Coming soon to a Rodin's Muse near you

Sorry again for the long delay. I have some posts stewing in my mind. I just need to clear my schedule to make time. This is a priority, so soon my patient friends...

A logic-antilogic explosion

A friend sent some links to some articles "proving" the existence of God. (I put the word in quotes not because I doubt it, but because others will.)

One story was about Frank Tipler, a mathematics professor at Tulane University who uses Einstein's theories of general relativity and theories of quantum mechanics to come to the conclusion that God must exist.

The other is a debate between Kirk Cameron (yes, that Kirk Cameron) and another evangelical friend who use three arguments to "prove" God exists and the rebuttal from two atheists who come across as equally fanatical in their arguments.

For the record, I think it is a travesty when people refuse to use their ability to critically think about something and instead trot out trite, emotional, vapid arguments either for or against. There were several good points from both sides, and several arguments that just made me cringe with their silliness.

Here is a suggestion. If you are going to use logic, then use it correctly.

Several of the points atheists often use to refute the existence of God were used in all their "originality." Please pardon my smarminess as I share them with you so you can revel in their illogic.

1. Horrible things have been done in the name of religion, so God does not exist

2. Different religions cannot agree on what God is, so God does not exist

3. People have believed in gods such as Poseidon who we know does not exist, so God does not exist

4. The Bible tells you that you can do anything and be loved by God, so God does not exist.

5. God wouldn't invent cancer or evil, so there must not be a God.

6. Every journey of 1,000 miles begins with the a single step. Micro-evolution exists, so therefore macro-evolution must exist.

This last is my favorite. We learned in logic class on day one that

(If A Then B) does not infer that (If B then A)
(If it is a car then it has wheels) does not infer (If it has wheels it must be a car)

Every journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, but not every step leads to a journey of a thousand miles.

I would not have any problem if instead they said "Because horrible things have happened in the name of God I choose not to follow or worship that God" because that is logical. I believe in God and subscribe to that statement. To say that God doesn't exist because I choose not to follow Him is not logical. (Isn't the English language fun!)

I also love seeing people in opposite corners engaging in silly accusations and definitive statements.

We can't trust science because science has been wrong (flat earth, sun revolves around the earth).

We can't trust the Bible because it contradicts itself and advocates slavery, stoning, polygamy (therefore God doesn't exist).

Scientist: We cannot prove God with science because science is about the natural, not the supernatural. To even ask the question is absurd.

Priest: God cannot be proven by math. He can only be proven by faith.

Me: We learned in Biology class that you can prove that spontaneous generation never has occurred, but not that it can never occur.

Here is an interchange between evangelists and atheists with some of my comments interjected.

Believer:
I see a painting, I know there was a painter.
I see a house, I know there was a builder.
I see a universe, I know there was a creator.

Atheist:
You know there was a painter because you can call him.
You know there was a builder because you know he had to get building permits.
You can't call God to verify He exists.

Me: If you found a painting, but there was no historical record of the painter, wouldn't you still believe there was a painter? Have you called the builders of Stonehenge, the heads on Easter Island, the Nazca lines, or the sphinx?

Believer:
Micro-evolution is one thing. We know each species evolves. That doesn't mean species evolve into other species (macro-evolution).
There is no fossil record of these missing links. Darwin himself said if we didn't find evidence within 100 years the theory would be suspect.

Atheist:
We don't need to see no stinking fossil records to believe in evolution.

Me: We don't need no stinking painter, either. You can't have it both ways, dude!

I fully admit I have had several days to ponder on the arguments made by both sides. I have picked more on the atheists only because they were so darn condescending and self-righteous and because we have pretty much heard all the evangelical arguments before. I would have made mistakes in the debate format because I am a ponderer, not a rapid thinker. I have to cogitate.

The point I am trying to make is that they would have had much more effect in uncovering the truth by engaging in a dialog rather than a competition. By critically thinking we can uncover the truth. In order to do so we must be detached from the outcome, be committed to finding the truth, and expect to find clues in the most unusual places. No question is absurd. To find the truth is to ask questions.

I got a little worked up about this one. I find that exploring truth works with just about anyone, and it is usually those with the least amount of faith who feel most threatened, whether they believe in God or not. I'd love to hear what you think.

Man, I'm busy

I apologize for the lack of recent posts. It has been a busy time. I won't bore you with all the ways I spend my time. I am going through an evaluation of where I spend my valuable time, so I expect writing time will be increased.

Well, maybe I will bore you with some details. Let see, in no particular order:

A weird computer semi-crash, botched backup, and reinstall
A weekend out of town in the hinterlands of Maine with no Internet access (my cell doesn't even get reception there)
Newly elected to the Local Spiritual Assembly with requisite duties
Two business trips, one overnight
Too many Bible studies
Two dinners at friends' houses (can't pass up Persian and Greek food)
Neighborhood cleanup

Some things have go to go!

Stay tuned...

A word from our sponsor

I would like to take this opportunity to digress from the current train of thought, or stream of blogginess if you will, to offer a couple of interpositions. One is inspired by a recent blog comment, the other is a "credit where credit is due" tiradette. (I think I just invented a word.)

I want to make it clear that in my exploration of circumstantial proofs of the existence of God that I am not trying to convert or convince anyone. I am sharing the thought process I, as a lifelong advocate of "intelligence is enough for me" and adherent of the religion of self-sufficiency, went through in allowing myself, perish the thought, to accept the existence of a Supreme Being and even more to accept my inferior and supplicative relationship to said being. I would look pretty foolish abdicating intellectual responsibility for my own set of rules for conducting my life if I was only accepting the rules of a non-existent being whose moral code was made up by a bunch of men thousands of years ago. This was a HUGE paradigm shift and I was not going to tread lightly. We are talking about overcoming the crashing gulf of cognitive dissonance that I had maintained all my life, not to mention 25 years of socialization as a man where I learned that you are to be self-sufficient and to surrender to any man (or God) is anathema to your being as a man. (I think that is one reason women find spirituality easier to embrace than men. Just look at participation in most churches.)

Perhaps I am beating a dead horse by exploring all these topics meticulously. Perhaps there is some amount of "easy topics for the next few blog posts in order to not stop writing while I think up the next thing to write about" syndrome. Perhaps I should just get on with the spiritual quest that led me to today and not partake of this primrose path. I'll consider it over the next few days. Stay tuned...

Now, for a rant about the topic of the extremes of wealth and poverty.

I picked up a book today. The title is Failing at Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls and I am looking forward to reading it. I also have books like The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men which is a fantastic, eye-opening book. You can also look at the Portland Press Herald's special report here.

I am somewhat of a passionate scholar of the issue of the equality of women and men. I firmly believe that establishing the equality of men and women isn't a matter of women attaining what men have. It isn't about just treating everyone the same. It is about eliminating everything that hinders people from exploring and reaching their full potential. It is about stopping the definition of things by gender when they don't need to be. Anyway, I digress in my digression.

I am not railing against Myra and David Sadker, the authors of the book I picked up today. I laud them for their efforts. I laud the efforts of anyone that points out how people are getting short-changed, particularly when it is how our children are getting short-changed by our education system. The problem is not that our education system favors boys over girls or girls over boys. THE PROBLEM IS THAT OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM IS GROSSLY UNDERFUNDED! Schools should never have to wonder where funding is going to come from, or how many children they can fit into a classroom, or which programs are going to get cut, or which teachers are going to be let go. Schools are not mills where you feed children in at age five and retrieve them at age eighteen just to send them off to jobs or higher education or whatever. They are vital elements of society. Baha'u'llah says: "“Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.”

Here is a thought. If class sizes were smaller and educators were plentiful enough to actually tailor education to the needs of children and to develop relationships with their students, perhaps we wouldn't have children who are so under-served and ostracized they feel the need to shoot people. (I'm not justifying these horrendous acts by blaming it on schools. These are individuals who make the decisions to act in heinous ways.)

How higher education is messed up, how municipalities get put in the position of "robbing Peter to pay Paul" when it comes to funding education, the racial impact of public schools, and where the money that should go in to education actually goes are topics for another day. Suffice it to say that children, regardless of gender, in most of our public school systems are paying a price that our society can ill afford. It is short-sighted in the same way chopping down rainforests is. Those who have money can bypass the issue by choosing private schools or tutors or whatever.

And now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Tick Talk

Can you flip a coin so it will land heads up one hundred times in a row? I can. I'll tell you how at the end.

But first the watchmaker argument for the existence of God. I'm sure you have heard this argument. You are walking through the desert one day and you see a watch lying on a rock. You would have to assume it was created by a watchmaker. You would never assume, in fact couldn't assume, that it just happened to be created randomly from particles and elements just zooming around that happened to join together in the form of a watch. Perhaps if you lived in another universe you could, but in this universe where you are constantly observing the physical laws in action, where they are the very fiber of your understanding of how the world works, you wouldn't.

Another example has you walking through the woods one day and seeing a pile of bricks. You walk by the next day and the bricks have gone from being a pile to being a nice little house. Is it possible that all of this order could have randomly arisen without some sentient design or organizing principle behind it? The law of entropy, also known as the second law of thermodynamics, says no. Those who argue this as proof of "intelligent design" say no.

If you open a bottle of perfume in a room it will dissipate to fill the room. This maximizes the entropy and leads to maximum disorder. Would you ever expect it to "randomly" collect in the open bottle? My desk becomes more and more cluttered until I spend a large amount of time and energy re-ordering it. Perhaps if I worked for millions of years it could randomly be ordered, but I'm not holding my breath.

Everywhere I look I can see examples of the universe tending towards disorder. Everywhere. That is why they call it the second LAW of thermodynamics. Not the second it usually happens this way of thermodynamics. I have never once seen anything that I would describe as defying this law. Even incredible odds of things can happen randomly, but they don't happen in consistent manner over long periods of time to defy the law of entropy.

Suppose you have a thousand pennies in a jar on a day you are really bored. Using your thumb, you flip the first one in the air and it lands on the ground heads up. You flip another and are amazed that it landed heads up on top of the other penny. Suppose you did this every hour every day for a million years. Would you ever expect that random chance would ever lead to the possibility of landing even 100 of those pennies on top of each other?

My experience of the world around me leads me to believe in the watchmaker argument. I think there must be something intelligent behind the design of the universe. Too many random things had to happen over too long a period of time in a definite direction (towards order, not disorder) for me to believe otherwise. This is just another circumstance that I chalk up in the God column.

God 2, No God 0

Now, how to flip a coin heads up one hundred times in a row. All you need is a big box and a large number of coins.

If you put 50 coins in a box and flipped them, you would expect 25 of them to be heads. Put those into the box and flip them again, getting ~12 coins. Flip them again, getting about six. Flip again getting about three. Flip again you'll probably get one. That is a coin that has landed on heads five times in a row. To get a coin to land heads up 100 times you just need 2^100 coins. I'd throw in a few more because random means not every flip will be exactly evenly divided. Put those coins in a BIG box and start flipping. (Thanks to Mr. Twitchell, my high school physics teacher.)

Next: How many constants would a constant maker make if a constant maker constantly made constants?

The Spirit of Consultation

They say two heads are better than one. What about five and a half billion?

Let's look at Britannica's chart of world-wide adherents to different religious categories. I have always liked it for its concise overview and because it lists the Baha'i Faith.

According to this list there are roughly five and a half billion people who follow some sort of religion as of the middle of 2006. Here is a rough breakdown:

Atheist - 155 million
Non-religious - 785 million
Total population - 6,540 million

Subtracting non-religious and atheist, which leaves all the other categories of religions, from the world population that they list, we get the following:

Religious - 5,600 million

I am loosely translating "follow some sort of religion" as "believing in some sort of higher power" even though they may disagree as to the definition of that higher power. So there are 155 million atheists and thirty six times more theists or deists or whatever you want to call them. Even when you subtract those that have abstained by not choosing a religion, there are six believers for every one non-believer. Even if you subtract religions who you would argue don't profess belief in a higher power it would be at least two to one.

I personally find this significant because of the principle of group intelligence. My thinking at the time went something like this:

I don't know one way or the other if there is a God.
I have had this experience that makes me think so.
There are millions of people who believe in God and millions who don't.
There are more that believe in God than don't.
Many of those people have had some clue or experience one way or the other that led them to their decision, a clue or experience that I don't have. (I know many are religious because their parents are, or because they grew up in a religious society, but I am assuming equal proportions of those who have chosen their belief.)
There are people both more and less intelligent than me in each group.
The odds are that there are equal ratios of more intelligent people in each group. (I'm not ready to say that intelligence is inversely proportional to belief in God, though I think many would say that. I am saying that at the time I valued the opinions of highly intelligent people more.)
According to the calculations above (which I never did numerically until today) there are somewhere between 6 to 36 times more intelligent people who believe in a God than who don't.
If I was to have access to all the knowledge of all these people, I would be more likely to believe in God than not assuming those that are more intelligent than me would make decisions as least as good as I would make.

I'm not saying this is proof of the existence of God. I'm saying that in my rational analysis of the world around me, this is one tick-mark in the God column. I would also be open to arguments about the faulty reasoning and the bias towards intelligence over spirituality. That is exactly where I was at the time - biased towards intelligence. Like any argument, opposing views are valid.

This exercise reminds me of one of the things I enjoy most about the Baha'i Faith - consultation. You can search the web to find out about it, I won't try to describe it here. I will just say that it is a form of group decision-making and I look at the world as having been engaged in an ongoing asynchronous consultation about the existence of God. God is winning in the marketplace of ideas, if you will.

Not being one to leave my salvation in the hands of others I would certainly need more proof. Especially now that my salvation is of vital importance to me.

Next stop - belief by Bulova, rationale by Rolex.

Circumstantial Proofs of the Existence of God

So there I was, on my couch, having what I felt was a spiritual experience. I prayed for the ability to accept my wife leaving me, for the courage to face it, and for the strength to deal with it.

My prayer was answered.

It was as if the crushing mountain of oppression that was threatening to annihilate me was instantly gone. Now you see it, now you don't. I'm talking soul-crushing, mind-numbing, paralysis suddently lifted and replaced by serene confidence that I could survive. I cannot stress that enough. This was not just a minor change in attitude. This was salvation. This was a deliverance of something impossible, a FedEx overnight delivery of the impossible and unimagined dream. Anyway, I think you get the point.

So now I had to wrestle with a lifetime of dismissing God as irrelevant. I had never seriously doubted that He existed, but I certainly had my share of atheist friends and wouldn't have dismissed the possibility. Mine was no firmly held believe until this experience. Over the years since then I have compiled a few different arguments that fit together to provide even more pieces to my certitude. Let's just say that I have yet to find something whose conclusion makes me think there might not be a God.

Today, I will just list them. Over the next few posts I'll outline them in more detail and share some of the pondering I did. I'm not trying to convince anyone, each person has to decide for themselves. I'm just sharing some of the ways my scientific, logical, rational, inquisitive mind has explored the ultimate question and always had the same answer. Some are arguments for the existence of God, some are arguments for acting as if there is even if there isn't.

* The overwhelming number of believers over time
* The Watchmaker argument
* The Universal constants argument
* Personal experience
* Media undertones
* Ability of prophets to start a religion despite severe opposition
* Scientific proof
* Euphemisms people use
* Altruism versus survival of the fittest
* Occam's Razor

* It is better to believe if there isn't than not believe if there is
* Look at the good it has done regardless of whether there is a God
* Hypocrisy in adherents doesn't disprove God
* Spiritual influence on world events

Some of these I'm sure you are familiar with, some are all mine. I'm a thinker. It's what I do. I could not have accepted God had I needed to turn my brain off and accept everything on Faith. I assume He gave me a brain for a reason. I admit that each and every one of them is subject to my individual biases and observations. I am, after all, fallible and finite.

Next time - two billion heads are better than one.