When Atheists Have FAITH In Science

"You would have to be remarkably resistant to brainwashing to resist the claim - endlessly repeated - that we are our brains. The notion that our consciousness, the self to which successive moments of consciousness are attributed, our personality, our character, personhood itself, are identical with activity in our brains is so widely received that it seems downright eccentric to profess otherwise." - Raymond Tallis "Aping Mankind"

Until this last weekend I have never understood why theists say that "atheists have faith in science", or that "science is our religion."

I do now.

For some, those analogies are anathemas. "How could that be true?", they cry. "Science is a process," they argue. "It's a collection of models which best fit the observations we make of the world around us. It is driven by research and evidence. We don't need faith to believe it. The evidence is there!"

The problem comes when atheists start to defend science like it can never be wrong. They really do start to sound like Christians defending the Bible, or Muslims defending the Qur'an. Science for these people isn't the nebulous constantly shifting and improving body of "best models we have at the moment" we all know it is, for them it's rigid, and certain. No more so than the people who have come to believe the all-pervasive, yet pseudo-scientific belief that "we are our brains" and therefore we do not have conscious free will.

I can already hear many of you shifting in your seats and a few gasps of air have been gasped in an incredulous manner as that last bit sank in. Yes, I did say that the evolutionary psychologist position that we are our brains is nonsense. It is a scientifically religious concept, or Scientism if you like.

If you want to believe that we humans are only a by-product of trillions of sodium-potassium exchanges in the neuronal matter of our brains then fine, stop reading now and go grab a coffee, or have a lie down. For those of you who aren't fooled by this homeopathic account of consciousness and actually want to understand where I'm coming from, strap in.

When I suggested this idea to an atheist on Twitter recently I was immediately branded a "closet-Creationist", accused of being insane, Called "Mr Black and White" (whatever that means), and because I have a disability which affects my memory (I'm not kidding) I was called a liar. Apparently he's all for us being our brains until faced with the evidence that one key component of fibromyalgia (which I suffer from) is memory-loss, which according to him I don't suffer from, instead I'm just choosing to lie to him. If we are our brains, as suggested, I cannot lie to him. I cannot reasonably be held responsible for any action I take because, according to him, I am the victim of an evolutionary drive to do whatever it is I'm currently doing. So, even if I was I would not be lying to him, my brain would be. I'm absolved of all guilt. So the statement "there are no murderers, only victims of brain activity" is also a valid according to this neuromaniac. It rather makes you wonder doesn't it? But, this does illustrate one underlying principle of Neuromania, similar to a condition we see in theists all the time, which we call "cherry-picking of facts!"

What do we get when we point out that God wasn't a nice guy in the Bible?
Lots of Bible passages cherry-picked to show he was (or that Jesus was) and personal insults.

What do we get when we point out contradictions in the text of the Bible?Lots of apologetics, and links to websites and blogs and videos teaching us ignoramuses why these contradictions aren't contradictions. And personal insults.

What do we get when we claim Jesus was likely a mythical god and not a real person?Lots of Bible passages claiming to describe him as real, links to the Gospels, more videos, articles written by believers and so on. Oh... and personal insults.

Guess what I got when I told this fellow that neuromania was a thing and we are not just our brains?

You guessed it... Cherry-picked studies, links to books and videos which supported his views, and the aforementioned incredulity and ad hominem attacks... exactly what we've all come to expect from theists.

People who think science is awesome (myself included) must also realize that science isn't definitive. There are many faults with it. Almost every study suffers from a degree of bias. Most scientists go to great length to iron out these biases, or at least own up when their sample-size isn't as big as they'd like, or when people dropped out of the study, or when something didn't otherwise go to plan, or even when they weren't meticulous enough, but there are people who perform studies with such tunnel-vision that they publish without noticing even the basic flaw in their methodology, or results. Their premise is incorrect to start with, or their conclusions are all wrong at the end.

One of the key "we are our brains" (WAOB) studies is Libet's experiments which showed that our brains "light up" on an EEG moments before we are aware of the desire to move a hand. This suggests that the brain activates our hand movement before we are even aware that we have actually made the decision to move it. This study was flawed for a number of reasons but it completely forgot that it is entirely possible that the area of the brain controlling the hand movements lit up because it had been told to, by the mind of the subject being studied. A conscious decision activating the brain which fed-back a confirmation code, which the participants mistook as the decision itself, which then led to the hand being raised.

Think about that. There are a few scenarios worth considering:

One :
The areas of our brains which control hand movement lights up.
We become aware of the need to move our hands.
We move our hands.

Two:
The areas of our brains which control hand movement lights up.
We become aware of the desire to move our hands.
We decide to move our hands.

Three:
Our minds tell our brains to activate our hands.
The areas of our brains which control hand movement lights up.
We become aware of the decision to move our hands.
We move our hands.

In all three cases the EEG lights up moments before an awareness is felt and then the hand is moved. Exactly what Libet saw.

If your argument is that we move our hand exclusively because the brain tells us to and we have no conscious control over that action, you're ignoring the possibility that the brain is being told what to do by something outside itself and the decision was in fact entirely our own; and that deciding to do something involves the subconscious as much as the conscious parts of our minds, and the non-physical as much as physical parts of our brains. It's a bit like arguing that workers on the factory floor make the shoes their boss tells them to make, whilst forgetting that the factory output is controlled by market forces. If you only have a method for assessing the actions of the factory boss, you're missing half the picture aren't you? In the above second case the brain tells our hand to move and we decide to do it, so there is an active participatory control mechanism in place between the brain and the hand. In the third instance the brain is being controlled from somewhere else which cannot be examined.

You can only test for things you can test. Aren't we telling theists that all the time? We admit openly that we could be wrong. There might be a god. However, given that we cannot test for one it can be assumed that there isn't one. And yet, the WAOB crowd refuse to accept that, since we cannot test for the mind, we could be wrong about there not being one!

If we are our brains and we have no conscious control over anything we do, we cannot be any more in control when we are awake than we are when we are asleep. We cannot be any more in control when we perform neurosurgery to cure a person of epilepsy than we are when having an epileptic fit of our own. This makes no sense at all.

I hope you can all understand how ridiculous that notion is though, because our legal systems can. After all, I wonder how many WAOB fanatics would be willing to stand up in a Court of Law to defend a paedophile accused of rape and murder, by stating for the record that he is under the complete control of his brain, carrying out only evolutionarily dictated actions (or actions determined by damage to otherwise normal areas of the brain) and therefore cannot be held responsible, so should be allowed to go free without any punishment?

Any takers?

Let's be honest here for once, shall we? The WAOB concept is all fine in principle, but not a single one of us truly believes it when taken to its extremes, any more than we think a theist would truly believe in a god when we take her beliefs to their extremes. We know what we think of ourselves, we can direct other people to become aware of our emotions, of other things in our spacial environment, or talk in the abstract about so far incomplete ideas. We can experience guilt, which we may or may not chose to use to change future actions. We can fight our supposedly evolutionary preference for 0.7 hip-to-waist ratioed women, or women from our own class, caste or "race", to settle down with a rotund, or skinny lady from the opposite side of the colour spectrum to our own, just because she has a similar sense of humour, or likes the music of Schubert and knows how to make a great omelette! Yes, I do know that all of these things can be explained, it is claimed, by evolutionary psychology, but it really is just the scientific equivalent of theistic apologetics isn't it?

When we look for someone who is similar to us they say it's because of our evolutionary compulsion for tribalism. Yet, When we look for someone opposite to us they say it's because of our evolutionary drive to widen the genepool. I call this having a bell for every tooth. We can find "research" to support every position under the Sun, so why bother with any of it?

The bottom line is that I think, rather than the declaration "We are our brains!", the very best we can do, if we want to remain honest and, most of all, consistent, is make the claim that "We could be our brains!" And, if you decide that makes me a closet-Creationist, insane, or whatever else.

There's apparently nothing either one of us can do about that.



For an in-depth study as to why Neuromania is wrong, see Prof. Raymond Tallis' excellent book "Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity." This blog represents an incredibly simplistic view of the arguments against scientism. If you only go by what I've said, I really feel for you. You need to look for better evidence than what I've said. You, more than anyone, need to read Prof. Tallis' book. :)


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Onus Probandi

I've been off for a while. My apologies, but my health fluctuates so sometimes I'm unable to focus clearly enough to write extensively.

Back with it now though.

While I've been away I've noticed that many theists on twitter, and in TV debates are still using the old fallacy of trying to turn the debate around and putting the onus probandi, or burden of proof, back onto the person denying the claim that they are making. This argument from ignorance is truly annoying.

Theists think that they get to claim whatever they like and because we cannot prove them wrong they get to claim victory.

The problem lies in their inability to extrapolate. If we cannot prove a god exists, then the god must be real, right? Well, they cannot prove that a universe-creating troll exists, so that must be the real truth. How would we ever decide which one was responsible for creating our universe? Then there's Bertrand Russell's cosmic teapot. How do you prove him to be incorrect? Is the teapot going to collide with any future mission to Mars? Does NASA need to take it into account?

Sometimes you achieve minor successes. I recently got one theist to admit that humans make up gods, but he couldn't get his head around the idea that the one he follows might likewise be a human invention. How frustrating! The cognitive dissonance required to apply rules to other ideas, but not your own, is beyond me.

Theists also tend to demand greater evidence for the negation of their claim than the claim they are themselves making. If I told you that I could fly without mechanical assistance you wouldn't be expected to prove me wrong, and likewise it wouldn't be incumbent upon you to prove that humans could not fly under any circumstances. I would not expect you to provide anatomical evidence, such as examples of bone or muscle tissue, or models of the physiological makeup of humans etc. etc. The onus is on me to provide you with evidence, perhaps by actually flying!

This moving of the goalposts is irritating, but like the shifting of the burden of proof it is just aimed at shutting down the conversation. It's the debating equivalent of "I am, but what are you?"

Why should an atheist be expected to be an expert in archaeology, chemistry, cosmology, physics, biology, anatomy, evolution, geology, theology, philosophy, literary studies, Biblical studies, history, climatology, or many other theoretical and physical sciences, arts and social sciences, just to defend their rejection of a theist's ridiculous claims? Atheism is the adoption of single position on a single claim. The burden of proof lies on the person making the claim, not on you or me.

Theists need (constantly) to be reminded of that.

In a recent to-ing and fro-ing in the local paper's letters section a contributor claimed that the Bible was true because he had knowledge of 40 excavations which proved the Bible to be historically accurate. Several problems arise as a result of this comment, but chief among them is the fact that even if the Bible was 100% reliable in its account of history and every single detail was absolutely true, nothing about that would be proof of a supernatural entity creating, or controlling, everything!

What on Earth makes him think it does?

If an excavation of, let's say, Tell ed-Dab'a, the home of the Canaanites* in Egypt, revealed intricate details of their religion, supporting every word of the Bible in remarkable detail, why should that prove Yaweh is real? After all, an investigation into Roman ruins does not in any way prove that Julius Caesar was a divine being. No examination of Japanese texts or temples proves that the Emperor is godly! Why do these people make that leap from A to WTF?

I think you can probably sense that I'm somewhat frustrated by these situations. I perhaps need to take a lie down and do an Apache-language crossword puzzle or a 10,000 piece jigsaw, perhaps even nail a jelly to the ceiling. Something less difficult than trying to argue with theists about their own responsibilities in the "god-debate"!

Remember:

onus probandi incumbit ei qui dicit, non ei qui negat

The burden of proof lies on the claimant, not the person denying the claim.

*Excavations revealed that the language of the inhabitants of Tell ed-Dab'a was Semitic, therefore they would have to have been Canaanite. Further evidence of the nature of their religious ideas and burial methods cemented the fact. The idea of a sudden Hyksos invasion, previously accepted by many historians as the true history, but now acknowledged to have been an exaggeration, was attributed to Manethos, an Egyptian historian who must have thought that a sudden attack on Egypt sounded sexier than the centuries of slow migration by Canaanites which actually is known to have happened.

Discussing Some Arguments For God

In this post I'd like to take a look at two arguments in the God-debate, the a posteriori argument from contingency and the a priori argument from necessity.

If you believe God exists you may be asking yourself why many other people do not notice him. So we should look at what there is about God which could reasonably lead us to notice him.

God is said to be an omnipotent being, so we could argue that not only should he just happen to exist, but he should have to exist. If his existence is happenstance (a contingency) then his existence is dependent on other factors, or is a freak one-off event, whereas if he is all-powerful and eternal then his existence rests solely on his own nature so that he must exist or everything else fails.

What is the essential difference between a contingent truth and a necessary truth?

Well, as the above statement about God shows, a contingent truth relies on other factors being true. For instance, you and I are contingent truths. For us to exist we rely on our parents bringing us into existence, and they on their parents in turn. When we look all the way back through history we see that even the Earth is reliant on several billion prior events for its formation to have occurred. It is a contingent truth. A necessary truth is different. The fact that the number 19 falls between 18 and 20 is a necessary truth, as is the fact that it is a prime number.

As a rule we do not encounter necessary truths in our day-to-day lives. They tend to be more abstract entities such as numbers which by themselves can have no direct impact on our world. God is not supposed to be an abstract entity. He is supposed to completely different to everything else we experience in our lives. He is an "other". Yet some people claim that such a being must exist against all the evidence to the contrary.


The Argument from Contingency

In the 17th Century there lived a German mathematician and philosopher named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz is famously thought to have developed calculus at the same time, yet separately, as Sir Isaac Newton. and invented component parts to the world's first calculators, As part of his work in philosophy however, Leibniz developed seven principles promoted by Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Anaximander, one of which was the Principle of Sufficient Reason which states that "there must be a sufficient reason for anything to exist, for any event to occur , for any truth to obtain." Nothing is, therefore, without reason.

Leibniz admitted contingent truths on the basis of there being an infinite series of events to which God alone had knowledge of all but the final event, since the series is infinite after all. God, he said, must exist in order to explain the sequence of contingent truths leading up to the cause of our existence and beyond.

Leibniz was never tasked to answer whether his model included many gods working together, or a creator of the God he claimed must exist for us to, or whether the God continued to exist after we came to be, or whether the God he had in mind had any of the characteristics of the gods we have imagined over our species' lifetime.

Also, if the Universe's contents are contingent is there a reason to believe that the Universe itself is contingent? After all a car's parts cannot move along the road themselves, but together they can. Even further, if it is true that the Universe is in fact contingent why should we assume that the reason it exists is anything other than an accident?


The Argument from Necessity (the Ontological Argument)

The argument from necessity is ontological; it centers around what we know must exist. We do not need to prove the nature of everything in the world to prove the existence of God in the same way that we do not need to examine all of our surroundings to define the necessary properties of triangles. René Descartes, the philosopher famous for the line "I think, therefore I am" put forward an argument from necessity for the existence of God. Put simply this is it:

1. God has all of the perfections.
2. Existence is a perfection.
3. Therefore God must exist.

In order to decide whether the conclusion of an argument is true we usually have to make certain that the first and second premises of the syllogism are themselves true. In this case the first assumption is true and one could argue that the second is also, therefore we must conclude, must we not, that the conclusion is also true. So, why does this feel wrong?

Because it is.

What if you were to substitute "God" in the first line for "The Perfect Dragon", would the same conclusion, that of its existence not also be true? Since we all know that dragons do not exist*, and perfect ones most certainly do not, we know immediately that this argument is flawed.

Modern atheists will be familiar with the "work" of William Lane Craig, possibly our most famous proponent of the ontological argument. His more long-winded version of it goes something like this:

1. It is possible for a maximally great being to exist.
2. If a maximally great being does exist then it exists in a possible world.
3. If 2 is true then it exists in every possible world.
4. If 3 is true then it is possible that it exists in our world.
5. If 4 is true then it exists in our world.
6. Therefore a maximally great being exists.
7. God is a maximally great being, therefore God exists.

Why does Craig assume that this "maximally great being" is God? Well, this comes from the work of St Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century. Anselm proposed that if one could conceive of the greatest ever being, then that being would be God. Whatever our imaginations could cope with, at the extreme edge of our thoughts of greatness would lie the essence of what God is. If we imagine another yet greater being then that being would be God.

The one flaw (among many) that is immediately obvious in Anselm's argument is it relies on what we can conceive as being the greatest ever  being, but as with all things which we can think of as the greatest ever, such as numbers, we can always add a bit more to the equation to gain a yet greater whole. It is therefore possible for a "greatest conceivable being" to exist in our Universe, but a greater being of which we cannot conceive, to exist in another yet greater Universe. If our Universe is an accidental by-product of the bigger Universe the whole thing falls apart.

Hence Craig's replacement of "greatest ever conceivable" with "maximally great". Craig's argument is no stronger than Descartes' original. In fact if anything, with the new parameters it seems to fall even flatter. Yes, it is possible for a god to exist, and yes it could exist in a possible world, but not necessarily in all worlds, nor in ours... so are we done here yet?

In neither argument for the existence of God presented here is the case proven conclusively, so the arguments only propose possibilities in a nice-sounding philosophical package. One says that a contingent Universe must have a central non-contingent overseer, or cause, whilst the other assumes the possibility of there being a God as proof that there is one.

So are we convinced by either of these? Personally, I would have to say no. So it's back to the drawing-board for you Mr Craig.

                                                         ____________________        

Neither of these arguments make an ounce of sense when you spend a few minutes reading this blog about it... although, that could be down to my inability to properly present the arguments in the first place of course. As always, feel free to send any corrections. Thank you for taking the time to read my blog... it means a great deal to me.



*Discounting Komodo Dragons of course.