Before that, I’d have to go back to my troubled religious youth to remember being in church. Sitting uncomfortably in straight backed pews; singing vapid, falsely cheerful songs of unworthiness and worship to an invisible sky daddy; sipping grape juice and eating stale bits of savior; getting baptized 3 times in 3 different churches to ward off eternal damnation and gnashing of teeth in the sulfurous, burning pits of hell; dealing with fake smiles on fake faces adorned in Avon makeup and festooned in Sears and Roebuck Sunday best outfits; parroting bible stories carefully cherry-picked from the sordid pages of a book filled with murder, slavery and hate.

None of it was all that pleasant. All of it was forced. No one ever seemed genuinely kind or compassionate. When I learned about hypocrisy at the age of 12 I promptly called bullshit on the whole mess of religion and refused to go again. My parents were furious, but in the end they gave up on me, content that I’d eventually get my just reward in the fiery lakes of hell.

This Sunday we’re going to the mega-church about 45 minutes away. I don’t want to go but my local group wants to experience it. Since I’m the Official Cat Herder, I feel like it would be a good thing to go along. Part of me wonders what it’s like in a mega-church. What is the feel of the place? Something I thought church should do for people is give them a sense of belonging, of community. How can you get that in a huge auditorium? I have no idea how big this place is. So it’s only fair that I actually experience it, I guess.

I have some questions that I want to answer on Sunday. Feel free to comment with other questions I can try to answer as well. Here’s what I have so far. I will take notes while I’m there.

• What makes people excited to come here?
• What messages are they conveying? Fire and Brimstone (like I got in the Southern Baptist church I went to as a child?), Love Thy Neighbor? Look forward to Heaven and forget about the troubles of today? End Times? Healing?
• Are the messages cherry-picked? Are they exclusively positive or are there warnings as well?
• Is there any bigotry?
• How many people are there? How many seats are there? How many seats are filled?
• What is the overall emotion? Do people seem desperately, fakely happy? Do they seem unconnected to reality? Are they calm or elated? Are they somber? Are they quiet or excited? Are they glassy-eyed?
• Do they talk to each other? Do they all sit near each other or are they scattered about? Is there any sense of “community?”

When the collection plate comes around, I have an envelope to put in. It contains the following quotes:

• I don’t want to believe, I want to know. Carl Sagan
• Scientia Vincere Tenebras (Science will defeat darkness)
• I have no need for a religion. I have a conscience.
• If God’s love is unconditional, then why does Hell exist?
• I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.

Thank you for all of your quotes that you shared with me. There were so many good ones, it was hard to decide which ones I wanted, but I had an idea of the message I wanted to convey. Someone commented that they didn’t know why I’d do such a thing. Well, I shared the idea with the rest of my group and hopefully others will also contribute an envelope of quotes to the collection plate.

Here is my reasoning. I will be uncomfortable enough in the presence of strangers ( I have severe Social Anxiety, of several diagnosed varieties, btw, so this is very stressful to me, just to go there at all), the last thing I want to do is stand out from the crowd and look really weird. As a Social Phobic, I like to blend in to avoid bringing attention to myself. I won’t sing the hymns or bow my head, but I will be very courteous and polite. I’m in their house, after all. The goal is to learn and experience. So I thought it would be nice to have something to put in the collection plate.

They will open the envelope and instead of getting hard earned (undeserved) money they will get the opportunity to experience a different worldview in a nonthreatening way. Of course, you can never teach anyone anything unless they are willing to learn.  I don’t expect my quotes to change any minds.

Now, to be completely honest, I must confess to you that part of the reason is harmless deviousness. I can’t help it. I want to smirk all the way to our brunch afterward thinking of them opening the envelope and getting wisdom instead of untaxed, undeclared income. To think I will spread a bit of Carl Sagan goodness and imagine their eyebrows raise as they realize a heathen sat politely among them tickles me to some degree.

If I have to suffer this discomfort at least I can have a tiny bit of harmless fun, can’t I? I know that my message will be discarded, probably in righteous indignation. But I picked my quotes very carefully. I tried not to be offensive or nasty in any way. I tried to show a love of science and knowledge, to show that atheists have morals, to show that asking questions and thinking critically is a wonderful human ability that shouldn’t be wasted by unquestioning obedience to an invisible man in the sky.

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We’ve all experienced a highly improbable event in our lives. Probably many, in fact. Some of us more than others, some more seemingly improbable than others. There is such a thing as the Law of Large Numbers that explains these coincidences and “miracles”.

The Law of Large Numbers simply stated (sans math): with a large enough sample many odd coincidences are likely to happen.

Coincidence: an occasion when two or more similar things happen at the same time, especially in a way that is unlikely and surprising.

Miracle: an unusual and mysterious event that is thought to have been caused by a god, or any very surprising and unexpected event.

~

On a side note, I was disappointed with Dictionary.com’s listing on these words so I thought I’d go to the Cambridge Dictionary. The definition above is from the Dictionary of British English. Out of curiosity, I looked up the word miracle in the Cambridge Dictionary of American English:

Miracle: an unusual and mysterious event that is thought to have been caused by God, or any surprising and unexpected event.

A very subtle but telling difference! I think I’ll be using the British version from now on.

~

Anyway, I digress, again! I like how the definition of miracle is either caused by god, or (moving the goalposts) unexpected. Those are two very different kinds of events. One is something supernatural, manipulated by god’s hand. The other is something merely surprising. And yet the definition combines them, basically rendering it rather meaningless.

So let’s get to the numbers that Michael Shermer shared in his article. He says:

I cannot always explain … specific incidents, but a principle of probability called the Law of Large Numbers shows that an event with a low probability of occurrence in a small number of trials has a high probability of occurrence in a large number of trials. Events with million-to-one odds happen 295 times a day in America.

Shermer quotes CERN physicist Georges Charpak and University of Nice physicist Henri Broch from their book, Debunked!: ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience:

In the case of death premonitions, suppose that you know of 10 people a year who die and that you think about each of those people once a year. One year contains 105,120 five-minute intervals during which you might think about each of the 10 people, a probability of one out of 10,512 — certainly an improbable event. Yet there are 295 million Americans. Assume, for the sake of our calculation, that they think like you. That makes 1/10,512 × 295,000,000 = 28,063 people a year, or 77 people a day for whom this improbable premonition becomes probable. With the well-known cognitive phenomenon of confirmation bias firmly in force (where we notice the hits and ignore the misses in support of our favorite beliefs), if just a couple of these people recount their miraculous tales in a public forum (next on Oprah!), the paranormal seems vindicated. In fact, they are merely demonstrating the laws of probability writ large.

So, for example if 23 random people are asked their birthdays, there is a 50% chance that at least 2 of them celebrate the same birthday. It may seem like an amazing coincidence, but it’s not amazing at all.

Then Michael Shermer refers to a review of the above book by another physicist, Freeman Dyson. He talks about Littlewood’s Law of Miracles:

“In the course of any normal person’s life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month.” Dyson explains that “during the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month.”

So a miracle is basically a one in a million event, according to Littlewood who was a University of Cambridge mathematician. And we all have about a million little events in our lives every month. So we all get a miracle a month, or thereabouts (actually 35 days). See how cool math is? Of course, a miracle a month is rather commonplace, isn’t it?

Then, when observing and reporting events, there is the ever present loom of confirmation bias and anecdotal evidence, which is not very reliable, if at all.

One thing I’ve never understood is when people see Jesus or Mary in bird poop or a pizza pan or a stump. (Basic everyday pareidolia, of course). Nothing special happens except that they recognize a face in a random pattern. But before you know it a shrine is constructed and people are kissing the bird poop and praying at the stump. Not being religious, I find this completely silly, but they are True Believers. Does the miracle follow the sighting? I never hear about anyone claiming a bonifide miracle from one of these sightings. (Then again, no true miracle has ever been verified, not scientifically). And Mary needs a better agent if she’s reduced to showing up in bird poop, but that’s just my humble opinion.

Other resources:

• Coincidences: Remarkable or Random?

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Let’s define a mystical experience first. Dan Merkur, author of Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions, lists the five most common symptoms of a mystical experience (from The God Part of the Brain, pg 134)

• a sense of unity or totality
• a sense of timelessness
• a sense of having encountered ultimate reality
• a sense of sacredness
• a sense that one can not adequately describe the richness of their experience

I was deeply religious as a child, from about age 4 to 12. I was so terrified of burning in hell that I was baptized 3 times in 3 different churches. I went to Sunday school, church, bible camp, I sang hymns, I prayed, I studied and read my bible, and had bible lessons for a short while. But in all those years, I never once had a mystical experience. I never felt god. I never felt the touch of the divine.

After I gave up on religion, I wandered from one spiritual practice to the next. I meditated, I practiced all kinds of energy woo, I sat in circles with others and we prayed and chanted, I sat in a sweat lodge and chanted and drummed and sweated. I tried my hand at everything I could think of. I had heard others talk about connecting with the divine, of having mystical experiences. But in those many years of spiritual searching and experience, I never felt anything mystical. I never felt a sense of timelessness, or one with the universe. I never felt a sense of sacredness or ultimate reality. Not once.

Maybe, unlike 85% (or more) of humanity, my god gene is turned off. So, I thought I’d ask you a few questions. You can answer by email or in the comments below. But I’d love to know the following:

1. Have you ever had a mystical experience?
2. If you had a mystical experience would you consider it religious (pertaining to God), or spiritual (more universal, not religious), or just a brain phenomenon at the time and after contemplation?
3. Did the mystical experience cause you to seek out a way to try to make it happen again? Did it make you try to be more religious or spiritual in some way?
4. If you have experienced something mystical, are you still spiritual or religious now? Is that in part because of your experience in any way?
5. If you had a mystical experience and you’re now an atheist, how did you reconcile that with being a nonbeliever now? Did it make it harder to lose your faith, do you think?
6. Are you like me? Have you never experienced anything like what I’ve described?
7. If you’ve never had a mystical experience, do you think that has made it easier for you to be a nonbeliever?
8. If you’ve never had a mystical experience and you’re religious or spiritual, how does that make you feel? Are you actively searching for this experience that others are having and you are not?
9. Do you have anything to add that I didn’t think of?

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to answer these questions. I’m wondering if it’s just me who is devoid of the mystical, or if maybe there is a correlation to those of us who don’t believe in any gods.

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One important tool is going to be Occam’s Razor: “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity” (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem). That’s it in a nutshell right from William of Ockham, a Franciscan monk and English philosopher, theologian and logician in the 14th century.
Another way to put it is: The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. But don’t get confused by the term, simple. It means: The hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is usually the correct one. When giving explanatory reasons for something, don’t posit more than is necessary. Or, don’t make any more assumptions than you have to.

So let’s say you have 2 competing hypotheses that are basically equal in most respects. Then this principle would suggest that you choose the hypothesis that makes the fewest assumptions while still sufficiently answering the question. In science Occam’s Razor is used as a rule of thumb (a heuristic) to help researchers develop good models.

In your life it can help you make decisions and choose what to think and what to believe (or not believe). You can use it as a heuristic as well, a great rule of thumb in your Critical Thinking Toolkit.

Sometimes atheists use Occam’s Razor to argue against the existence of god since everything can be explained through natural means without complicating it with the supernatural.

Another example: Crop circles. There used to be 2 competing ideas for where crop circles came from. One was that flying saucers from an alien world made them. Another was that a person  (or people) used some type of instrument to make the designs in the grass. Since there is no evidence for the flying saucers from outer space, and given how complicated and how many assumptions need to be made to make that argument work, Occam’s Razor would suggest that the simpler explanation would be that humans did it with instruments. That is the argument that makes less assumptions.

Of course, the second argument could be wrong, but until there was more information, it was the preferable hypothesis. Then 2 guys admitted to the crop circle hoax in the 1990′s. So that ended that debate for most people.

A quote by Carl Sagan is appropriate here: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. When it comes to the supernatural, Occam’s Razor is a very valuable tool indeed.

Sources:

• The Skeptic’s Dictionary
• Wikipedia
• 2Think.org

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If there is one gift you can give to a child or anyone else, it is to teach them to think for themselves. The educational system doesn’t teach this important skill. It teaches rote memorization and focuses on test taking. Therefore it’s up to you to learn it for yourself.

Unfortunately, I’m self taught and have no formal training in this realm. Which means sharing it with you is harder. So instead of putting it off even longer, I thought maybe we could explore the subject together and develop a plan for sharing with others in our lives or on the web. First, let’s define it.

Here is a quote: [Critical thinking is a] desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and hatred for every kind of imposture. ~ Francis Bacon (1605)

Here is the short and sweet definition:

Critical Thinking: n: the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion.

But I’ve found that there are many different interpretations for this concept. You can see a whole page of them here.

Here’s another one:
“Critical thinking is best understood as the ability of thinkers to take charge of their own thinking. This requires that they develop sound criteria and standards for analyzing and assessing their own thinking and routinely use those criteria and standards to improve its quality.” Elder , L. and Paul, R. “Critical thinking: why we must transform our teaching.” Journal of Developmental Education, Fall 1994.

What makes a critical thinker? Here are some attributes:

• asks pertinent questions
• assesses statements and arguments
• is able to admit a lack of understanding or information
• has a sense of curiosity
• is interested in finding new solutions
• is able to clearly define a set of criteria for analyzing ideas
• is willing to examine beliefs, assumptions, and opinions and weigh them against facts
• listens carefully to others and is able to give feedback
• sees that critical thinking is a lifelong process of self-assessment
• suspends judgment until all facts have been gathered and considered
• looks for evidence to support assumption and beliefs
• is able to adjust opinions when new facts are found
• looks for proof
• examines problems closely
• is able to reject information that is incorrect or irrelevant

Just about anyone can learn to think more critically. Even more importantly, you can use it in nearly every aspect of your daily living. You already think all the time, but if you are not consciously trying to think critically, your thoughts will be more biased, distorted, partial, uninformed and prejudiced. You’ll make decisions based on your emotions and feelings, you’ll rely on your “intuition” and your gut instinct, which can sometimes be useful but can often be quite flawed.

One way that flawed thinking is noticeable is through Logical Fallacies, which we talk about here at HDC.

Here are some other resources that you might find useful:

• Critical Thinking on the Web
• Foundation for Critical Thinking

Well, that is enough to get us started. Do you have any great resources for learning to think critically that you would like to share?

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To start out, the definition I am using for god is any given being that can supposedly create matter out of nothing, is omnipotent, and is unbound by physical spatial traits. Furthermore I derive that an omnipotent god constitutes as an unstoppable force or can be the causation of such. The existence of such a god forms my hypothesis (which I will regard as true for this proof); therefore the following mainly concerns itself with monotheistic brands of gods.

Using the above traits, the god from my hypothesis could create an object of infinite size and maximum density. This theoretical object would literally fill the entirety of the universe, with every small speck of space filled with matter. This rock constitutes as an immovable object as there is nowhere left to move the rock and thus it is incapable of movement. As an aside it happens that god can create an object so large that he cannot move it.

However the existence of an immovable object by definition means that an unstoppable force cannot also exist. Since that is a part of the definition of god outlined above, I therefore must reject the hypothesis and assert that such a god cannot and does not exist. In particular a god that can create matter unrestrained cannot also be omnipotent in all regards.

Simple, short, and sweet… but the devil is in the details (ha ha). Any god with boundaries and limitations obviously escapes the above, but from my experience that’s the last thing any monotheist will even begin to contemplate (god being the biggest baddest supernatural being that ever was—who also happened to create everything—just isn’t enough, seemingly god must also have limitless power and ability). So please qualify objections to the below considerations.

1)      Can god create an object so large even he cannot move it?

The answer given above is yes. To disagree, please provide what way the following proof is inaccurate and give an alternative:

a)      Definition: god is omnipotent (omnipresent as well).
b)      Definition: god can create matter anywhere out of nothing.
c)       Action: god creates matter everywhere he exists / in all space.
d)      Analysis: there is nowhere left to move the object, thus…
e)      Conclusion: god can create an object so large that he cannot move it.

It is a very logical progression given omnipotence that does not limit god in any way. Please refrain from self-defeating arguments, god cannot create space no matter how capable he is as space is nothing. I literally mean nothing, it doesn’t exist—it is the default before anything is created or exists there. Furthermore adding a step between c and d is self-defeating as well (such as removing a portion of the object to create space to move it) as it implies that before god does something to it the object is immovable.

2)      Infinity and Gravity

The first thing to note is that the matter in the object from the proof is countable infinity and the force is not. Infinity in mathematics doesn’t actually exist either, so any mathematical attempts should have both these considerations explained with it. I’d also like to add here that a theoretically infinite object is at equilibrium and has no center, so that should take care of gravity qualms.

3)      Hilbert’s Hotel Paradox

Hilbert’s Hotel paradox refers to a hotel with infinite rooms each filled with a guest (so full). However the hotel can accommodate infinitely more guests by putting a new guest in room 1 by having the guest in room 1 move to room 2, the guest in room 2 to room 3, and so on for each new guest. The conceptual flaw to this problem is that the hotel isn’t actually accommodating more guests; it’s just that there are now guests infinitely transitioning rooms. In other words the number of guests in rooms did not increase. This paradox cannot apply to the infinite object due to the incapability of having a transitional progression.

4)      Beyond Reason

Please refrain from trying to tell me god is not understandable by human reason. Realize that there would be no correct religion if that was the case as no religion understands god, and there would be no assertions that god exists because it would be beyond reasoning. Besides religions often like to claim we were created in the image of god, thus cannot be outside of our reasoning. I’m going to make an assertion that anybody who asserts such doesn’t actually believe it… By saying god is beyond reason, nobody could then assert that anything above is wrong since it would be beyond their reasoning as well.

There we go, I think that covers all the rift-raft arguments. Let the fun begin!

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Partial Transcript:

37:18 If the goal is not to score points, if the goal is actually to persuade people, if the morally superior goal is to win minds rather than just make people look stupid, then tone really does matter. Psychology has some things to say about how we should best go about trying to persuade people to really, any position, but even more specifically to a scientific position that they may otherwise feel threatened by,  or may conflict with their worldview.

38:07 It’s an empirical issue. What is likely to be persuasive or off-putting or not is a testable question. There are people right now researching how you package factual issues and seeing if that affects the rate at which people believe, disbelieve or deny them.

One of the examples of this, there is a researcher who’s name is Geoffrey Monroe from Towson University who has done some studies on peoples’ willingness to agree with belief consisting information as opposed to information that’s inconsistent with beliefs as a function of things like how the information is presented to them.

So he had a piece on Science and Religion Today where he folded this into the debate about, do you alienate people by using blunt language that offends them. The theory behind this that people don’t, as most people probably realize, they don’t simply make up their mind on the basis of factual, cognitive, cold type calculations. This is one aspect that frustrates us, is that when we are debating with somebody, it quickly becomes apparent that the facts of evolution in some cases won’t make a difference, if the person has an emotional investment.

So people hold attitudes because they are linked to aspects of your self-identity. As stated in Terror Management Theory, if you have a worldview that can be threatened, you get defensive. You circle your wagons as if attacked. In the same way, with factual issues like scientific-type things, religious people hold these as part of their broader self-identity.

So if you’re saying, “I’m a creationist”, you’re not just saying, “I favor the arguments for creation”, you’re saying, “I, as a person, my identity is as a creationist”. So if you’re attacking creationist claims, you’re attacking that person as well, their self-identity. So how do you challenge the beliefs, but don’t threaten them on a personal level?

40:14 Geoffrey Monroe did a study that is very sobering, because what he found was that, his particular study used stimuli that had to do with things like homosexuality and mental illness. He had people who thought homosexuality and mental illness were the same thing, and he had people who had the view that there’s no connection. Then he presented them both with statements that confirmed or disconfirmed that.

What he found was disturbing. People who’s views were challenged by this evidence, so believed disconfirming information, so if I thought that homosexuals have higher rates of mental illness, then I read a scientific article that said the opposite, those people tended to devalue science itself. That is, they rated lower the ability of science to answer questions like that, even beyond that, that it generalized to other issues other than the one that was challenged.

So it wasn’t even just, “this is a bad study”, or “I disagree with the conclusions” it was that “science itself cannot answer a question like this”. They become almost postmodernist. They would say, “well, you can have your science, but that doesn’t answer these questions.”

People at my university usually reserve two areas where “science can’t touch this”: religion and things like love or sexuality. They say, “Yes, you can have your data but these things are immune to faith or the wonders of the emotions, but science can’t address that.”

It seems also that a lot of pseudo-sciences tend to cluster together. You’re going to hear on a christian radio network, typically, obviously creationist stuff, but climate denialism comes in there, a lot of times there’s a lot of pseudo-science-y herbal remedies that you’ll hear late night on the christian talk shows.

It does seem to be that once you distrust one area of science, it’s not all that hard to start being more skeptical of others.

42:07 It spreads. So, what Monroe’s work is suggesting is the reason that happens is the person has some sort of cognitive dissonance. “My view is apparently disconfirmed by this study, so therefore this study cannot be valid, and studies in general probably aren’t valid.” They bring out things like, “even scientists disagree” or “facts can be twisted”.

What Monroe’s broader point to the debate of how information is presented is that often you can change that, or you can blunt that response by packaging the information in a less threatening way. That is, if somebody’s emotional factors are involved in this, if they are hurt, or if their worldview is challenged, if you present the information in a way that allows them to maintain part of their worldview, they are less likely to have that compensatory defensive response.

His argument is that you can use language that is relatively more accommodating. Like instead of saying, “we argue” that you instead frame it as, “here’s what the data says”. Or that you allow them to affirm part of their identity in another area.

So the way that some of these studies work is, let’s say you’re studying group boundaries like nationalism or patriotism. If you present the information like, write an essay on things that are good about America, and then present them with information that might be challenging, like slavery or something like that, then the person is more likely to accept that information because they’ve had the chance to affirm their broader values in a different context.

If I’m somewhere talking to a christian face to face, and we’re getting into a theological debate, I found myself instinctively but then later deliberately using a lot of morally loaded terms when talking to them. Instead of just saying, “you’re wrong on this position, that’s not the most valid argument”, you say things like, “well, I know you believe in integrity, I know you believe in worshiping god with all your heart soul,  and mind. I think integrity requires us to use the same standards to judge our own arguments that we would others.” Now what that’s doing, I’m still making a critique of their position, but I’m affirming some part of their moral identity. I’m not attacking them, “you’re a bad, ignorant person”, I’m saying “you’re a person who wants to live a life of integrity. Here’s an opportunity to have more intellectual integrity.”

45:05 The evidence suggests that if you frame a response within the person’s own worldview as much as possible, that it’s less likely to be alien to them and they can just dismiss it. For example, about the environmental movement becoming more christianized, or rather that the christian left movement, that if you package things in terminology like “creation carer” or “global warming stewardship”, that the persons are more likely to receive that rather than deny that.

The point is that if you frame an issue that is less likely to be threatening, or if you allow the person to affirm other things, like “religion is really great for you, it sounds like it’s done great things, but”, then that makes the person less likely to have a defensive response where they just say “No, I’m not going to listen”

45:54 So the question is, can we do this in a way that preserves our intellectual integrity? Do we have to lie to them, and coddle them and say, “oh this is really great” when we don’t think it is? Or can we frame things and still preserve our own beliefs?

~What follows is the RD guys hashing out their ideas and thoughts, which are interesting. They don’t really agree that it’s a good way to handle arguments with religious people, but have a listen for yourself to get their full thoughts.

What do you think? I want to mull it over some more, but I think affirming someone’s moral identity, appealing to their sense of integrity, would be a good way to go, to not alienate them. But I agree with the guys that winning a tiny little battle isn’t really that satisfying. Although part of me thinks it might help, another part thinks it might be harmful, as the guys mention how people mix pseud0-science with real science readily, which isn’t acceptable. I also don’t believe that science and religion can mix.

It’s a delicate issue. I look forward to hearing what you think about it, if you care to chime in.

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