Kent Hovind recycled a video titled Aronra, Professor Dave, & PZ Meyers get OWNED by Kent Hovind’s Assistant, originally posted by Matt Powell as AronRa & his minions vs. Matt Powell (no link, sorry, they’ve received enough attention). It’s the same damn argument he’s been making for months: They said we didn’t come from rocks, but I found an article I don’t understand that says we did come from rocks. Sorry, guy, no phylogeny includes “rocks” in the tree of life. There is no line of descent from “rocks”. We’re all made of carbon, that does not imply that in the distant past there was a Mama Anthracite that spawned a little family of coal lumps that then led to us. I’ve pointed this out to him before, and he paid as much attention to that as he did to the spelling of my name.

What’s depressing about that is how intellectually bankrupt these guys are. Powell has three arguments he makes over and over again, that he thinks are clever: scientists think we evolved from rocks, scientists think squid came from comets, scientists think dinosaurs farted themselves to death. All wrong. I guess that’s better than Hovind, who has one: incredulously stating that you think you’re related to a mosquito. At least Hovind’s assertion is factually correct.

That’s the conclusion I draw from the words of the wealthy and famous. Elon Musk was doing a fine job of demonstrating that he was a brainless twit all by himself, but now his ex-partner Grimes has chipped in.

World is 4000 years old. Dinosaurs were planted by god to confuse us

— 𝔊𝔯𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔰 (@Grimezsz) September 13, 2022

Maybe it’s just religion that screws them up, because she also said this:

Good cuz I am almost finished developing an experimental polytheistic religion

— 𝔊𝔯𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔰 (@Grimezsz) August 25, 2022

Religions are something con artists invent, so I’ll take that as a confession.

I don’t think someone who makes up an experimental polytheistic religion is going to be welcome with young earth creationists like Ken Ham. You never know, though — they may share a common interest in the art of the grift.

I’d almost managed to forget that Michael Egnor exists, but there he is, yelling stupid arguments at me. He dropped a pingback on my recent post about objective morality, but then he weirdly quotes something I wrote in 2012.

There is a common line of attack Christians use in debates with atheists, and I genuinely detest it. It’s to ask the question, “where do your morals come from?” I detest it because it is not a sincere question at all — they don’t care about your answer, they’re just trying to get you to say that you do not accept the authority of a deity, so that they can then declare that you are an evil person because you do not derive your morals from the same source they do, and therefore you are amoral. It is, of course, false to declare that someone with a different morality than yours is amoral, but that doesn’t stop those sleazebags.

Yay! I’m consistent!

Egnor objects, however.

Actually, Christians don’t ask “Where do your morals come from?” in order to call atheists evil. We do it to point out that objective morality is powerful evidence for God’s existence.

They can do both, you know, and they do. On multiple occasions, I’ve had Christians announce that I’m an atheist to discredit me and my arguments, so yes, they certainly do use it to call me evil. I will concede that they may think they’re making a “powerful” argument for god, but they’re not. It’s a stupid argument. I guess I was unconsciously giving them more credit than they deserve to think they can’t possibly believe it’s good evidence.

Egnor then defines the difference between subjective and objective morality to explain how the argument defends the existence of a god.

How so? From our human perspective, moral law can have two origins — subjective and objective.

Subjective moral law is based on human opinion. It may just be one man’s opinion, or it may be the collective opinion of a group of people. If our standards are wholly subjective, dislike of strawberry ice cream and dislike of genocide are not qualitatively different. The dislike is just human opinion.

Objective moral law, by contrast, is outside of human opinion. It is something that we humans discover. We do not create it. Thus, objective moral law exists beyond mere human opinion.

Oh, OK. Then I do possess an objective morality, by Egnor’s own definition. It’s not merely my opinion that we shouldn’t murder other people, it’s a conclusion based on empirical observation of the consequences of murder on individuals and society. Human cultures discovered this by seeing the harm done to a society if death runs rampant. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was also a genetic component, that we have an in-built revulsion from death, especially violent death.

Also, I like strawberry ice cream. What kind of monster dislikes strawberry ice cream? Except…OK, if you are lactose intolerant, you’ve got a legitimate objective reason to dislike it.

So far, I’m fine with Egnor’s claim. Yeah, moral judgments (but not all moral judgments!) can be based on something objective, greater than opinions about ice cream. Fine. Done and done. So we agree that atheists can have an objective morality? Not so fast, because next, without evidence or reason, he leaps to another claim, one that is not related to his earlier definition.

Of course, if a value judgement prevails over other human value judgements, there must be Someone whose opinion is Objective Moral Law. There must be a Law-Giver. That is the one whom all men call God.

No, this is false. I just gave sources of objective morality that are not dependent on authoritarian pronouncements from an imaginary deity. There doesn’t have to be an anthropomorphic invisible law-giver anywhere in the process.

This is just the standard creationist shimmy. The universe had a beginning, therefore there must have been a superpowerful cosmic man-shaped being who started it…but no, that’s not true, there could be some other material cause, or some meta-cause outside our universe that triggered it. A burp in hyperspace, a glitch in the matrix, or why not an entity that cares nothing about us, but spasmed a bunch of stars into existence for its own purposes? There is no logic to his conclusion there.

Myers, as you might expect, is a moral scold, which is odd, coming from an atheist who by definition denies any Source for objective moral standards. Without Objective Moral Law, debates about morality are merely assertions of power — I just try to force you to believe and act as I do because I assert the power to do so. And you do likewise to me.

Every time Myers scolds humanity on morality and immorality, he implicitly acknowledges God’s existence. Myers detests the question “where do your morals come from” because he can’t answer the question without acknowledging the existence of a non-human Moral Law-Giver. For an atheist, denying God’s existence appears to be more important than consistency, logic and evidence.

Notice that he smuggled in a capital-S Source as a prerequisite to objective morality, and that he hasn’t provided any evidence or even any reason why it must exist. That’s his premise. So his argument distills down to:

1. Objective morality exists because God is the Source
2. God exists because objective morality exists
3. Goto 1

It’s as circular as a hamster wheel, and Egnor is frantically running in it.

The latest from Émile Torres focuses on how longtermists have effectively focused on PR and advertising. They have a truly odious philosophy, so they emphasize whatever element will get them the most money. The core of longtermism is the idea that in the far future there could hypothetically be many, many trillions of hypothetical “people” (who would mainly be artificial intelligences of some sort), and that therefore we should make any contemporary sacrifice we can to maximize the population of machines in the unimaginably distant future. There’s a lot of weebly-wobbly rationalizations to be made since nobody has any idea what strategies now will lead to conquest of the galaxy for human-made computers in some imaginary fantasy future, but somehow the current popular ones all involve sucking up to disgustingly rich people.

Ironically, it grew out of the goal of ending world poverty.

Longtermism emerged from a movement called “Effective Altruism” (EA), a male-dominated community of “super-hardcore do-gooders” (as they once called themselves tongue-in-cheek) based mostly in Oxford and the San Francisco Bay Area. Their initial focus was on alleviating global poverty, but over time a growing number of the movement’s members have shifted their research and activism toward ensuring that humanity, or our posthuman descendants, survive for millions, billions and even trillions of years into the future.

If you asked me, I would have thought that building a stable, equitable base would have been a sound way to project human destiny into an unknowable future, but hey, what do I know? The longtermists gazed into their crystal ball and decided that the best, and probably most lucrative, way to defend the future was to pander to the elites.

Although the longtermists do not, so far as I know, describe what they’re doing this way, we might identify two phases of spreading their ideology: Phase One involved infiltrating governments, encouraging people to pursue high-paying jobs to donate more for the cause and wooing billionaires like Elon Musk — and this has been wildly successful. Musk himself has described longtermism as “a close match for my philosophy.” Sam Bankman-Fried has made billions from cryptocurrencies to fund longtermist efforts. And longtermism is, according to a UN Dispatch article, “increasingly gaining traction around the United Nations and in foreign policy circles.”

After all, haven’t billionaires already proven that they will do their all to spread their wealth? OK, maybe the past is a poor guide, but once they’ve perfected brain uploading and have a colony of serfs on Mars, then they’ll decide to let the rest of us have a few crumbs.

The article is largely about one guy, MacAskill, who is the current Face of the movement. His entire career is one of lying to make his philosophy palatable to the masses, but especially delicious to wealthy donors. From day one he was shaping the movement as manufactured public relations.

But buyer beware: The EA community, including its longtermist offshoot, places a huge emphasis on marketing, public relations and “brand-management,” and hence one should be very cautious about how MacAskill and his longtermist colleagues present their views to the public.

As MacAskill notes in an article posted on the EA Forum, it was around 2011 that early members of the community began “to realize the importance of good marketing, and therefore [were] willing to put more time into things like choice of name.” The name they chose was of course “Effective Altruism,” which they picked by vote over alternatives like “Effective Utilitarian Community” and “Big Visions Network.” Without a catchy name, “the brand of effective altruism,” as MacAskill puts it, could struggle to attract customers and funding.

It’s a war of words, not meaning. The meaning is icky, so let’s plaster it over with some cosmetic language.

The point is that since longtermism is based on ideas that many people would no doubt find objectionable, the marketing question arises: how should the word “longtermism” be defined to maximize the ideology’s impact? In a 2019 post on the EA Forum, MacAskill wrote that “longtermism” could be defined “imprecisely” in several ways. On the one hand, it could mean “an ethical view that is particularly concerned with ensuring long-run outcomes go well.” On the other, it could mean “the view that long-run outcomes are the thing we should be most concerned about” (emphasis added).

The first definition is much weaker than the second, so while MacAskill initially proposed adopting the second definition (which he says he’s most “sympathetic” with and believes is “probably right”), he ended up favoring the first. The reason is that, in his words, “the first concept is intuitively attractive to a significant proportion of the wider public (including key decision-makers like policymakers and business leaders),” and “it seems that we’d achieve most of what we want to achieve if the wider public came to believe that ensuring the long-run future goes well is one important priority for the world, and took action on that basis.”

Yikes. I’m suddenly remembering all the atheist community’s struggling over the meaning of atheist: does it mean a lack of belief in gods, or does it mean they deny the existence of gods? So much hot air over that, and it was all meaningless splitting of hairs. I don’t give a fuck about what definition you use, and apparently that means I’m a terrible PR person, and that’s why New Atheism failed. I accept the blame. It failed because we didn’t attract enough billionaire donors, darn it.

At least we didn’t believe in a lot of evilly absurd bullshit behind closed doors that we had to hide from the public.

The importance of not putting people off the longtermist or EA brand is much-discussed among EAs — for example, on the EA Forum, which is not meant to be a public-facing platform, but rather a space where EAs can talk to each other. As mentioned above, EAs have endorsed a number of controversial ideas, such as working on Wall Street or even for petrochemical companies in order to earn more money and then give it away. Longtermism, too, is built around a controversial vision of the future in which humanity could radically enhance itself, colonize the universe and simulate unfathomable numbers of digital people in vast simulations running on planet-sized computers powered by Dyson swarms that harness most of the energy output of stars.

For most people, this vision is likely to come across as fantastical and bizarre, not to mention off-putting. In a world beset by wars, extreme weather events, mass migrations, collapsing ecosystems, species extinctions and so on, who cares how many digital people might exist a billion years from now? Longtermists have, therefore, been very careful about how much of this deep-future vision the general public sees.

The worst part of longtermist thinking is that what they’re imagining, in the long term, is a swarm of digital people — none of whom exist now, and which we don’t know how to create — is the population that our current efforts should be aimed at serving. Serving. That’s a word they avoid using, because it implies that right now, right here, we are the lesser people. Digital people is where it’s at.

According to MacAskill and his colleague, Hilary Greaves, there could be some 10⁴⁵ digital people — conscious beings like you and I living in high-resolution virtual worlds — in the Milky Way galaxy alone. The more people who could exist in the future, the stronger the case for longtermism becomes, which is why longtermists are so obsessed with calculating how many people there could be within our future light cone.

They’ve already surpassed the Christians, some of whom argue that there are more than 100 million (100,000,000) angels. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, remember, so sacrifice now to make your more numerous betters.

You will also not be surprised to learn that the current goal is to simply grab lots and lots of money by converting rich people to longtermism — this is also how Christianity succeeded, by getting a grip on the powerful and wealthy. Underdogs don’t win, except by becoming the big dogs.

So the grift here, at least in part, is to use cold-blooded strategizing, marketing ploys and manipulation to build the movement by persuading high-profile figures to sign on, controlling how EAs interact with the media, conforming to social norms so as not to draw unwanted attention, concealing potentially off-putting aspects of their worldview and ultimately “maximizing the fraction of the world’s wealth controlled by longtermists.” This last aim is especially important since money — right now EA has a staggering $46.1 billion in committed funding — is what makes everything else possible. Indeed, EAs and longtermists often conclude their pitches for why their movement is exceedingly important with exhortations for people to donate to their own organizations.

One thing not discussed in this particular article is another skeevy element of this futurist nonsense. You aren’t donating your money to a faceless mob of digital people — it’s going to benefit you directly. There are many people who promote the idea that all you have to do is make to 2050, and science and technology will enable an entire generation to live forever. You can first build and then join the choir of digital people! Eternal life is yours if you join the right club! Which, by the way, is also part of the Christian advertising campaign. They’ve learned from the best grifters of all time.

Britney Spears has declared that she is an atheist, for unfortunate reasons. I say unfortunate because her apostasy is a consequence of the horrible treatment by her family, and it’s sad that she had to go through that.

Britney Spears, to put it lightly, has been through a lot. Between her conservatorship and her current family drama with her ex-husband and her children, her faith has been tested, so much so that she now says she doesn’t “believe in God anymore.”

In a now-deleted audio recording (as transcribed by Page Six) shared on Instagram last night (September 5), Spears concludes by saying of the four-month mental health facility stay she regularly mentions, “God would not allow that to happen to me if a God existed. I don’t believe in God anymore because of the way my children and my family have treated me. There is nothing to be believe in anymore. I’m an atheist, y’all.”

K-Fed will do that to you, I guess. I’d rather that major religions recognized that abuse is not an effective recruiting tool and cracked down on their repulsive believers.

I have lost what little taste I ever had for arguing with theists. It just leaves me feeling like I’m wasting my time — I’ll let Matt Dillahunty do the debates.

I got a request to join a fellow I don’t know, William Whiting, in a “fun conversation” for a podcast, for something called BasedFaithTV. Having a conversation, I can do. Unfortunately, this was just a guy aggressively asserting his Catholicism at me, and while it did start out amusing, it degenerated into an exercise session for his bigotry. It was not fun.

We got mired in a discussion about “objective morality” with no attempt to define what that is. He said he had an objective morality, while I did not (there was a lot of atheist bashing going on). It developed that what he called “objective morality” could be more accurately described as an authoritarian morality — he possessed the absolute truth granted to him by a transcendent god, therefore he was always right and I was just wallowing in the world of my subjective feelings. I guess that’s one way to define it, but I don’t think he can defend the idea that he knows what the truth is. It all boiled down to the Bible (and the Church fathers and Catholic dogma) says it, therefore he believes it. Early on, he said that he thought it would be great if the Church got a zealous Pope who would lead all Catholics on a crusade to reconquer Europe and the Middle East, which tells you something about his moral compass.

I don’t accept that version of “objective morality”. I also don’t hold a different definition, that objective morality is a universal, not subject to interpretation, because, well, we don’t know what that universal truth is. Maybe there is some moral nature immanent in ourselves, bestowed upon us by a god or by natural selection, but if so, we live lives where we struggle to discern what the best way to live is. Some people seem to think they’ve found it in their holy book, but I’m pretty sure that just leads to horror when they get their way — see the idea of purifying Europe for the Catholic church as an example. I’d also agree that atheism doesn’t exempt one from that flaw. He brought up the Communist purges, and all I can do is agree. Those were horrible catastrophes led by atheists who believed in an objective morality defined by their ideology — or more likely, saw that ideology as a tool to grasp at power.

So this is an argument that objective morality is a good thing? I don’t get it.

I personally favor the idea that an objective morality is one independent of one’s personal, subjective, transient desires, and in that sense atheists can be objectively moral. Maybe I can think I’d sure like to steal that candy from that baby, but I don’t, because I think outside my immediate impulses. I can empathize with the child — they’d be distressed and unhappy if I snatched away their sweet, and I think that I wouldn’t want to live in a world where strangers could steal my candy. I can think about consequences. I don’t want to be beat up by the baby’s mother, and I don’t want a reputation as a candy thief. I can think rationally and objectively about what kind of society would be best for me and my children, and it’s one with some accepted rules of behavior.

I don’t have possession of an absolute truth, but I can try to approach it by trial and error, trying to minimize the likelihood of my personal extinction (that’s the final arbiter of morality!), by seeing beyond the gratification of my personal impulses. That’s what an objective morality is to me — I do things I don’t like right now, because I’m capable of seeing the rewards of doing what others would like, and building a culture of mutual aid and shared community. In a sense, part of that is built in and part of human nature, since we are social animals, but there are so many different ways of building that self-supporting culture that we can’t claim one absolute way to truth.

Oh, also…I mentioned to him that I once had a debate with a Jesuit priest who impressed me greatly with his humanity and his tolerance, and that he seemed to have a very different interpretation of what Catholic morality involved, and it was the antithesis of Mr Whiting’s views. So much for an “objective morality” founded on Catholicism, because ideas there seemed to be highly diverse. His answer? That guy wasn’t a true Catholic, he was a heretic.

This conversation went on way too long and way too frustratingly, but lost any appeal near the end, when he started arguing that, as an example of absolute objective morality, gay and trans people are irreparably wrong and must repent. That’s not a pleasant conversation. That’s a guy using his claims of perfect knowledge of morality to deny the right to exist to people he doesn’t like, while claiming his bigotry is not at all subjective. I could laugh at him at the beginning, but when he tried to deny the humanity of so many people, I was increasingly dismayed and angry with this asshole, and eventually just cut him off. If he posts his podcast, I’ll let you all know, but I’ll tell you now that you won’t enjoy it.

He tried to claim that America today is his vision of Hell, because of all our liberal policies and the way liberals dominate everything. I should have realized then that he was calling from an alternate universe. Imagine his version of paradise on Earth: a European Reconquista by a militant Catholic church, followed by outlawing gay and trans people, among other regressive actions. And that is his vision of an “objective morality”.

He wants to continue our conversation. I don’t think so. I don’t talk with bigots.

It’s not really about artificial intelligence — it’s so muddled I don’t think they understand what they’re talking about, except that whatever it is, they’re ag’in’ it. All the Answers in Genesis “journal” can do is publish a a vague complaint about mind-cloning.

The dominant view of the constitution of the human being in modern times is physicalism. This view attempts to explain mental manifestations as an epiphenomenon of the brain to the exclusion of the soul, as opposed by dualism. According to the dominant view, the mind arose at some point during evolutionary development. As such, physicalists have attempted to transfer the human mind from one substrate to another, in a process called mind cloning.

We have? This is news to me. I don’t think anyone has even tried to transfer a human mind to a different substrate. I don’t even know how you would start to do such a thing, because the mind is inextricably intertwined with the brain.

Yeah, I just searched PubMed for mind cloning, “mind cloning”, and mind-cloning. No papers anywhere on anything like it. Thanks, AiG, now the NIH is giving me an icy stare and wondering if I’m some creationist nutcase.

That project leads to multiple problems. Until now the connectome of only 100,000 mouse neurons have been mapped, thus calling the feasibility of the project into question.

Quite rightly. I think we can say that scientists, even the physicalists he’s complaining about, call the feasibility of this imaginary process of “mind cloning”, which at best exists in the pages of science fiction novels, into question. Just as we call the fictions of the Bible into question.

Ethical issues also arise: would I be held responsible for my mind clone’s criminal activities? What if I and my mind clone vote against each other? Would mind cloning lead to the devaluation of human life?

Granting the absurdity for a moment, no — they’d be separate, autonomous beings. Who cares? We let individuals, and a “mind clone” would be an individual who can vote as they choose, although if they were truly a copy of your mind, wouldn’t they think the same way you do? Why would a copy lead to the devaluation of human life? This seems to be something Christians specialize in, but us non-Christians already oppose it.

This is the best they can do, a series of silly non-issues compounded by their own misconceptions. So, you want to compare materialist and supernatural concepts of the mind? Here you go, be illuminated.

Don’t you just love meaningless graphs? I start with the axes. What is measured on the X-axis? Is it quantifying the amount of evolution and the amount of creation? The Y axis isn’t even labeled. It suggests that “evolution” proponents think there is a progressive increase in “mind” from simple organisms to humans, and that there is a discrete point where “consciousness” exists.

Meanwhile, creationists think there is a measurable undefined Y-axis something, and that cats have more of it than dogs or horses, and that god at some moment in time (should the X-axis be days of creation, from 1 to 6? And weren’t all the animals shown created on the same day?) conjured them into existence with some fixed quantity of consciousness-stuff? I do not understand any of that. It’s an attempt to create a pseudo-quantitative picture of something they don’t understand.

So, what is the goal of this paper? At least they spend a paragraph on that.

In this paper, the main area of mind cloning will be examined and its feasibility will be assessed, and relevant ethical issues discussed. It will also examine the reasons why the human soul exists as an alternative explanation of the human mind as opposed to monism.

Mind cloning is not a thing, it is not feasible, and we already know that the only ethical issues they’re going to bring up are silly and irrelevant, since we can’t clone minds. The arguments for the soul…well, you already know what they’re going to be. This is Answers in Genesis! The answer is that the Bible says so.

Once again, we get a pseudoscientific graphical illustration of the difference between a brain and a soul. Does this help?

I guess the difference is that the brain is tangible and exists, while the soul is intangible and exists. I don’t see how making some strange 3D graph and putting question marks after the axes helps, but OK, I guess someone was reassured by it. Some innumerate, fuzzy-brained someone.

Let’s see one example of how they deal with ethical issues.

Some may ask, but what about frozen embryos? What happens when the soul does not seem to manifest itself? The question is easily answered. When people are asleep or are in a coma, their bodily functions slow down, albeit they do not cease entirely (Moreland 2010; Moreland and Rae 2000, 227). When an embryo is on ice, its functions slow down dramatically, although not entirely, just as the metabolism of a hibernating bear slows down during winter but does not come to a complete stop. But arguably, putting an embryo on ice is a form of torture, and it is a logical non-sequitur that the embryo lacks a soul.

(I should mention that most of their citations show their ideas are based on the writing of JP Moreland, a philosopher and theologian, who also happens to be a heretical old earth creationist.)

All of it is one logical non sequitur after another. How do we know that an embryo has a soul, an entity that has not been demonstrated to exist? Because it would be illogical to think it lacks one. I think the author mistakes his Christian assumptions for logic.

Speaking of illogic, I’ll leave you with the author’s predictable final conclusion, a little lump of evangelical glurge.

However, humans can live forever, but not in a way fashioned by men in an attempt to escape God’s rule. They must humbly repent of their sins and submit to God’s will. That explains the death of Christ: he died for us that we may have eternal life (John 3:16; 17:3). If we trust in Christ, then all diseases, all our sorrows and death itself will one day pass away (Revelation 21:4). This is the true way of salvation and eternal life, not a futile materialistic fantasy that equates a human with his mind, and tries to achieve immortality by perpetuating it.

Logical non-sequitur.