Insufficient Christianity: 10.2

Lewis finishes up chapter 10 by explaining what it is like to be a Christian: he says that Christians attempt to copy Christ, and that Christians have a “Christ-life in them that they can lose if they don’t make an effort to be Christian. He says that Christians can do wrong things, but when they do they can repent and pick themselves back up due to this “Christ-life”. Additionally, Christians are “Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or--if they think there is not--at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him.”

Lewis says that this “Christ-life” is not merely mental or moral, but that “Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts-that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body. And perhaps that explains one or two things. It explains why this new life is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and Holy Communion. It is not merely the spreading of an idea; it is more like evolution--a biological or super-biological fact. There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it."

There is an interesting point here. I have often heard theists ask where all of the matter in the universe came from, and when they find that any answers I give are insufficient, say that this proves their god “invented” the matter in the universe. Why is it that we assume “nothingness” is the natural state of things and “somethingness” (matter) being a state of affairs that needs explanation?

I also couldn’t help but notice that Lewis thinks evolution is a biological fact. Nice.

“Another possible objection is this. Why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil?

Secret… society? I’d certainly like to know why the Christian god is said to disguise himself from people, but Christianity is absolutely not a secret society. Some Christians may think so (Flimsy felt that way when he was a Christian) but the Christian influence on our society is pretty pervasive. Perhaps this pervasiveness is not notices quite so acutely by a Christian as it is an atheist.

“Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is it that He is not strong enough? Well, Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely. I do not suppose you and I would have thought much of a Frenchman who waited till the Allies were marching into Germany and then announced he was on our side. God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world.

Obviously, at this point Lewis has ceased to argue for his god and is now asserting Christian doctrine without any justification. The rest of this chapter is a dire warning to convert now because we are all in the shadow of the apocalypse. I am unsure as to what kind of meaningful comments I could make.

Let’s do a little thought experiment. Suppose I were to set a rock down upon my kitchen table and proclaim that this rock would one day turn into a monster and invade us all, but we don’t know when. All I have to do is say, “one day, it will happen. It just has not happened yet. You’ll see” and I have created an unfalsifiable hypothesis. If I can use the same argument to argue that my rock is going to destroy the world as a theist uses to insist that his god is going to destroy the world, the argument is pretty useless.

“When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else--something it never entered your head to conceive -- comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.

These same arguments could be made about any god who people believe is coming down to get us all one day, and thus they have no strength when applied to this particular god. There are people who believe aliens will destroy the world one day and so our best bet is to join their side. If we used this same argument, claiming that aliens are going to invade without disguise to destroy the world and so we better get on their side, would this argument be convincing? No.

Organic food = bullshit

That's right. I said it.

There are no health benefits of choosing organic food over typical food.

I've had an inkling that there is no evidence to support the idea that organic foods are healthier than their inorganic counterparts. Now I have the evidence to back it up, along with an episode of Penn and Teller's Bullshit to offer a colorful media rebuttal.
From BBC news:

There is little difference in nutritional value and no evidence of any extra health benefits from eating organic produce, UK researchers found.

The Food Standards Agency who commissioned the report said the findings would help people make an "informed choice".

But the Soil Association criticised the study and called for better research.
Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine looked at all the evidence on nutrition and health benefits from the past 50 years.
   
Among the 55 of 162 studies that were included in the final analysis, there were a small number of differences in nutrition between organic and conventionally produced food but not large enough to be of any public health relevance, said study leader Dr Alan Dangour.

Overall the report, which is published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found no differences in most nutrients in organically or conventionally grown crops, including in vitamin C, calcium, and iron.

The same was true for studies looking at meat, dairy and eggs.

Differences that were detected, for example in levels of nitrogen and phosphorus, were most likely to be due to differences in fertilizer use and ripeness at harvest and are unlikely to provide any health benefit, the report concluded.

Gill Fine, FSA director of consumer choice and dietary health, said: "Ensuring people have accurate information is absolutely essential in allowing us all to make informed choices about the food we eat.

"This study does not mean that people should not eat organic food.

"What it shows is that there is little, if any, nutritional difference between organic and conventionally produced food and that there is no evidence of additional health benefits from eating organic food."

She added that the FSA was neither pro nor anti organic food and recognised there were many reasons why people choose to eat organic, including animal welfare or environmental concerns.

Dr Dangour, said: "Our review indicates that there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority."

He added that better quality studies were needed.

Peter Melchett, policy director at the Soil Association said they were disappointed with the conclusions.

"The review rejected almost all of the existing studies of comparisons between organic and non-organic nutritional differences.

"Although the researchers say that the differences between organic and non-organic food are not 'important', due to the relatively few studies, they report in their analysis that there are higher levels of beneficial nutrients in organic compared to non-organic foods.

"Without large-scale, longitudinal research it is difficult to come to far-reaching clear conclusions on this, which was acknowledged by the authors of the FSA review.
"Also, there is not sufficient research on the long-term effects of pesticides on human health," he added.

 I'll be locating this article and offering my own opinions as to whether the criticisms offered in this news report are justified. You'll see my thoughts soon!

Insufficient Christianity: 10.1

This is a critique of chapter 10 of the book Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. You can find the critique of this book so far by clicking the “C.S. Lewis” tab at the bottom of this page. You can also find an online copy of the book by clicking the link at the bottom.

The first half of this chapter is interesting because Lewis lays out two bits of apologetics: one a very popular apologetics argument and one less so.  We’ll start with the first.

In this argument, Lewis points out that this process of atonement and receiving a “new life” as a Christian involves at least these three things: belief, baptism, and partaking in Communion/Mass/Lord’s Supper. He says that he really does not see why these three particular things are the conductors of new life. He likens this to sex: when people are children, they don’t know how sex works, and they could never guess that mommy and daddy bonking each other nine months before they were born produced them. It seems so odd to children when they learn of conception that many of them react in disbelief. Lewis says, “Now the God who arranged that process is the same God who arranges how the new kind of life-the Christ life--is to be spread. We must be prepared for it being odd too. He did not consult us when He invented sex: He has not consulted us either when He invented this.”

To me, this argument could be used to explain the actions of any religious practice – and if you can use an argument to explain the actions of any religious practice, it has no authority as an argument. The issue we take with the Christian religion in particular is not that it is odd, but that its followers can use it to justify unethical behaviors. To use a recent example: when you believe so strongly in your religion that you are willing to let your own children die for it (in the case of parents neglecting medical care for their children in favor of prayer), yet you believe it is immoral to allow certain sounds to escape your mouth because those sounds insult your god, we consider your moral compass to be fundamentally broken by your religion.

The truth is that the universe is unmistakably odd. We humans only understand the universe within the narrow band created by the lumpy tissue and the exchange of sodium ions from one area to the next within our skulls. When I call religion odd, this is not because it is oddness atop a mountain of evidence. It is because it is odd, and that oddness stands alone. If there were compelling evidence, I would gladly change my mind and shake the hands of the individuals responsible for such change. If I believed in god I would fully expect his ways to be beyond my understanding. Alas, the crux lies in the premise.

In the second argument, Lewis says that he believes Jesus is god due to his authority. He says that most of the mundane things we believe in we believe on authority, and so believing Jesus is no different:

“Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I could not prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority--because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.

We’ve heard this argument, or one like it, from various sources. The central problem I see with this argument is that while things like New York or the Solar system or blood flow can be measured objectively, the claims of religion cannot. It is easy for me to accept that New York exists (having not been there) for several reasons:

1. New York is a city. St. Louis is also a city (that I live in), so I know things like cities exist. I have been to many other cities besides St. Louis. I have seen many pictures and videos of New York, and know many people who have visited New York. It is no impeccable feat of faith to accept that New York exists.

Now, let’s pretend that I currently am incapable of observing New York in any way. If 30% of the world told me New York existed, but was floating 15 feet above Rhode Island, 20% of the world told me New York existed, but was actually an ancient sunken city, 10% of the world told me New York existed, but was a part of every city, 10% of the world told me New York existed but only in my heart, 10% of the world told me that New York was actually called Planet X and was a mystery planet in our solar system we could not actually observe at all, and they all told me that I could not see New York unless I really believed in New York with my whole heart, I’d side with the 20% remaining who had come to the conclusion that there is no New York.

2. If someone whom I trust told me something that was contrary to empirical evidence, I would not trust them, no matter how great an authority figure they were. I trust Flimsy very much. If he told me he had Taco Bell for lunch, I would not ask for evidence. If he came home from work one day insisting that he had been abducted by aliens in the Taco Bell drive through during lunch, I would not believe him. This is because I apply a standard of evidence to extraordinary claims: namely that the more extraordinary the claim, the greater wealth of evidence such a claim must have before I accept it.  We apply this standard all the time: if a telemarketer calls us, we know the offer is probably too good to be true. If someone claims to have discovered the cure for cancer, we require evidence. We understand that our senses deceive us: this is why we do not think our dreams are real. We might not know for sure what will happen if we stop paying our mortgage, but we do not stop paying it simply because we cannot know for sure whether or not it will matter.

3. I believe in evolution because I have studied the theory, and the theory makes sense. I need no authority other than my rational mind and observation.

4. History is another matter. I do not blindly accept histories as Lewis says, neither do historians. History is far more complicated than simply accepting things we see written. I would not accept a history if it contained things contrary to physical laws or empirical evidence. There are two stories of Nazi Germany: I accept the one with evidence. I understand that fables, legends and stories are told along with histories. How do we determine which is which? How is a talking wolf less extraordinary than a talking serpent? How is it that a story of a man walking on water is believable, but a story of a man on a flying carpet unbelievable?

5. Finally, other people will claim that they believe in their gods on authority. What do we do with a spiritualist who believes in the authority of her spirit guides, the new-ager who believes in the authority of her psychics, the Muslim who believes in the authority of Mohammad, the conspiracy theorist who believes in the authority of the Holocaust denier? I would imagine that Lewis might look at the claims of these authority figures and analyze them based on reason, observation, empirical evidence, and the like. He would absolutely apply some measure of standard to the claims made by other religions, yet in this one instance when his religion is on the line, these standards do not apply. It is not unreasonable to apply the same standard by which we judge other claims to our own claims.

Mere Christianity Online

Michael Shermer's Five Moral Dimensions

So, Ziztur and I had an awesome time at TAM7.  Discussing the lectures afterwards, we had to admit that there wasn't a great deal of new information there - most topics that were discussed were old news to us.  I suppose that's to be expected, considering the two of us have drowned ourselves in everything skeptical, rational, and godless for years now.

Surprisingly, the most interesting lecture, to me, was Michael Shermer talking about Libertarianism, and that was precisely because I disagreed with him more than any other speaker!

*Disclaimer:  It's now been a couple weeks since I heard the lecture, and I didn't anticipate wishing, in retrospect, that I had taken notes.  I'll leave obvious disclaimers here and there when I don't remember something, some things I've looked up online to ensure their accuracy, but some things might be mistaken.  If that's the case, don't hesitate to let me know!

The opening of Shermer's talk sounded straight-forward enough; he said that "skepticism" in general is or should be an apolitical movement.  He said that sometimes "skeptics" or "rationalists" can have a tendency to identity atheism/skepticism/rationalism/etc. with modern liberal political ideology.  He cautions us that devoted skeptics and critical thinkers have a wide variety of political bents.

All this is true, so far as it goes.  It seems to me that "skeptics" do not necessarily entail a specific political ideology for the same reason that being "skeptical" doesn't necessarily entail any other specific demographic.  Skeptics tend to be politically liberal rather than libertarian, and far, far more likely to be either of these than politically conservative.  In the same way, skeptics and rationalists tend to be atheist or agnostic rather than a member of an organized religion.  However, this does not mean that there are no conservative skeptics, and it's entirely possible for a skeptic to be a theist as well.  This is because every human being is skeptical of some things - skepticism is not a rigid, defined category, it is a spectrum, with some people being more skeptical than others.

Of course, this is all well and good, but as I mentioned, there is a very obvious correlation between self-proclaimed skeptics and liberalism, just as there is a nigh-overwhelming correlation between skeptics and atheism/agnosticism.  So Shermer rapidly moved on from the above heart-warming message about us all just getting along, into a defense of libertarian ideology.

There were a number of papers he referenced, which I have hunted for but have been unable to find.  One such point was a study of different papers claiming that there have been zero wars between liberal democracies for some considerable period of time.  Without access to the original research or the criteria used to categorize the nations in question (and Shermer even mentioned that some of these criteria were a bit questionable) I can't really comment on this seemingly significant claim.  All I will say is that there were just over 200 wars during this period between non-democratic countries, and almost 170 wars between one or more non-democratic countries and democratic countries, which makes me question the criteria used.  Also, I would find this point much more persuasive if those wars between democratic and non-democratic countries were overwhelmingly instigated by the non-democratic countries, which is not the case.  Of course, this also assumes as an unstated premise that a liberal democracy must by definition be a strictly capitalist culture, with no socialist policy at all, which is completely untrue.

The focal point of Shermer's talk, to my mind, is his discussion of the Five Moral Dimensions, a very interesting bit of research into the ethics of human cultures and individuals, which is being headed by Jonathan Haidt.  You can read about these moral dimensions that he proposes here, and can even contribute to his research and get a table of your own ethical layout (among other question-and-answer studies) according to this research here.  The table you receive shows how you prioritize your own ethical principles, alongside the results of those who identify as liberal, and those who identify as conservative.  Here are those results, along with my own (mine are in green, liberal results in blue, conservative results in red):

Here's a brief description of the Five Moral Dimensions:

1.  Harm/Care - Ethical foundations concerning compassion and security.
2.  Fairness/Reciprocity - concerning justice and human rights.
3.  Ingroup/Loyalty - concerning patriotism and loyalty to a group.
4.  Authority/Respect - concerning social and cultural hierarchies, and tradition.
5.  Purity/Sanctity - concerning resistance to cultural immorality and/or physical contamination.

In a nutshell, those who self-identify as liberal place far more emphasis on the first two moral dimensions, significantly downplaying the latter three, while conservatives largely weight each of the five dimensions relatively equally.

Here's where I think Shermer went wrong.  If one wishes to defend libertarianism, I think the best way to go about it is to make a case that the first two moral dimensions provide all the foundation you need to build libertarianism from, using reason and critical thinking.  The implications of this research is that a libertarian ideology does take some fuel from the latter three dimensions.  If that's the case, then Shermer has considerably weakened his argument for libertarianism - frankly, the latter three dimensions are completely irrational as foundations for morality.

Shermer attempts to drive home his point in, in my opinion, a pretty pathetic way.  He shows a slide - a picture of the Twin
Towers, in flames, about to collapse.  Below the towers is a question:  "Can we really afford to abandon tradition and patriotism?"

Um, yes.  We can.  Let's think about this.  The clear implication of this emotionally-charged question is that we need, we require the third, fourth, or fifth moral dimensions to condemn the actions of fundamentalist terrorists.  Really?  Take a good look at the first and second moral dimensions - does Shermer really think that we cannot possibly condemn violent religious extremism based on these first two (most espescially the second)?

As for why the first two moral dimensions are rational foundations for ethics and the latter three are not, well, isn't that obvious?  Imagine a society that governed itself entirely through the first two.  There will obviously still be disagreements, but it is quite possible for a just society to draw it's cultural ethic from these first two entirely.  Simply put, the first and second moral dimensions do not require the third, fourth, and fifth.  Now, imagine the reverse.  Pretty obvious, isn't it?  I hate to pull such a predictible example, but yeah, screw it, I'm throwing down the Nazi card.  A society that bases it's cultural morality on only the third, fourth, and fifth dimensions would be horrifying.  It seems obvious to me - whereas the first and second dimensions don't require the latter three in any way, the latter three absolutely require the first and second to be present as well.

Think of all the greatest ethical cock-ups in human history; the ancient Hebrew war crimes, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, all the various genocides of native peoples in the Americas and Africa.  Can anyone credibly argue that these atrocities resulted from applications of the first or second moral dimensions?  Or were they all painfully obviously the result of the latter three being more powerful than the first two, in the cultures in question?

As I said, if you've concluded that libertarianism does have a rational foundation in the first two ethical principles alone, then I might disagree, but that would at least be a rational foundation for the ideology.  Michael Shermer certainly seemed to be claiming that libertarianism is based, at least in part, on all five moral dimensions to some extent or another, and that this basis is rational.  It seems clear to me that a political ideology that is derived from authority, ingroup loyalty, and/or a concern for what is "sacred" and "pure," then such an ideology is completely irrational.

Ziztur's Law

Ziztur's Law:

As a political discussion regarding funding sources grows longer, the probability of an opponent’s attempts to lobby for funding being referred to as a “bailout package” approaches one.

(AKA Ziztur's Rule of Bailout Packages)

Faith Infiltration: Trinity Assembly of God Church

 Well folks, this is the 27th church or religious event we’ve infiltrated. For those of you who don’t know, Flimsy and I regularly visit different churches or religious events and report on our experiences.  We look at the general atmosphere of the church or event we’re attending, and then listen to the speakers or congregants to see what kinds of things are important to them. Here, we comment on what we see. This is something like credopology. You can find all of our other Faith Infiltrations here.  We’ve also taken to Twittering our church experiences live, so you should follow us on Twitter here.

Today we visited the Trinity Assembly of God Church, which is part of the charismatic movement. 

We entered the church, and already people were singing an uplifting hymn, the central theme of which was glorifying Jesus. The church sanctuary was small and filled to capacity with about 150 chairs. There were perhaps 75 people in the congregation. They were all white and mostly middle aged, with a scant few older folks and fewer young people or children. It was brightly lit and had an informal feel to it, though most people were well-dressed.

On the ceiling, several flags ran down the center aisle. About 15 identically constructed and golden-colored wall-hangings read, “Jehovah”, but the crowning glory of décor in the sanctuary was an American flag with the Ten Commandments in place of the fifty stars.

As the congregation sang another song, the theme of which was “brokenness is what you want from me”, the pastor walked to the front of the stage, asking his congregation if they were “glad to be holy because Jesus is holy”. He asked them to all raise their hands to acknowledge Jesus’ holiness. His congregation obeyed, raising their hands.

In front of us, an old woman stood. Seated next to her was her husband. They held hands lovingly, gently caressing each other’s paper-thin skin. The pastor began whistling the tune of the song, now a slower one proclaiming love for Jesus. As the song ended, a woman near the back began speaking in tongues rather loudly. She spoke in tongues for a few seconds while everyone remained silent, and then a man seated near the front spoke as if translating her tongue – it was a blessing from Jesus, he said.  Flimsy and I exchanged an incredulous look.
  
As the song ended, the pastor told his congregation to whistle as the song played again. He proclaimed that this would be a sacrifice to Jesus, and Jesus and the angels would not care how they sounded, but they should praise god by whistling. The congregants whistled the tune of the song, and the pastor proclaimed that the all angels up in heaven must have stopped and taken notice, wondering why this church was whistling.

During the greeting time, a woman shook our hands and asked us if we were new. We told her we were new, and let her know we go to different churches every week and then report our experiences. She was interested in this and told us that she was new to the neighborhood and wanted to know more about churches in the area, so she asked for our web address. We gave her a business card, telling her we report from a different perspective than she might expect, given that we are atheists.

Interestingly, she did not seem taken aback or surprised. She proclaimed that god might perhaps touch us, and asked if we had been to a Pentecostal church before. We had. She told us openly and happily that we should convert, because “there are a lot of atheists in this area” and if we converted, we could be a good resource for the church to reach out to other atheists. It always amazes me when people hear that we’ve gone to 20-something churches and still think we might convert somehow, or think their god is calling to us or trying to touch us. We’ve found a lot of nice, caring people within the walls of these churches, but thus far we’ve seen nothing supernatural. I also don’t think we’ll ever be used as tools to convert other atheists.

Greeting time ended, and the pastor informed visitors that this church does not pass an offering plate around. Rather, they have offering plates sitting near the front of the church. I’ve come to appreciate churches that downplay offerings.

Before the sermon (by a guest speaker) began, the pastor told his congregation that his god does not care how much faith we have in him, we will be healed simply by being in his presence. Yay! I didn’t know it worked like that.

After this, the pastor told his congregation that even though we like singing hymns we are accustomed to, his god does not want us to worship in comfort – he wants us to worship with our whole being, which sometimes means being uncomfortable.

“Being uncomfortable” in this case meant singing along to a video of a black preacher singing R&B style hymn.

On to the sermon!

The guest pastor was apparently an individual who had lived in New York and Alaska. He had the personality of the most stereotypical New York pro baseball player turned middle-aged pastor, which is exactly who he was - handlebar mustache, big hands, gruff voice and all. His sermon was a rambling hodgepodge of loosely strung together stories, ideas and pithy-sounding but ultimately useless soundbytes and phrases. He said a lot of things like (in this order):

“There’s nothing you can do to make god stop loving you. You can even go to hell and he’ll still love you.”

“These are crucial times where we can draw parallels between the spiritual realm and the natural realm.”

“I don’t want to get political on you guys but god is not against the government. We need more government, but a government of god.”

“If a country loses the influence of god, it suffers. Lack of god equals poverty. In godly countries, people prosper.”

“God only shows up in countries where he is celebrated, not just tolerated”

“The medical definition of anything that doesn’t change is death.”

“The good old days were good because they weren’t old.”

“You once were a sinner, now you’re a winner.”

“If you lose, you choose to lose.”

“I’m not here to beat you down, I’m here to beat you u.p”

“If you do the right things and think the right things, you’ll see god.”

“An accident can change your life forever but so can a miracle.”

“I liked it when men were men and women were women and I could tell the difference.”

He told his congregation several stories about how he had influenced people to change their lives. One story was about a guy he knew in college who never showered. One day the guy asked the speaker to introduce him to a pretty girl, and he told him no – because you stink! The guy apparently had a “vision” (realizing he smelled bad) and so cleaned himself up and ended up marrying the girl.

In another story, he talked about how he was the first person in his family to be saved, and he went on to help the rest of his 90+ relatives be saved as well. He used these two stories as examples of how “if you don’t have a vision, you’re life stinks” and “once one person in a family is saved, it’s destiny for the whole family to be saved”.

Moving on haphazardly, he spoke of how we’re supposed to be a Christian nation, but we’re not. He recalled that 50 years ago when he was a teen, divorce rates were extremely low because we were all more Christian back then, even though there were a lot of miserable marriages. There were no television shows with people sleeping in the same bed, but now he’s happy when it’s a “same sex couple” in the bed. Clearly, he thought it was better to stay in a miserable marriage than get a divorce, because getting a divorce means backing down on your sacred covenant with god to remain faithful no matter how bad your partnership becomes. Obviously, he also has a problem with same-sex relationships.

Moving back to stories of himself, he talked about how he was looking for a job, had prayed for god to create a job for him, and then had gotten a job somewhere because the hiring manager knew he was a member of the church. He told a story about how he converted the entire company to Christianity.

In yet another story, he spoke of how he forced a foul-mouthed contractor to agree to listen to him preach for five minutes before handing over his paycheck. He preached to this contractor for years, and then finally left the company. Five years later he called the foul-mouthed contractor to give him a job, only to find he had converted to Christianity after nearly leaving his wife, he and his wife had adopted children from Russia, and were now moving back to Russia to start an orphanage.

His whole sermon seemed to lack a particular point or focus, so it’s hard to really comment on anything specific as there were so many stories and random proclamations. Finally, after a whirlwind of stream of consciousness preaching, he ended by saying “there is no party like a holy ghost party” and told everyone that if they needed help to influence the world outside, they should come up and pray.” At this many members of the congregation came to the front of the sanctuary, and a cacophony of voices, saying “hallelujah” or speaking on tongues rose above a gentle guitar serenade.

A sign above the door on our way out read, “Now entering the missionary field”.

Insufficient Christianity: 9.2

Here is part II of my critique of chapter 9 of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. For those of you out of the loop, we’ve been going through Mere Christianity argument by argument and deconstructing them; partly because no one else has done this, and partly because I need a hobby and this is it.

So far, Lewis has led us down a rabbit hole of non-sequiturs and profound-sounding but inapplicable metaphors. At this point he is running with scissors, and those scissors are his religion.

He continues on by defining “repentance” using the Lewis Dictionary of Christianity (not a real book) as: surrendering to his god by realizing just how wrong and worthless you are so that you may start your life over again because that is the only way to fix all the fucking up you’ve done. Apparently this involves unlearning self-will. It sounds quite a bit like an Alcoholic’s Anonymous 12-step program to me. Apparently though, there is a catch. Once you read this catch, you’ll see why it is a catch.

“And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person--and he would not need it.

Here is why Lewis thinks god cannot just do the repenting himself: “Now if we had not fallen, that would be all plain sailing. But unfortunately we now need God's help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all--to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God's nature corresponds to this process at all. So that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. God can share only what He has; this thing, in His own nature, He has not."

So who might this perfect person be, who can actually repent perfectly? Obviously it can’t be god, because god doesn’t suffer and die. Hmm… I think his name starts with J.

Sometimes, honestly, I marvel at the silliness of the ideas of repentance and atonement. I wish someone could explain to me why an omni-powerful god would create beings in his image, recognize that they are all horribly flawed by nature, send himself down to his creation as one of them to atone to himself for the sins of the things he created, and then reject them if they don’t believe he did this. This is supposed to be flawless, perfect, beautiful godly justice. The compass of justice, I bend thee.

Mere Christianity Online

Reducing the Need for Abortion and Supporting Parents Act hubbub

I was listening to the local Christian radio station when I heard an announcement about the introduction of a bill called the Reducing the Need for Abortion and Supporting Parents act. The announcement pointed me to this site, where I found a nearly word-for-word transcript of the radio broadcast. 

“Democrats in the U.S. House have introduced a bill purportedly aimed at reducing abortions, but which would, in fact, increase funding of sex education without a major abstinence component.

You can find the bill here.

Well yes, because comprehensive sex education works to reduce abortions by reducing unwanted pregnancies. I’ve never heard of a sex-education program that did not have a major abstinence component. All of them (and I’ve read the details of about 30 or so sex-education programs) promote abstinence as the only 100% effective method to prevent pregnancy. In Title I, the bill states explicitly that grants will give preference to those that encourage teens to delay sexual activity and provide information about contraceptives but are only available to programs that agree to provide age-appropriate, factually and medically accurate and complete, science-based education. Pardon my sarcasm, but how dare those evil democrats try to propose funding for sex education programs based on *gasp* evidence.

Also, this bill was introduced in 2006, so while reporters seem to imply this bill is new and sudden, it’s not as if it was produced last week.

“The bill, the Reducing the Need for Abortion and Supporting Parents Act, also calls for increased access to contraceptives and expanded Medicaid family-planning coverage.

It seems fairly obvious that one would want to increase access to contraceptives. Contraceptives prevent unwanted pregnancies. If you don’t have an unwanted pregnancy, you have a 0% chance of deciding to have an abortion.

"It's about death, and it's about spreading Planned Parenthood's philosophy and getting millions of dollars into their coffers," said Jim Sedlak, vice president of the American Life League.

I fail to see why this bill is all about death, but let’s look through it and see what the bill actually intends to do:

1.    Gives preference to pregnancy prevention programs that are science-based.

2.    Reauthorizes after school learning programs. (to keep those kiddies busy with activities other than bonking)

3.    Gives grants to states that submit a plan to reduce teen pregnancy rates and actually accomplish reducing teen pregnancy rates.

4.    gives a grant to establish a national center to enlist parents in preventing teen pregnancy.

5.    Reverses the decision of the Deficit Reduction Act, which allowed states to avoid Medicaid coverage for family planning services.

6.    Expands family planning services for low-income women to include prenatal, labor, delivery and postpartum care by increasing income ceilings for funding.

7.    Authorizes increased funding to Title X of the “Prevention First Act”.

8.    Authorizes grants which require accurate and complete contraceptive information for teen and new mothers being visited by a nurse home visit program.

9.    If a woman seeks an abortion, the act requires that she receive informed consent, including nonjudgemental and science-based information about adoption or carrying her pregnancy to term.

10.    Provides states with the option to cover pregnant women under Medicaid.

11.    Close gaps in coverage of pregnant women by not allowing insurance companies to count pregnancy as a pre-existing condition.

12.    Grants for ultrasound equipment to offer pregnant women an ultrasound.

13.    provides for treatment and an awareness campaign of women who are pregnant and victims of domestic abuse.

14.    Provides grants to research pregnant students who decide to carry their pregnancies to term and parenting students.

15.    requires that federally-funded group homes for pregnant women provide adoption and parenting skills counseling (on request).

16.    Increases the adoption tax credit and makes it refundable.

17.     Increases support for new parents by providing support through food stamps and nurse home visits.

Saying that this bill is “all about death” is sort of like saying the pro-life movement is “all about owning women”. Your credibility is seriously diminished when you demonize your opponent like this. I would really like to see pro-life advotes use stronger arguments in support of their position.

“Sedlak described the bill as one that helps fund the wish list Planned Parenthood gave the Obama administration in its earliest days.

"And that wish list, if you added everything up, comes out to $4.6 billion going into Planned Parenthood and their friends," he said.

Ziztur said, "if you add up all the grants given out in the Faith-Based initiative, it comes out to $65 Billion. Isn’t the faith-based initiative all about spreading religious philosophy and getting billions of dollars into their coffers?" You could make this argument about any organization that receives any government funding. If the argument can be applied to all, it loses any validity.

"Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, noted the House Energy and Commerce Committee has rejected Title V abstinence-education funds from going to states and replaced it with a $50 million program for teen pregnancy prevention.

Yes, that’s because the abstinence education funds could only go to programs which, among other things, barred teachers from discussing contraception and required them to say that sex within marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity. The title was rejected because the program was not proven to be effective.

"And that ," she noted, "is just code for more contraceptive education, explicit sexual education in the schools across the country."

It’s not a “code”. We want sex education that has evidence of providing reduced pregnancy rates and increased contraceptive use without increasing sex among teens. Comprehensive sex education has been shown to be effective at this. Saying that it is a code implies some sort of deceit. Once again - demonizing your opponent only make you lose credibility.

Sedlak doesn't buy the claim that the bill has support from some pro-lifers. 

"There is no major pro-life organization in this country that would support this kind of a bill," he said, adding that the bill's mention of adoption promotion is simply the other side "throwing us a bone."

“Support from some pro-lifers” is not equivalent to “support by a major pro-life organization”.  The bill is also known as the Ryan/DeLauro bill, named for its sponsors by Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) a nd Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT). Ryan used to be on the national advisory board of Democrats for Life of America, a pro-life organization. He is a strong pro-life advocate and was booted from his position on the board after sponsoring the bill. Apparently the Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good organization doesn’t count as a pro-life organization because they support funding a common ground.

Chinese Herbal Medicine for Endometriosis

Media outlets are reporting that Chinese herbs may relieve symptoms of endometriosis, using a Cochrane review of 2 research articles. Headlines read “Chinese herbs show early promise for endometriosis”  and  “Chinese Herbs May Relieve Endometriosis Symptoms, Review Finds”  .

Endometriosis is a medical condition in which some of the endometrial cells (typically found in the uterus under the fluctuating influence of female hormones) are found outside of the uterine cavity. Symptoms include many nonspecific complaints such as pelvic pain, infertility, nausea, unusual menstruation, chronic fatigue, mood swings, back pain, ovarian cysts, constipation, urinary tract infections, diarrhea, anemia, etc. Appropriate diagnosis is by laparoscopic biopsy – a doctor will use a laparoscopic instrument to remove suspected extrauterine endometrial cells and examine them.  Treatments vary and can include hormonal treatments or surgery to remove the cells. In China, treatment of this disorder with Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) is routine.

Both of the media reports linked to above say that the Cochrane reviewers found some evidence that CHM has comparable benefits to conventional drug therapy after laparoscopic surgery for people with endometriosis but that the review has limitations. The primary author of the study is quoted as saying “"I think the positive message is that Chinese herbal medicine may offer equivalent benefits to conventional medicine but with fewer side effects.”

I found the Cochrane review [1] and noted that reviewers collected 110 studies for review and graded them based on methodological criteria. They dropped all but two of the 110 studies due to excluding trials with poor methodology, unconfirmed randomization procedures or ones diagnosing endometriosis without an appropriate laparoscopic biopsy.

Did the two retained articles feature research with superior methodology? First, let’s look at what those two articles were, and what the author concluded from this review:

The first article [2] had two treatment arms: women treated with CHM orally (2x/day) and via enema (1x/day) after laparoscopic surgery versus women treated with gestrinone (2x/wk) after laparoscopic surgery for 3 months. The results showed no difference between rates of symptom relief or pregnancy in either group.

The second article [3] had three treatment arms: women treated with CHM orally(2x/day), women who treated with CHM orally and via enema(1x/day), and women treated with danazol(1x/day) for 3 months. These women did not undergo laparoscopic surgery, but instead were only biopsied for diagnostic purposes.  Women obtained greater symptomatic relief with oral and oral plus enema CHM versus danazol, oral plus enema CHM shower a greater reduction in dysmenorrhoea pain scores than danazol and shrinkage of adenexal masses. There were no differences for other factors (lumbrosacral pain, rectal discomfort, vaginal nodules).

The author concluded that post-surgical administration of CHM may have comparable benefits to gestrinone but with fewer side effects, that oral CHM may be better for treatment than danazol and may be more effective at relieving dysmenorrheal and shrinking adnexal masses when used with a CHM enema.

So, what are our weaknesses?

1.    No placebo control: There was no arm of the first study which looked at women receiving laparoscopic surgery alone without CHM or danazol, and no arm of the second study which looked at women receiving no treatment or a placebo pill treatment.

2.    Poor blinding: I should not have to point out that if you enroll in a study that has a pill treatment arm and an enema treatment arm, it is impossible for the participants to be blinded to which treatment group they are in. And enema, as you probably know, is a procedure in which liquids are forced into the rectum through the anus. It might be possible to blind participants to whether or not they are getting CHM versus the other medications, but I bet most people can tell the difference between a Chinese medicine pill and the other pills in the study. The researchers were also not blinded as to which treatment group women were in, though the paper indicates the assessors were blinded to which treatment group the women were in.

3.    Inadequate comparison treatments: Danazol is no longer commonly used as a treatment for endometriosis, and gestrinone is not available in the USA. These studies would have been much more robust had they compared it to typical drug treatments for endometriosis. In the world of conventional treatments for endometriosis, these two drugs can hardly be called conventional.

4.    Poor outcome measures: In both of the studies, a clinical outcome of “no effect” was recorded if there were no change in symptoms or if the symptoms became worse. Recording worsening symptoms as “no effect” biases the data toward a positive outcome.


I think that the most appropriate take home message or finding of the study is this: the massive stockpile of clinical trials that explore CHM for treating endometriosis have serious methodological shortcomings. 

The author’s main conclusion (and the conclusion parroted by the press), that CHM may work to alleviate symptoms of endometriosis, seems spurious in light of this. Additionally, it appears that researchers used a specific mixture of herbs (Nei Yi) in the two studies, which raises the question: why the author did not title his paper “Nei Yi for endometriosis”?  Perhaps he wanted his readers to focus on the fact that this was a Chinese herbal medicine versus a “conventional” medicine.

Lastly, it is worth noting that although the authors of the review state that there is no conflict of interest in the publication of this review, the primary author is an acupuncture and Chinese medicine practitioner at a center for Chinese medicine in the UK.

References:

[1] Flower A, Liu JP, Chen S, Lewith G, Little P. Chinese herbal medicine for endometriosis. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2009, Issue 3. Art. No.: CD006568. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD006568.pub2.

[2] Wu SZ,Chen XL,Chen WZ, Li SY.Clinical analysis of the treatment of endometriosis using Nei Yi pills and Nei Yi enema. Journal of Liaoning University of TCM 2006;8(7):5–6.

[3] Wu SZ, Chen XL, Chen WZ. Clinical observation of Nei Yi pills combined with Nei Yi enema in the treatment of endometriosis. Chinese Archives of TCM 2006;24(3):431–3.

Insufficient Christianity: 9.1

C.S. Lewis opens the 9th chapter of Mere Christianity with the Lord, Liar or Lunatic argument. Lewis popularized this argument, which goes something like this:

P: Jesus claimed to be God.

Q: one of the following must be true:
1.    Jesus was not god, but believed he was (Lunatic)
2.    Jesus did not believe he was god, but spoke as if he did. (Liar)
3.    Jesus is god (Lord)

C: Jesus either is god, or is neither great nor moral.

This argument has been criticized by theologians and non theologians alike. First, the premise assumes that there was a historical Jesus and that said historical Jesus claimed to be god. The argument is supposed to prove Jesus was god by disproving that he was a liar or a lunatic, leaving Lord as the only choice. Of course, the classic argument usually leaves out two unstated premises: that Jesus was both perfectly moral and perfectly good. Thus, if he was a lunatic he could not have been perfectly good, and if he lied he could not have been perfectly moral. In a sense, this argument is sort of circular, as in the premise, Jesus both claims to be god and is also perfectly good and moral, yet any being “perfectly good and moral” would be either some kind of deity or at least a really amazing human.

The three choices set up a false trilemma, given that it leaves out a third option – Legend.  It is not necessary to choose between only the three options Lewis gives. Yet this is exactly what Lewis claims, saying, “I have to accept the view that He was and is God.” There is no reason to accept this view, as we can easily reject both the premise, the structure of the argument, and the conclusion.

The rest of this chapter is essentially an explanation of the basic ideas of Christianity. At this point, is seems like objectivity has been tossed out the window and I doubt it will return. Lewis moves on to claim (without evidence to back up his assertions) that the purpose of Jesus coming to earth was obviously to teach, but also to suffer and be killed.

 “The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work. … A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.

This is the antithesis to critical thinking. When one engages in critical thinking, they begin from a neutral or evidenceless position and then proceed to use observation, critical thinking, reason and experimentation to arrive at a conclusion. If one begins with one’s conclusion already firmly seated in place, proving your conclusion is easy – you simply find evidence that corresponds to your already established beliefs while ignoring or rationalizing away evidence that does not support your already established beliefs. Claiming that one cannot know how Christ works until one accepts that Christ works sets the believer up in such a way as he cannot be disproven. Any evidence, logic or argument the skeptic might use is invalidated by the mere fact that he or she is a skeptic.

The same argument can be used to prove the claims of any other deity. I might say that one cannot understand how Allah’s mighty power works unless one accepts Allah. I doubt this argument would hold any water for Lewis.

In the empirical world, I do not have to accept a theory before I can understand how it works. I may accept a theory before I understand it, but this does not mean I have to accept a theory before I understand it. Rather, my understanding of how it works (if it works) will lead me to its acceptance.

Lewis claims that all we have to do is believe that Jesus was killed, that his killing washed away our sins, and that in his dying he disabled death itself, and any theories as to why or how this insanity works is entirely secondary. Yet, he feels that they are worth looking at. Thus we look:

“The one most people have heard is the one I mentioned before-the one about our being let off because Christ had volunteered to bear a punishment instead of us. Now on the face of it that is a very silly theory. If God was prepared to let us off, why on earth did He not do so? And what possible point could there be in punishing an innocent person instead? None at all that I can see, if you are thinking of punishment in the police-court sense. On the other hand, if you think of a debt, there is plenty of point in a person who has some assets paying it on behalf of someone who has not. Or if you take 'paying the penalty,' not in the sense of being punished, but in the more general sense of 'standing the racket' or 'footing the bill,' then, of course, it is a matter of common experience that, when one person has got himself into a hole, the trouble of getting him out usually falls on a kind friend.

So being “punished for our sins” is, according to Lewis, not so much a punishment but a paying of a debt for our sins. But there is a problem. Lewis fails to explain why the punishment for our sins is eternal damnation, and why a perfectly innocent person had to pay said debt. What's more, while we can pay a debt by having someone else pay our debt for us, we cannot pay a debt of imprisonment by having someone else go to prison on our behalf. Is hell more like a prison or more like owing someone a "debt"? I'd say it is much more like a prison.

Honestly, the whole thing is completely arbitrary. If I were god, it would be as if I were creating an inescapable cosmic game of cards in which if any of my card-playing creation draws a card, they have to quack like a duck forever. This is okay though because I am going to create a version of myself to go play card with you who is incapable of drawing cards, and they will quack like a duck once and pay the quacking debt for everyone, but only if they believe. On the face of it, the atonement is a very silly theory, I agree. Explaining that the “debt” is not like a punishment but more like someone “footing the bill” does not make it make more sense, as it is so patently absurd to begin with.

Also, I should point out that Lewis continues to fail at providing evidence that a god, much less his god, exists.

Mere Christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity: 8:1

For those of you just joining us, here’s a recap: we’re thoroughly dissecting C. S. Lewis’ book Mere Christianity in excruciating detail. This is chapter 8. The previous chapters can be found by going to the bottom of this post and clicking the “C. S. Lewis” label. You can also find an online copy of Mere Christianity using the link at the bottom of this post.

Chapter 8 is amusingly titled, “The Shocking Alternative”. Of course, what Lewis is referring to here is an alternative to atheism and deism. The shock, you’ll surmise, is that the alternative is Christianity.

Lewis begins this chapter by stating that Christians ‘believe that an evil power has made himself for the present the Prince of this World.” He says that a skeptic will then ask if the existence of evil is in accordance with the Christian god’s will. His answer is: free will allows for evil. He says this is akin to a mother’s will being for her children to clean up after themselves, but sometimes they don’t. 

That’s all well and good, except that a mother would not punish a kid who didn’t clean up after himself with eternal hell and separation from mommy because the kid didn’t do or think the correct thing while calling this act “perfect justice”. But, Lewis has not made this claim yet, so I am merely speculating that as a Christian he believes in Hell and in his god’s perfect justice.

As an aside, I don’t think Lewis’ definition of free will is not a counter-causal definition, so I’ll tentatively accept that (somewhat simplified) definition.

“Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible.

Doesn’t Lewis’ concept of god throw a wrench into the idea that he can’t imagine a creature which is free but cannot be bad? Does Lewis’ god have free will? If so, then wouldn’t it also be free to be bad? If having free will means you have the capacity to be bad, then Lewis’ god either does not have free will, or it has the capacity to be bad.

“Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

Lewis has this backward. Love/joy/goodness seems to be a consequence of our capacity to be good or bad, not the purpose of being able to be good or bad. Lewis goes on with an unsupported assertion that his god wants us to be freely united to him and each other and that this union is really super awesome. He gives no rationale.

Lewis’ next point is that we can’t argue with the things god says because he is the source of our reasoning power so we can’t be right and his god wrong. Of course, this conclusion only works if we agree with all of Lewis’ other prior premises and conclusions, namely that morality proves there is a god, and that said god is the Christian god, only god, and that the Christian god created everything and is all good (despite the fact that we don’t know if this god has free will or not). Lewis has failed to support that there is a god. He has failed to support that his god is the source of our reasoning powers, and he has failed to support that his god is all good. If we are incapable of judging his god’s actions, how do we know he is good?

This argument can also be applied to any god and is thus completely useless in proving anything. I could say, for example, that we can’t question the actions of Allah because Allah created us and is all good. When you have magic and supernaturalism on your side, you can prove anything.

Lewis goes on to talk about Satan’s sin of wanting to put himself first, be the center, and be god.  He asserts that Satan taught this sin to all of humanity. Because humans think they can “invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God,” they have created all of the bad things in the world – “money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery”. All of this is due to trying to find something outside of god to make us happy.

I have to wonder why Lewis even needs Satan (who he supposes exists without any proof whatsoever) to explain all of this. If god gave us the capacity to either be good or be bad, aren’t we just doing what god gave us the capacity to do? We don’t need a superpowerful bad guy to explain that we screw things up.

Lewis goes on to say that his god’s solution to this was 1. consciousness. 2. Jesus!

If you think I am skipping huge chunks of his book in which he provides a decent rationalization for this, you’re dead wrong. He doesn’t.

The “shock” of this chapter is that this Jewish dude showed up and told people he was god. Lewis describes this as “quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.” Apparently some Jewish guy showing up claiming to be god and capable of forgiving any sins is so asinine that it must be true. Otherwise, this is pure silliness.

My vote is for pure silliness. Lewis is actually arguing (for the second time in his book) that if someone says something incredibly absurd, the absurdity makes it more likely to be true.
You know, atheism seems patently absurd to lots of people…

Mere Christianity online

Dennett and sugar taste

I have been re-reading Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon due to having scheduled a book club meeting, and I came across an idea that caught my eye:

Coevolution endorsed the bargain between plant and animal, sharpening our ancestors' capacity to discriminate sugar by its "sweetness." That is, evolution provided animals with specific receptor molecules that respond to the concentration of high-energy sugars in anything they taste, and hard-wired those receptor molecules to the seeking machinery, to put is crudely. People generally say that we like some things because they are sweet, but this really puts it backward: it is more accurate to say that some things are sweet (to us) because we like them! ... There is nothing "intrinsically sweet" (whatever that would mean) about sugar molecules. (pp. 59)

So sugar molecules aren't sweet, we just interpret them as being sweet. Rather, sugar molecules are valuable forms of energy, and we've evolved to prefer valuable sources of energy, so now sugar molecules make our brainmeat go, "Yum! Eat that!"

Now, of course, this powerful instinct is working against us, given that food is so plentiful.

Insufficient Christianity: 7:1

On to more of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity.  In Chapter 6, he attempts to show how pantheism and atheism are unsound philosophies, and from the looks of Chapter 7, he seems to be proceeding from one such worldview to the next, breaking down them all, until only Christianity remains.

I am highly entertained that, in the same way as with Chapter 6, his arguments in this next chapter also do as much or more violence to Christianity as they do to the alternate worldviews that he is attempting to argue against.

Lewis' next opponents are what he calls Christianity-and-water and Dualism, with another jab or two at atheism.  First he "refutes" atheism (again) and his "Christianity-and-water":

Very well then, atheism is too simple. And I will tell you another view that is also too simple. It is the view I call Christianity-and-water, the view which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all right-leaving out all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and the redemption. Both these are boys ' philosophies.

It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not. The table I am sitting at looks simple: but ask a scientist to tell you what it is really made of--all about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my eye and what they do to the optic nerve and what it does to my brain--and, of course, you find that what we call 'seeing a table' lands you in mysteries and complications which you can hardly get to the end of.  . . . if you want to go on and ask what is really happening--then you must be prepared for something difficult.

. . . and the twisting semantic games never end.  Lewis goes on to state that the exact reason that he believes Christianity to be real is that "It has just that queer twist about it that real things have."  He goes on for several paragraphs about this, and for the life of me, I cannot decipher this point of his to be anything other than a many-layered statement that basically says, "The more bizarre nonsense that a worldview claims, the more likely it is to be true."

It takes a certain considerable volume of philosophical cojones to actually claim this. I find myself slightly disappointed that humanity had not discovered the truth of the Flying Spaghetti Monster until after Lewis' death; it seems he would have converted instantly, and I would have loved to have seen such a thing.

Of course, he's missing a rather important point here; while it is true that the planets are all different sizes and shapes, and the earth, in fact, revolves around the Sun (contrary to what we might otherwise naturally assume), etc., we only accept these seemingly strange assertions as true after we have evidence for them.  Their strangeness is not - and that's not in big-assed capital letters - itself a reason to believe these assertions.  I would have thought this would be obvious.

That's the most obvious and . . . wait for it . . . simple rebuttal to Lewis' argument, but there are others.  For example, he noticeably doesn't bother defining what way in which he considers some worldviews to be simpler than others.  A volume containing all the knowledge that we presently have about the completely naturalistic, material universe would be somewhat larger than, for example, the Bible.  Likewise, there is nothing inherently "simpler" about his Christianity-and-water God than his hard-nosed, "manly" Christianity (yes, Lewis hilariously claims that Christianity is the "manliest" worldview!).  Both assert "truths" so simple that they can be conveyed with a few lines of scripture from a very old holy text, or alternatively, "truths" so complex that human minds are completely incapable of understanding them.  The point here, obviously, is that it's easy to claim that a religion is either simple or complex, as your situation and philosophical needs dictate; religions simply don't discuss reality- you can keep them simple or make up any amount of nonsense, because religion doesn't actually need to have an externally verifiable gauge.

Now, concerning Lewis' "rebuttal" of Dualism . . .  You might recall Chapter 6, where tries to refute Pantheism?  He claims that if there is any such thing as real moral good and real moral evil, then God cannot be everywhere and in everything and still be morally good, and this is why Pantheism is false.  Besides several other obvious issues with this argument, Christianity claims that God is all-powerful and perfectly good, so by Lewis' own reasoning, the God of Christianity cannot co-exist with a world containing evil.

Entertainingly, Lewis digs himself another hole in Chapter 7, here, with his supposed rebuttal of Dualism:

The two powers, or spirits, or gods--the good one and the bad one--are supposed to be quite independent. They both existed from all eternity. . . .  One of them likes hatred and cruelty, the other likes love and mercy, and each backs its own view. . . .  So we must mean that one of the two powers is actually wrong and the other actually right.

But the moment you say that, you are putting into the universe a third thing in addition to the two Powers: some law or standard or rule of good which one of the powers conforms to and the other fails to conform to. But since the two powers are judged by this standard, then this standard, or the Being who made this standard, is farther back and higher up--than either of them, and He will be the real God.

Did you catch that?  Lewis claims that if we are to call one power good, we must judge him by a standard higher than himself.  My question for Lewis (my rather obvious question, I would have thought) is:  How then do we know whether your own Christian God is good?  This is the classic question; Is X morally good because God says so, or does God say so because X is morally good (according to an objective standard of morality independent of God)?

I think this might be the single biggest issue with secular morality versus theistic morality:  How does one define the word "moral" itself?  If your answer to the above question is the first response (X is morally good because God says so, and for no other reason), then you are specifically defining morality as "the will of the most powerful/oldest/most intelligent/most Y quality/whatever being that exists," and that is what morality is.  (Of course, I disagree, defining morality for myself as, "morally good actions increase, or at least maintain as much as is possible, the degree of personal freedom and justice enjoyed by all sentient, self-aware lifeforms that themselves possess a moral conscience; morally evil actions having the opposite effect.")  Whatever your personal standard of morality might be, if you take the second response to the above question, you have done what Lewis describes here in his rebuttal to Dualism.  You are requiring another force greater than the "god" in question, and judging the "god" in question by that objective standard.

My point here is that Lewis has been arguing all along that morality, by definition, cannot be arbitrary.  That, however, is exactly what one is claiming if they claim that morality is literally nothing more or less than the will of "god."  If we agree that institutionalized slavery, for example, is morally wrong, then why is it wrong?  Is it wrong because God says so, and for no other reason?  If it is, then the obvious response is to point out that if God were to say that slavery was morally good he must still, by this logic, be morally correct.  To say that morality is nothing more than the will of "god" (to borrow a phrase from Lewis) is to state that morality is nothing more than God's personal preference.  This is exactly what Lewis has been arguing against for the entirety of the book thus far - that morality absolutely cannot be the arbitrary "personal preference" of a person, and that there must exist a real objective reality.


Briefly, then, Lewis' exact argument against Dualism also does violence to the Christian concept of God.  Lewis claims that (assuming that morality is something more than someone's arbitrary preference) we could only determine if either of Dualism's two godlike beings were "morally good" by comparing them to an external, objective standard.  I totally agree with him; the problem is that he somehow fails to see that this exact same issue applies to the Christian god.  Obviously, Lewis then claims that this external, objective standard must itself be a sentient, godlike being, yet he has spectacularly failed to prove this.  Entertainingly, if Lewis is correct about the existence of morality requiring the existence of a supreme moral being, and that this godlike being must be judged by an external objective standard (not someone's mere "personal preference"), he will have created, in his own mind, an infinite regress of gods, each being judged by a system of morality created by the god directly above him.

What facinating method of disproving the existence of the Christian god will Lewis come up with next?  Same godless time, same godless station, folks.

We'll end today's review with a scary quote from this chapter:

Enemy-occupied territory--that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.

Yes, that's right, Lewis claims that there is an "enemy" that Christians are called to wage war upon.  I understand that this is the case in a Christian worldview (and that the Bible says as much), but it still disturbs me to remember this all-to-common rhetoric from when I called myself a Christian. Really, is it any wonder that Christians have burned people to death because they thought that they were possessed by demons?

Mere Christianity Online

The A-word

According to the Pew forum surveys, though 5% of people surveyed claim they do not believe in god or a universal spirit, only a quarter of those label themselves "atheist". about 14% of people who say they don't believe in god also labeled themselves Christian, which is fascinating.

I think this has something to do with the fact that "atheists" are often associated with immoral cranky jerks who have no wonder and happiness in their lives.

If you read this blog here and don't believe in god but also don't call yourself an atheist - why?

masturbation and the appeal to nature

An interesting thing happens when I am talking to some people (typically Christian) about masturbation.

Typically, the individual I am arguing with will say that masturbation is wrong because it is an unnatural thing to do.

The appeal to nature is a fallacy of relevance in which someone claims that a given thing is good or right because it is natural and that something is bad or wrong because it is unnatural.  In this case, the individual making the claim that masturbation is wrong because it is unnatural is committing this fallacy. Just because something is “unnatural” does not make it wrong, and it is obvious that one can point out many examples of this, assuming we can settle on a definition of “natural”.

“Nature” and “natural” are vague terms, which is the first problem with this argument. What counts as “natural”, and why does masturbation not fit into this definition?

Masturbation is a behavior, so what individuals are saying is that masturbation is not a natural behavior. Of course, this is claimed without defining “natural behavior” precisely enough so as to exclude masturbation.

If by “natural behavior” one means, “a behavior commonly seen among different animals”, then masturbation is absolutely natural.  Many times when we see a dog humping a pillow, we assume the dog is stupid – believing that the pillow must be another dog or “appropriate” sexual object. Scientists suggest that this behavior is masturbatory rather than the behavior of your daft pet.

A rigorous program of daily masturbation can actually increase fertility, suggesting that those who masturbate are more likely to bear offspring, counter to popular proclamations that masturbation will make you impotent (actual advice from Flimsy’s mom)

So, not only are individuals committing a fallacy when they claim that masturbation is unnatural and therefore bad, but they are also incorrect.

The interesting thing is that when I point these two facts out to people making this argument, they assume my position is that of the naturalistic fallacy. In this way, they fail to see the faults in their own argument but readily believe they are recognizing a variation of the same fallacy in my argument, even though they are claiming I am making an argument that I am not actually making. The conversation will go like this:

Them: “Masturbation is unnatural and therefore wrong.”

Me: “Claiming that masturbation is unnatural and therefore wrong is a fallacy known as the appeal to nature. You don’t have a clear definition of natural, and even if you did, not all things falling outside of the scope of your definition are bad, just like not everything natural is good.”

Them: “Yeah, but it’s still unnatural.”

Me: “How to you mean? Animals masturbate all the time.”

(Here, I might have to provide proof that animals masturbate)

Them: “Well, just because animals do it does not make it right. It just makes the behavior animalistic. Are you saying we can masturbate just because animals do it?”

Here, they claim that my argument is the appeal to nature, and readily point out that this method of thinking is incorrect. Of course, I have already explained that it is incorrect, so I find it quite odd that individuals believe that this is the argument I am making – that masturbation is good because it is natural.

Confused? Me too, but this is invariable what happens when someone makes the claim that masturbation (or homosexuality, for that matter) are unnatural and therefore wrong.

skeptic in the public

A few days ago I was at a party chatting up some women and networking. A friend of mine there told everyone that I had been to Vegas recently. When asked why, I explained that I had attended a meeting on science, critical thinking and skepticism.

The girls were interested to know exactly what we were skeptical about, and so I told them that we were skeptical of things like religious claims, paranormal claims, alternative medicine and cryptozoology, though I mainly focus on religious claims and alternative medicine.

Almost immediately, a woman there told me that cryptozoology was awesome. The conversation dissolved into anecdotal stories of seeing strange creatures, ghost and psychic experiences - all while I sat by, nodding numbly.

What am I supposed to do in a situation like this? Obviously, I would not deny that people experienced strange things, and they all sounded so convinced - one woman told a story of dreaming of a ghost boy, and then finding the ghost boy's clothing in a closet, and having alphabet letters fall off her sister's wall in such a way as to spell his name. They were so sure of their memories and experiences.

bone marrow transplant = adult stem cells

Here is another article, courtesy of the Christian Research Institute's Twitter feed. (I am a glutton for punishment)

Scientists at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, California, are discovering a potential cure for leukemia and sickle-cell disease. How? By using blood stem cells from the placentas of women who have had Caesarian deliveries.

But researchers at the hospital are frustrated. State agencies have made multi-million-dollar grants available for embryo-destructive research, but money is scarce for its ethically sound counterpart, adult stem cell research.

Really? Not according to CNN. Please provide evidence that embryonic stem cells are ethically unsound.

In the Contra Costa Times, lead Children’s Hospital researcher Frans Kuypers says, “No one has been cured by an embryonic stem cell. We are able to cure folks with [adult] stem cells.”

Normally I don’t dive into ad hominem attacks, but this is pure insanity and betrays either a misunderstanding of the differences and similarities between adult and embryonic stem cells or a deliberate deception. Allow me, a complete layman when it comes to stem cells, to explain:

There are two classes of stem cells: multipotent and pluripotent. Pluripotent stem cells can give rise to any type of cell in the body except those needed to support and develop a fetus in the womb. Multipotent stem cells can give rise to a limited number of different types of cells.
Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent. Adult stem cells are multipotent. What this means is that while adult stem cell X may only be able to give rise to blood cells, an embryonic stem cell can give rise to blood and any other type of cell.

Adult stem cells have been being used for over four decades to cure disease in the form of bone marrow transplants. So of course people have been cured with adult stem cells. They’ve been researched for far longer than embryonic stem cells.

Embryonic stem cells have vastly more potential than adult-derived stem cells because they are pluripotent. What has been done for adult derived stem cells could potentially be done for embryonic stem cells, but on a much larger scale. Unfortunately, scientists have only been researching embryonic stem cells since 1998, all under heavy legal restrictions. Comparing the gains made by adult stem cells to the gains made by embryonic stem cells is akin to comparing the advanced problem-solving abilities of a two year old to that of a thirty year old.

 So why isn’t adult stem cell research receiving more funding? Josephine Quintavalle, director of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, says “What you get from [the adult stem cell] approach is a patient-specific cure. There's no middleman . . . and there's no drug company that's going to get rich as a result of it.”

Why would a treatment with embryonic stem cells be less “patient-specific” than treatment with adult stem cells? Can the author provide evidence of the lack of funding of adult stem cell research as I have provided evidence showing that adult stem cell research received lots of funding?

If by “middleman” he means the companies who currently own the stem cell lines, then opening up embryonic stem cell research funding would eliminate or reduce this middleman, as those companies who have grandfathered in stem cell lines from before federal funding was banned would no longer be the sole holders of stem cell lines, as other companies could receive funding to develop new lines.

As far as the “get rich” comment… if no one has been cured using embryonic stem cells, how can a company “get rich” from them?

But, she explains, a lot of the pressure for stem-cell research is to find products that they can sell, as opposed to a treatment they can do to cure you.

Evidence please.  So what the author is saying is that embryonic stem cells don’t cure people and aren’t patient-specific, but drug companies think they can get rich off of them by marketing a product that sells rather than cures, due (in part) to this mysterious middleman. Got it. Provide evidence for this assertion.

Quintavalle is just one of many experts from both sides of the debate interviewed in the new documentary, Lines that Divide, produced by the Center for Bioethics and Culture. http://www.cbc-network.org/

Ah ha! Here is one point of this article – buy or see this documentary. I’ve e-mailed them and asked for a review copy.

In the documentary you’ll hear first-hand testimonies from people whose lives have been saved through adult stem cell research. Like Barry Goudy, who suffered with multiple sclerosis. Since undergoing adult stem cell replacement therapy, he’s been free from MS for five years.

“adult stem cell replacement therapy” - AKA a bone marrow transplant – has been conducted in uncontrolled trials for people with MS. No controlled trials have been completed, though there are some underway. Here is how it works: MS is an autoimmune disease in which an individual’s immune system attacks the myelin sheath surrounding their nerves. This causes symptoms as nerves do not function properly when the myelin is destroyed or damaged. Bone marrow is extracted from a participant with MS. The participant’s immune system is destroyed with chemotherapy. Then, the participant’s own bone marrow cells are put back in, effectively letting the participant with MS grow a new immune system. There is no proof that it works.

They reboot your immune system,” he explains. “I live a normal life. I coach hockey, I play racquetball, I golf.” Without the adult stem cell transplant, Goudy would probably be in a wheelchair.

The plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not data (Thanks quackcast). Also, it really annoys me when writers say things like, “if X did not happen, he’d be in a wheelchair’. Being in a wheelchair is better than being stuck in bed without a wheelchair.

Twenty-two-year-old Corrina Archuleta also shares her dramatic recovery from a flesh-eating auto-immune disorder. Her family was making her funeral arrangements before adult stem cell therapy saved her life.

So… she had a bone marrow transplant? I wonder why the authors don’t mention that bone marrow transplants can cure leukemia and other autoimmune disorders. A blood marrow transplant is a transplant of stem cells. Why don’t the authors of this article or the writers of this documentary call it a “bone marrow transplant”? Most people understand what that is. My guess is that if they stop calling it “bone marrow transplant” and call it “adult stem cell transplants” then they can politicize it.

The film also covers why even traditionally pro-choice advocates are speaking out against embryo-destructive stem cell research. In order to extract enough eggs for embryonic stem cell research, a woman’s ovaries are hyper-stimulated so that she will produce a dozen or more eggs at a time.

But doctors know that ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome and the drugs themselves have caused blood clotting, stroke, and even death. The former chief medical officer of the FDA warms that potential egg donors “need to be aware that this is not a procedure that is without risk.” Even the risk of death.

Bone marrow transplants are not without risk, either.

The vast majority of embryonic stem cells are leftovers from thousands of unused embryos from in vitro fertilization clinics. A simple solution to this problem might be to limit the ability of women to donate eggs to a stem cell clinic unless they are part of a fertility procedure. This is not an argument against stem cell research but an argument against fertility procedures.

That’s not what you are seeing in the media. What you do see, however, are celebrities and politicians gushing over the potential for embryo-destructive stem cell research. Even while lives are being saved today by adult stem cell therapy.

Well yes, because embryonic stem cell research does have lots of potential, whereas the potential of adult stem cells has been realized (at least in part) for 40+ years.

We need to be informed in order to help shape the public debate-and encourage our leaders to fund proven, morally unproblematic adult stem cell research.

That’s why I urge you to get a hold of the film Lines that Divide.

Wait, what was that about profits? I don't want scientists to research procedures that have already been proven effective. I want research to fund potentially effective treatments using science-based methodology.

CRI on stem-cells

Here we go with another article from the Christian Research Institute, this time on Stem Cells:

Some of America's hottest celebrities have been delivering emotional performances, designed to strike a resonant chord with their audience. They're pleading with Congress to endorse government-sponsored research involving the use of human embryos.

Why would Hollywood celebrities enter the world of congressional hearings? Because fetal tissue research — especially research on embryonic stem cells — is being trumpeted as a great scientific breakthrough and a biomedical revolution. This revolution, they say, could lead to cures for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes, AIDS, and more.

Consider for a moment why someone at CRI might write a piece on stem cells in which the article threads together the connection of “America’s hottest celebrities” to stem cell research. My guess is that typical readers of CRI are deeply Christian and thus may have a tendency to see celebrities as living in a world of failed values, sin and moral depravity. As such, mentioning celebrities in a piece (especially in this vague sense) is a tactic to get the reader to identify with anti-celebrity rhetoric. We “know” that the Average American® will listen to the advice of a celebrity regardless of said celebrity’s credentials. As such, this is likely to appeal to the intellect of the reader, I.E. “don’t be like the Average American® who gets advice from celebrities. Think for yourself!”

 They're campaigning because they want to see taxpayer dollars go for research programs that may alleviate suffering. That's all well and good, but the real problem is that fetal tissue research requires scientists to engage in unethical and immoral experimentation.

Please back up your assertion that embryonic stem cell fetal tissue research is unethical and immoral.

Some may ask how anyone with a heart could oppose such well-meaning research.

When they ask that, they are approaching the question from the wrong angle. Clearly, that kind of argument is meant to demonize opponents of stem-cell research. Of course we should not want human babies to die in order to help out other sick people. The question then becomes whether or not a collection of several hundred cells in a petri dish is a human baby.

The converse is true when stem cell opponents say that stem cell supporters are supporting mass genocide. By demonizing and misrepresenting your opponent’s argument, you lose credibility and your potential to make others understand your point of view diminishes.

The answer is that stem cell research requires the destruction of living human beings.

Please provide some evidence to back up that statement. Stem cell research does require the destruction of embryos, but I would argue that an embryo is distinct from a living human being. Also, once the embryos are destroyed, stem cells can be propagated almost infinitely.

Only human beings produce the precious stem cells that scientists desire; so, to get enough of them for research purposes, babies, even eight-weeks-old embryos in the womb, must be aborted and die.

Please back up your assertion that 8-week old embryos “must be aborted and die”.  Last I checked (which was right now) most stem cells are originally developed from embryos that are a few days old. Those embryos are grown in the lab rather than aborted from a womb.  Scientists have no problem “getting enough for research purposes”. The problem scientists have with embryonic stem cell research are people like the folks at CRI, who do not understand how stem cell research works and actively misconstrue information. The author of this piece makes it sound like scientists will need to go on fetus harvesting sprees to get the stem cells they need. No such thing needs to occur. The problem is not acquiring the stem cells – the problem is politics.

This is what NIH has to say:

“There are several sources of stem cells. Pluripotent stem cells can be isolated from human embryos that are a few days old. Cells from these embryos can be used to create pluripotent stem cell "lines" —cell cultures that can be grown indefinitely in the laboratory. Pluripotent stem cell lines have also been developed from fetal tissue (older than 8 weeks of development).

“Non-embryonic, or "adult" stem cells have been identified in many organs and tissues. Typically there is a very small number of multipotent stem cells in each tissue, and these cells have a limited capacity for proliferation, thus making it difficult to generate large quantities of these cells in the laboratory. Stem cells are thought to reside in a specific area of each tissue (called a "stem cell niche") where they may remain quiescent (non-dividing) for many years until they are activated by a normal need for more cells, or by disease or tissue injury. These cells are also called somatic stem cells.

Once a stem cell line is established from a cell in the body, it is essentially immortal, no matter how it was derived. That is, the researcher using the line will not have to go through the rigorous procedure necessary to isolate stem cells again. Once established, a cell line can be grown in the laboratory indefinitely and cells may be frozen for storage or distribution to other researchers.

Back to CRI...

Such researchers are willing to overlook these troublesome facts for the so-called "greater good of society," an argument straight out of Dr. Mengele's Nazi laboratories.

Some CRI writers are very fond of the Reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy, aren’t they?

Barring that, the author of this piece is once again misrepresenting the position of his opponent. We do not want mass genocide of babies in order to save people from disease. 

From the Hippocratic Oath of the fourth century before Christ to modern-day documents, medical ethics explicitly prohibit the harming of human life. "First, do no harm" has been the solemn oath of generations of physicians, but advocates of stem cell research would have us believe it's not a problem.

Belief has nothing to do with it. We swear not to harm human life, but it is more complicated than this simple proclamation. There are many gray areas in which one must use reason and critical thinking to determine if one’s actions are or are not harming human life. We are not trying to convince people that “harming human life” is okay. We’re convincing people that what we are doing isn’t “harming human life”.

 Some go further, saying that refusing to conduct such experiments is unethical! What's the basis for their assertion? It’s the possibility that the therapies derived from stem cell research could potentially alleviate the suffering of millions. The argument, however, is logically insupportable. Destroying life in order to save life is irrational and wrong, and it cannot be construed as an ethical act.

Maybe. Once again, the author simplifies a complicated issue into a soundbyte. We destroy life to save life every single day, simply by being alive ourselves. Humans sacrifice themselves in order to save others. We kill animals for food. We cut tumors out of people. We kill primates for research. Virtually all of medical science has destroyed life to alleviate suffering. Be more specific. If stem cells can be studied without killing people, then stem cells should be studied. Once again, stem cell supporters are not saying that they want to kill babies to save other people.  "destroying life to save life is irrational" just doesn't cut it as an argument. The author needs to specifically argue that destroying an embryo is unethical in order to have strong logical footing.

Furthermore, government-sanctioned destruction of human embryos isn't just unethical, it violates existing law. Federal funds may not be used for research in which embryos are destroyed. Some have tried to circumvent the law, but if Congress succumbs to the pressure to compromise, they'll be setting dangerous precedents for how human life is valued in the twenty-first century.

I am confused by this argument that stem cell research “isn’t just unethical, it violates existing law”. People would not be pleading with congress to lift the ban on government finding of stem cell research if government funding of stem cell research were allowed.This is like saying it is wrong for people to support the legalization of marijuana because marijuana is illegal.

The author seems to be claiming that human life will be devalued in the 21st century if the ban on federal funding for stem cell research is lifted. This is interesting. What kind of effects might we see from this devaluation? I guess we will see more destruction of blastocycsts and the potential to cure some of humanity’s most miserable ailments. This does not seem like a devaluation of human life to me.

Thankfully, several members of Congress are fighting for the unborn; and you can help them. Contact your representatives and let them know how you feel. Urge them to stay the course and make sure federally funded stem cell research remains illegal — regardless of what Hollywood superstars may say.

You should do what you believe think is right, regardless of what Hollywood superstars may say - that’s certainly true. You can also contact your representatives and urge them to lift the ban on federal funding for stem cell research.

We're back from Vegas!

Hi everyone!

After my nearly week and a half-long blog hiatus, I am seriously behind! I had absolutely no free time to write during my trip to Vegas for TAM7 – I might have had time if I were able to write in the car, but doing to makes me carsick.

TAM7 was fun – I got to meet a lot of new and interesting people. I didn’t feel particularly enlightened by the speakers and panels, but that’s okay – I am rather entrenched in the skeptical movement, so I am not surprised that there was nothing particularly new to hear about. We've got a few entertaining stories from the after-party, such as Saint Gasoline being constantly reminded of his knife-fucking ways, me tying people up with some bondage rope and running into an internet friend in passing. We also have a few entertaining stories from the road - staying in the worst motel ever and passing by the "Jesus Christ is Lord... Not a swear word" truck stop.

I quite enjoyed a performance of the “Nigerian Spam Scam Scam” in which Dean Cameron receives a Nigerian 411 scam email and corresponds with the scammer for over a year. The performance is a reading of the correspondences.

Michael Shermer had some interesting things to say about politics which Flimsy will cover in more detail – politics are his thing more than they are mine. We will also return to our regular deconstructing of Mere Christianity and silly journal articles.

Insufficient Christianity: 6:1

In this chapter, C. S. Lewis makes a couple of different points, flowing into one another:

If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view. But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong.

I can see some hint of this perspective, because I was once a fundamentalist Christian myself.  I think, however, that this business about "all religions having some hint of the truth" only really holds water from a Christian perspective (possibly others, as well, but not mine).  From the perspective of many Christians, the single most important question in life may very well be "Is there a God?"  Perhaps some atheists agree, but I rather doubt it.  Lewis seems to be implying that he considered this to be the "Most Important Question" when he was an atheist as well, but I find this rather odd.

As an atheist, the question of whether God exists is important, yes, but still takes a backseat to others.  Bluntly, I find it to be considerably more important how ethical and intelligent a person is (whether they infringe upon the rights of others or advocate policies that would achieve such a thing, do they undermine science, do they indoctrinate their children to the point of severely handicapping them later in life, etc.).  As an atheist, exactly because I don't believe in a God or gods of any description, the question of the existence of God (or any other supernatural phenomena) is quite important, yes, but it is secondary to issues directly concerning the benefit or detriment of the human race.  As Ziztur has mentioned before, there is a reason why we rant and bellow about many portions of organized religion and alternative medicine, while not particularly caring about bizarre conspiracy theories or cryptozoology (Bigfoot, Loch Ness monster, etc.).  We're concerned to some degree or another with any type of demonstrably false belief, but we're primarily concerned with such beliefs that have a direct and significant harmful effect on humanity.  I'll argue against Ray Comfort and fundamentalist Christianity all day long, but I have no huge bone to pick with, for example, even a devout Catholic Christian who is very concerned with preserving the rights of others (like abortion) and supporting genuine scientifically sound education (like comprehensive, contraceptive-based sex education).

I think most non-religious people can agree with me here; overall, the mere existence of God just isn't quite as important to us non-believers as the actions of his followers, and the effect of those actions on the fate of humanity.  I'm very curious why C. S. Lewis, as an atheist, apparently considered this question to be the most important of all.

Lewis goes on to say that the first big division in humanity is this:  whether we believe or disbelieve in a God or gods (again, this is true, so far as it goes, but I maintain that an even more significant question is whether a given person or group of persons, unified by common belief, behave in a way that is beneficial or detrimental to humanity).  The next big division among the majority of god-believers is between those who believe that God is in all things and that he/she/it, indeed, is all things - pantheism, and monotheism, as in the case of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.  Obviously, this conspicuously ignores a whole vast portion of humanity, at least in the past, who have believed in a pantheon of gods.  Lewis correctly observes that in pantheist religions, the culture was quite often relatively secular to some degree or another, yet this was also the case in many or most polytheistic religions.

Interestingly, Lewis makes a point of declaring that in the division between the "religious" and the "secular" in general, we secularists are far in the minority, which is true.  On the other hand, Lewis, for some reason, fails to mention the fact that monotheism has been, throughout human history, far, far in the minority itself.

Lewis expresses his disagreement with what he claims is the pantheist view; that because God is in everything and is everything, that there is no real distinction between Good and Evil:

If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is, a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will. Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, 'If you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realize that this also is God.' The Christian replies. 'Don't talk damned nonsense.'

This is highly illogical.  A pantheist (in the sense and of the type that Lewis presents here) could potentially argue that parts of the universe could still be outside of God's will, in the same way that a person diagnosed with cancer would certainly agree that a part of their body is behaving outside of that individual's will.  However, in general, I agree with Lewis - if a pantheist were to consider their universal God to be "all-powerful" in some sense, then one must either claim that there is no meaningful distinction between Good and Evil, or one must abandon that conception of God.

However, Lewis rather obviously glosses over the fact that his Christian god is in exactly the same boat.  Because the Christian god is claimed to both be the creator of the universe and to have absolute control over the universe, then by Lewis' exact argument against a universal, pantheist God, it is completely logically impossible for anything to occur in the universe that is "outside of God's will."

This, of course, is how Lewis dismisses both the atheist's naturalistic view and the pantheist's view:

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?. . . Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies.

This is the entire crux of Lewis' argument.  It seems clear to me that Lewis is still begging the question.  There is simply no contradiction in saying, as the atheist Secular Humanist does, that reason and critical thinking can enable us to determine what actions would be in the best interests of humanity, and that we should pursue those actions.  Lewis' argument rests entirely on his unstated premise that his sense of justice, which he judges the universe by, can not possibly be "real" unless it has been given to us by a higher power.  Simply because a system of ethics judges the world to be "unjust" (yet was not passed on to us by a god or gods) does not mean that those ethics are therefore merely "a private idea of our own."

Lewis' conclusion is impossible based on the criteria that he himself gives us.  If the world really is unjust, then there cannot exist a God who agrees with us about the world's state and who has ultimate power over it.  The only rational conclusions based on Lewis' own premises are:  1)  There is no such thing as "good" and "evil" from a human perspective (which is refuted by our observations of reality, unless you use really weird, horribly butchered definitions of those words), 2)  There exists a god capable of *partially* installing morality in human beings but is otherwise completely incapable of taking direct action in the world, or 3)  Human beings are capable of determining "good" and "evil" with logic, observation, and critical thinking, and our conclusions are the best and, likely, the only measure of determining whether the world is just or unjust.

Lewis' argument is circular; he can only reach his conclusion by assuming as an unstated premise that an idea of justice is only "real" (or, more accurately, objective) if it was given to us by a supernatural creator.  The real answer to his problem is simple:  Objective morality can be determined by human beings with logic, reason, and observation, and such a moral system is perfectly capable of identifying injustice in the world.

Mere Christianity Online

homepathy yet again: funny video

This video is all over the skeptisphere, but I don't care - I am going to post it again!

Also, I realize this video will be so big that it covers up some of the sidebar. I can't find a good way around this, you'll live.

Insufficient Christianity: 5:3

To finish up chapter 5 of Mere Christianity, Lewis continues:

Now my third point. When I chose to get to my real subject in this roundabout way, I was not trying to play any kind of trick on you. I had a different reason. My reason was that Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing.

It still does not make sense to me, because the “fact” described herein are not face – merely rationalization. Lewis has arrived at this point by believing Christianity is true at the outset, and then proceeding to rationalize his beliefs if a five-chapter circular argument.

 Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realised that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power--it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.

In that case, since Lewis has failed to prove there is an absolute moral law given by god, Christianity will continue to not make much sense to me. 

When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor.

Good doctors don’t treat illness unless they have solid evidence to back up their diagnosis. If Lewis were a doctor, he would assume before you walked in that you had a broken leg, and then based on his diagnosis, rationalize that all of your symptoms fit that of “broken leg”.

When you have realised that our position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about. They offer an explanation of how we got into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it. They offer an explanation of how God can be this impersonal mind at the back of the Moral Law and yet also a Person. They tell you how the demands of this law, which you and I cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how God Himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God.

Ha! I’ve had some people tell me that “god became a man to save man from the disapproval of god” misunderstands Christianity (Actually, I put it like, “god sent down himself to have his creation kill himself as a sacrifice to save his creation from himself”) yet here Lewis uses similar phrasing and tells his reader that Christianity can explain this oddness. What he does here is assume that doctrines of Christianity are true and that the Christian religion can explain it.
A person of another religion could say the same thing – that the doctrine of their religion is true and that their religion is the best explanation of said truth. This would probably be quite unconvincing to Lewis, or any other Christian, for that matter.

All I am doing is to ask people to face the facts--to understand the questions which Christianity claims to answer.

As I have explained already, sometimes it does not make sense to ask those questions in the first place. 

And they are very terrifying facts. I wish it was possible to say something more agreeable. But I must say what I think true. Of course, I quite agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort.

 But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth--only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion.

I might say the same thing about the conclusion of atheism. Of course, that woould not really add anything to the persuasiveness of atheism, as you could say the same thing about any religion, worldview, etc.

Insufficient Christianity: 5:2

Lewis continues chapter five of Mere Christianity…

And we have not yet got as far as a personal God--only as far as a power, behind the Moral Law, and more like a mind than it is like anything else.

To sum up Lewis’ points thus far.

1.    god made the universe happen
2.    god gave us morals
3.    god is actually really scary and not nice to people

Lewis goes on to assume that the thing that produced 1, 2 and 3 is a “mind” or sorts. Why? Why not “minds”? There is no reason to assume that 1, 2 and 3 come from a single mind – this could have all come about as a result of the meddling of ten eternal beings working at an eternal shop of infinity. They could be a group of new hires proving their worth during their probationary period by creating a prototype universe. There is no reason to assume, even if you accept that the universe and moral laws came from somewhere outside the universe, that we know anything at all about the thing(s) that are outside the universe. It is a wholly unjustified premise that only comes about because Lewis is not engaging in skepticism in which he lets logic and reasoning lead where it may. His logic and reasoning clearly has a goal and thus falls squarely in the category of “rationalization” – and you know that one can rationalize anything one wants if one tries hard enough. Let’s move on…

But it may still be very unlike a Person.. If it is pure impersonal mind, there may be no sense in asking it to make allowances for you or let you off, just as there is no sense in asking the multiplication table to let you off when you do your sums wrong. You are bound to get the wrong answer. And it is no use either saying that if there is a God of that sort--an impersonal absolute goodness--then you do not like Him and are not going to bother about Him. For the trouble is that one part of you is on His side and really agrees with his disapproval of human greed and trickery and exploitation.

What Lewis is saying here is that since humans ask god for things, claim that we don’t like god, that god must be a personal god. He is right – it doesn’t make sense for people to ask an impersonal god for things, much like it doesn’t make sense to ask a doorknob to save your marriage. I think that Lewis intends for the reader of this paragraph to think, “Oh! I ask god to forgive me, so he clearly must not be an impersonal force, because otherwise my asking makes no sense. So god must be a personal god”. Of course, you could also use the same reasoning to conclude that the doorknob is not an inanimate object, but a personal force.

You may want Him to make an exception in your own case, to let you off this one time; but you know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detests that sort of behaviour, then He cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do.

A lot of people wonder how a being composed of absolute good can create beings that are so imperfect it hates most of what they do.

This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless.

Why? I hear this all the time from people and do not understand how they can come to the conclusion that unless there is an absolute good, all the good we do is pointless. It just does not follow. It seems to assume, perhaps, that our eventual goal is to get as close to absolute goodness as possible. If we build a sandcastle, is our goal to build a cool sandcastle or to get closer and closer to the ultimate absolute sandcastle?

I think that this is a fundamental flaw in thinking – assuming there is a “perfect” or “absolute” version of abstract concepts like “goodness” or “love”. This is another kind of reification – assuming that an abstract concept (goodness) must possess a certain abstract property (perfection). This is essentially a version of Plato’s Theory of Forms.

But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we must need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger -according to the way you react to it. And we have reacted the wrong way.

This is definitely a “religious jaw”.

Why Evolution Is True; and cumulative selection

The other day, I picked up Why Evolution Is True by Dr. Jerry Coyne from the library. A few days later I had finished it, and a few days after that, I want to write a few lines on what I think about it.

The book’s aim—as very straightforwardly implied by the title—is to lay out in concise form a reasonably comprehensive (and comprehensible) body of evidence for evolution. As such, it spans a pretty wide range of areas—biogeography, palæontology, genetics, and so forth. At only ~300 pages, it has to go at a pretty good pace, and it does—but it’s largely a good thing. The book is accessible, but not dumbed down; it is brief and concise, but not superficial. It lays out a huge breadth of evidence with plentiful references (many internet references) for those who want more depth.

My brief opinion is: This is one of the best, and possibly the best book I have read in terms of laying out precisely what the title claims: Why Evolution Is True.
 
The funny thing is, when I put it down, my mind was actually full of gripes. I was constantly wondering about the tone—it wasn’t very technical, but couldn’t it have been simplified in places? I now think that, yes, it could have, but I don’t think it would have been to its advantage. It’s simple enough to be accessible to laymen, and that is enough. Let’s not pretend that it isn’t science, don’t give the impression of condescending, and don’t sacrifice precision by avoiding scientific terminology altogether.

I also found one argument missing that I might have liked to see—one that Richard Dawkins has made wonderfully lucid in more than one book—that of the difference between “single-step” and cumulative selection: The counter to the old “747 in a junkyard” argument¹. In fact, its omission irked me very greatly because I think it is such an excellent counter to fairly common creationist/cdesign proponentsist objections to evolution by natural selection as being statistically impossible.

However, I think that the reason why this irked me so very greatly may be because virtually every other persuasive argument is either explained or alluded to; and the focus of the book is, after all, on evidence rather than argument. If someone near you suffers under the delusion that evolution is not a fact, and the neo-Darwinian synthesis is not a very solid scientific theory, you could scarcely do better than to recommend this book to them—perhaps with an explanation of cumulative selection to solidify the deal; or have them graduate to Dawkins, e.g. The Blind Watchmaker, which takes a complementary approach of theoretical argument (though on a very accessible level!) as contrasted to Coyne’s straightforward presentation of evidence.

---

¹ The “747 in a junkyard” argument stems from this quote by astronomer Fred Hoyle:

A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.

Hoyle was not a creationist—but never mind his motivation. Creationists have hijacked this quote and use it to point out a perceived implausibility of evolution. The chance of something so complex as an eye, for instance, arising by chance, is of course minuscule. How can “Darwinists” claim that it arose purely by chance? The answer is, of course, that they don’t, because nobody thinks that the eye sprung forth fully formed from a single mutation, but rather incrementally, and if it was improbable, it was a matter of cumulative selection.

What do I mean by “cumulative probability”? I mean that we can build up on past successes. Take, for example, a coin flip. The odds of getting heads on a single flip is ½. The odds of two flips simultaneously resulting in heads are ½×½ = (½)² = ¼. Three heads at once? ½×½×½ = (½)³ = ⅛. —And so on. The odds of, say, 100 heads all at once are 1 in 2¹⁰⁰: Less than one in a thousand billion billion billion. If we flip our 100 coins once a second, it will take us on the order of a million billion billion years to flip all 100 heads at the same time. That’s about 100,000 billion times the age of the universe. This is single-step selection: We’re looking for a specific result, and we need to get it in a single step: The simultaneous flip of 100 coins.

But natural selection doesn’t require this. The theory of evolution by natural selection predicts that any helpful change will be “saved up” and passed down to further generations—it doesn’t have to be perfect—it just has to be an improvement, however small. If we flip 100 coins, we’ll almost certainly get some heads—the odds of getting 0 are the same as getting 100, and that will virtually never happen. We’ll probably get about 50 heads. Now we’re allowed to save them, and only have to re-flip the 50 tails. Probably about half of them will be heads. —And so forth. If we assume that we get half heads, half tails every time, we’ll have 100 heads—on average—after 7 flips or so.

You will note that 7 is rather less than a thousand billion billion billion. We can now accomplish the task of flipping 100 heads in about 7 seconds rather than 100,000 billion times the age of the universe (if we can sort through them quickly enough…). The argument is vastly simplified, and obviously none of this applies at all closely to biology.

What should be clear—and the point of the argument—is that there is a huge (in fact, a geometrical) difference between single-step and cumulative selection.

JREF swift again!

Remember my post on Acupuncture and Occam's Razor from a few days ago? I wrote a more complete analysis of the journal article in question and sent it off to the JREF Swift blog to be published.

You can find it here.

Insufficient Christianity: 5:1

Lewis opens chapter 5 by explaining that some people might be annoyed that he has tricked them into listening to a “religious jaw”. He says that he is not – that he is simply starting at the beginning and following the rabbit hole of reason where it leads. Thus, he asserts he is not coming to a conclusion that his god exists based on any religion.

…we are trying to see what we can find out about this Somebody on our own steam. And I want to make it quite clear that what we find out on our own steam is something that gives us a shock. We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody. One is the universe He has made. If we used that as our only clue, then I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place). The other bit of evidence is that Moral Law which He has put into our minds.

Alas, Lewis has failed to prove that there is a somebody. The universe is not evidence that the universe was created, and Lewis does not provide any evidence that it is, aside from the moral argument used previously. I’ve explained this in previous posts, so I don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

Let’s consider for a moment the beauty of the universe. It certainly is beautiful, but this says more about our perceptions than it does about the universe itself. I think that the chaos and destruction of an abandoned building is beautiful. But the beauty of peeling paint and broken windows does not mean that the abandoned building is a product of an intentional artist. It’s just there, being taken over by various forces: nature, physics, vandals. An abandoned building is a far more apt metaphor for the universe than a painting.

The comment about this “somebody” being merciless and no friend to man is interesting. Surely, the universe is an inhospitable place. Again though, it depends on your perspective. As to the “somebody” being the giver of moral law, I’ve already refuted that.

And this [the moral law] is a better bit of evidence than the other, because it is inside information. You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.”

The plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not data. The idea that you can find out more about a man by listening to conversation than by looking at a house he has built is pure speculation and depends on what information you are seeking. I can gather plenty of information about someone by looking at the house they have built –how skillful a craftsman they are, what kind of eye they have for design, how much thought they put into finer details, how they think a house should look, etc. If I observe them actually building the house, I can glean much more information – how fast they work, whether they hire outside help, what kinds of tools they prefer, how they hold a hammer, how often they take breaks for food, how they solve problems, and so forth. A person cannot tell me how they balance on two feet with conversation.  The only thing that listening to myself tells me for certain are things about myself. The fact that I have morality and know that I have morality is not good evidence that there is a creator any more than the fact that someone believes they were abducted and raped by aliens means they were abducted and raped by aliens, especially in light of a lack of externally observable evidence. So what Lewis is saying is that even though we can’t observe god, we know he is there because we intuit him based on the fact that we have morality.

Now, from this second bit of evidence we conclude that the Being behind the universe is intensely interested in right conduct in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness. In that sense we should agree with the account given by Christianity and some other religions, that God is 'good'.

This simply does not follow. So, let’s pretend for a second that I accept Lewis’ arguments that the universe was created, and that said creator put morality in our heads. It really does not follow that this creator is intensely interested in our morality. Could he not just have set our moral programming on autopilot so he could go off to do something else? Once again, this is like reaching into an infinite cosmic grab bag with an infinite number of prizes (which contains prizes we cannot begin to imagine) and knowing that you will pick a yo-yo. We could argue that sexual desire it outside of humanity in the same way Lewis argues that morality is outside humanity. The creator also put intense sexual desires in our heads, so the creator must also be intensely concerned with matters of sex, so by Lewis’ reasoning, his god must be a nymphomaniac. Even accepting the premise that there is a god and that said god put morality into us, it does not follow that this god is good, as this god also put everything else which is “outside man” into our head, not to mention all of the things inside the heads of animals, whatever those may be.

But do not let us go too fast here. The Moral Law does not give us any grounds for thinking that God is 'good' in the sense of being indulgent, or soft, or sympathetic. There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft. It is no use, at this stage, saying that what you mean by a 'good' God is a God who can forgive. You are going too quickly. Only a Person can forgive.

Only a person can forgive? I’d really like some supporting evidence for this. Yet, this assertion is made with no justification whatsoever.

Since god gave us morality, and morality is not easy stuff, then god must not be easy stuff either. Why not? Why couldn’t god have given us morality, but be forgiving of everyone, or be easy and soft? Again, Lewis offers no justification and simply asserts ideas as facts, paving the way endlessly and convoluted toward Christianity. Is this a "religious jaw"? Absolutely.

Ref: Mere Christianity Online

Leaving for TAM7!

In a few hours we'll be leaving for TAM7. I am going to have limited internet access, but will probably be Twittering interesting tidbits. You can follow me here.

Somehow, I'll figure out how to blog from my Blackberry - maybe I can write up blog posts using my laptop, then transfer them to my Berry? We shall see!

I have to thank all the people who have bought jewelry or just straight up donated money to help Flimsy and I get to TAM7. You know who you are (I'd call you out by name but you might want to remain anonymous) and you deserve lots of love!

I'll be Twittering random updates or pieces of interesting information as I see fit, as well as posting random pictures of our road trip to Twitpic.

Insufficient Christianity: 4.2

Lewis continues chapter 4 of Mere Christianity…

Now the position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know. And because of that, we know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make

I have earlier rejected the premise that men did not make the moral law – there is no reason to assume that we haven’t, any more than we make any other social law.

 Anyone studying Man from the outside as we study electricity or cabbages, not knowing our language and consequently not able to get any inside knowledge from us, but merely observing what we did, would never get the slightest evidence that we had this moral law. How could he? For his observations would only show what we did, and the moral law is about what we ought to do.

We do not need to know exactly what other beings think in order to come to a conclusion about their morality. We can and have obtained information about “inside knowledge” from observation of the behaviors of other animals that behave in a moral way. We can infer from animal species what behaviors they “ought to do” by using reason to determine which behaviors will produce whichever outcome. Lewis provides no justification for why something outside man cannot get even the “slightest evidence” of moral law. We can, in fact, get more than slight evidence of the morality of other animals by studying them. Thus, Lewis fails at establishing that morality exists outside of the populations that possess it.

 The position of the question, then, is like this. We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it.

But certainly that power has an effect on the universe –and effect which can be observed. If that power has no effect which we can observe, then that power is essentially irrelevant. How does one determine that inobservable effect exist? How do we know what those effects are if we are unable to observe them? I like to use this analogy: determining that we know the effect of an entity that escapes observation is rather like reaching into an infinite cosmic grab bag with an infinite number of prizes (which contains prizes we cannot begin to imagine) and knowing that you will pick a yo-yo. Any sort of attributes we can claim to an inobservable entity is nonsensical.

So, Lewis is saying we cannot use facts to determine whether or not the universe just IS, or whether or not the universe was created. He says we cannot use facts to determine the ISness or the CREATEDness of the universe. His justification is that since we cannot say anything about the morality of a given population by simply observing them (we can), that the universe works in the same way – the creator of the universe must be outside of the universe, just as morality must be outside humans. But morality isn’t outside humans. It is outside of individual humans, but it is more likely a product of evolution, the fact that our species is a population of individuals, and culture than anything else. Additionally, evolutionary psychology provides a better, if not complete, picture of how morality may have evolved. The book “The Moral Animal” by Robert Wright is a good start.

Or put it the other way round. If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe--no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house.

I am really having a hard time wrapping my head around how this metaphor is supposed to work. If there is a controlling power outside the universe, it can show itself to use by having an observable effect on the universe – for example, if it wrote its name in million foot tall neon letters across the sky just so that we could see it every night of the week, “MADE BY GOD”. A controlling power outside the universe could reach its metaphorical hand into the universe and poke us in the face.

The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way.

This statement is absolutely unjustified. Why is this the “only” way? How is this different from the metaphor above? This sure seems like an example of the architect of the house being a wall to me. So to sum up…

1.    Morality is separate from humans
2.    Either the universe IS, or was created.
3.    We can’t observe a creator as a fact
4.    The creator only shows itself by giving humans morality

Lewis’ Conclusion: we have morality, therefore there is a god.

My conclusion: we have morality, therefore we have morality.

Ref:  Mere Christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity: 4.1

Lewis begins Chapter 4 of Mere Christianity with this:

I now want to consider what this tells us about the universe we live in. Ever since men were able to think, they have been wondering what this universe really is and how it came to be there. And, very roughly, two views have been held. First, there is what is called the materialist view. People who take that view think that matter and space just happen to exist, and always have existed, nobody knows why; and that the matter, behaving in certain fixed ways, has just happened, by a sort of fluke, to produce creatures like ourselves who are able to think. By one chance in a thousand something hit our sun and made it produce the planets; and by another thousandth chance the chemicals necessary for life, and the right temperature, occurred on one of these planets, and so some of the matter on this earth came alive; and then, by a very long series of chances, the living creatures developed into things like us.

Before I begin explaining why this is a strawman misrepresentation of the materialist view, I will note that there is a note at the end of this chapter wherein Lewis explains that these are not the only two views on origins. Now…

The question as to how matter and space “got here” (cosmology), is a separate question from how biological life arose from matter and space (abeogenesis), is a separate question from how biological life became so complex (evolution by natural selection). Lewis essentially boils down the materialist position into that of a smug scientist shrugging his shoulders.  Materialists hold the position that there is no supernatural, that all things operate according to laws of nature, and that life is a product of natural processes. Materialists, assuming they follow consensus cosmology, do not believe that “matter and space have always existed and that nobody knows why.” To even ask “why” is to presuppose a purpose. But, I’ll leave the long-winded explanation of materialism aside and say simply that materialism is not quite as Lewis describes it, though I suppose we can give him a free pass for condensing materialism into its creationist soundbytes, given that Mere Christianity is essentially a transcription of a radio essay.

The other view is the religious view.* According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another. And on this view it made the universe, partly for purposes we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like itself--I mean, like itself to the extent of having minds. Please do not think that one of these views was held a long time ago and that the other has gradually taken its place. Wherever there have been thinking men both views turn up.

This is very interesting. Instead of beginning an inquiry as to the nature of the universe by looking at the evidence we see, Theists like Lewis begin an inquiry as to the nature of the universe by first asking what the purpose of the universe might be, and then proposing a conscious entity to give the universe its purpose. Yet, we have not yet established that the universe has a purpose. That the universe has a purpose is an unstated premise. On a smaller scale, this is akin to walking outside and seeing a smudge of mud on the sidewalk. On seeing the smudge, we ask what the purpose of this smudge might be. Once we inquire as to the purpose of the smudge, we propose a smudgemaker who created the smudge with the intention of having us go outside and ponder the purpose of the smudge. We have not even considered that there us no purpose to the smudge. I realize this paragraph is only loosely related to Lewis’ text, so you’ll have to forgive me for going off on a tangent. Here, Lewis seems to be boiling down the materialist and the religious viewpoint into, “viewpoint that the universe does not have a purpose” and “viewpoint that the universe does have a purpose”.

Moving on…

And note this too. You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense.”

What Lewis is saying here is that we can’t use observation, experimentation, and rational thinking to determine if the materialist or religious view is the right one. Science, in the ordinary sense, has already determined that the materialist view is the “right one”.  I can only conclude further that what he means by “right one” is the opposing views of whether or not the universe has some greater purpose.

This is a type of fallacy of reification or anthropomorphic fallacy. Having a purpose is an abstraction. All that we have been able to observe about the universe shows that it operates as a series of events, and treating the universe as if it has a “purpose” erroneously attributes intention to these events, unless we can establish that the universe in fact has a purpose. We have not established this - thus assuming that the universe has a purpose, and then assuming that some entity had to give the universe this purpose, and then following that concluding that a god had to give the universe a purpose - is a string of logic based on a fallacious initial premise. Thus, we have a problem. We (humans) generally behave as though we have a purpose – a cognitive awareness of linking cause and effect in order to achieve a goal. We cannot assume the universe is working to achieve a goal, and many errors in thinking can be attributed to this assumption.

Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, 'I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 a.m. on January 15th and saw so and-so,' or, 'I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such -and such a temperature and it did so-and-so.' Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is.

Science also works by observation and rational thinking.

And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science--and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes--something of a different kind-this is not a scientific question. If there is 'Something Behind,' then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, 'Why is there a universe?' 'Why does it go on as it does?' 'Has it any meaning?' would remain just as they were?

I have already answered the question. Quite simply, asking what purpose and meaning the universe has is reification – a fallacy. This is likely to be quite an unsatisfactory answer for most people. So in a way, Lewis is correct. Science can’t answer questions as to the plan and purpose of the universe, because we have observed no such purpose –we have only observed events. Asking “why” presupposes that there is some type of purpose which we might glean from inquiry. Asking science to answer the question as to the plan and purpose to the universe is like asking me how much money I have in my wallet after I've told you I do not own a wallet.

What science tells us is that we give our own lives purpose and meaning and that there is no ultimate plan or purpose.  Why bother give our lives purpose and meaning? The simplest answer is, "because we can".

Ref:  Mere Christianity Online

acupuncture versus electro-acupuncture: Occam's Razor

It irks me when I see headlines like, “For Women with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, Acupuncture and Exercise May Bring Relief, Reduce Risks”, as seen here in this article.

When you click the article, you’re greeted with, “Exercise and electro-acupuncture treatments can reduce sympathetic nerve activity in women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), according to a new study.”

Electro-acupuncture and acupuncture are two entirely different things. There are countless studies documenting the positive effects of applying electric currents to bodily tissues. The mechanism of action in this study is the “electro” part, rather than the “acupuncture” part. But, people may read the headline of the study or even the article itself and come to the conclusion that acupuncture may be effective. In the article, they interchange the words “electro-acupuncture” with “acupuncture” freely, using the word “electro-acupuncture” and “acupuncture” 8 times each.

If electrical therapy (given via a TENS unit or other non-invasive modality) is equally as effective and an electro-acupuncture therapy, then electro-acupuncture therapy is unethical, as it puts a participant at unnecessary risk of complications. I did an Article First, Pubmed and Academic Search Primer search for studies comparing electro-acupuncture therapy to some type of non-invasive electrical therapy.

I found no comparisons.

I think Occam's Razor applies here. If 1 + 1 = 2, and 1 + 1 + X = 2, where X has potential side effects (such as punctured lungs, paraplegia, subarachnoid hemorrhage, infection, endocarditis, and so on), then applying X to participants is unethical and unnecessary.

One of the arguments against "western medicine" is that people often are "forced to undergo expensive and unnecessary procedures". Clearly, that argument can be turned around and aimed at alternative medicine practitioners just as easily.

Insufficient Christianity: Chapter 3.1

In this chapter, Lewis makes a distinction between physical laws by which material objects operate and moral laws by which humans tend to operate. He comes to the conclusion that these differences are such that it defies simple “natural” explanation and requires, instead, that something “above and beyond the ordinary facts of men's behaviour, and yet quite definitely real--a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us”.

Lewis begins by saying that objects behave according to certain laws – a rock will fall due to the Law of Gravity, and a tree will grow and be shaped by the environment due to physical laws. When we say that a stone is the “wrong shape”, we do not mean that a stone can be blamed for being the shape that it is because we understand the processes that gave the stone its shape.  A rock shaped for our purposes obeyed the same laws as a rock unsuited for our purposes.

In this way, a “Law” means, “an observation of what things always do”. I.E. a rock always obeys gravity. Lewis says that this is different from the “Moral Law” as people do not always obey moral laws. Lewis believes this is unnatural.

    The Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not simply a fact about human behaviour in the same way as the Law of Gravitation is, or may be, simply a fact about how heavy objects behave.

Lewis says this, and while I agree that the “Moral Law” is not the same as a Law of Gravitation”, that does not mean that the moral law is not a fact about how humans behave. I believe that this distinction Lewis makes between some laws being “natural” and morality being “unnatural” is entirely arbitrary. Human interactions, thoughts and ideas are incredibly complex and there is no reason to assume that this complexity is somehow unnatural simply because it is different from the “Law of Gravity”. Lewis is essentially pointing out that physical laws and moral laws are different from one another, and that this difference must mean that the more complicated moral law is unnatural.

Let us compare a simpler law with the Law of Gravity. Let’s pretend that in my home city of St. Louis, it is illegal to own tomatoes. It is possible for me to own tomatoes, but I ought not to own tomatoes. Perhaps I really enjoy tomatoes and feel I would greatly benefit from owning some, but feel that for the greater benefit of society, I should refrain from owning them. My ability to act in a manner which is not entirely selfish is, according to Lewis, unnatural and thus requires explanation:

And that is where I do stop. Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be fair. Not that men are unselfish, not that they like being unselfish, but that they ought to be. The Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not simply a fact about human behaviour in the same way as the Law of Gravitation is, or may be, simply a fact about how heavy objects behaveAnd that is where I do stop. Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be fair. Not that men are unselfish, not that they like being unselfish, but that they ought to be.”

No, it is not the same as these facts, but that does not meant that it is not a fact that human as a species survive because they are capable and driven to behave unselfishly. If all humans suddenly decided to behave completely selfishly tomorrow, one can imagine that our species would not last very long – just like if a species of beetle all decided to fly into the mouths of dogs, the species of beetle would not last long, either.

We don’t behave in the way we do in order to survive – rather, we survive because we behave in the way we do.

This seems to be such a common thread in the way Christian apologists think - making the assumption that the way the universe operates is a goal rather than an effect. To put it in a simpler, far more absurd way – it is like marveling at how well the legs were designed perfectly for the fitting of pants, or marveling at how the face is shaped just so to accommodate a pair of glasses.  The reason Lewis needs to postulate something beyond reality to explain the moral behavior of humans is due to the fact that he sees our species as an end product – he sees our legs as being perfectly designed for pants, and tries to explain how something extraordinary must be posited to explain how our legs got that way. There is no reason to assume that our social morals are not naturally what we do, that the ever increasing complexity of our social morals is a product of fitting into the environment that we were handed.

Reference: Mere christianity Online

JREF Swift Blog

For those of you familiar with the James Randi Educational Foundation (the lovely TAM7 folks) you might want to check out the Swift blog - I guest posted over there!

Check it out! I feel so famous.

How to make ad hominem attacks

This blog post is in response to this article, published by the Christian "Research" Institute.

Please do not think I am actually making these arguments - I am not.  This is very important - I am NOT MAKING THESE ARGUMENTS. I have taken the original text and replaced the words "atheist" with the words "Christian". The point is that if you make a lot of substanceless and bigoted attacks toward one group, it is very easy to replace the name of one group with another and get the same useless mealy-mouthed results. Note how I say nothing at all, and instead resort to name-calling and sound bytes. This is an example of how NOT to make an argument, yet the original authors have done exactly this.  I highly suggest clicking the link above and reading the original text first, or this may make no sense. Observe:

 A few published and prolific Christians apparently have commandeered the soapbox at the proverbial free speech alley, vowing not to surrender it until the extraordinary and popular delusion of naturalism is completely dispelled. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, in less than a couple of years Christianity’s newest champions have sold 200+ million books, Some 10 million copies of Lee Strobel’s Case for a Creator, 30 million copies of Rick Warren’s the Purpose Driven Life, 65 million copies of Tim LaHay’s Left Behind Series, 250,000 copies of Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box are in print, along with countless other books on Christianity taking up huge sections of bookstores. There are even entire bookstores devoted to this new pestilence. 

“The character of the ‘village Christian’ reappears from time to time in history, usually after the latest scientific announcement or the latest natural disaster. His title is akin to that of ‘village idiot’ which was popularized by George Bernard Shaw in 1907,” says Christian apologist Joel McDurmon, author of The Return of the Village Christian.1 “The idea is that every village had its ‘idiot’ who was full of opinions and advice on every topic, would never shut up, and made little sense. No one took the guy seriously” (p. xiii).

When the title “village idiot” becomes that of “village Christian,” it speaks of the person who thinks that The Holy Bible has all the answers and that the idea of non-supernatural reality is an illusion. “Like the village idiot, he knows everything, argues till he is blue in the face, never shuts up, and yet never learns,” says McDurmon, “and like the village idiot, no one really takes him seriously, either” (xii).

Despite what McDurmon notes is a tendency of Christians to wax dogmatic, however—consider Warren’s claim that “This book will help you understand why you are alive and God's amazing plan for you--both here and now, and for eternity...The Purpose-Driven Life is a blueprint for Christian living in the 21st century...”—some argue that there are reasons enough to take them seriously. One of the main reasons is that much passionate debate raises questions for many people, such as, Is naturalism intellectual nonsense? Are science and religion locked in a battle to the death? and, Is atheism simply a force for evil?

Then there is the matter of the cult of personality. Ziztur, occupational therapy doctoral candidate and atheist, believes atheists should take the likes of Warren, LaHay, and Strobel seriously because “these guys are so confident and their rhetorical force so convincing, there are people who may believe the message even if they don’t understand the arguments. These [atheists] should not be reading these books without qualification,” she parodied in her blog, “On the other hand, the critical thinker, able to see through the smokescreen of rhetoric and to endure their caustic delivery, would be led to ask the question, ‘Is this is the best you’ve got? Maybe my worldview has a lot going for it after all.’”

Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, realizes that the rise of Fundamentalist Christianity confirms the ancient biblical wisdom of the book of Ecclesiastes that “there is nothing new under the sun.” He is quick to note several stunning new developments, however.

“Promulgating Christianity has become a lucrative business [and] profitability is not the only feature distinguishing today’s fashionable belief from the varieties of Christianity that have arisen over the millennia,” he says.

The most obvious characteristics, Berkowitz states, are best realized by a historical comparison of Fundamentalist Christianity to the classical Christianity of Martin Luther, the Enlightenment Christianity of the eighteenth century, and the anti-modern Christianity of Lewis and Augustine. “Whereas classical Christianity rejected naturalism in the name of pleasure and tranquility in the afterlife, Fundamentalist Christianity rejects naturalism in the name of superstition,” he says. “Unlike Enlightenment Christianity, which arose in a still predominantly religious society and which went to some effort to include scientific advances in its belief system but also stoned blasphemers, Fundamentalist Christianity proclaims its seemingly never-ending hatred of science and non-belief loudly and proudly from the rooftops.” And, according to Berkowitz, whereas antimodern Christians considered the death of God movement as part of the natural course of culture changes, Fundamentalist Christianity views the attachment to belief despite contradictory evidence as a good thing, “lamenting only the perverse and widespread resistance to shedding once and for all the hopelessly backward belief in a naturalist worldview.”3

Christian and secular responses to the flood of new Christian material appearing on bestseller lists, television, radio, and Internet blogs and sites are gradually building, too.

Founded in 1978, American Vision is a nonprofit Atheist think tank, national training center, book publisher, and speaker’s bureau whose mission, according to its Web site (www.americanvision.org) is “Equipping and Empowering Atheists to Restore America’s Secular Foundation.” The strategy of American Vision is to do so using the Internet, radio, television, audio/video resources, publications, and training seminars.

The latest such resource is a two-minute commercial that has been broadcast globally via the Internet and television. “Christians present themselves as enlightened and civil. But this new commercial will reveal the shocking truth to viewers,” reads the Web site promo. “The French Revolution, Crusades, Nazism, etc. have taught us that the Christian worldview will inevitably lead to the persecution of anyone different than themselves and the killing of anyone who gets in the way. What’s worse is that Christianity is paving a wide road for Islam to advance in our nation and around the world."

The commercial script reads:

This is Rick [Warren]. He writes books. Rick likes to think. He uses words like god, faith, and grace. Rick thinks that his god is real and that evolution is a fairy fale. Rick is a nice guy and cares about you. He thinks you should stop living your life based on the morals of modern secular humanist ethics and just love god.

This is Lee [Strobel]. He writes books, too. He’s one of Rick’s friends and believes in a god too. In fact, he thinks that parents who don’t teach their children about his god should be arrested….

This is Robespierre [Maximilien Robespierre, a leader of the French Revolution]. He lived 200 years ago in France. He liked to think and use words like god and faith just like Rick and Lee. But he also liked to kill people who disagreed with him. [This was]… known as the reign of terror.…Maybe if more people decide to listen to Rick and Lee we could all be more faithful and god-fearing like Robespierre. Maybe we could even have our own reign of terror for people who continue to be irrational and believe silly things like secular humanism.

See what I did there? Don't I sound bigoted?

A simple question...

...with no clear answer.

Is this universe better with human beings in it, as opposed to without human beings? Why?

Insufficient Christianity: Chapter 2.1

The last lines of the first chapter of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity read:

First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

I have more to say about these assertions; happily, Lewis' next chapter is written to address potential objections to these claims.  He acknowledges that some people will say that our knowledge of the "Moral Law" is simply herd instinct, as he puts it.  Lewis counters that:

. . . feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires--one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them.

This is not much of a counter-argument.  To put is simply, Lewis is begging the question; the situation itself decides between the two instincts, and one acts according to whichever is strongest.  He seems to anticipate this obvious objection:

If' two instincts are in conflict, and there is nothing in a creature's mind except those two instincts, obviously the stronger of' the two must win. But at those moments when we are most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses. You probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the man who is drowning: but the Moral Law tells you to help him all the same.

It seems that the only point that Lewis has to stand on, here, is that if you refuse to help the victim in question, or consider fleeing instead of helping, you will "feel bad," and that this is proof of something else, distinct, in your mind, telling you to choose the morally correct action.  However, if you do choose to help the person in danger, and put yourself at risk in the process, you will still feel fear - does this mean that there is a distinct, universal "Self-Preservation Law" that is telling you to protect your own welfare?  These two different biological instincts necessarily have different subjective "feels" to them; if you help him, you will feel fear and very possibly regret for choosing that action; if you don't help him, your biological instinct to help other human beings in your community will similarly cause you to feel shame and regret.  There simply is no third factor of "ultimate universal morality" necessary.  Lewis states with great authority, "The thing that says to you, 'Your herd instinct is asleep. Wake it up,' cannot itself be the herd instinct."  Yes, yes it can.  It says, "I am your 'herd instinct.'  I am a crucially important biological function, thoroughly evolved, such that I am absolutely crucial to the success of human societies.  Wake me up."

Lewis offers yet another explanation of why the "Moral Law" cannot be a natural instinct of humanity:

If the Moral Law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which was always what we call ' good,' always in agreement with the rule of right behaviour. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage.

It certainly looks like Lewis is just playing word games, here.  There most certainly is an impulse to act "in agreement with the rule of right behavior" - the impulse to act in agreement with the rule of right behavior.  Again, Lewis seems to be begging the question; he simply takes the human desire to call oneself an ethical, moral person, and claims, as an unstated premise, that this desire is not itself a human instinct.

He further attempts to justify this premise by claiming that the "Moral Law" sometimes tells us to suppress an instinct, and sometimes tells us to encourage it, and that therefore the "Moral Law" cannot be itself an instinct.  However, we can easily imagine a situations where one instinct would influence the strength of other instincts; our desire for physical contentment might tell us to physically relax, or to eat, or to have sex at some times, and to work to earn a living or fight off an attacker at other times, as appropriate.  A desire to have a strong family unit might encourage our sexual impulses (if we have a suitable partner handy and/or have few children already), or it might serve to suppress our sexual impulses (if the object of that sexual attraction is not a suitable partner, or is not our partner at all, or if we already have children that require our immediate attention, etc.).

Basically, as near as I can tell, what Lewis is saying here is; "My argument rests entirely on my assertion that all human beings possess (to some degree or another) a knowledge of what I call the Moral Law.  Even though everybody has some impulse towards the Moral Law, there is no such thing as an instinct that is similar to the Moral Law."  I have to give credit where credit is due, though; this is possibly the most convoluted, semantically-layered circular argument that I've ever heard.

Another significant portion of this chapter seems intended to refute moral relativism.  I agree with this portion, but for different reasons that I assume C.S Lewis would claim.  He says that "The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other."  It is vitally important in any such debate that you define what you mean by "morality" itself.  There are many who claim very seriously that "morality" is whatever the will of God dictates, whereas a Secular Humanist like myself will insist that a more genuine ethical system only takes into account the interests, for benefit and for harm, of self-aware, sentient beings.  Others will have their own differing ideas of what morality itself is.

So when Lewis says that some notions of morality are more right than others, he is absolutely correct . . . if everyone agrees on what morality itself is.  Lewis seems to be implying that if you acknowledge that other conceptions of morality than your own exist, you are somehow also endorsing those moral systems as being as legitimate as your own.  I can acknowledge that Christian morality exists while acknowledging that something that might be highly moral according to biblical morality might be horribly immoral according to my Secular Humanist morality.

Lewis wraps up this chapter with yet more bizarre semantics; he acknowledges that some will object to the assertion that morality has been extremely constant throughout human civilization.  He imagines a person pointing out the very significant differences in morality between human society burning witches a couple hundred years ago, whereas today we would never do such a thing.  Lewis explains that the morality of the situation hasn't changed - if there really were women who sold their soul to the devil in exchange for supernatural powers, and were using those powers to torment innocent people, we would certainly be morally justified in punishing them.  There is no moral advancement in not executing witches when you don't believe that witches exist.  This is true, so far as it goes, but Lewis had previously implied, very strongly, that he believes that those who violate the Moral Law are aware that they are enacting moral evil:

What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.

What Lewis says about those who, in centuries past, burned witches alive, can be said exactly, word-for-word, about Nazi Germany.  If there really were huge demographics of sub-human "people" bent on the destruction of our society, then of course we would be justified in punishing them!

*Sigh*  To my mind, there isn't much difference between the moral incompetence of murderous witch-burning mobs and Nazi Germany.  Lewis seems to be strongly implying that Nazi Germany was terribly immoral, and we were justified in judging them for their actions.  Conversely, he seems to be saying that those who burned witches alive in centuries past were simply . . . what?  Mistaken?  Misinformed?  Where would Lewis draw the line between a simple lack of relevant knowledge and genuine immorality?  Lewis is meandering all over the place, attempting to establish his contradictory assertions.

Of course, Ziztur and I do, in fact, agree that there exists an objective moral reality.  We just dispute that C.S. Lewis has succeeded, in any way, in establishing it's supernatural nature.

Ref:  Mere Christianity Online

Large Experimental studies

A quote from a commenter on this post:

Yes, alt treatments get by without having to do such large studies (which unfortunately can provide false positives--you can get a positive result for almost anything by making the study large enough). However, that helps to keep the cost down. Herbs and supplements are far, far cheaper than most prescriptions. If we're trying to keep healthcare costs down, do we really want everything to be uber-regulated and uber-expensive, especially innocuous things that have been used safely for a long time?

 I am confused as to how someone could come to the conclusion that the larger one's sample size, the more likely it is to provide positive results for "almost anything". The exact opposite is true, I.E. the smaller the sample size, the more likely one can provide positive results for "almost anything".

A major problem in alternative medicine studies is that small sample sizes produce positive results, but larger sample sizes produce negligible results. In science-based medicine, if larger studies show a medicine to be ineffective, but smaller studies show a medicine to be effective, we conclude that the smaller studies were flawed due to small sample size.

I'll let you guys comment on the rest of the taradiddles you see above.

Coincidences

Brief IM log snippet:

(10:20:50 AM) David: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obIGsb-IZMo&feature=user
(10:22:11 AM) Petter: I paused my music to check that out.
(10:22:28 AM) Petter: In a rather amusing coincidence, the song I paused was a song by Tom Lehrer called "New Math".
(10:22:40 AM) David: wow, what are the odds? ;)
(10:23:10 AM) Petter: Probably inversely proportional to the frequency with which such remarkable coincidences happen to me.

Other peculiar coincidences of my life:

• 
  At a lake, swimming with a friend; we see a column of smoke rising from nearby and make jokes along the lines of I guess I shouldn't have planted that car bomb (yeah, yeah; we were about fourteen). Heading home, we pass the source of the smoke; the burning wreck of a car.
  
• 
  The weirdest one: Playing a role playing game with a friend (same friend, incidentally). The setting is a sci fi one; the game…kind of superhero-ish, a bit like Batman with a lot more guns. Having broken up some crime or other, the hero fires a few rounds into the air to attract the attention of the authorities as he makes his sortie. You accidentally shoot out a streetlight, I declare. Annoyed, he says something to the effect of Oh, come on!, then falls silent as the light bulb in my desk lamp cracks.
• 
  This is the only time in my life I've seen a light bulb do that; I guess thermal expansion and contraction had slowly worked microscopic cracks to the point where most of the glass bulb fell off and shattered on the desk, leaving the screw-in part in the socket, adorned with some jagged pieces of glass.
  

Remarkable coincidences like these seem to tempt some people to commit superstition. Me, I like to wonder the following: What are the odds that anyone should go through life without running into at least a few remarkable coincidences? After all, every single day, every one of us experiences many hundred events (using the term loosely), for a grand total of millions of events over a lifetime. On average, therefore, a person should expect to run into at least a couple of coincidences that are literally one in a million rare; coincidences that are one in a thousand, meanwhile, are a dime a dozen—you'll go through thousands of them. Or, in one of my favoite self-coined phrases, Every single day, on Earth, there are half a dozen people having a one-in-a-billion kind of day.

For a more thorough (but very accessible) discussion of this sort of thing, read Richard Dawkins's Unweaving the Rainbow, in particular chapter 7, Unweaving the Uncanny.