Age Of The Answer

Yes, I've reached the Age of the Answer - 42!

For those who haven't the faintest idea what that means, there's two parts to it. One - the rather more banal part is that today is my 42nd birthday. Yay! (I guess... ;) No, seriously, I'm fine with that, and have had a really pleasant day. No big party, but I have treated myself nicely and been treated nicely by the people I love, and am now winding down with my boy.

Why the Answer, though? Well, that's a lot more amusing. If you haven't read Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" series, you are really missing out; they are some of the funniest books out there, and Adams also manages to slip in some deep observations as part of the humor. The story of the Answer is one such.

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A group of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings decide that they're fed up with all the bickering about the meaning of it all, so they construct a computer called Deep Thought to tell them the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. Deep Thought is so brilliant that when it is accidentally switched on early, even without any data banks hooked up it begins with "I think therefore I am" and gets as far as deducing the existence of income tax and rice pudding before anyone manages to switch it off again.

(Note the cute philosophical point Adams has slipped in here; Descartes made a brilliant observation about the subjective nature of the human experience when he noted that the mere fact of being able to think proves to an individual that he she or it exists - but how can one go from there to proving that anything else exists? All the rest of it, income tax and rice pudding included, could be the ravings of a disordered mind. It may seem unlikely, and no doubt is, but such a theory cannot ultimately be proved incorrect.)

When the day of the Great On-Turning finally arrives, Deep Thought asks the programmers to state why they have created it, the second greatest computer in all time and space (even though it transparently already knows why). They ask for the Answer to Life the Universe and Everything, but they're a bit perplexed at the self-description since they were pretty sure they'd built the greatest. Before they can get to the bottom of it, though, they're interrupted by two professional philosophers, who object to the idea on the grounds that a definitive Answer would put them out of business! They demand rigidly defined and precisely demarcated areas of doubt and uncertainty in preference to absolute certainty.

(Doesn't this sound exactly like the whittering of any number of modern-day theologians, amateur and professional, who object so strongly to the temerity of those who would examine questions of religion with the tools of science and critical thinking? It's all very fine for making the technology and the medecine, but to critically examine religious ideas is just not on.)

Deep Thought informs them that, while its circuits are now irrevocably committed to finding the Answer, it's going to have to think about it for a bit - seven and a half million years to be exact! In the meantime they can make fortunes for themselves by speculating on what form the Answer will ultimately take. The philosophers are duly impressed - "Now that's what I call thinking! Why don't we ever think of things like that?" "Dunno, reckon our brains must be too highly trained."

(Adams is slyly pointing out that ultimate Answers don't necessarily have much to do with the business of living from day to day, and that we don't really think in spans at all appropriate to the Universe at large; seven and a half million years is an eyeblink to the Universe, but to us it's a span of time we can't really concieve of, far too long for any reasonable project.)

As well as being hyperintelligent, these particular pan-dimensional beings are able to maintain focus on a project. Seven and a half million years later they are ready and waiting. Deep thought confirms that it does have the Answer, that it is simple, and that it will indeed give it to them. But it warns them, "You're not going to like it." The answer, as you've doubtless figured out, is 42. Deep Thought points out that they've never really known what the Question was, and that's why the Answer doesn't make much sense to them. Naturally they ask it if it can tell them what the Question is, but Deep Thought says no, that's too tricky even for it!

(Daniel Dennet is very fond of pointing out that most of philosophy is a matter of finding good questions, rather than definitive answers. That's why his focus is less on whether gods exist, and more on why we humans are generally so enamored of the notion that they do.)

However, Deep Thought is able and willing to help them build an even bigger and better computer to calculate the Question. This computer will be so large and complex it will resemble a planet, and they themselves will go onto it and help guide its program. This new computer is named by Deep Thought: the Earth! "What a dull name." Sadly, after running for four and a half billion years, the Earth is destroyed five minutes before it is due to output the Question, to make room for a hyperspatial bypass just as a new type of ship makes hyperspatial bypasses obsolete.

(Even if the world has a purpose, there's no guarantee that it's a good one, or that it will be fulfilled; stupidity, randomness and chaos are forces too, and may be as strong as intelligence, purpose and order, whether we like the idea or not.)

As it happens, one Earthman, Arthur Dent, does escape the catastrophe (by hitching a ride on the prototype of the aforementioned new type of ship) with the Question embedded in his brain. After many adventures in time and space, he does figure a way to output the Question, which turns out to be "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?" As Arthur comments, "I always thought there was something fundamentally wrong with the Universe."

Actually, the process was messed up from the beginning, as the program was corrupted by the accidental inclusion of the most useless types of human beings into the program - the Neanderthals, it turns out, are not our ancestors; we are descended from hairdressers and telephone sanitizers. The rest of humanity, incidentally, was wiped out by a disease contracted by a dirty telephone.

(So who's really useless, after all?)

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Well, perhaps I am, and perhaps not; certainly I'm unlikely ever to know the Question. I've reached the Answer, though, and I'm finishing out this day a pretty contented guy! :)

Two Gods: The Irrelevant And The False

Believing in something for which there is no evidence is not deluded, it's just a rather silly way to waste your time and mental energy.

That is why believing in the deist's god, who set the universe in motion but has no further interaction with it, is not deluded but simply pointless. The very reason the notion can't be disproved is because it makes no practical difference whether such a god exists or not. A universe with a deistic god is indistinguishable from one with no god at all; that being the case, the deistic god can neither be proven nor disproven, nor is it useful in any way for explaining why the universe is the way it is.

The deistic god is therefore, scientifically speaking, profoundly irrelevant.

Believing in a proposition which the available evidence, including internal consistency, contradicts is delusion. The god of the Abrahamic faiths falls into this category.

The characteristics normally ascribed to that god, alone - omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence - cannot logically exist together. Omnipotence is self-defeating; an omnipotent being cannot create a force which that same being cannot defeat, i.e. God can't make a rock so heavy even He can't lift it. Omniscience is incompatible with any power at all, because it includes the ability to foresee an action which can then be prevented, meaning the prophecy was invalid. Omnibenevolence, in conjunction with omnipotence and omniscience, is incompatible with the world containing needless suffering; a god which sees the suffering, is able to prevent it and does not do so is obviously not loving in any recognizable sense of the word, unless you are a particularly talented sado-masochist.

I say suffering rather than evil because the doctrine of free will, which is the best answer theodicy has to offer, does not cover agentless suffering. In the specific case of the Abrahamic god, the distinction is largely superfluous, as most of the actions described as taken by the Abrahamic god in the sacred texts can only be described as deeply and directly malevolent. The unprevented agentless sufferings of humanity outside those texts are simply icing on the cake of disproving that notional omnibenevolence.

These are not new observations by any stretch of the imagination; the problem of suffering certainly predates Christianity and Islam, and probably Judaism but the archaeological record gets scarce that far back. Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians have been struggling to answer the paradoxes for near enough the entire time the faiths have existed, and have not yet been able to do so.

In science, it is perfectly permissible for a theory not to explain everything; at this stage of our development it would be ludicrous to expect anything else. The best and most mature theories will explain an abundance of observable facts, and that is enough to make a theory credible but not useful; to be useful a theory must predict facts before they are demonstrated. A complaint many physicists have about string theory is that while it explains many things it has not yet provided any disprovable predictions. The theory of evolution by natural selection is an example of a theory which is both mature and useful, and not just for enraging creationists either.

What is not permissible is for a theory (or even a hypothesis) to be internally inconsistent or to directly fly in the face of the evidence. The technical term for a hypothesis that does that is false.

Moral Relativism

Every society has some constellation of predispositions considered good, and some bad. In this sense, good is defined simply as conforming to societal expectations, bad as not; the specifics may be viewed as arbitrary since they are defined entirely within the societal system itself, i.e. they are ultimately self-referential.

If no universal standard can be applied to judge between sets of societal predispositions (which is to say between societies), then no society can be usefully judged except in its own terms; this is the view known as moral relativism. Taken to its logical extreme, the reductio ad absurdum, moral relativism carries all the flaws it is accused of; murder is indeed equivalent to jaywalking, to a hypothetical detached intellect judging the two.

However, there are at least three standards which can be applied across societies which are useful for comparing them irrespective of the specific tenets of the compared. Our hypothetical detached intellect may still, without moral judgment, scale any two given societies (sets of interacting presuppositions) on the bases of internal consistency, of adaptability to change both external and internal, and ultimately of utility in terms of survival.

The former may be judged by the degree to which an individual member of a society can think and act within the society's precepts without conflicting with others doing likewise. A society which values only adherence to a given set of self-consistent values would always score highly on such a scale, and need never fear destruction from within; destruction from without would always be a danger.

Most religions score pretty badly on internal consistency; this is why they either split incessantly into smaller schisms, or actively suppress societal mechanisms (such as widespread literacy) for examining their precepts. The latter tactic badly degrades societal adaptability.

Contrastingly, science by its core methodology incorporates any novelties of data or ideas into its core. Basic inconsistencies, such as the conflicts between general relativity and quantum mechanics, are not suppressed or ignored but rather actively worked upon. Nothing is sacred except the methodology itself, and if you could empirically convince scientist that tossing chicken bones worked better they'd probably order all further lab lunches from KFC.

Adaptability is thus built right into the foundation of science. Contrarily, since religion relies strongly upon revelation for content, and such revelation is normally decreed unquestionable (one might almost define religion in such terms), the bases of any given religion are by definition unchangeable and thereby inapt for adaptation either internal or external.

The remaining criterion by which our hypothetical detached intellect might judge societies is simple ability to survive. The Darwinian viewpoint prefers the society that survives best, but there is no inherent guarantee that the society which survives best prefers the Darwinian viewpoint. It could well be, as you imply, that some particular set of non-true societal assumptions might work better than the truth, and even that some non-scientific societal processes might better serve any given good, including survival. With respect, though, I consider it very unlikely; I have to confess, of course, that what makes me consider it unlikely is largely the application of the scientific method itself.

While the body of societies which have appreciated the scientific method (of testing ideas against reality) is necessarily small compared to those which had no such notion, the former have been far more successful, not only in traditional terms of population and wealth but in terms of adaptability to changing circumstance.

Without knowing it for an inconcontestible fact, I therefore believe that a secular society based on evidence-based inquiry is 'better' than a religious society based on authority-based faith., where 'better' is based on societal survival. Is it possible that a society based on unfounded assumptions and unsound (or no) methods for testing them would be better suited for survival than a society which valued truth and logic?

Well, possibly, but I'm not betting on it. Show me a study, or a disprovable theory.

Choosing beliefs

In common with more prominent atheists I'm often asked why I "choose not to believe in God"; I must confess the question makes very little sense to me as expressed.

I didn't choose not to believe in God, any more than I chose not to believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny. I'm not being flippant in the comparison; in all of those cases I once believed but no longer do. In each case what caused me to abandon my belief was the lack of real evidence for, and the abundance of logical evidence against, what was in the end a ridiculous proposition. The only distinguishing factor between them is that a majority of putative adults profess still to believe in God, and at that some of them still profess a belief in Santa Claus as well.

That is also, incidentally, the reason why I maintain my small campaign against belief in God, but not against Santa, the Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. My son is in little danger of retaining his belief in the latter three, because they are conspiracies amongst the Illuminati; the spurious 'evidence' of money beneath the pillow, of baskets full of fertility-themed candy, and of presents beneath the tree (and the occasional radio report of flying reindeer sightings) are all set up by adults who know full well that it is just a lark, a bit of fun we allow ourselves to perpetuate on the kids.

Not so the equally ridiculous tales of religion. These are perpetuated by adults who really, genuinely believe in them, even though they describe events like virgin births and dead people getting up and strolling about, events every bit as ridiculous as a rabbit laying pastel-coloured eggs. Kids are necessarily ignorant of how the world really is, but they are not stupid, and they are very very good indeed at detecting adult sincerity, and they give great credence to any
stories which their adult teachers sincerely believe. My son respects my sincere and hard-won beliefs, but his respect for my beliefs butts up against his respect for the contradictory beliefs most of the other adults in his life express.

The only reason I'm okay with that is that my strongest belief is that the best thing for a human being to learn is not a fact but a robust process of evaluating facts, and most of the other adults in Speed's life agree with that, even though they often don't apply it to their religious beliefs. I have faith (based on evidence) that my kid can think for himself, given half a chance.

Which returns me to he beginning of this essay; why, even in the face of overwhelming social disapproval, do I "choose" to disbelieve in God?

It's because it isn't a choice. I don't choose what to believe; I believe what seems to me to be true. I suspect that's true of us all, but all too many of us accept as true what we are told as a child is true, right up to the point where our parents admit to putting the money under the pillow. If we never learn to think for ourselves, then we simply look around us and gather a gestalt of what our neighbors believe to be true. If the majority of them believe that a six-armed goddess controls our lives then we do too; if the majority believe a Jewish carpenter born of a virgin rose from the dead and is therefore our only chance of salvation, we do too.

I am so constituted that the opinions of my neighbors, even of my family, is secondary; by the grace of sheer luck in my genetics and environment, I ended up with a mind incapable of believing anything which is internally inconsistent or which contradicts the world around
me. It's actually difficult for me to see things from the point of view of someone who can; I have friends and coworkers who freely acknowledge that the tale of Noah's Ark is literally impossible, but who "choose to believe" it anyway, in the face of the inherent contradictions and impossibilities. This is literally incomprehensible to me; I acknowledge that it is true they do, but I cannot comprehend it. HOW can someone believe a tale which their own understanding denies the possibility of? It is utterly beyond me.

Many a theist takes the position that this is a deficiency in me rather than them; that 'faith' is an absolute good, that to believe in things for which there is no evidence is a true ability, and not a disability of the normal functioning of a rational mind. In the short term that may
even be true, I think; a society which can produce suicide bombers has a tactical advantage against one which cannot, and a society which enforces a uniformity of viewpoint on any given ethical dilemma will be able to react more quickly than one which does not.

Nevertheless, the history of science shows that the society which is able to abandon bad ideas in favor of new and better will outstrip the society which insists it already has all the right answers; at one time that was the Islamic world outstripping the Judeo-Christians because they were more open to new ideas, later in the Enlightenment it was the Judeo-Christian outstripping the Islamic sciences for the same reason. Today it is the secular world which outstrips both, bogged down as they are in Iron Age texts bound up in outdated cosmogonies.

Why do I reject the idea of God, a supernatural, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being who is nevertheless concerned with my personal well-being? Come on, why would I *not* reject it? Do you take me for a fool?

Ah, yes, perhaps you do. "The fool has said in his heart, there is no God." Well, it's easy to call names, of course, but does the evidence back it up? Who is truly the fool, the one who accepts childhood teachings and sticks by them despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, or the one who admits that ideas can be wrong, even when they are traditional, or popular, or comforting? Who is the fool, the one who changes his or her views in the face of the evidence, or the one who puts on blinders to avoid seeing an inconvenient truth?

I have often heard, in the course of debates on atheism, the idea that it takes more 'faith' not to believe than to believe. That is simply a lie, but I see its root; it does take more *courage* to tell your neighbors and family that they are being fools than to simply go along with the conventional wisdom. I have absolutely no doubt that my son has and will have the ability to see through the illogicalities and irrationalities of all the silly stories he is told, from the Easter
Bunny to the Tooth Fairy to Santa Claus to Jesus; my hope in so publicly opposing Christianity and all other religions is that he will learn from me, by example, the courage to be honest about disbelieving even the most popular nonsense.

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Blasphemy is a victimless crime!

On magic mustard seeds

A dear friend sent me this cute little story:

The Mustard Seed

Once there was a woman whose only son had died. In her sorrow she went to ask a wise holy man is there a way to bring her son back to life. "Fetch me a mustard seed from a home that has never known sorrow. We will use it to bring your son back to life." He said to her instead of sending her away or try reasoning with her.

At once she quickly set off looking for that elusive mustard seed. The first place she came to was is a huge mansion. Knocking on the door, she asked "I am looking for a house that has never known suffering. Is this the place? It is very important to me."

"You have come to the wrong place" they told her. They begin to pour out all the tragic things that have befallen upon them.

"Who is better to be able to help these poor unfortunate souls than I who has experience sadness and can understand them?" she thought. Therefore she stayed behind and consoled and comforted them before going to another house that has never known sorrow before.

However, wherever she goes, from huts to palaces, there is never one without tales of sadness and misfortunes. In time to come, she became so involved in listening to other people's sad stories that she forgot about her quest for that elusive mustard seed. By listening to other people, she had actually driven the grieving out of her life.

Author Unknown

Now this seems a heart-warming little tale of redemption through good works, and no doubt that's what appealed to my friend, who is a woman of good heart. Alas, I am a cynic and an overly analytical one at that, and my reaction was different:

"Stupid woman should have gone to a brand new housing estate and found a couple of newlyweds who'd just moved in. Sorrow is bound to come to any household in time, so the only solution is to find the brand-spanking-new home before the first tears fall. Since newlyweds always go bonkers on the spice rack, she'd have had the magic mustard seed in no time.

"Of course then she'd have found out that so-called holy men are usually liars, and their claims of being able to resurrect the dead are always bogus. Any wise man could have directed her into helping others, since her natural inclination obviously lay that way - why was the deceit necessary? Was it just so the "holy man" could maintain his reputation for being capable of summoning miracles?"

The source of the story, by the way, was properly cited by my friend. I refuse to do likewise because it links to a bunkum website offering the gullible and desperate help for "everything from the common cold to cancer" (yes, that's an actual quote) in return for $60 a DVD (there are nine in the set, and if you still seemed burdened with extra money you can take workshops). I'll be damned if they'll get any PageRank love from this blog, though.

It's an old formula: get a charismatic "holy man", mix the placebo effect with some obscurantist jargon, optionally throw in a claimed connection to Ancient Wisdom (tm), and above all avoid actual scientific study like the plague, and you too can make enormous profits off the desperation and misery of sick people.

The same basic technique has worked for freelance Hindu fakirs selling their urine as medicine, and for profitable shrines of the Catholics like Lourdes and Knock, and for various brands of faith healers for centuries. It now forms the entire backbone of cults like Christian Science and Scientology.

In the age of the InterWubs, it's just easier for the snake-oil salesmen to reach their market. It remains to be seen whether the countervailing abundance of information debunking these charlatans will override that effect. Sadly, I have my doubts; most people, and especially the poor desperate saps the charlatans prey on, prefer a comfortable lie to a hard truth.

Holy men are generally lying toads, or at best deluded, but their traditions can contain wisdom. Shorn of the untruth, there's wisdom in seeing that a compassionate attention to the living is both a palliative for the grief of losing your loved ones, and perhaps the best of all ways to honor their memory.

In the end, though, your dead remain dead, and a magic mustard seed is only a condiment. To say otherwise is a despicable and unworthy fable.