How would you explain why you’re an atheist?

August 1, 2016 • 8:30 am

I believe I wrote one post, a long time ago, asking readers to recount their journey to nonbelief. That, I thought, would not only help us get to know each other, but to appreciate the diversity of ways that people either embraced atheism from the outset, or did so while leaving their faith.

Today, though, I have a different question, one that came from a hypothesis I floated two days ago: is anybody  an atheist for reasons other than lack of evidence for God or evidence against the idea of God (e.g., the existence of undeserved evil)? In other words, is your nonbelief grounded on evidence or the lack thereof?

I’d like to know the answer to this, for in truth I can’t see any other reasons for rejecting God. So here I pose a simple question to readers, which I’d appreciate your answering. It’s this:

If you were asked explain to someone, say an open-minded person you’d just met, why you’re an atheist, and were limited to at most three sentences, what would you say?

I’ve given my own answer before, but as always I’ll answer the question here. It’s this: “I realized at age 17 that there was not a whit of evidence for anything I’d ever been told about God, and abandoned the idea within a few minutes of that realization.”

Your turn.

Readers’ wildlife photographs

August 1, 2016 • 7:30 am

Reader Mark Sturtevant sent some photos of arthropods; his notes are indented:

Here is another batch of pictures. These were largely taken during the winter, when I had very little invertebrate companionship except for the occasional creepy crawly. Obviously I was experimenting on photography against white backgrounds. Some of these were taken with an ancient 50mm manual Canon Fd lens that I got essentially for free (it was in a bunch of other camera gear that I bought through Craigslist). The lens was reverse mounted onto extension tubes.

The first three pictures are of a male dimorphic jumping spider (Maevia inclemens). They are so-named because the males come in two color morphs, this being the prettier one. This little cutie was hanging out on a lampshade in our house for a few days, and so I decided it needed its picture taken. Jumping spiders can be rather difficult to manage since they see very well and react to most any movement. But this little guy hopped right into my hand and obligingly worked with me through the whole process of taking pictures at our kitchen table. I was very pleased with it so I gave it a fruit fly, as shown in the last picture.

1Dimorphic

2Dimorphic

3OnHandwFly

Next is a female dimorphic jumping spider which showed up at work, and so I brought it home. Was she as cooperative as the male? No. She was a complete pain in the tuchas, true to the nature of their family.

4DimorphicFemale

Next up is a big Muscid fly, species unknown but I am thinking genus Morellia. I put this one inside a cage on white paper, and to get it to stay in one place I made sure it was hungry and I laid down some sugar.

5Fly1

Finally we have an elegant critter known as the parson spider (Herpyllus ecclesiasticus). The name of these common ground spiders refers to their white markings which resembles the cravat once worn by the clergy.

ParsonSpider

And Stephen Barnard sent some flies:

Mating drone flies (species unknown). Not a good photo technically, but it was unusual to see.

RT9A4465
Additional photo included at no extra charge. 🙂 [JAC: I suspect that this, like many drone flies, is a bee mimic.] The Forest Service website says this about drone flies:

“The diverse group of flower flies and hover flies (family Syrphidae) includes many successful bee mimics. Drone flies (members of the genera Eristalis) masquerade as bees with various body forms and striping patterns that are almost perfect matches to many common bee species. Often very effective pollinators due to their hairy bodies, flies have keystone roles in many of ecosystems where they occur. Flies are also the dominant (and in some cases only) pollinators of key crops and foods like coffee, chocolate, tea, bananas, and mangoes.”

RT9A4438

Monday: Hili dialogue

August 1, 2016 • 6:30 am

It’s August! Monday, August 1, 2016, and in some places there are holidays, including Canada and Ireland, but I don’t know the occasions. All over the world, though, it’s World Scout Scarf Day, in which you’re supposed to wear your Scout neckerchief, even if you’re a businessman in London City, to commemorate your membership. I’m betting that not many comply. How many people will see a Scout scarf today?

On this day in 1774, Joseph Priestly discovered oxygen, although it had already been discovered (but published only later) by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, a Swedish chemist whose dilatory publishing habits—he’d also discovered molybdenum, tungsten, barium, hydrogen, and chlorine, but didn’t get credit—led Isaac Asimov to call him “Hard Luck Scheele”. On this day in 1834, slavery was abolished in the British Empire, and, exactly 110 years later, the Warsaw Uprising broke out, the largest resistance movement against the Nazis in WWII. It failed because of the Russian Army’s failure to enter Warsaw, and so the entire city was destroyed by the German army. (Note: this is not the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, which occurred in April, 1943.) The father of my host Andrzej’ was in the Polish Resistance army then, and participated in this operation in a maneuver—also a failure—to draw the Germany Army out of Warsaw. On this day in 1966, Charles Whitman killed 16 people at the University of Texas at Austin, sniping from atop the tower until he was killed by police. He was later discovered to have a brain tumor that might have influenced his behavior.

Notables born on this day include mountaineer Eric Shipton (1907) and evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton (1936), bizarrely identified by Wikipedia as an “Egyptian-English biologist, psychologist, and academic”. Hamilton was born in Egypt, but his parents were from New Zealand and he was brought up in Britain. (Could somebody fix this?) Further he was not a psychologist, although perhaps they mean “evolutionary psychologist,” but he wasn’t really that, either. Those who died on this day include Calamity Jane (1903; read about her) and Paddy Chayefsky (1981). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being helpful as we search for pie cherries (we’re pals):

Hili: Wait for me, I’m going with you.
M. But we are just going to pick some cherries.
Hili: I will show Jerry where the nicest cherries are.
P1040640
In Polish:
Hili: Zaczekajcie, idę z wami.
Małgorzata: Ale my idziemy tylko zrywać wiśnie.
Hili: To ja pokażę Jerremu gdzie są najładniejsze.
And the Big News from Winnipeg: Gus played with a stick. The video is below; look at that face!

Gus also managed to slip out of his harness and venture next door, but he was recovered without incident.

 

 

Misconceptions about determinism, illustrated

July 31, 2016 • 1:30 pm

Over at the website Evolving Perspectives, reader Pliny the in between has a new cartoon called “Nuts and bolts of crime and punishment“. It illustrates one of the many misconceptions people have about science-based determinism and its rejection of libertarian free will: that under determinism is useless to try to change anything since everything is preordained by the laws of nature. Well, the last part of that is pretty much correct—save for fundamental indeterminacy due to quantum mechanics—but within that paradigm lies the fact that people’s arguments constitute environmental factors that affect how others behave.

My own example is that you can alter the behavior of a dog by kicking it when it does something you don’t like. (I am NOT recommending this!). After a while the dog, whose onboard computer gets reprogrammed to anticipate pain, will no longer engage in the unwanted behavior.

Well, Pliny also used the kicking example, but on humans rather than dogs (click to enlarge). I thought the guy was a real person, but Pliny told me this:

It’s generic henchman # 7 (first used here).  Some might think that he is based on a Fox News hack, but that can’t possibly be true. I only used him here because that expression worked so well for the aftermath of Venn’s aversion therapy 😉

The cartoon, as usual, encapsulates what I try to say, but in many fewer words, and in graphic (and painful) imagery:

Untitled.001

Maajid Nawaz on ISIS’s “holy war”

July 31, 2016 • 11:15 am

If you read Graeme Wood’s absorbing Atlantic article “What ISIS really wants,” you’ll know of his thesis that ISIS has adopted apocalyptic medieval Islamic theology with the goal of establishing another Caliphate. That caliphate will arise after a final big battle, presumably with nonbelievers (i.e., the West), prophesied to take place near Dabiq, Syria.

In a new piece at the Daily Beast, “Isis wants a global civil war,” liberal Muslim Maajid Nawaz goes further, observing first that a lot of Muslim violence is perpetrated against other Muslims:

In fact, since the start of Ramadan last month, and till the time of writing on July 27, 2016, there have been 75 attacks in 50 days by various jihadist groups globally. This amounts to attacks in 21 countries at a rate of one-and-a-half per day, leaving over 1,169 dead, not including the injured and maimed. The 21 countries and territories attacked have been Jordan, Iraq, Bangladesh, Syria, Israel, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Libya, France, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Malaysia, Turkey, Mali, Palestine, Cameroon, Saudi, Thailand, and Germany. Sixteen of those are Muslim-majority territories.

What is the point of this? Well, one could say that they’re inching toward the Final Big Battle, but creating these brushfires in Muslim countries, most of whose religionists are Sunnis (ISIS’s own brand of Islam), doesn’t really make sense under that theory. Who is that Big Battle going to be against—will it involve all forms of Islam that aren’t exactly shared by ISIS?

Nawaz has a different take: that ISIS’s goal is not to move toward the one big apocalyptic battle, but to create perpetual civil wars everywhere. Why?

Nawaz claims that about 12 years ago ISIS “adopted a playbook Idarat al-Tawahhush, or the Management of Savagery.” Here’s what the playbook foresees from this civil strife:

This book on jihadist war theory first appeared online around 2004 and was attributed to an ideologue who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Bakr al-Naji. Naji instructed followers to incite ethnic, sectarian, and religious hatred throughout the world so that societies end up dividing along mutual mistrust and a desire for revenge. Naji’s hope was that Sunni Muslims would then largely be blamed—as they now are—as the cause of this intolerance and violence, rendering them hated and left isolated. Naji even highlights the importance of provoking heavy state military responses against Sunni Muslims everywhere, so that entire populations of Sunnis feel suspected and attacked by everyone else around them, and turn in on themselves. The idea is that through such division Sunnis would find no refuge from angry non-Muslims and over-reacting states, except in jihadists who would embrace them. In turn, Sunnis would end up swelling the ranks of jihadists’ militias as they began to protect themselves against reprisal attacks.

Behold, a world divided along sectarian religious lines, the ideal conditions for a “caliphate.”

In other words, the beleaguered Sunnis would finally see that their only salvation lies in uniting under the ISIS banner. And that, says Nawaz, is why ISIS is trying hard to incite hatred of the very people they ultimately want to recruit. His example is the provocation of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to overreact against his own people, which drew Sunni Arabs to the ISIS cause while, says Nawaz, “the international community stood aloof.”

And indeed, why would the international community get involved in Muslim-on-Muslim civil wars? There’s nothing for us in it, except a lot of deaths of Western soldiers and innocent Middle Easterners. Our dithering about what to do in Syria is exactly, says Nawaz, what ISIS wants. And that makes sense. Presumably the violence incited by ISIS in the West will just create more animus towards Sunnis, further spurring their unification under the black flag.

Well, who knows what ISIS wants, or who is really in charge? Nawaz’s views make as much sense as any other theory. But regardless of what ISIS wants, I think Nawaz’s solution—the one he’s trying to enact through his think tank Quilliam—is correct

Too many Muslims still insist that to challenge Islamist extremism breeds anti-Muslim bigotry, while they fail to grasp that it is the Islamists themselves who provoke anti-Muslim hatred thorough their divisive agenda, and by insisting on defining Muslims against others primarily by our religious identity. Our collective task will be to robustly stand against the division caused not just by the far-right who seek to isolate Europe’s Muslims, but to challenge the very same division promoted by the Islamists themselves within our Muslim communities. Only by reasserting the universality of our secular liberal democratic citizenship are we able to protect the multiplicity of identities, as opposed to the exclusionary religion-based identification that Islamists and anti-Muslim bigots thrive on.

No insurgency can survive without a level of ideological support within the community it seeks to recruit from. To isolate the terrorists from their host population must be a priority for us all. One needn’t be black to condemn racism. Likewise, one needn’t be Muslim to condemn any expression of theocratic Islamism.

While Nawaz calls on both Muslims and non-Muslims to “challenge Islamist extremism,” I’m coming around to the view that the crucial people for reforming Islam are liberal Muslims like Nawaz. Reform has to come from within, because it surely isn’t coming from without—not with non-Muslims scared of being labeled as bigots (or getting attacked). All the palaver by Westerners is like so many tinkling cymbals, and powerful Western leaders like Obama are simply too pusillanimous to “condemn theocratic Islamism.” Instead, they claim that ISIS is “not really Islam,” with some even blaming the violence on Western colonialism. Those attitudes, of course, do nothing to solve the problem of terrorism, and bombing won’t help, either. Nawaz’s solution makes a lot of sense, but it’s falling on deaf ears.

Big Think: 3 questions will tell you how religious you’re likely to be

July 31, 2016 • 9:45 am

UPDATE:  The Gervais and Norenzayan paper mentioned here should be considered inconclusive in light of later work. Go here for the explanation under “update.”
_______________

I’m not so sure that “The Big Think” (TBT)  website deserves its name, as the Thinks there are often pretty small. But this headline caught my attention (click on screenshot to go to the site; h/t reader Ant):

Screen Shot 2016-07-30 at 11.03.52 PM

“So what are the questions?”, you’re asking yourself. I’ll give you those in a second. First, a bit of background by the article’s author, Steven Mazie:

People who are more disposed to analytical thinking, the hypothesis goes, are less inclined to believe in a deity.

In 2012, in the journal Science, social psychologists Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan published the results of five studies suggesting this might be the case.

And so the questions, I guess, test whether you think analytically; and if you get them all right, I suppose you’re more likely to be a nonbeliever. (Maddingly, they don’t give you an “atheism score” or a correlation between number of correct answers and the proportion of nonbelievers.)

Well, try these:

1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? ____cents

2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? _____minutes

3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? _____days

This was the first thing I saw this morning when I woke up and looked at my laptop in bed; and even half asleep I answered all three questions correctly within one minute. I’m clearly a strong atheist! The answers seemed self-evident to someone familiar with math, but of course the questions are designed to prompt intuitive answers that are wrong.

I won’t give you the answers, though the Big Think piece does. Most of you will get them right—if you think about them. TBT goes on to say this:

The study these questions are drawn from was conducted using 179 Canadian college students. After completing the quiz task, the students were asked about their intrinsic religiosity, religious beliefs and beliefs in supernatural entities (including God, angels and the devil). The results followed expectations:

“[A]s hypothesized, analytic thinking was significantly negatively associated with all three measures of religious belief, rReligiosity = –0.22, P = 0.003; rIntuitive = –0.15, P = 0.04; and rAgents = –0.18, P = 0.02. This result demonstrated that, at the level of individual differences, the tendency to analytically override intuitions in reasoning was associated with religious disbelief, supporting previous findings.”

To translate: the more religious the undergrads were, the less likely they were to have demonstrated effective analytical reasoning on the three questions. And the better the students did on the questions, the less likely they were to have strong religious beliefs.

The study’s authors (and Mazie) relate the results to Daniel Kahneman’s classification of “System 1” (intuitive, fast) thinking, and “System 2” (slower, more analytical) thinking. Why, then, are more intuitive thinkers also more religious? Mazie notes:

The authors reason that since “religious belief emerges through a converging set of intuitive processes, and analytic processing can inhibit or override intuitive processing…analytic thinking may undermine intuitive support for religious belief.” Seeing people through the Kahnemanian lens thus “predicts that analytic thinking may be one source of religious disbelief.”

Well, that sounds good, though it’s fancy language for saying, “People who carefully work through their ideas rather than go with what they were taught to be true, or feel to be true, are less likely to be religious.” However, most people get their religious beliefs from their parents and peers, and I’m not sure that counts as an “intuitive process” rather than as simple indoctrination. I think the difference is the tendency to examine carefully what you think is true, and if that’s considered Kahneman-ian System 2, so be it.

Unfortunately, Gervais and Norenzayan had to add a caveat to their paper to make sure that people don’t think they’re anti-religion:

[W]e caution that the present studies are silent on long-standing debates about the intrinsic value or rationality of religious beliefs…or about the relative merits of analytic and intuitive thinking in promoting optimal decision making.

Some day those caveats won’t be needed for, of course, a belief that is thought through and examined from all sides is more likely to be correct. That’s the definition of rational thinking! You could probably do the same test, but correlating the answers with acceptance of homeopathic medicine, and find pretty similar results. But in that case it would be taken to show that the results are NOT silent on the rationality of homeopathic “beliefs.” Once again, we have to tiptoe around religion as opposed to other forms of irrationality. Mazie adds his own caveat, too:

There are many other reasons people might decide not to believe in God, of course, and it would be a mistake to construe religious believers as unreflective, shallow-thinking fools.

Most of us don’t think that anyway: there are smart religious people who hang on to faith for emotional reasons, or because they were taught it and find solace in it, or simply don’t want to dissolve a social network that involves religion. But seriously, are there really lots of reasons people don’t believe in God, or does it all boil down to this: “not enough evidence, and lots of counterevidence”?