If you have been watching the news lately, you know that at least one Christian lunatic thinks that today is going to be the Rapture, marking the beginning of the end of the world. Somehow, he's managed to get a lot of media attention. I've heard people mention it on the street, and local skeptic groups are having an End of the World Party to poke some fun at the idea.
When tomorrow comes around and we're all still here, what will the Christians say? Will the ones who believe in the Rapture actually change their beliefs based on the fact that the Rapture didn't happen as predicted? Unfortunately, no. In general, their belief that the Rapture will some day occur is based on their faith that the Bible is the absolute, unerring word of God. It's truth is permanent and unchanging.
On the other hand, if the Rapture did actually occur, if billions of people suddenly ascended into Heaven in a clap of thunder, skeptics would change their beliefs. If I saw this happen, of course I would believe that some sort of superior being existed and these events happened as predicted in the Bible. I would have to be delusional not to.
That's the difference between "people of faith" and skeptics. Skeptics understand that we don't have complete knowledge of the universe. Science is a process of gaining facts and modifying our understanding based on the observed facts. History is full of cases where the scientific consensus was one thing at one time and then changed when a new hypothesis was introduced or new facts came to light that changed our understanding of the universe. One only has to look at the history of medicine for ample examples of this. It was once thought that bloodletting was a useful treatment for disease. We now know that good health isn't a matter of balancing the body's "humors". We have a much better understanding of the mechanisms of disease and such practices have been rightfully abandoned. Religious people see this as a fault in science. They somehow think that admitting that you were wrong and accepting a new idea as a better representation of the truth is somehow a failing in science. For them, it seems to be important to have beliefs that are absolute. They do not change no matter what. This, somehow, is a virtue.
I think that stubbornly sticking to your ideas and being unwilling to change is sad. How can we grow as individuals if we are unwilling to accept that sometimes we are wrong? How can we continue to grow and improve our family relationships if we aren't willing to accept new ideas and change as our life situation changes? How can we ever expect to improve our society if we aren't willing to question the assumptions about the values of our culture, our interactions with others, and our relationship with our planet?
Being a skeptic is a positive world view. It shouldn't be confused with being a cynic, which is a pretty negative view. Skeptics want to use all the tools of science, philosophy, and art to increase their understanding of the world. They want to know the Truth, but they always keep in mind that our current understanding of what is the Truth can change, based on sufficient evidence.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Lack of Evidence
In my previous post, I compared the evidence for the existence of God with the evidence for the existence of mosquitoes. I'd like to take that idea a little further and generalize it a bit.
Given the claims that are made about the properties of the Christian God, the overwhelming lack of evidence of its existence provides a strong argument that it doesn't exist at all. Of course, lack of evidence is not proof of nonexistence. Until recently, we had no evidence of exoplanets - planets orbiting other stars. We now have lots of evidence of exoplanets. They clearly exist. The difference between exoplanets and a god is that we simply didn't have the proper technology to detect the exoplanets. According to many Christians, their god is everywhere on Earth, and he is constantly involved with peoples' lives. We should have ample evidence of his existence. It's not the case that we're just waiting for someone to build a sufficiently sensitive god-detector, and then, voila, there he will be.
But this blog isn't intended to rehash the arguments of my last blog. I want to apply the same concept to other supernatural claims. Let's take psychic powers as an example. If humans had actually evolved psychic abilities of some sort, then we would expect that there would be lots of people walking around with some level of psychic ability. In fact, I imagine that psychic ability, say the ability to read minds, would have incredible evolutionary advantage. Imagine being able to walk into a room and being able to immediately know which person in the room is interested in mating with you. I'm not talking about the perceptive abilities of a drunken frat boy who thinks that every woman in the room wants to mate with him. I'm talking about the ability to actually read minds and know what other people want and think. It would be an incredible advantage in dating, business, and politics. It would be well known that people with these skills exist and who they are. In fact, they would likely be so successful in mating and surviving that those genes would quickly be prevalent in the population. Everyone would have a psychic ability just like everyone has a sense of smell.
Instead, we have people who claim to have psychic abilities and advertise them to con a few bucks off of gullible suckers. Last year I was walking along the street in the Greektown section of Detroit. I was directly across the street from the Greektown Casino. I noticed a sign over a door advertising a Psychic. Amazing. Of course, if that person really had psychic abilities, they would just walk across the street into the casino and walk out with a fortune. Instead, they have set up shop across the street and are preying on the statistically challenged (and obviously reality challenged) customers of the casino. If this isn't adequate evidence that this person's claimed psychic powers are a fraud, I don't know what is.
You can take this same argument and apply it to lots of claims - Bigfoot, UFOs, alien abductions, cases of autism caused by vaccines, funny Adam Sandler movies, etc. In all cases, the complete lack of evidence that such a thing exists is very strong evidence that it doesn't exist. It doesn't prove it, but it's a good first approximation.
Given the claims that are made about the properties of the Christian God, the overwhelming lack of evidence of its existence provides a strong argument that it doesn't exist at all. Of course, lack of evidence is not proof of nonexistence. Until recently, we had no evidence of exoplanets - planets orbiting other stars. We now have lots of evidence of exoplanets. They clearly exist. The difference between exoplanets and a god is that we simply didn't have the proper technology to detect the exoplanets. According to many Christians, their god is everywhere on Earth, and he is constantly involved with peoples' lives. We should have ample evidence of his existence. It's not the case that we're just waiting for someone to build a sufficiently sensitive god-detector, and then, voila, there he will be.
But this blog isn't intended to rehash the arguments of my last blog. I want to apply the same concept to other supernatural claims. Let's take psychic powers as an example. If humans had actually evolved psychic abilities of some sort, then we would expect that there would be lots of people walking around with some level of psychic ability. In fact, I imagine that psychic ability, say the ability to read minds, would have incredible evolutionary advantage. Imagine being able to walk into a room and being able to immediately know which person in the room is interested in mating with you. I'm not talking about the perceptive abilities of a drunken frat boy who thinks that every woman in the room wants to mate with him. I'm talking about the ability to actually read minds and know what other people want and think. It would be an incredible advantage in dating, business, and politics. It would be well known that people with these skills exist and who they are. In fact, they would likely be so successful in mating and surviving that those genes would quickly be prevalent in the population. Everyone would have a psychic ability just like everyone has a sense of smell.
Instead, we have people who claim to have psychic abilities and advertise them to con a few bucks off of gullible suckers. Last year I was walking along the street in the Greektown section of Detroit. I was directly across the street from the Greektown Casino. I noticed a sign over a door advertising a Psychic. Amazing. Of course, if that person really had psychic abilities, they would just walk across the street into the casino and walk out with a fortune. Instead, they have set up shop across the street and are preying on the statistically challenged (and obviously reality challenged) customers of the casino. If this isn't adequate evidence that this person's claimed psychic powers are a fraud, I don't know what is.
You can take this same argument and apply it to lots of claims - Bigfoot, UFOs, alien abductions, cases of autism caused by vaccines, funny Adam Sandler movies, etc. In all cases, the complete lack of evidence that such a thing exists is very strong evidence that it doesn't exist. It doesn't prove it, but it's a good first approximation.
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