, certainly, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a genuine, sincere or real theist argument.
It’s supporting the idea that a god exists, and I think that’s the only criterion that counts. Even if this particular person who authored it doesn’t take it very seriously, others can and do. Because it’s being communicated to them as well as us, there’s no reason why a response of some sort isn’t warranted. Notice how much we’re already blowing it off and aren’t going to great lengths to treat it as The Most Important Argument Ever, so what are we supposed to do instead? Say nothing at all?
Why isn’t calling out confused nonsense for what it is a solution to something or satisfying to anyone? I mean, if you’re really committed to truth and having coherent/productive intellectual dialogues, what’s supposed to be helpful about letting nonsense get a pass?
Actually, I am confused. Because, it seems that the argument proposes using religious faith to know things instead of verifying that what I’m perceiving is what others are perceiving, and then use shared perceptions to increase our knowledge of the universe. And it confuses me, because most believers would never use this (I hope) in any other facet of their lives, so it’s obvious they don’t actually buy the argument themselves.
Zenlike:
I agree with you. I think I was just trying to say that but in a different way.
Consciousness Razor:
I have paid plenty attention to theistic arguments throughout the ages.
Let me clarify for you, Aquinas’ ‘ways’ to know God’s existence is a much more proper foundation for a theistic argument than the one presented. Aquinas would affirm the senses and their relation to epistemology. This other one would undermine epistemology to save what they believe, having more to do with nominalism than with theology.
“In what sense is this different from any other theist argument?”
In epistemology, which is a mountain of a difference.
“Which is why it* should be torn down….? We should only respond to theistic arguments that are difficult or impossible to refute?”
Imagine if ALL of Plato’s dialogues were spent on refuting the stupid things people say. If he did that he certainly wouldn’t be an influential person and who knows where the course of philosophy might have went. You can refute stupid arguments all day, and in some sense you should, but can we not move on from them to dialogue?
“Notice how much we’re already blowing it off and aren’t going to great lengths to treat it as The Most Important Argument Ever”
No I didn’t notice. Sure a response is warranted but not needed. If it truly was insignificant than it wouldn’t have been discussed. We don’t need to waste time on petty thoughts.
? How long has it been since E = mc² was first published – 110 years?
I don’t agree that all of these belong to philosophy. I’d say 6 belongs to physics and 2 to neurobiology.
Speaking of causation: Rob Grigjanis, do you happen to have a link to the latest thread where we talked about the causes of radioactive decay?
David Marjanović @90: After getting over the shock of you addressing me by name (:-)), I found this.
Yes, Einstein’s annus mirabilis. Here’s the E=mc² paper, with a link to the previous one, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”. Beautiful stuff.
David @90:
I don’t think we actually talked about that, but we could…
There’s a beautiful model of alpha decay due to George Gamow (see here), which pictures the alpha particle as rattling around the inside of a nucleus, trapped by a potential well which is zero inside the nucleus, and the Coulomb potential outside. The size of the nucleus and the speed of the trapped alpha particle determine the frequency with which the alpha hits the potential wall. The frequency times the probability of tunneling gives the decay rate.
Need to expand on the coffee table metaphor. Specifically: Not only Dr. Meyers can measure, document, and research the coffee table. His wife can. Anybody here can. The theist can. Everyone’s results will be the same, unless PZ has had a particularly persistent hallucination. And even then, everyone BUT Dr. Meyers will get the same results.
The theist implies that none of us will measure the coffee table, and just take Dr. Meyers’s word for it because he holds a PhD in furniture spotting. Furthermore the theist demands that we value HIS (they’re always male) coffee table opinions above those of Dr. Meyers, because his PhDFS was granted by a superior university. He also claims his educational superiority excuses him from the tedious effort of observing the coffee table before rendering judgment.
I’m confused by that wordvomit, but not for the reasons implied in the premise.
James Pabst #93
Trolling is frowned upon, here.
I feel confused. Is a theist playing with those electro-chemical reactions in my brain? Can God help me understand a theist?
gakxz1 #84
Hopefully.
I didn’t think I was trolling. I thought I was contributing to a conversation.
I guess I’m just not clever enough for the cool kids here. (Now THAT’s trolling. So is “word vomit.)
Buh-byeeee.
James @98: I didn’t think you were trolling. Not sure why anyone would.
James Pabst, I am not sure that John Horstman was responding to you but rather the main post. Unclear. As for chigau, I dont know why xe thought you were trolling.
Rob Grigjanis
“Meyers” is almost always a sign.
—-
James Pabst
I apologise for my knee-jerk reaction.