Trust Versus Faith

I have been repeatedly accused of having faith in science. The accusation is meant to say that my “faith” in science is no different from faith in religion. It’s a (fairly pathetic) attempt to equate science and religion.

The problem with that line of argument is that the word faith is being used with two different meanings. I don’t have faith in science, I trust it. I trust it like I trust that the roof over my head won’t cave in, or that the bridge I went over every day all summer wouldn’t collapse. I trust these things because they have a record of working, similar things have a record of working, and those records indicate to me that they will continue to work.

Faith, in the conventional, religious meaning, is completely different. Faith implies that there’s not necessarily a proven record, and in with religious faith there’s none at all. This means that you’re taking it “on faith”. You have no reason to believe that anything a religion says is true, it’s all faith.

Science is a method of gathering knowledge, and the knowledge that has been gathered through that method. Science works. It works every time you start your car, every time you flip a switch, every time you use GPS to find your location, every time you fly. The list is enormous, and a full description of the triumphs of science would fill pages and detail nearly everything we know about the way the world works. That is why I trust science, and whether or not you want to admit it, you do too: the conveniences of modern living are the results of science, you can’t trust them without trusting it.

But when I think of faith, I’m stymied. I can think of nothing it has given the world that couldn’t have resulted from something else. I realize that many good works have been done in the name of religion, but the goodness behind the act would be there regardless. In some cases, for example missionaries, the good is offset by bad works. How much time do they spend proselytizing that would be better spent helping? How many deaths in sub-Saharan Africa have been due to their advice on condoms? Secular organizations, such as Doctors Without Borders, do much of the same work, without any of the negatives. We don’t need faith to do good.

If any religion had a record of being right and useful, then I’d trust it too. But they simply don’t. Science does, so I’m going to be sticking with it.

Biblical Changes

This article raises an interesting point about the Bible: it has changed a lot over the years. Which is to be expected, in the times of hand-copying all works did. One book I’ve read (I think it was The Ancestor’s Tale) even used different copies of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to illustrate how mutation works.

But back to the point: the Bible changes. The percentage of Americans who believe that the Bible is literally true is large, but hard to pin down. I’ve seen numbers as high as 60% and as low as 10%, which raises a bunch of questions about those polls, but they’re beside the point. I’m curious as to how those people, however numerous, would respond to the fact that the Bible is different, in some cases very different, now than it was two-thousand years ago.

Because I can only see three possibilities:

1. God inspired the Bible then inspired the changes.
   
2. God inspired the Bible but men changed it.
   
3. Men created the Bible and men changed it.

None of those possibilities bode well for literalists. The first is the best, but why would God change the book that he wrote? Maybe it’s just me, but that doesn’t make much sense. If God is perfect then why would his works need editing? Possibility two is worse, given that it means that man messed up what God wrote, but the basic message is probably still there. This is still problematic, because why wouldn’t God stop man from mangling his works?

The third possibility is the absolute worst, since it takes God completely out of the equation, and makes the Bible no more important than The Epic of Gilgamesh or the proverbs of Ahikar the Wise, or Moby Dick (the first two were picked as they predate the parts of the Bible to which they bear striking resemblance). This is also the most plausible, and it’s the conclusion that most Biblical scholars, like Bart D. Ehrman, reach. Ehrman wrote a book called Misquoting Jesus about this very topic.

The Bible is undoubtedly an important book, but not because it’s the word of God.

The Power of Faith

This is probably the best YouTube video I’ve ever seen. The use of “Mad World” in the background is perfect. We live in the maddest of all possible worlds. Or so it sometimes seems.

This made me think about how much I agree with Bertrand Russell when he said, “I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.” An honest look at historical and contemporary events shows that religion has had far more negative consequences than positive ones. All of the hope and charity and love that would have been there without religion is far outweighed by the blood of innumerable innocents that wouldn’t have spilt without religion.

Diderot had it right when he said, "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." Here’s to that day.

Anonymously Insightful

The other day I got an anonymous comment on my post Doubt Technology Too that was so insightful that I had to mention it in a real post. Honestly, I wish I had thought of/said this, because it really impressed me, and I think it’s something that a lot of people need to be reminded of.

Nick and Stu:

It strikes me that the two of you are talking about two different kinds of "truth", and two different kinds of "knowing." Therefore, Stu, you completely talk past Nick when you say "I believe what evidence supports," because Nick relies on "spiritual evidence" while you rely on "material evidence." And by the same token, Nick, you completely talk past Stu when you say "I cannot reveal anything to you that you are unwilling to see," and "evidence is all fine and dandy, but I seek truth on a higher level: reason."

In Stu's world view, I think, these are not well-formed English sentences; they conform to the syntax of English, but their semantics are either empty or self-contradictory.

Nick, you believe that there is such a thing as revelation, in the biblical sense, meaning that some higher truth is directly revealed to you by God in some internal process that must always remain ineffable. In this way of knowing, you don't become convinced of things by a an incremental process of rational thought that proceeds from known facts to reasonable conclusions by use of logic. Instead, you find yourself suddenly overwhelmed by an epiphany: in an instant, everything becomes clear and you feel no need to question, because you just know that you know what you know...

The rapture of resolved tension is so great that it does not occur to you to double check the truth which has been revealed to you; you are totally convinced. And, because of the intensity of this feeling, you believe that this process is more valid than that based on reasoning from evidence to conclusions.

Stu, your comparatively slow and unglamourous process of reasoning from established facts to necessary conclusions, using provably correct logical operations, cannot possibly offer Nick an emotional experience of comparable intensity, and therefore you cannot convince Nick of anything.

And Nick, Stu does not judge the truth of a statement by the intensity of his emotional response to it, and therefore you cannot convince Stu of anything.

Personally, I try to remain skeptical of any belief that I have a strong emotional response to. The stronger the emotional response, the more likely it is to color my reasoning, and therefore the more careful I must be to seek validation by alternative means. I am no stranger to that moment of inspiration and insight, when one shouts "AHA! Now I see it all!" But I try to keep myself honest by backtracking to what was previously known and tediously building the bridge of reason that will prove to me that I have not fooled myself, or given in to wishful thinking, or simply made a mistake...

That's what reason is for.

That quote perfectly illustrates why discussions between the religious and atheists can be so frustrating for both sides; we’re simply not speaking the same language. Personal revelation is something that science can’t deal with (at least not yet, although some of the articles I’ve read indicate that we’re getting close), and the evidence that atheists seek is just not there (at least in any form besides personal revelation).

The best way to think of the “culture wars” or whatever it’s being called is in terms of logic versus emotion. Instead of “faith”, think about trying to convince your best friend that their cheating lover is not good for them. Without any emotional attachment, it’s really easy to see. But when you’re in love, there’s almost no logic that can break it. The human brain can so easily be made completely illogical by love, and (I’d imagine) the same thing happens with faith.

So how can those without faith preach, if you will, to the faithful? It would seem to me that you’d have to do it the same way you’d convince a friend that their significant other is no good, hammer home the evidence, and maybe get a little mean and confrontational (if the situation warrants it). It probably won’t work, but if you’ve seeded doubt in their mind, it may grow. Eventually some people will deconvert. As far as I can tell, this is what most people espouse anyway.

The opposite could be said of converting people, and it’s exactly what evangelicals do. They’ve had thousands of years to figure out what works, and appealing to fears of death or needs for community or a sense of purpose work. They play to emotion, and unbelievers need to have counters to those emotions (some of which, such as personal revelation, we might not have anything to counter with, except perhaps Sam Harris’ meditation).

But the numbers of the religious are dwindling, as more and more kids leave the church when the leave the home, so something is going right for us. We need to take advantage of it, and work to show people that godlessness can be a very good, happy place. All the evidence in the world cannot make up for that.

Faith Does Need Proof

I'm currently reading Sam Harris's The End of Faith. He has a lot of good points, but one I'd like to discuss here is that all beliefs require some form of proof, or at least people desire proof for their beliefs. Most people seem to think that, in the words of Douglas Adams, “Proof denies faith.” But I think it’s fairly obvious that “faith demands proof.”

Don’t believe me? Take apologetics. If faith doesn’t need proof, then why have thousands of people throughout history felt the need to defend their faith with evidence? Why is it that when you ask the faithful for proof, they give you an answer? If faith didn’t need proof, then the answer would be “our faith is proof enough”, but that’s very rarely heard.

Then there’s the science-deniers. If faith needs no evidence, and evidence is irrelevant to faith, why spend so much energy attempting to refute scientific claims? Why spend so much time insisting that science and archaeology “prove” the Bible? They shouldn’t need to, because their faith is worth more than all the evidence in the world.

But it isn’t, and people know it. The human mind craves rationality. When we believe something, it has to have some rational basis. And when we get information that goes against our beliefs, we have to rationalize it somehow, whether we utterly dismissing it, or change our beliefs (see this article).

Which means, of course, that beliefs don’t survive unless we ground them in reality, even if that reality is distorted. Which is why we have apologetics, and why Gould’s “nonoverlapping magisteria” is totally wrong; science and religion cannot survive together as long as they both make claims about how the world is.

The simple fact is that a belief, any belief, needs some kind of rational basis; that faith needs proof. Which is why the religious fear science so much. Science is capable of finding the real truths in the universe, religion is a muddle of ignorance, fear, and bigotry that we’d be better off without. It’s only a matter of time before religion is relegated to the history books, and I hope I’ll live to see it.

Scientists Are Not Dogmatic

Anyone who read my previous post, Science is Not Dogmatic and disagreed with me will probably be interested in this article (subscription required). It’s about the fine structure constant, alpha, experiments determining it, and what they mean for science and physics. The physics is cool, but not what I want to talk about. The article contained these gems:

"It [Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), the quantum field theory of electromagnetism] was just patched together out of bits and pieces, in order to explain some experiments," says Freeman Dyson, one of the theory's architects, now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. "We didn't expect it to last," he adds. "Every time there was a new experiment, we all expected that the theory would be proved wrong in some interesting way. Instead, each experiment still agrees with the theory. That's sort of a disappointment."

"There is no wiggle room if theory and experiment disagree," Kinoshita says. Some fundamental aspect of QED - quantum mechanics, say, or special relativity - might have to be modified. "If quantum electrodynamics is wrong, that would be a fantastic discovery," says Gabrielse. "The stakes are really high here."

"It has worked so remarkably well for a number of years that it has made it into all of our textbooks as if it's the gospel truth," Gabrielse says. "Most of us would be surprised if it breaks down, just because we've failed to make it break down after trying so hard." He adds, "We're in a rut, for very good reason, in using these field theories. They have been wildly successful. But it seems to me sort of part of the human experience to always ask, 'Is that the whole story? Or is there something more to it?'"

Yup, that’s dogmatic all right. Because if anything’s dogmatic, it’s wanting your supposed “cherished theories”, which are now “gospel truth” to be wrong. One of the principle architects of QED wants the theory, which he helped create to be wrong! They want to have to change it! These are not nut-jobs, out of synch with the majority of scientists. The fact is that science only really progresses when we don’t understand things, so if we knew everything about the universe scientists would be out of jobs!

One of the most important ways science progresses is by actively trying to find flaws in our theories and models. The only way a hypothesis can develop into a theory is by withstanding the unrelenting scrutiny of scientists. No incorrect hypothesis survives long under this intense pressure. As an example, disproving current theories is one of the biggest things going in particle physics right now, and the first team to find what’s wrong with the Standard Model will get a Nobel Prize, probably the same year they do it. If any of our current theories (except wholly theoretical ones like String Theory) could be proven wrong with what we have on hand, then they would have been proven wrong by now.

When a scientist says that a theory is right all that they mean is that all evidence gathered has supported it or its predictions. Everything could be wrong, but many theories have so much evidence behind them that it’s highly unlikely that they’ll need anything other than tweaking. The simple fact is that these thousands of scientists aren’t part of some grand dogmatic conspiracy, they just want to understand the way the world works; they want the truth. And currently, the scientific method is the only thing that gets us reliably to the truth. It might be a rocky, uneven, and bumbling ride, but it works. Which is far more than can be said about anything else.

Lost Faith in the Aftermath of Tragedy

A little while ago I wrote about blind faith in the aftermath of tragedy, people who think God “saved” them despite the fact that they’ve been through an unnecessary disaster, and many other people died. I feel that it is the height of human stupidity and arrogance. Although I guess if you’re already religious you have to rationalize what you’ve been through somehow, because we can’t possibly live in a random, meaningless world. I suppose it’s understandable if it gives them some comfort, although I say that reluctantly.

But I was shocked a little by this story. An airplane accidentally took off from a runway that was too short, and only one person survived, albeit with horrific injuries. The man’s first words after coming off of a ventilator were, “Why would God do this to me?”

Well, it’s just as arrogant as “God saved me!” But faith is all about giving yourself a big place in the world when you don’t have one. But it shocked me a little because he’s so close, so close to the truth. I wonder if it will actually dawn on him that there is no God, that there’s nothing in control, no rhyme, no reason, no big place in the world for a small human.

I hope he recovers from this terrible accident, and I hope he sees the light, so to speak.

Inherent Intolerance

A recent conversation with a friend got me thinking about how many Americans seem to believe that Islam is an inherently violent and intolerant religion. And it is. However, those same people usually resist comparisons to Christian violence and intolerance. But is Islam any worse than Christianity? To find out, I went digging for some quotes from their holy books. The answer might surprise you.

Below are seven quotes, four from the KJV Bible, and three from the Koran. Try to guess which are which.

1. “And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter. And fight not with them at the Inviolable Place of Worship until they first attack you there, but if they attack you (there) then slay them. Such is the reward of disbelievers.”

2. “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?”

3. “And it shall come to pass, that every soul, which will not hear that prophet, shall be destroyed from among the people.”

4. “Verily We have revealed unto thee clear tokens, and only miscreants will disbelieve in them.”

5. “O ye who believe! Take not for intimates others than your own folk, who would spare no pains to ruin you; they love to hamper you. Hatred is revealed by (the utterance of) their mouths, but that which their breasts hide is greater. We have made plain for you the revelations if ye will understand.”

6. “But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.”

7. “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.”


The answer are below the fold. No peaking!


1. Koran 2:191

2. 2 Corinthians 6:14

3. Acts 3:23

4. Koran 2:99

5. Koran 3:118

6. Luke 19:27

7. John 3:36


This is just a small sample from each religion, and they took me a few minutes to collect. A comprehensive list would be pages long. And it exists, at the Skeptics Annotated Bible, the links above.

It should be clear from these that both of them are inherently violent and intolerant, at least based on their books. They both have a history of violence, and both are currently violent. Perhaps Islam is more vocal about it, or maybe we just hear about radical Islam more often (remember, there’s still sectarian violence in Ireland). Either way there are still plenty of fanatic Christians who use their faith to legitimize their hatred, and that fact is undeniable. Just ask Matthew Shepard. So next time someone criticizes Islam in general, or says that the moderates should reject the radicals, remind them that Christianity, and every other religion, should do the same.

Blind Faith in the Aftermath of Tragedy

Why is it that when something like this happens, people never blame god for the terrible event but praise him for their survival? I don’t understand it. How can they possibly do it?

It’s even worse when it’s not a personal tragedy. How many people said that god had spared their lives after Katrina? Yup, god loves you so much that he destroyed your entire city, and killed thousands of your neighbors, but left you alive. Not only is it idiotic because if god loved you at all he wouldn’t make you suffer, but it’s so egocentric and arrogant. How can these people thank god for saving themselves but not the other people? They’re saying that they’re better, that god loves them more. Apparently he loves them just enough to not kill them. Yeah, that’s love.

I guess that the minds of the religious are in such a state of denial about the world that something so blatantly idiotic such as this passes as logical. Or maybe it doesn’t matter. I don’t know, and I probably never will.

Faith's Evolution, as demonstrated by psilocybin.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that psilocybin, the hallucinogen in peyote and other psychedelic mushrooms, can trigger “mystical experiences”.

Technically this isn’t new news. It’s been known for a while that psilocybin can have these effects. But what is novel is the rigorous and longitudinal design of the study. This gives the findings much more weight.

Continue reading...The study focused on people with heavily religious backgrounds, feeling that they would be best able to interpret the results as mystical. In my opinion, also adds some comparative value, as these people are more likely to have had previous mystical experiences, if only feeling “in the presence of God.”

When they took the drug, a full third of the participants felt it was the most meaningful experience of their lives, and another third ranked it in the top five.

This is mind boggling to me. Can you imagine tripping on shrooms being more meaningful than having a child, graduating from college, or falling in love? Maybe it’s one of those things you really have to do to understand.

Regardless, the researchers shy away from the religious implications of this, giving the old standby of “This work can't and won't go there.” Which is good science. The material cannot address the immaterial; the physical cannot address the metaphysical.

However, I think you can infer enough to make the argument. After all, a mushroom triggered the most meaningful experience of some of these people’s lives. The drug can only act on pathways in the brain, pathways that can be triggered in other ways, possibly independent of drugs.

All that happened was an alteration of the participants’ state of consciousness; and it occurred completely naturally. Natural mechanisms lead to mystical experiences that will be interpreted supernaturally without proper context. Hence they lead those ignorant of the phenomenon’s natural origin to some kind of supernatural conclusions. Is this how religion started? It’s been hypothesized before.

But what’s really telling is that 79% of the participants felt that their lives improved afterward, and this was corroborated by family and friends. Mystical experiences on their own aren’t necessarily a survival advantage, but if they can improve your mood and outlook toward life for an extended period of time then they very well could be. Human faith has been explained many times before as conferring a survival or reproductive advantage upon the faithful, (Matthew Alper’s The God Part of the Brain is one example). Now it seems that mystical experiences, which can be a key part of faith, are also.

It would appear that the evidence for all parts of human faith having evolved is mounting. I find it ironic that soon scientists will understand the faithful better than the faithful understand themselves.