Belief: Part 2 of 2

A friend of mine once told me "It's too bad you are an atheist. I'd really like for you to be up in Heaven with me when you die".

Yeah, he's a childlike idiot. For one, I've told him numerous times I am not an atheist. Being an atheist requires faith. And two, he assumes that some part or all of our personality persists after death. And three, that some region of space and time exists somehow somewhere eternally which would correspond to an earthly idyll. And four, a really big stretch, is that, because he believes in Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, all of the awful sins of omission and commission he has performed throughout his long and tawdry life will be forgiven.

Another time, after a very strange and ultimately annoying proselytizer informed me that I was going to hell. Or rather, in her mind, Going to Hell.

I replied, "Honey, I've had job offers".

Again, she assumed that for one the personality, in part or in whole, persists after death. For two, that there exists some type of cosmic justice which closely corresponds with our monkey ethics and morals. And for three that some place exists eternally, in which those not quite up to snuff according to these cosmically ordained monkey ethics and morals, enjoy eternal suffering and degradation.

There's actually more than just these assumptions as to where you can go. The first assumption is the big one, that you persist. What happens after that gets shadier and vaguer, and all pretty much colored and limited by human imagination. But I figure (accepting the first assumption as true) it probably is roughly divided into benign, neutral, and malignant consequences. Perhaps not. If, for example, you are just let lose into the larger universe, without any possible way of interacting with matter, like a ghost or something, where is the fun in that? Or purpose? Or even worse, what if you can't interact with anything? Including other spirits. Not much fun at all.

Oh, it could be fun. Who knows? As is the case for or against God, if you posit an infinite universe, or an infinitude of universes, pretty much anything is possible. Heavens, Hells, Purgatories, Valhallas, Ginungagaps, boring Limbos, and who knows what else?

Because we are constrained by our monkey minds within our monkey bodies to only a small set of what can be. Anthropocentrism as opposed to what else exactly?...

Belief: Part 1 of 2

belief: 1. The mental act, condition, or habit of placing trust or confidence in another 2. Mental acceptance of and conviction in the truth, actuality, or validity of something 3. Something believed or accepted as true, especially a particular tenet or a body of tenets accepted by a group of persons.


(From Middle English bileve, bileven, to believe; of Old English gel-aefa; see leubh- in Indo-European roots.)


(leubh- Indo-European root: loving, desiring, caring. Related words, love, beloved, libido.


So, obviously, beliefs are something cherished, something to wrap your arms around and snuggle, something to get you all mushy and sentimental. That's a strange way to feel about something as nebulous, unresponsive, unrequited, and intractable as an idea, or a set of ideas. It's like having feelings for a stuffed animal. Let me get back to you on that.


When I started, I was raised as a Lutheran, which isn't that far from being a Catholic. So, the usual right? Tri-partite Godhead, Father Son, Holy Ghost. Loving personal God, omniscient, omnipotent, all that stuff. Then, of course, curious young lad notices logical inconsistencies and paradoxes. These in turn evaluated, discussed, and any questioning summarily dismissed by religious authorities both local and distant. With the observation of the imperfect state of the world combined with the obvious ignorance and hypocrisy of said authorities resulting in the inevitable cynical conclusion that There Is No God and all by about the age of fourteen years old.


Of course, it turns out that the atheist's position is just as philosophically and empirically untenable and unprovable as the theist's. The statement "There is no God" is a positive assertion, a statement of fact as subject to the burden of proof as the statement "There is no more toilet paper in the bathroom". Anyone who tells you different (especially atheists) are either intellectually dishonest or just yanking their own pud in public.


So, in response, I've modified my position to that of agnostic. It's not the weak weenie-boy "I Don't Know" type of agnosticism. It's more the "I honestly don't know, and I doubt that you know either. So if you are going to get all rabidly serious about it, best to keep it to yourself unless you want your primitive superstitions and monkey gods to be made fun of" type of agnosticism.


On the one hand, it's a big universe out there. Look at the picture. That's billions of light years, billions of galaxies in that picture. That's a huge amount of space and time, a truly scary yawning vast abyss of who-the-fuck-knows-what out there. It could even be infinite. In which case, seems like there is plenty of room for doubt against the Case Against God. On the other hand, there is no reason to assume there is a monkey shaped god giving us the gunfinger, the wink and the nod.


Just for the heck of it, I once entertained the notion that there really was a loving personal god out there, looking after me, keeping an eye out, in my corner. The flood of warm relief that passed through me was pretty remarkable. But then, I went back to my normal way of thinking, and that wonderful warm feeling passed away soon enough. And there I was back to living in uncertainty. Back to, you know, the normal state of human affairs, which is generally one small emergency away from a full-blown panic attack.

So, what's a person to do in this situation? I don't know. I guess I choose to live life as it comes. I choose to love life as it comes. For good or ill. That's my belief. My beloved.

Not Even Wrong - Part 3

At this point, you are probably asking "So, why the hell should I give a crap about this metamagical botulism, or whatever the heck you are talking about, Johnny?"

Mathematical platonism.

All-ri-ight. Let's just cut through all my bullshit and get to the point.

FACT: People's world views affect how they receive facts. Information is personal.  Information that does not sit well within your system of beliefs is likely to be rejected. Information that is in line is likely to be accepted. Seems fairly obvious. Are we in agreement so far? If so, then: 

CONSEQUENCE: How often is false information accepted? (And here, I designate false information as demonstrably false, i.e. empirically false, e.g. beyond opinion, beyond suspicion, beyond reasonable doubt, into the realm of science). Answer: as often as your system of beliefs can stand the strain. There are limits to credulity, you know. You may believe in an Almighty, but how far are you willing to go, with both the conceptual assumptions and narratives? Is your Almighty ineffable and immaterial? If so, does He or She or It occupy a spiritual realm separate from material existence? If so, how populous is this realm? Are you willing to believe in gnomes? Goblins? Fairies? How ridiculous does the creature have to get before you don't believe in them? And can you reliably draw a parting line? Etc.

(Lest you think I am picking on spiritual types as the more credulous and naive --and I am, because ultimately this is the frickin' point-- let's not forget that materialism is itself a metaphysic whose assumptions are subject to investigation. The Catholic Encyclopedia suggests that materialists deny the existence of God and the soul. But if you looked at yesterday's journal entry, you can see this ain't necessarily so. For better criticisms, see Immanuel Kant, or, to some extent David Hume, or George Berkeley. Although I should warn you. These guys are seriously boring motherfuckers, and philosophy is, ultimately a giant fucking waste of time).

ELSE ALTERNATELY: Congratulations. You have absolutely not a shred of bias or bigotry in that vacuum fresh little mind of yours. You are either a newborn (unlikely, as they have biases, like prefering pretty faces over ugly ones), or you are an idiot, like the Peter Seller's character Chance in "Being There". So, no, there is no Else Alternately. Back to... Consequences!

Here's something. I've run across people who get all excited about things like numerology, or sacred geometry, or even that things like the Golden Ratio, the Golden Mean, the Fibonacci sequence, and basically they swoon over the idea that the universe is founded upon mathematics. The underlying assumption here is that Number is real. Number has a separate, independent, and perhaps transcendental existence from our reality. Or as the mathematician G.H. Hardy once put it, mathematics - numbers - would exist even if our universe did not.

Bullshit.  

I could give you the standard philosophical objections to this, but it's boring and silly. The most fanatical of mathematical platonists, probably of all time, was Kurt Godel. Godel insisted that not only was the Realm of Number real, but an internal sense called Mathematical Intuition existed that allowed us to tap into this realm. 

Again, bullshit.  

And I'll tell you why I think it's all bullshit tomorrow. But I've run out of time, once again.

Suffice to say, the consequences of accepting this world view are pretty dire, and can in more cases  than not result in some dangerously stupid decisions about what to do in the world.

Not Even Wrong - Part 2

The Not Even Wrong series got off to a shaky start. Let's see if we can recover some before we go forward. Yesterday I was to Call Bullshit on mathematical platonism. Well, I think I'll need to move along several tangents to get there. So hang on a sec'.

A 2009 Gallup poll found that 44% of Americans believe that God created human beings in their present form within the past 10,000 years. Many of them also think the human body is perfectly designed.

My response to that is... Wow. That Is Really Fucked Up.

And Americans wonder why our nation is in decline.

I think anyone beyond the age of eight, or who uses possibly more than a third of their (God given?) frontal lobes, has to realize that it requires several convoluted explanations that just get stupider and stupider as they go along to get to the Flintstone Theory.

God created Man in His own image? Does God have a prostate? Well, God is a really old guy, so that sucker must have swelled up to the size of Wyoming by now!

Okay, enough funnin' around. The reason I brought up the Gallup poll result was threefold.

1) In order to talk about mathematical platonism, we need to talk about platonism. In order to talk about platonism, we need to talk about perfection. And possibly the divine. Or at least some realm in which perfection exists, which is what Plato was talking about. The realm of God, or the Gods.

2) We need to mention that Plato was Class II Stupid: in other words, ignorant (not, you know, Class IV Stupid: intentionally, willfully, and dangerously stupid like 44% of Americans). He, like Aristotle, or Socrates, or others before our time, was not in possession of facts that we have today.

3) My reaction is a subjective one. But our judgements tend to categories ranging along a spectrum of (if we are honest with ourselves) merely personal opinion to objective fact. Its a question of doubt. As such, I can Call Bullshit on something recognizing that it is merely my personal opinion, and that you might think otherwise (in other words, I have a doubt), to I have a personal opinion which I suspect is also an objective fact (I have only a small doubt), to I strongly consider my opinion to be an objective fact (I have no doubt). Please note, faith is not the polar opposite of doubt. I do not require faith to have no doubts.

So, let's say I consider the idea that "there is no God" an objective fact. I am under a burden of proof, of empirical evidentiary duty to back up this statement.

Why? Some people (atheists, but, you know, they already have a lot of fucked up problems, starting with an undeserved opinion that they are somehow smarter than other people) will try to cop out and say that I am making a negative statement (There is No God), and do not need to prove a negative. Oh, Bullshit. One of the fundamental principles of logic is the principle of Noncontradiction (something cannot be both true and false). The principle is clearly a negative statement, and is easily proved.

(I should note that my opinions about the existence of God, or the logically distinct and independent question of the existence of a human soul, is this: I really don't give a crap).

So, Oops! Did you read carefully bakc there a little while back? I said... the IDEA that "there is.. " etc. The concept. Why did I say that? Because any honest person will recognize that the objective fact regarding existence or nonexistence of a deity is not only not provable through logic or reason, we can neither establish it through empirical evidence. In other words, it is not only philosophically unsustainable, it is unscientific because it is not falsifiable.

(A dorky guy named Richard Dawkins dishonestly tried to say otherwise in his book "The God Delusion". Dawkins is, quite frankly and in my opinion, a douchebag. But that's for another time. Maybe).

So, all we got to talk about is the idea of something. Because it is an abstraction. If you want to show me an abstraction, that is outside of your head... hey, have fun with that.

More later tomorrow, hopefully. I gots to go do some work out here in the real world.