Wiley Miller’s first cartoon of 2016: fact beats faith

January 4, 2016 • 10:35 am

It’s a good start to the cartoon year for, drawn by Wiley Miller. He must be a nonbeliever, though I don’t know for sure.

Here’s his latest:

Non Sequitur

Naturalism wins! But did the bears do that to nom Pierre, or are they just messing with him?

h/t: Ben Goren

67 thoughts on “Wiley Miller’s first cartoon of 2016: fact beats faith”

    1. Yes, for me the fact that polar bears (and their cubs) are undeniably “cute” is offset by the fact that as I understand it they are one of the few species (maybe the only species) which actually prefers the taste of human flesh over others. Unlike the usual carnivorous predators, they will track human beings for weeks even when there is plenty of other, easier game available. Ooh, yummy.

      Whenever I see an adorable polar bear picture, card, or stuffed squishy I always imagine that the fur beneath its adorable little mouth is stained pink. Rather ruins it for me.

      2. Actually, there is another specie of animal that actively prefers the taste of human flesh; the common or brown rat. Think about that — and have a little more respect for domestic cats.

  3. Naturalism wins! But did the bears do that to nom Pierre?

    I would think they went through all that to eat him. Look at the(anthropomorphic) expression on some of those bears!

  4. Pierre is lunch. The poor polar bears have to adapt new prey hunting strategies due to loss of sea ice.

  5. Sad to say, but I think this supports PZ’s contention that there is no evidence possible that would support the existence of God.

    1. Depends on what you consider a god to be. If a god is simply some super-powerful entity, then it’s not difficult to propose all sorts of aliens that could, for all practicing porpoises, be reasonably considered gods…but then that would, in turn, mean that James “The Amazing” Randi could convince a back-bush tribe that he is a god.

      If a god is a miracle-worker, an entity that really truly can perform that which is actually impossible — which is the case with all gods ever worshipped by humans — then, no. No empirical evidence can demonstrate the existence of such an entity any more than any empirical evidence can demonstrate the existence of a land north of the North Pole.

      It’s important to understand that the true origins, nature, and function of the gods is to provide an unquestionable authority to the prophets and priests. The gods establish their authority by doing the impossible. It’s essential that the deeds really be impossible, not merely difficult or amazing, or else somebody else could conceivably usurp the authority of the gods. That the gods only ever do their deeds in stories is therefore to be expected.

      b&

      >

    2. I would say that this cartoon supports the opposite. A miracle is debunked… but we can imagine it not being debunked. Pierre of the North could have walked out into a tropical paradise through the ‘divine’ intervention of his creator, Wiley Miller, the existence of whom we wisely infer from his works.

      Non Sequitur does not resemble what we know about straight news stories and what makes them credible.

      1. “but we can imagine it not being debunked”

        I can’t. There is always an explanation for the evidence that falls short of an omnipotent being.

        1. Yes. The unimaginably immense and the infinite may be practically indistinguishable to us ants…but you can get to the unimaginably immense from the mundane whilst you can’t get to the infinite from the unimaginably immense. Nor, incidentally, can you get to the unimaginably immense from the infinite. That divide simply can’t be bridged, and the gods are, by definition, on the other side of it.

          b&

          >

        2. Baby steps. It’s like anything else.

          First, we look for the most reasonable natural explanation. Then, if that fails, we look for other reasonable natural explanations. If we can rule them out, we get further and further into the not-very-likely and the damned-unlikely natural explanations until we eventually reach an arbitrary yet increasingly clear line where holding on to a natural explanation can now be considered perverse.
          (This of course assumes we’ve got a clear enough working distinction between natural and supernatural.)

          At some point ‘very very very very very powerful’ might combine with ‘very very very very honest/reliable’ and hey, what the hell, it’s “omnipotent” enough for practical purposes. We should never abandon the standard of “for all practical purposes” as long as we keep in mind the possibility that this standard sure as hell isn’t certainty. Focusing too much on the logical impossibilities of establishing an “omni” looks like quibbling, or maybe going for the easy target and ignoring the big fat empirical one.

          1. Nah. Mind control can explain any observation and is still more reasonable that an omnipotent being.

          2. It wouldn’t be mind control versus an omnipotent being — it would be mind control by something of lesser power vs. mind control by something of greater power. Baby steps.

            If it doesn’t work by some form of “mind control,” it can’t be considered divine.

          4. That’s almost the right question.

            The real question is, how do the bears themselves know that they’re at the North Pole and not on an Hollywood sound stage?

            b&

            >

          5. At some point ‘very very very very very powerful’ might combine with ‘very very very very honest/reliable’ and hey, what the hell, it’s “omnipotent” enough for practical purposes.

            Yes, and 1 + 1 = 3, but only for exceedingly large values of 1.

            We’re reenacting the children’s game of, “name the biggest number you can think of.” Somebody starts it off with a thousand, then a million, then a quadrillion, then 999 million billion thousand quadrillion hundred trillion thousand, then that plus one. Finally, somebody plays the trump card of, “infinity,” another replies with, “infinity plus one,” and we’re soon off to the races again with billions of billions of times infinity to the infinite billion power.

            Problem is, infinity isn’t an actual number. You can’t count to infinity. There’re numbers so large that neither you nor I can see the end, and that might as well be infinity as far as we’re concerned from our ant-like perspective…but they’re still finite, even if they’re vastly bigger than our minds.

            And infinities are really different beasts from finite quantities. All the familiar rules go out the window. One of the most important…is that infinities are surprisingly static. You can’t actually do anything with the infinite, usually. They’re very resistant to change and reluctant to act. After the child has finished raising infinity to the infinite power an infinite number of times and run out of breath…well, she might as well have saved her breath because the result is exactly the same as what she started with: ℵ0. But had she simply included the irrational numbers, she’d have had an infinite number infinitely bigger than her original infinite number….

            Cheers,

            b&

            >

          7. Which immediately demands the question: why should there be any doubt when invoking the divine? The gods are all-knowing and all-powerful. If even they can’t give ironclad undoubtable evidence of their own divinity…of what sense is it to even pretend that they’re really divine?

            Gods simply can’t exist in an Universe where doubt is always justifiable. That’s why you need faith to believe in them, after all.

            b&

            >

          10. Amen to Ben’s recommendation. It was nice to see reference to Al Bartlett’s comment about humans not understanding the consequences of exponential growth.

          11. I don’t think that line is where we give up on natural explanations and cede the supernatural. It’s where we say “I don’t know”. Why would we ever decide we’ve thought of all the possible natural explanations, likely or unlikely?

          12. I think the problem with this approach is that it doesn’t seem very scientific. It leaves someone with no way to change their mind and discard one hypothesis or theory for another — even in principle. If we rightfully criticize supernaturalists for refusing to consider any finding which would change their belief that something “might” still have a supernatural cause or source, doing the same thing ourselves opens us up to a similar charge. Instead of being a reasonable conclusion derived from a solid base of evidence, naturalism is now, like supernaturalism, more like a faith commitment.

          13. That one about minds so open your brains fall out might be relevant.

            I would argue that it is reasonable to refuse to consider the possibility that we might find a land north of the North Pole. Even if evidence were somehow presented suggesting such a conclusion…well, at that point so many things have gone so far afield from anything even pretending to resemble rationality that the only possible conclusion is insanity, either one’s own or that of the Universe — with the former, of course, being much more likely. Not that it would make any difference.

            So, too, I would argue that there’s no point in considering the possibility that the impossible is real, which is what a claim of miracles breaks down to. The whole point of the miracle is its impossibility, so why are we supposed to take seriously the proposition that the impossible is real? And once you revise the definition of miracle to equate to the impressive and the improbable rather than the impossible, iPhones and underdogs winning sports championships become miraculous. We wind up with a bait-and-switch or a deeptiy or some variation on that theme.

            b&

            >

          14. People who believe that miracles are possible obviously do not define miracles as impossible. They are making a distinction between what is possible under naturalism, and what is possible under supernaturalism. And while certain aspects of what they propose as “supernatural” may be logically contradictory or incoherent, the gist of it is simply wrong.

          15. Replying to your reply to Ben:

            I think religious thought is rather more sloppy than that. Theists want to have their cake and eat it, too. Yes, they think miracles are “possible” – but only with scare quotes. They also need miracles to be impossible, otherwise, as Ben and I have argued, the miracles cease to be miraculous. If scientists discovered a new dimension in which our natural “laws” didn’t apply, and in which the things theists claim as miracles could happen, and if this dimension and the occurrence of “miracles” was actually, demonstrably real, those miracles wouldn’t retain their miracle status very long. See my cell phone example below.

      2. Yes, but even in an hypothetically-real context, would we consider Wiley to actually be a god, even if he really did create a real world in which his creations really manifest and live?

        If so, then every programmer who’s ever created a virtual reality world is a god, albeit of a very simple universe. And pimply-faced teenagers playing Sim City are also gods. But few would recognize them as gods…and any definition of the term, “god,” that would exclude them would also exclude Wiley-god as well as Matrix-style Architect-Programmers as well as Jesus who Spoke the Word into existence.

        b&

        >

        1. All religious and spiritual versions of god(s) involve inherent properties of pure/primal mentality to a significant degree. Otherwise, we use scare quotes.

          1. I think the more important constant to observe is that all gods have unquestionable unsurpassable authority, authority established by their ability to do the impossible. Those who tell the stories of the gods take great care to ensure that nobody can even in principle usurp that authority by duplicating the divine feats.

            b&

            >

  6. Since Pierre of the North is a recurring figure, my guess is that the bears are just playing mind games with him rather than having him for lunch 🙂

    1. I agree. If their goal was to eat Pierre, they would have at least carried some “sirop d’érable” (maple syrup).

  7. Naturalism wins! But did the bears do that to nom Pierre, or are they just messing with him?

    I wonder if a run-of-the-mill log cabin would be able to withstand assault by a single polar bear, let alone six (plus a probable hidden panda).
    Therefore ursine head-games.
    Can I find a different type of head-game? Well, I’m sure it’s an outcome in Buzkashi. And there’s the reference in either The Hobbit or Lord of The Rings about the origin of golf.

  8. And this is why miracles are profoundly antiscientific – once you rule them in as “possible” any experience or any finding in the world could just be one and you’d never know otherwise unless you eliminate the “anything can happen” attitude. (Incidentally, this way the latter is also unscientific – the universe has patterns!)

    1. I don’t think that a miracle would have to be anti-scientific in principle. I agree with you that they are in practice because all “miracles” are either just rare events that have been documented to occur without the request for divine intervention or simply claims for which there is no objective evidence.

      But, a rare event could conceivably be the result of divine intervention if we had supporting evidence that this divine being actually caused the rare event. Of course, that’s the problem, there’s never any evidence for the divine being even existing, never mind causing the event. The assessment and confirmation of miracles by bodies like the RCC never involve the alleged miracle worker.

      1. What makes the divine being divine? The ability to perform miracles, to do the impossible.

        But once you’ve actually demonstrated that the miracle really did happen, you now know that it’s not actually impossible, because you’ve got proof that it really is possible staring you in the face. So the phenomenon is merely very impressive, but not actually miraculous. It might be something beyond your own personal abilities…but you probably can’t run a four-minute (let alone three-minute) mile, either.

        That’s the paradox of miracles. They can’t actually exist, because existence renders them mundane and no longer miraculous.

        But don’t be mistraken: this a feature, not a bug. It ensures that miracles remain the province of the gods, and therefore under the control of the prophets and priests who bring mere mortals the news of the antics and whims of the gods.

        b&

        >

        1. What makes the divine being divine? The ability to perform miracles, to do the impossible.

          That may have been the definition two millennia ago with Jesus and his alleged parlor tricks, but they’ve certainly walked the definition back over the centuries. Now cancer remissions, faces in dog’s asses, and crying statues pass the test for the miraculous. And yet, there’s still no man behind the curtain. Were there some very powerful agent behind some of these things, we could quibble about whether the thing should be called divine, but at least we’d have a subject to discuss. We don’t even have that! All we have are rare events with theists claiming divine causation. And, as you pointed out, other claims of supposedly impossible things. But, I think your Humean definition of miracle is too narrow even for the most miraculous of claims. Jesus’s best trick was allegedly coming back to life, but to people 2000 years ago, resuscitation at a hospital would be equally miraculous. There are problems with some violations of conservation laws when you start analyzing where the hell Jesus may have gone, but the central claim of being “dead” only to be alive a couple days later can have explanations that are well within the realm of the natural. There are some impossible aspects to some of these claims, but I’d say the majority of things people call miracles now don’t fall into that category, which still puts them in the same boat: without demonstrating the existence of the deity behind the act, their claims are meaningless at best and incoherent at worst.

          1. But that’s just it. Jesus on toast isn’t miraculous if you have a toaster with a Jesus-shaped heating element; it’s only miraculous if it’s otherwise impossible for Jesus to have appeared. Anything can be a miracle…if it’s perceived as having been impossible for it to have happened.

            But people don’t think it through. If you’ve got an otherwise-unexplained phenomenon, the gods did it because it couldn’t have been done any other way.

            Or…gods of the gaps. Thunder and lightning? Don’t know what they are? Sure it’s impossible to make it happen? Must be the gods.

            b&

            >

          2. I agree with Ben. Miracles have always and still are supposed to be impossible. It’s not a miracle if you know how it’s done, regardless of how complicated. Playing a YouTube video on your smartphone for people who lived in the 1300s would be called a miracle by those people. We don’t call it a miracle today because we know how it’s done. And the fact is that if something happens, there’s obviously a way for it to happen. Miracles are supposed to defy explanation.

          3. This is probably a very minor semantic quibble, but the dictionary definition of miracle doesn’t rule out possibility, it rules out scientific explanation. Thus, your example of people in the past finding YouTube to be miraculous is probably valid. Something could have been considered a miracle at some point and not now. But this is just god-of-the-gaps. In my experience, I’ve never heard of a religion declaring something to be miraculous and then later saying, “Woops, now we understand how it happened.” Certainly, some miracle claims fall into the category of impossible; but, my original point is that many of them don’t, especially the quotidian types such as spontaneous remission. So, it seems the religious once again have a problem with incoherence. Ben already pointed out the problem with miracles that are impossible and most of the other miracles are explicable by science, but fall into the rare events category. I will concede that the religious usually don’t label these events this way; they do often call them impossible, even if they aren’t.

          4. Actually, yes, you do get the “woops!” after a fashion. Think about those denominations which accept to some degree evolutionary biology; it used to be that a stronger form of creationism was popular amongst these groups (e.g., Catholics).

            They don’t *put* it this way, of course, but the retreat towards naturalism, materialism, etc. has in fact happened.

          5. That’s a fair point. I wasn’t even thinking of this class of miracles…perhaps these should be “miracles, broadly construed”? The Catholic Church still holds that each new human life is a miracle, a main part of that miracle being unverifiable ensoulment. But I don’t think they’ve retreated from this class of miracle in the sense that there has always been some wiggle room with regard to how God did his magic rather than room to declare that he didn’t do the magic at all. Religion has long held that scientific discoveries offer glimpses of the divine mind, even if those glimpses are now more mechanistic as opposed to informative. E.g., prior to Darwin, the religious may have marveled at the diversity of animals God made, now they marvel at the diversity as well as the clever way he did it. In a twisted way, they make it sound even more miraculous. I think I do agree with the gist of what you’re saying though.

            The other type of miracle, the type I was thinking of, involves special intervention on behalf of a specific person or people. In this category, there are no “woops” retractions. The Church will never say the living crucifix or bleeding cracker was the result of hallucination or a hoax. They’ll never say a spontaneous remission after visiting Lourdes was simply a rare anomaly that has a low, but non-zero chance of occurring, that Fatima was the natural result of a bunch of crazy people staring at the sun, that Padre Pio’s stigmata were self-inflicted, that there’s no evidence of flying saints beyond hearsay, etc.

          6. Well, no, I guess I wouldn’t expect a dictionary definition to rule out possibility, given that many dictionary definition authors will be theists.

            Ben and I are basing this claim more on observation than on dictionary definitions.

          7. What identifies a “miracle” is not the lack of explanation, but the lack of an explanation which can be reduced to mindless mechanisms of matter and energy. Supernatural = pure mentality. In other words, if scientists discovered a new dimension in which our natural “laws” didn’t apply but intention, emotions, consciousness, or values DID apply — were, in fact, basic and integral to cause and effect — then believers would be happy to agree that miracles were possible, real, and taking place in ways which could be observed and tested. Remember, the existence of the paranormal is supposed to ‘shift’ our paradigm firmly towards the spiritual and confound the atheist.

            We don’t call smartphones a miracle today because we know they don’t run by “psychic power,” God’s or ours. If they did, we would: skyhooks are miracles, cranes are not. And if people in the 1300’s considered cellphones to be amazing in the same way they considered ox carts or aqueducts to be amazing, I daresay they wouldn’t have deemed them miracles, but clever contrivances. Even people in the past recognized that sometimes they couldn’t figure out what wiser (or foreign) people could.

          8. It’s difficult to predict what will amaze other cultures.

            I recall reading a book ‘The Innocent Anthropologist’ (IIRC) about a young anthropologist doing field work among a pre-literate west African tribe. They were not in the least impressed by his portable tape recorder (they had all heard voices coming out of little transistor radios) but his notebook staggered them – that he could make a few marks on paper and then, days or weeks later, look at it and tell them what they had said – that was truly astonishing.

            cr

  9. One tiny criticism: why does the cartoonist have a French Canadian speaking with a French (rather than a French Canadian) accent? A French Canadian would say “De” instead of “Ze” for “the”, and would never say “Sacré bleu”. We would probably say “Calise de merde blanche”.

    1. Wai, wai. Mais je m’en câlisse.

      Well, actually that’s not true at all, just something I came across while attempting to find a translation of your phrase.

      White shit could mean snow I suppose, but I’m missing something about how that goes together with the blasphemous chalice reference.

      One of the Québecois I worked with in Ottawa remarked on how in English one swears mostly with terms about sex or human waste while in French it tends to be about blasphemy.

    2. But it’s not about what a French Candian would actually say, it’s about the common perception of what a French Canadian would say, which is ‘sacre bleu’. The same way a cartoon Englishman would say “Jolly good show, chaps”.

      (Sorry ’bout the lack of accents, I’m acutely embarrassed by this grave fault, but I can never remember how to do them. Quel dommage!)

      cr

      1. Grave! Lol! But yes, you’ve got aigu on your face.

        (BTW, I’m acutely aware of the culture of competitive punnery here, so don’t try to one-up me. 😉 )

  10. Evelution, has gotta be true!!  Who could believe otherwise? REMEMBER Please Remove all extra e-mail addresses before forwarding, and use BCC when forwarding it to your friends. This helps keep spammers from harvesting the emails of others and ours.                                         Thanks: Harold Sanders

  11. Hmm . . . after noting all comments, I will add: as a daily reader of the best comic strip on the planet, the point to this Sunday cartoon is–find a way to draw bears! Wiley’s bears are exactly what regular readers want to see (after Eddy and Paulie, of course).

  13. “He must be a nonbeliever, though I don’t know for sure.”

    I’m pretty sure, though I don’t think he’s ever stated it. But I’ve followed his strip for many months now.

    I can think of e.g. Danae starting her own religion a while back, Moses and the Red Sea surfer, and many other sceptical themes.

    (He’s also no friend of big business, top management, Republicans or Washington politicians).

    cr

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